How Drawing Can Make Your Day More Than a Draft
Compass in Hand: Selections from The Judith Rothschild Foundation
Contemporary Drawings Collection
Amelie von Wulffen. German, born 1966. Untitled. 2003.Cut-and-pasted chromogenic color print, synthetic polymer paint, and ink on paper, 47 x 68 1/2″ (119.4 x 174 cm). The Museum of Modern Art. The Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection Gift. © 2009 Amelie von Wulffen. Courtesy: Museum of Modern Art
There are few occasions when a show of contemporary drawing has the effect of a light bomb on your nervous system. Compass in Hand certainly is one of them. Energy is propelling through the cooled – too cooled – air of the Contemporary Galleries, right from the start, drawing you into the core of the subject, as if you were a willing particle of graphite dragged by a sound pencil stroke.
What is it all about? Nothing more, and for sure nothing less, than the celebration of drawing, of its manifold pathways to and fro the maze of meaning. Meaning we have to allow popping up, unfolding, developing until, again and again, we open new corridors, uncertain about what they lead us to. Yet that is the essence of art: to maintain us in a puzzling uncertainty by confronting us ideally with very certain, solid and outspoken works of art, with traces to be read.
Compass in Hand helps us with deciphering the maze, the curatorial merit being to allow an immediate confrontation with the works themselves, not their reason for being here nor their presentation. The architecture of the show marvelously fulfilling its job, we can concentrate on what any structure is there for: to be built upon, and lived with.
The show covers a broad, yet in-depth spectrum of contemporary practice, focussing on younger living artists, in dialogue with mature and celebrated ones. In more than 300 of the total 2.500 works comprised in the Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection, the excitement about the vitality of what’s being done today never diminishes. The conventional definition of drawing as a discipline concerned with the line is proofed invalid by the sheer abundance of all practices, and the extreme freedom in mark-making. Paper as the support of almost all works displayed could qualify as the only formal common denominator. Yet there is a sufficient number of pieces even challenging this in their distinct use of the material, as in the digital print-outs by Kelley Walker, or else in Tom Friedman’s felt-tip pen on cut out paper in which line and support merge into the same. On the other hand, the show includes a large work by Neo Rauch which seems to qualify here as a drawing, although it is nothing else than one of his paintings painted on paper.
Even the hierarchical ranking of scribble, sketch, preparatory study and final piece does not apply in the contemporary approaches. A work conceived from the very beginning as a piece in its own right can use a far more sketchy language than a meticulous draft for a sculpture. Sigmar Polke’s Untitled (Treppe, Hund, Page, Dame) of 1983 can be such an example, as he manages in his thoughtful planning of the various layers to build up an all-over surface that seems to have accidentally popped-up, or rather to have geologically grown. Whereas Donald Judd, in Untitled, 1970, uses a limited set of straight lines drawn along a ruler, thus creating a thoroughly balanced composition (on bright orange paper), although this sheet being merely the sketch for a sculpture project. We have to bid farewell to any preconception about style and technique, and acknowledge that both can only be the expression of being, individual being framed by cultural conditioning. In this regard, it is a pity that almost only artists of the more or less homogenous “Western” world are represented. It would have been instructive and challenging to see work come out of cultural conditions embedded in another distinctive heritage and presence. Although then, as we know, the access to a Western Art Temple becomes even more unlikely.
Several wall arrangements across the exhibition present an agglomeration of works, turning the individual pieces into constituents of an installational concern. Only at a closer look can one grant single attention to single drawings, invited to read them then within the suggested context.
For a practitioner it is particularly enjoyable to witness how free-wheeling drawing is being explored by the younger generation. Cheyney Thompson’s black and white ink drawings show a strong gaze on the depicted object, mastering the lessons to be taken from Léger, Guston and Pettibon. Charlyne von Heyl, in black and white alike, overpowers with her 15-piece-wall-ensemble of collaged and ink drawn meanders of half recognizable, half allusive forms. Marcel Dzama’s “Underground”, at the contrary, unfolds a narrative through hybrid creatures skilfully brought about in detail with watercolor. In Christian Holstad’s half collaged, half drawn works an entire world of domestic and intimist sceneries are announced by precisely framed settings as if stills of moving images.
The collaged element is predominant in many of the works showcased, and proofs its diverse employability as a straightforward device to produce meaningful imagery.
Sherry Levine’s “President Collages” are a fine example on how to make a found image say more than what it depicts.
A real pleasure and a fresh revelation are some of the conceptual pieces by Alighiero et Boetti, where it becomes evident that conceptualism does not exclude, at the contrary!, sensuality. Also in Gina Pane’s “Air Mail (Lettre de Turin-Lettre de Paris)” the conceptual approach reduced to the necessary minimum shows a noble understanding of how to fuse drawing and the written word so to make them one in one single gesture and form.
The end point of the show, or rather its life performing addition, is Roman Ondák’s “Measuring the Universe”, of 2007. Along the four walls of the large space black horizontal lines, scribbles from afar, form a stunning continuity of marks, fading out to the top and the bottom in grey and blending into bold dark patches at a height comprised between 5 and 6 feet. This is where visitor’s are asked to stand against the wall so that a museum’s assistant can note their name above their head. Many people queue and get photographs taken by friends when it is their turn to have their imprint registered… Our human need for mark-making, for leaving traces…
Thus this piece functions as an anticipated re-enactment of our appearance on Earth, or as a living cemetery, close in this to photography, yet by the performative means of writing turned drawing.
Hence this work sums up what the practice of drawing most concisely stands for: the representation of the human presence and our attempt to fix the irrevocably transient.
© Stephan Weitzel
Compass in Hand
through to January 4, 2010
The Museum of Modern Art
Contemporary Galleries, second floor
11 West 53 Street, New York, NY 10019
(212) 708-9400
More information at: http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/311
Stephan Weitzal was born in 1970 in Stuttgart, Germany. He has previously worked as a radio producer, a speaker and as an extra in film. He has received various grants and travels to work in Cuba, Ireland (Cork, Sculpture Factory, map programme/Pépinières pour jeunes artistes), Austria (Graz, European Forum for Emerging Creation), Germany (Weimar, ACC European Studio Programme) and India (New-Delhi/Kolkata, Artists-in-Residence, French Embassy). He lives and works in Berlin. For more information visit www.stephanweitzel.com
