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Drawing Biennial: Commentary - The Open College of the Arts

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Drawing Biennial: Commentary

Katharine Stout – co-founder and director of The Drawing Room – recently gave a talk accompanying the 2015 Drawing Biennial that can now be seen here:

I recommend watching at least the first twenty minutes or so as she gives a useful and concise description of how drawing practice has changed since the middle of the twentieth century. She then moves on to use the work in the Biennale to dissect and discuss the status of drawing in contemporary art practice. The talk is an extension of her catalogue essay Drawing as a flexible tool in a post-digital age and haunting the presentation is how technology and the internet are used by artists working today.
But to start at the beginning: Stout explains that the status of drawing has shifted from being thought of as mostly preparatory to become a primary mode of expression for artists. Drawing’s economy — it’s not just cheap but also direct and requires little complex equipment — gives it a special place in all kinds of creative practice, freeing it of an exclusive association with any single pursuit. Stout plots how technical drawing and other ‘non-art’ modes of working (things like diagrams, architectural plans, and mind-maps) were appropriated by the conceptual artists of the late 1960s to make works more concerned with ideas than emotion. Since the heyday of Conceptual Art exhibitions have often included sketches as well as ‘finished’ work. Drawing embodies a sense of enquiry or speculation and has the capability of undermining grandiose ideas of ‘the masterpiece’. In many ways the rise of the importance of drawing hasn’t rested on any change within it, but in the acceptance of what it always had as something useful and valid in its own right.
At the risk of oversimplifying what Stout says after this contextual review there’s a characterisation of drawing as a way of investigating rather than just representing the world. She runs through some broad categories in relation to the works on display and it’s useful to look at the images she talks about and you can find an archive of all the images here.
Without replicating what she says, I’ll simply list some of the areas she discusses and add my own notes:

  • Drawing and language. Writing is made up of lines, gestures, and revision and can therefore be seen as a version of drawing. When this is placed next to digitally produced text (like this one, which I am writing on an ipad) there’s a something worth picking at. How might drawing be like and unlike the way language is used and produced?
  • Drawing and abstraction. Most drawings in the Biennial are not representative or seemingly ‘about’ anything other than the act of drawing. Pattern, composition and process all play a part in art practice and drawing provides an arena to play with these things.
  • Drawing and politics. There’s a strand of collage in the show that relates to the harvesting of images found online. The use of found imagery is not new in art (see Kurt Schwitters, Hannah Hoch, as well as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, and Jeff Koons), and some artist juxtapose images found online to make the strange and challenging juxtapositions. Drawing is at the forefront of this. By painstakingly drawing an image we might normally glimpse before clicking off the page introduced a new ‘speed’ into how we encounter the world.
  • Drawing and sculpture. Interestingly, Stout points out that some sculptors make drawings after making three dimensional pieces to work out what happened, and not just as a way of working out what to do.

In summary, this talk (along with the accompanying catalogue), and Stout’s recent publication Contemporary Drawing (Tate Publishing, 2014) all provide useful reference material for anyone who places or seeks to place drawing at the centre of their work. It’s not always simple, but then it wouldn’t be as interesting or yield such fascinating possibilities.

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Posted by author: Bryan

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