Performance Drawing

New Practices since 1945

Maryclare Foá, Jane Grisewood, Birgitta Hosea, Carali McCall

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350113008
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Tecniche artistiche

What is 'performance drawing'? When does a drawing turn into a performance? Is the act of drawing in itself a performative process, whether a viewer is present or not? Through conversation, interviews and essays, the authors illuminate these questions, and what it might mean to perform, and what it might mean to draw, in a diverse and expressive contemporary practice since 1945. The term 'performance drawing' first appeared in the subtitle of Catherine de Zegher's Drawing Papers 20: Performance Drawings, in particular with reference to Alison Knowles and Elena del Rivero. In this book, it is used as a trope, and a thread of thinking, to describe a process dedicated to broadening the field of drawing through resourceful practices and cross-disciplinary influence. Featuring a wide range of international artists, this book presents pioneering practitioners, alongside current and emerging artists. The combination of experiences and disciplines in the expanded field has established a vibrant art movement that has been progressively burgeoning in the last few years. The Introduction contextualises the background and identifies contemporary approaches to performance drawing. As a way to embrace the different voices and various lenses in producing this book, the authors combine individual perspectives and critical methodology in the five chapters. While embedded in ephemerality and immediacy, the themes encompass body and energy, time and motion, light and space, imagined and observed, demonstrating how drawing can act as a performative tool. The dynamic interaction leads to a collective understanding of the term, performance drawing, and addresses the key developments and future directions of this applied drawing process.

1

MARKING: LINE AND BODY IN TIME AND SPACE

Drawing, with its long history rooted in material permanence and its status as a private and often preparatory activity, may seem at odds with performance art. Yet drawing has been used by artists engaged with performance just as it has by painters and sculptors, to record their actions and for the mapping and preparation of those actions. The deployment of the unorthodox materials and approaches to the two-dimensional surface, often involving an intensely physical interaction, has in many cases rendered drawing an action in itself.

CORNELIA H. BUTLER¹

The act of drawing itself transforms the mark into line and the body into action. This chapter provides a foundation to the interrelationship between performance and drawing and focuses on the implications of mark making in time-based artworks. The artists select open creative debates and highlight transformative methodologies that involve concepts of the line and body, time and space as means of working. They are instrumental in introducing and revealing the relationship between drawing and performing in the expanded field today.

Introduced are the pioneers of contemporary art practice and artists such as Jackson Pollock, Gutai artists and Gego, whose concepts and actions contributed to the emergence of performance drawing, and acclaimed artists that follow, such as Helena Almeida, Trisha Brown, Richard Long, Tom Marioni, Ana Mendieta and Robert Morris, whose physical performances expanded drawing ideas. Importantly, the chapter engages with works tangibly bound in time that range from John Latham’s one-second studio drawing to Tehching Hsieh’s epic one-year performance outdoors, where time is evidenced and embodied in the action itself.

The chapter looks to artists using new approaches that have given way to thinking about the body as movement and a performative tool. In addressing how drawing transforms the mark into line and the body into action, the first section looks to the transition and opening up of materials – as practitioners in fine arts have been engaged in the multidisciplinary and performative processes since 1945. It describes the ‘Shifts in painting and drawing’, seeing Jackson Pollock’s work as an expansion of painting that encompasses a drawing-like trace of the body in action. The other artists selected in the first section include Yves Klein, Janine Antoni, Ana Mendieta and Richard Serra – all use a performative action and help describe an interest and shift of focus to the body involved in creating the work.

The second section emphasizes the line, and many artists’ long fascination with the line as a trope, and in particular the notion of the ‘Line in time’. Works by Piero Manzoni, John Latham, Tehching Hsieh, Elena del Rivero and Robert Morris introduce key processes, later expanded by contemporary artists such as Jane Grisewood and Carali McCall, Piyali Ghosh and Kevin Townsend, whose use of the concept of time illustrates a visualization of the line. The third section, ‘Materials and actions in space’, includes the artists Tom Marioni, Bruce Nauman, Trisha Brown and Gego, whose practice highlights the importance of incorporating a sense of space and has more recently been considered and taken up by the artists Monika Grzymala and Jaanika Peerna, making artworks that imply a sculptural drawing in space.

In the fourth section, ‘Trace and record’, the artists Helena Almeida, William Anastasi and Morgan O’Hara as well as selected works by Jane Grisewood demonstrate the significance of gesture and tracing motion. Developing how a mark-making process is embedded and fundamentally part of the conceptual thinking of many artists, this section brings together artworks that highlight the complexities between marking and drawing and recording movement. The final section, ‘Walking as drawing’, builds on these ideas and presents works by Richard Long, Francis Alÿs, Lygia Clark and, again, Tehching Hsieh to demonstrate how performance and drawing practices can move beyond visual-based mark making and identifies how today walking can be a drawing practice.

Shifts in painting and drawing

JACKSON POLLOCK / GUTAI ARTISTS / YVES KLEIN / JANINE ANTONI / ANA MENDIETA / RICHARD SERRA

The paradigm shift in art from the late 1940s carried an increasing awareness of the social and political mood; and, from the point of view of many, Jackson Pollock was the pivotal artist between modernism and postmodernism. A prodigious impact on younger generations paved the way for artists to experiment and progress with groundbreaking developments from the vertical (working on walls) to the horizontal (working with materials on the floor and expansive spaces), exposing new forms of art to live audiences and a wider public.

The focus of performance drawing as a medium embodied time and movement, line and trace, and emerges from a practice with the term defined as ‘action painting’, introduced by the critic Harold Rosenberg in his 1952 essay in ARTnews: ‘giving more prominence to process and action rather than the painting itself’.² For Rosalind Krauss, art theorist and critic, Pollock’s weblike shapes were also ‘constituted of pure line, the very stuff of drawing’;³ the curator Gary Garrels also conveys Pollock in ‘terms of drawing and line and there is a very blurred boundary between drawing and painting in his work’.⁴ He subverted traditional conventions by using his whole body and indulging with his materials, attracting the viewer to the action behind the marks. ‘Until Pollock, art making oriented toward two-dimensional surfaces had been a fairly limited act so far as the body was concerned. At most it involved the hand, wrist, and arm. Pollock’s work directly involved the use of the entire body.’⁵

The curator Connie Butler surveyed Pollock’s work, describing his ‘bodily engagement with canvas or paper and paint with a kind of performance’.⁶ Amelia Jones, art historian and curator, coined the term the ‘Pollockian Performative’.⁷ Pollock’s unorthodox gestures required not only his hands but also extending his entire body, bending and crouching, stretching and twisting, while spontaneously splattering, dripping and flicking lines of paint. His methodology revealed instinctive performance-based gestures, sweeping back and forth over the canvas that lay flat on his studio floor in Long Island, New York. Butler also saw in him ‘parallels in modernist dance’⁸ and dance-like traces left from his drip paintings. Catherine de Zegher observed: ‘Even when still material, in the “drip” paintings of Jackson Pollock, line had a new volatility.’⁹

Pollock’s work is mostly known through the celebrated documentation of the renowned photographer Hans Namuth. Hundreds of black-and-white photographs (each holding a residue of time) and film had a powerful impact on artists, enabling an opening to performance drawing. Namuth’s film Jackson Pollock 51 (1951) allowed a wider dimension for viewers to experience the art as performance and spread worldwide, attracting a large audience.

Countless action artists motivated by Pollock spread and are viewed as transitional figures in changing the art world, affirming physical gesture and emphasizing lines of paint and body in action. The composer John Cage’s inspiring works contributed towards Pollock’s expanding vision and practice, as did the artist Allan Kaprow in his 1958 essay ‘The Legacy of Jackson Pollock’, which acknowledged far-reaching actions that would profoundly influence subsequent generations of performance artists, shaping a significant and enduring legacy.

The radical-minded Japanese Gutai artists were also motivated by action painting and the performed gesture, bridging what seemed to be an interest in the transformative approach to simply making a mark and engaging with materials in new ways. In a further understanding, the emphasis on their ‘playful’ paintings freed them from having to commit to any aspect of their work being read as a reflection of post-war devastation or emblematic of a given sociopolitical agenda.¹⁰ In The Gutai Art Manifesto, the artist Jiro Yoshihara states: ‘We are following the path that will lead to an international common ground where the arts of the east and the west influence each other. And this is the natural course of the history of art.’¹¹ The act of painting in the unconventional sense provided a connection and flexibility and, most importantly, a focus on the physical manifestation of movement and art making.

Pollock produced his action paintings on the floor of his studio, sometimes with his partner Lee Krasner present,¹² whereas the Gutai artists (consisting of twenty-four members between 1954 and 1957) exposed the process of performing their work in site-specific outdoor spaces in front of a live audience. For Gutai artists, it was the temporal process of marking and making that was more important than the outcome. The physicality of the body became fundamental to the material, leaving traces that mark evidence of the intensive corporeal duration. Challenging the boundaries of mark making from the artists, the Tate Modern curator Catherine Wood affirmed that ‘a history of performance is evident in the traces of action in paintings […] or indeed, the choreography of tracks left by the movement of Pollock on his drip paintings’.¹³

In live performances, Kazuo Shiraga, a co-founder of the Gutai group, used mud on his feet to create large tactile works and, for Challenging Mud (1955), rolled and tussled with his body to make sculptural forms. At his first performance in Osaka in 1957, he suspended himself from the ceiling of the gallery by hanging from a rope, extending a drawing to incor...