On Drawing.
In
the last few years the art of drawing has become more and more of an all
consuming interest for me. First: I make a distinction between drawings and
prints: a drawing is the living record of the progress of the marking device
over the ground; the use and the texture of the materials engender a felt
presence of the artist’s hand. They are the record of the development of an
idea. Prints, by contrast, are a conceptualized commodity made for the
marketplace. More often than not they are on the very edge of being overworked
and in every case suggest the presence of machinery and industry. With the
exception of those by Goya and Picasso I do not like prints. Nor do I make an
exception for Rembrandt: I find his prints far less interesting, engaging, and
moving than his drawings.
Over the last four hundred years art
students in Europe were trained in a specific,
academic, discipline. Once recorded contour was modeled to create the perception
of three dimensional form. Thus drawings and paintings present a dual
perception: the perception of the surface and the perception of depth created
on the surface. When an academically trained artist allowed himself to express
his response to the form presented, to the anecdote or to the legend, as
opposed to his adhering to the rigidity of the doctrine, his work assumed a
personal character.
While visiting a Seurat exhibition
at MOMA a few years ago I was amused to observe a middle aged, artistic, female
visitor swooning over one of the artist’s academic nudes. She was swept away on
the wings of rapture. Had she been less inclined to publicly give herself up so
completely to the stimulus of a moment she might have reflected that the
drawing was merely a fine example of what everyone at the Ecole de Beaux Arts
had been trained to produce. And indeed most artists of note have in their
portfolios work of a similar kind.
In our time mastery of the academic
study or the academic nude, even if they are still taught in the schools, is no
longer the striven for destination. Now it is the personal experience that
matters and that is often achieved with an individual penmanship. In order to
succeed one must make iconic marks and in such an abundance of work as to
constitute a style that cannot be duplicated without there being a charge of
plagiarism. So much so is this the demand that the artist today need not even
be proficient in draftsmanship …no prior study or training, apparently, is
necessary. Nor, according to Sol Lewitt, is there any need for the involvement
of the artist in the manufacture of the product.
In the art of this era those marks often
seem to me to be arbitrary and the fame of the successful artists often seems
equally arbitrary…one has the sense that in this day and age good marketing by
the right people produces great artists. Most art of this kind is accompanied
by long essays explaining to the general public the subtleties of the artist’s
intellect. In this environment it is easy to forget that drawing and painting
are visual experiences.
Generally when one confronts a large
display of a contemporary artist’s oeuvre, as the art world likes to call it, belying
the fact that the center of the universe shifted to New York from Paris over half
a century ago, the work is so one noted that one often wonders if the artist in
question ever had a desire to draw the nude, a landscape, or a generic scene. Often
one is curious why a person of “artistic” bent could be so satisfied by a
decade’s long repetition of similar marks. The question of repetitive work, as
the stuff of a career, arises and suggests its contrast to the psychic content
propelling one’s pen. The greatest exponent of the latter is of course Picasso
who never tired of letting his pen empty the roiling turbulence of his
imagination …and in any number of styles. Mondrian is a great example of an
artist who never paused long with the successful creation of each succeeding
innovative achievement. It’s a shame more contemporary artists don’t follow his
example.
Despite the abundance of evidence to
the contrary in contemporary art a great classical drawing indicates the
mastery of craft by the maker. And I suspect that most of us go out of our way
to look at great drawings in order to be in proximity with the expertise of an
individuated voice, just as the Ladies Who Lunch most likely go to museums in
order to be in proximity with great wealth. That the subject of the drawing is
a Greek legend, a religious moral, a tourist’s experience, or the face of a
loved one has less interest to us than the opportunity to experience great
draftsmanship.
But there can come a moment sometimes
when the sheer abundance of the work makes us begin to suspect that the mastery
of craft has become merely a display of bravura, an activity in and of itself:
the subject then comes to the fore bringing with it a sense of boredom. This
best describes those whose work we acknowledge as “nice” or “very nice” and
which is set apart from the works of those major artists which are rarely ever
less than fascinating. It is the work most often seen in second tier Nineteenth
Century artists and of those early Twentieth Century artists who turned their
backs on modern art.
Thus in our own time the question
arises: what does one draw? How can the superior draftsman express his
individuality? What gives a drawing authenticity? Representational drawings no
longer sustain the interest of the viewers. Abstraction runs the risk of
falling into Gombrich’s description of “matching”: as we can see, the world is
awash with collage. Finding the crack in the wall that leads to liberation from
the prison of conventional wisdom is extremely difficult. Few succeed.
It was with this question in mind:
what does one draw, that prompted me to go out of my way to see this
exhibition. I have known the name, Lebbeus Woods, from my readings in modern
architecture …along with drawing and painting one of my preferred art forms… but
had I been asked specifically who he was or what his work was like I could not
have said.
I am well aware of architectural
drawings. I know that every office has its preferred and consistent presentational
style. Those works were never intended to be exhibited in a gallery
retrospective but to assure the buyer that the work was indeed the work of that
architect and his staff. But as the works in this exhibition were publicized as
“drawings” as opposed to architectural renderings, I was curious to see it.
My initial response was very
positive: almost all of these are in graphite …pencil, at present my favorite
medium. It was extremely pleasant to note the pressure that had been exerted to
create the specific marks on the paper. …and very fine paper it is. It was
pleasant to discern that pencils of different hardnesses had been used to
create a mix of tonal values. The blacks in particular are very deep and rich. (At
present my favorite pencil is a Derwent-9B. You can’t get blacker than that.) I
was also pleased to see the use of colored pencil, the medium of choice of
Frank Lloyd Wright. Colored pencils are a very interesting medium but generally
neglected by mainstream artists, I suppose because of the association with the
bourgeois subject matter in the work of those in the CPSA (Colored Pencil
Society of America). In the work here the colored pencils are used so
delicately as if to suggest that the color had been gently blown onto the
surface. (Some of the color is softly brushed pastel.) It is gentle but at the
same time absolutely controlled. In fact this sense of absolute control becomes
the paramount impression created in the execution of all these works.
A series of drawings, San Francisco , Inhabiting
the Quake, plates 56 through 63 in the catalogue, stood out from the others.
They are listed as graphite and pastel on paper pasted onto prepared wooden
grounds. Some of them include bent piano wire. Small sculptural objects
arranged in front of them incorporate the piano wire as well. There is a sense
of play with the dual perceptions teased into the actual third dimension though
the use of the wire. These are lovely and well made. But what stood out for me
in this set was the fact that they are mounted on board, what I suspect is
three quarter inch birch veneer plywood. The edges have been softly rounded
with a router, the corners are rounded. The thickness of the wood and the
collage of drawn material surmounted by the wire, and with the pieces in front
and below create a lovely sense of an organic and growing object. However,
because the central object is so similar to that in the other drawings my focus
remained steadfast on the wood, its dimensions and its finish. I love beautiful
paper; in this case I loved the beautiful wood.
Clearly
Mr. Woods has something to say. But what he has to say has not to do with
drawing, contemporary art, or with the nature of human experience; that there
are no, or very few, human figures in the drawings giving the projects a sense
of scale makes this apparent. This work has to do with architectural concepts,
the drawings being the means of communication of those ideas, or, and this I
think of as a fault, these are illustrations of those ideas. In my world an
illustration is not as exalted as a fine art drawing. Compare, for example, the
work of N.C. Wyeth with his son Andrew’s.
And for the most part this
theoretical architecture is the subject of the gallery and catalogue
interpretation as it seems to have been the nature of Woods’ work, teachings,
and influence. That’s perfectly fine. Unfortunately I had gone to a lot of time
and trouble to get to a gallery where I was disappointed to find that the art
of contemporary drawing was not to be either the subject or an elucidation of
the way forward …in this particular exhibition.
Certainly this is not modern art. It
was immediately apparent to me that two primary influences were reflected here.
As for concept and execution these are really latter day Piranesi Imaginary
Prisons…the sense of the labyrinth, the gloom, the implied monumentality. But
in regard to the conceptualized central edifice it is almost pure 1950’s comic
book science fiction …in fact many of the more intricate drawings and the models
especially look to have been inspired by the underside of the mother ship in
the film, 2001, A Space Odyssey. Woods was a year my junior and so I am certain
we were subject to the same popular cultural influences. In fact to this day I
rarely see a photograph of the space station without hearing echoes of The Blue
Danube Waltz.
The works in the exhibition were
made between 1980 until near Woods’ death in 2011. For the most part they have
a sameness of concept and execution as if the same architectural structure was
being presented in various situations and locations. I was disappointed to see
that what was new to Berlin could be new as
well in Zagreb ,
that neither of those locales inspired or required an individual design. I
began to suspect that this sameness was being suggested as the newest
international style.
The
drawings themselves, and the models, are so intricate and detailed, and so
finely wrought, that despite their being fascinating individually, in sum they
exhibit the obsessive/compulsive character of outsider art. That too is fine: I
like outsider art. This becomes especially obvious when, upon looking at four
small notebooks filled with carefully executed, intricate drawings, we read
that these are only four of over two hundred similar notebooks in the archives.
But that suggestion emphasizes that these drawings are less about drawing or
architecture than they are about the making of them, about the artist’s
intensive labors in making them.
One
of the most laudable characteristics in the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Kahn,
and Rem Koolhaus is that for each man each project had a distinctive character.
Rarely did those men repeat themselves. I couldn’t help but wonder that if
Woods had actually built something other than scale models would he have
produced drawings of structures in which the forms evolved from one thing into
another over the thirty years of his career, that there might have been more
visual variety in the central object.
But
as I have said, I was only interested in seeing drawings. These are
illustrations. But of course so much of modern art is in fact only the illustration
of a polemic, one polemic or another, many of them highly touted by persons
with vested interests, and few of them
really all that interesting. These are splendid drawings, the work of a master
draftsman. I am sorry that they were not what I had hoped they might have been.
And so my question remains unanswered: What does one draw? That, of course, is
answered by the question: why does one draw? Does an artist only want to master
and repeat what has been done by others, as in the case of Albrecht Durer, or
does he want to explore beyond the realm of the tradition, as in the case of
Picasso?
Yet
another question is raised: who is the viewer and what is his part in this
process? Or does he have a part? No play is fully a play until it is in
performance before an audience. Is an unseen drawing not a drawing?
A
great novel is a profound human experience often not otherwise available to us.
However much slighter it might be, shouldn’t a great drawing be as profound an
experience as well?
Energy
That Is All Around. At the Grey
Gallery
On
Painting.
After
seeing the Woods exhibition I walked up through Soho to Washington Square
Park San Francisco artists known as The Mission
School. All of this can be described as
anti art in the respect that it is contrary to the established western
tradition, or strains to be so. Almost all of it is painting although there are
sculptural pieces that are painted as well. Every effort is made to avoid
creating likenesses with which the viewer might be familiar…paint is splashed
onto old pieces of found scrap wood, or utilitarian objects, a contrast created
in some of the works by the use of some very tightly controlled brushwork.
While I understand and support the attempt I was unsatisfied with the results.
Unfortunately
works similar to much of this can be seen in the canon of Picasso, Arthur Dove,
Charles Biederman, and Kurt Schwitters. So much so that where we were to have
seen something new we see, alas, an ongoing straining for innovation. And while
there were some interesting pieces, for the most part it looked like student
work. This kind of thing is fine, if it is a series to which one devotes a few
months or a year, such as the few years of analytical cubism or the decade of
surrealism, but when it goes on and on as a lifetime’s preoccupation it becomes
less and less interesting. It really only emphasizes that the release from
academicism forged by Picasso, Braque and their confreres has created an
insurmountable obstacle over which most of the rest of us are unable to clamber,
that we know not what to do with our freedom.
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