Breaking Ranks, Pencils Ready

Since the 1950s, the most uncompromising artists have approached the blank page as a battlefield, determined to make their mark in a new way. Paper tigers with real teeth, the explorers in drawing of the past half-century have challenged every art historical shibboleth. For those not satisfied with making depictions or designs, special tactics have been necessary. First, an overall strategy. Chance or geometry? A scribble or a grid? Then, the weapon. Pen, brush, or finger? Ink, pollen, paint, or soot? Lastly, the tone of the attack. Coolly rational or wildly emotive? Well aimed or blustery and scattershot?

As partisans of arguments on paper, Wynn Kramarsky has collected relics of these esthetic skirmishes, amassing a case for the lasting inventiveness of post-minimalist and process-oriented drawing. This selection of fifty-nine drawings from his comprehensive collection includes works by the innovators of the post-war avant garde as well as emerging artists who have continued to find new ways to extend the limits of what a drawing might be.

Wynn began tracking down challenges to the conventions of drawing in the heady days of the late 1950s and early 1960s. The earliest drawing here, Robert Rauschenberg’s Untitled (Mirror) from 1952, remains one of the freshest, demonstrating the artist’s breakthrough employment of solvent transfer to disperse ghost-like images from art history and the newspaper alongside swaths of pale watercolor and smears of crayon.

Other drawings by mid-century masters portray new ways of conceiving of subject matter in drawing. Ellsworth Kelly’s untitled tempera and gouache from 1964 transforms compositional push-pull into a literal struggle of two rounded-off squares of color. The slightly squatter blue lump cheekily infringes on the territory of its counterpart. Pure color takes on a personality distinguished by shape and form.

Eva Hesse’s wobbly patchwork grid from 1964 presents a loose line-up of funky vessels, antennae, and amoeboid shapes animated by bright color and playful details. These surreal icons seem less abstract pictographs than hints of alien lab experiments. Such play between order and disorder has fascinated many artists since that time. In Joel Shapiro’s 1972 relaxed grid of repeated fingerprints, the sanctity of our society’s legal symbol of identification seems belied. Variously inked, the replications wave in uneven rows that imply the vagaries of happenstance and the range of possibilities that might undermine any symbol of identity.

For the artists represented here, form is not a static ideal but a framework for thought and feeling. Reined in by a rectangular grid, Agnes Martin’s atmospheric bands of watercolor challenge and transcend the notion of geometric regularity. Richard Tuttle’s deliberate, casual notations focus attention on the nuances and ramifications of mark-making. Paying attention to offhand gestures and simple shapes, he reveals the metaphysical nature of form itself.

The Kramarsky collection also includes works organized with less conscious control. William Anastasi’s 1993 Subway Drawings document in graphite squiggles the starts and stops, bumps and grinds of a New York trip on the IRT. Motion and time are recorded as abstract form. The boldly looping, undulating ink notations of Brice Marden’s Muses Drawing 5 (Mnemosyne) (1989-91) are elaborations inspired by the mythic origins of the nine Greek Muses. Marden was struck by poet Robert Graves’ description of ancient texts that referred to the Muses as euphoric, bacchanalian celebrants. Wanting to reflect this “wildness in the landscape,” Marden structured works that evoke the enthralled dance-like movements of the reveling goddesses. The effervescent flow of line in these works is a visual metaphor for ecstatic dance.

This kind of freedom pervades the work of many of the emerging artists in the Kramarsky collection. On layered wax paper and beeswax, Christine Blair suspends delicately hued and textured organic materials distilled from plant life to create patterns seemingly extrapolated out of nature. For a fifteen year period (1987-2001), Brad Brown was engaged in The Look Stains, a massive diaristic assessment of studio activity consisting of thousands of abstract drawings that were continually recycled, emended, and recontextualized. The impulse to inventory also stimulates the work of Suzanne Bocanegra whose Drawing Everything in My House series meticulously analyzes the multifarious systems at work in everyday activities. With their casual nature, drawings seem testing grounds for other media. In recent installations and works on paper, Christine Hiebert has composed complex forms out of blue housepainter’s tape—the material relied on by so many abstract painters as a crutch for crisp geometries. Hiebert’s variegated shapes draw on the proactive nature of the tape; they seem like sketches for monumental abstract metal sculptures. Elena del Rivero makes drawings that use abstract forms to refer to emotionally charged events in her life. Her intimate, personally charged Letter to the Mother series makes reference to both Kafka’s Letter to His Father and a seventeenth century correspondence between a troubled mother and her estranged daughter. The personal translates into the compulsive act of drawing in Jacob el Hanani’s exquisite accumulations of tiny repeated marks derived from the calligraphy and patterning he saw as a child in Morocco and Israel. Deborah Gottheil Nehmad burns and embosses paper in patterns of repeated numerical metal punches that refer both to her Jewish heritage and to operations for chronic back pain.

True to their 1970s process-oriented predecessors, however, most of the emerging artists eschew any notion of the autobiographical or the expressionistic. In her simple, highly refined mark-making, Lynne Woods Turner describes an interest in ‘a sublimation of self into the physics of the form, the process and the material.’ Similarly Nicole Phungrasamee Fein strips away all content and outside references in her obsessive, highly sensitized recordings of freehand lines on paper. As she puts it, “I mark a moment on paper, and the collection of marks shows the passage of time.”

Besides demonstrating a remarkable range and rigor, this collection of drawings makes evident the regenerative nature of art history. Although facing a daunting legacy of experimental approaches to drawing, artists continue to be provoked by the empty page, devising ever more ingenious, obsessive, and conceptually intricate methods to make their mark.

Citation:
Duncan, Michael. “Fine Lines: Breaking Ranks, Pencils Ready.” Fine Lines from the Collection of Wynn Kramarsky: Minimal and Conceptual Works. Santa Barbara, CA: Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum, 2003. © 2003 Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum