Tannery Arts, Brunswick Wharf, 55 Laburnum Street, London E2 8BD
Tel +44 (0)20 7729 5333 mail@drawingroom.org.uk www.drawingroom.org.uk
Idea Sharing Forum on Drawing: Saturday 5 November 2011, 2 – 5pm
History of Art Department, UCL
The Drawing Room and The Centre for the Study of Contemporary Art, UCL are
pleased to announce the beginning of an ongoing collaborative project to survey and
debate the state of drawing practice, research and theory today. The aim is to
initiate debate that will inform Drawing Room’s forthcoming programme and to
identify future participants including practising artists, curators, writers and
theorists.
We invite you to participate in the first of a series of collaborative events that aims
to bring together artists, critics, curators and art historians who engage with drawing
in various ways.
We invite all participants to contribute a short, 5-10 minute response to the
questions posed below. Avoiding the traditional conference format for something far
more informal and relaxed, the Idea Sharing Forum on Drawing will eschew the usual
audience/speaker divide for an inclusive seminar format that hopes to foster
dialogue between those engaged with drawing as writers and as practitioners that
will contribute to participants’ understanding of drawing and perhaps move toward
a contemporary definition.
We hope that the presentations and discussions will range from more general
observations about the role and definition of drawing today to ideas that relate
specifically to three planned exhibitions (see information about these below).
Drawing Room will develop publications and symposia to extend the ambition of
these exhibitions and wishes to use this event to identify interested participants and
key areas of research.
Questions:
1) Is drawing an activity or a medium?
2) How do artists situate drawing in relation to the other elements of their practice,
and how does this compare with the situating of drawing by curators and
academics?
3) Drawing and sculpture: are these two mediums linked above all else by the active
condition of linearity, detached from any material specificity? Are the languages of
drawing and sculpture intertwined or simply parallel?
4) Is the relationship between drawing and writing based primarily on their shared
registration of embodied gestures? In what ways, and by which artists, has the
constant exchange between language and drawing (trace, sign, mark, notation) been
articulated since the 1960s?
Please let us know if you wish to attend as soon as possible.
In order to structure responses please let us know which questions you wish to
address by 24 October.
Drawing Room aims to provide the key European Resource for contemporary
drawing through its website and through an on-site resource centre. At present we
have a modest section devoted to this on our website – follow this link <resources>
We would welcome ideas towards the development of this on-line and on-site
resource.
GRAPHOLOGY
May – June 2012
In collaboration with Edwin Carels (curator, M HKA, Antwerp and researcher in the
arts KASK/Hogent).
William Anastasi , Carl Andre, Fiona Banner, Anna Barham, Pierre Bismuth, Steffan
Bruggeman, Tony Conrad, Viking Eggling, Nam June Paik, Sigmund Freud, Mekhitar
Garabedian, Dean Hughes, Antony McCall, Laslo Moholy-Nagy, Brian O’Doherty,
Man Ray, Peter Roehr (some to be confirmed)
This exhibition will combine established and emerging artists along with art historical
documents and artefacts to explore ways in which immediate experience is
translated into a systematised representation, between the trace and the sign,
between writing and drawing.
Graphology will consider the range of techniques that have been employed by artists
to visualise their ideas, allowing for a particular tension between the hand and the
medium, between automatism and automation.
The exhibition focuses on the human hand as a living seismograph of inner life, but
with extra attention to the ‘mechanical unconscious of the machine’ which imposes
itself on the human eye. It will consider how graphic techniques of reproduction
start to live their own lives.
OPEN WORK
January – February 2013
This exhibition addresses the legacy of the breakdown of the distinction between
sculpture and drawing that emerged during the 60s and 70s.
“What has happened [since Pollock] is that the pictorial impetus in sculpture has
been dematerialised and has often taken the form of drawing, either literally, on
surfaces (LeWitt, Bochner), in space (Robert Barry’s nylon threads; Hesse’s ‘Icycle’.
Right After and her last piece: Bollinger’s ropes), or on the ‘ground’ (Hesse’s mat
pieces, Andre’s plaques, his Lever and related outdoor pieces; Smithson’s Heizer’s and
Oppenheim’s monster-scale landscape sketches) and so forth. The question is…
whether such drawing or pictorial effects in real space are essentially bad, dishonest,
untrue to the internal necessities of something called sculpture…” Lucy Lippard,
1971.
The exhibition juxtaposes different generations of international artists to investigate
the notion of drawing in three dimensions and the origins of this practice.
DRAWING AND LANGUAGE
March – April 2013
Drawing Room is in dialogue with Drawing Center, New York, to develop a theme for a
possible collaboration.