The Drawing Center

The Armory Show kicked off its scheduled programming on March 4th with a conversation between The Drawing Center’s Executive Director Brett Littman and Armory commissioned artist Susan Collis. Prior to the Armory, Collis’s work appeared at The Drawing Center in 2009 as part of the Apparently Invisible exhibition. The dialogue focused primarily on Collis’s literary background and the impact this has had on her artistic process. As a cultural studies student in the early eighties, Collis found herself drawn to 1960s American literature and authors who actively challenged the traditional format of the novel and linear narrative. Through discussing texts such as Exercises in Style by Queneau, Slaughterhouse 5 by Vonnegut, and La Jalousie by Robbe-Grillet, Littman and Collis arrived at a philosophy of playful absurdity that can be traced throughout Collis’s oeuvre.

In addition to the literary influences, Littman and Collis touched on influential art works that deal with similar themes including Charles Ray’s Ink Line (1987) and Francis Alys’s Green Line (2004). Collis noted that works like these – much like her own — rely on the stories that surround the work to give it form. Further, these delicate pieces so often stand at the edge of what Collis has deemed “perfection and disaster,” relishing in a complex tension while lending the work its meaning. Littman and Collis also discussed Tom Friedman’s work 1000 hours of Staring (1992-97) in which the artist stared at a blank sheet of paper for one thousand hours. This piece is particularly relevant to Collis’s oeuvre; just as Collis’s list of materials lends the work its drama, 1000 hours of Staring depends heavily on its title to lend significance to the piece. Collis draws meaning from works like Friedman’s because it emphasizes, as she says, “so many different kinds of emptiness.” Due to the scale of Collis’s work in often expansive gallery or museum settings, this idea of emptiness and subtle significance is at the intellectual forefront of her work. The dialogue was successful in bringing about a greater understanding of Collis’s early influences and a philosophical foundation not often found in previous discussions of her work.
– Allyson Feeney, Executive Office Intern

This event marks the American debut performance of the critically acclaimed Montreal-based Ensemble Transmission, featuring works by Xenakis, Vivier, Aperghis, Murail, Boulez. A lecture-presentation on “Xenakis in Canada” by James Harley, author of Xenakis: His Life in Music will precede the concert.

Tickets can be reserved by calling 212-817-8593. Suggested contributions: $25 Friends; $10 Students and Seniors; FREE with CUNY Graduate Center ID.

This evening is co-sponsored by the Xenakis Project of the Americas and CALQ (Conseil des arts et lettres du Québec).

Join us for an art-making workshop and discussion (ages 9 to 12 years) in conjunction with Selections Spring 2010: Sea Marks.

In conjunction with SoHo Night — an evening of extended exhibition viewing and special programs by the not-for-profit visual arts institutions in SoHo — The Drawing Center presents exhibition walk-throughs with Carey Lovelace, Co-curator of Iannis Xenakis: Composer, Architect, Visionary and Nina Katchadourian, Curator of Selections Spring 2010: Sea Marks for a walk-through of each exhibition. Other SoHo Night venues include apexart, Art in General, Artists Space, CITYarts, Dia Art Foundation, Harvestworks, Location One, The Renee and Chaim Gross Foundation and Swiss Institute.

Open Forum presents a conversation between The Drawing Center’s Executive Director, Brett Littman and 2010 Armory Show artist Susan Collis, in a discussion about Collis’s past and present work and its relationship to contemporary practice.

Pier 94, West Side HWY between 51st & 54th Streets, New York, New York, 10019

William Kentridge: Five Themes, opened on Tuesday at The Museum of Modern Art– the fourth installment of an internationally traveling exhibition on view in New York through May 17th. This large-scale exhibition will no doubt offer viewers the same sort of eye-opening experience of discovery that I had when I first encountered his work nearly ten years ago at The Drawing Center in a show which featured his compelling charcoal drawings and Drawings for Projections animations from the mid-1990s. The exhibition at MoMA surveys over three decades of work by Kentridge (b. 1955, South Africa), with artworks that combine the political with the poetic. The bulk of the exhibition focuses on live-action films and recent stage productions, marking an important shift for the artist towards creating larger-scale, multimedia projects. Included are works related to the artist’s staging and design of Dmitri Shostakovich’s The Nose, which will premiere at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in March.

Arranged chronologically, the exhibition highlights five primary artistic themes from the 1980s to the present. In addition to the artist’s early work, the show features combinations of drawing, moving images, and stage performances that engage with a variety of subjects, ranging from apartheid and “generic” histories to the artist’s own creative activities. Dealing with controversial subjects as serious as colonalism and totalitarianism, Kentridge’s work is often imbued with dreamlike undertones or ironic twists that render his powerful messages both alluring and unresolved.

In most of his films, including the iconic Shadow Procession (1999)—which depicts refugees carrying their possessions from one place to another— Kentridge employs a somewhat primitive technique known as “stone-age animation” in which cut pieces of paper are photographed as they are shifted across a translucent surface, creating skittish movements that effectively express a sense of misfortune and doom. The adjoining gallery contains a range of Kentridge’s drawings, many produced for the animated film, which are beautiful documents related to the making of the film—each image representing the final frame of a scene and often contain several connected incidents, each of these leaving a mark on the drawing’s final state. As a result, the work is best when presented in translation or in motion. In the moving images, the charcoal working-drawings themselves appear moveable, and act as a visual tool that delves through South African history and human consciousness. Similarly the imaginative drawings, objects, and shadow figures for set designs including, Mozart’s Magic Flute, previously performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
Arguably one of the most compelling artists of our time, Kentridge’s distinct fusion of drawing, film, graphics, and the performing arts, is representative of how a variety of media can work together as the extension of a single artistic sensibility through formative mark-making techniques. With Kentridge’s prolific contributions to theater and opera, the viewer can sense the degree to which he has made the staging of these disciplines a parallel interest that directly informs his development as both a filmmaker and draftsman. Kentridge’s unwavering dedication to exploring the possibilities of several media shows the extent to which he understands his own art and its place within a broader historical, social, and artistic context. – Joanna Kleinberg, Assistant Curator

THE BOTTOM LINE is designed to keep you up-to-date on drawing-related events and activities both here and abroad. From exhibition and literary picks to popular calendar listings, it is THE BOTTOM LINE’s mission to keep you engaged and informed of current ideas, trends, and projects within the field. -Stephanie Schumann, Editor

A Place to Sit, A Place to Read, on view at Kate Werble Gallery in New York through February 27, is the first solo exhibition by Gareth Long. The three-part show consists of a series of multi-colored lenticular prints based on iconic cover designs for J.D. Salinger books (the timing of his death was coincidental), as well as sculptural modules intended for visitor seating and book display, and a performative component in which Long and his collaborator, Derek Sullivan, sit in the gallery and create pencil drawings of all of the entries in French writer Gustav Flaubert’s Dictionary of Received Ideas.

Published posthumously between 1911-13, Flaubert’s Dictionary of Received Ideas is a short spoof of an encyclopedia of common utterances, which he compiled based on remarks that he heard and considered ridiculous. In the process of converting Flaubert’s definitions into drawn, visual works, Long and Sullivan conduct a Google image search for each term. These image results serve as the “originals” for Long and Sullivan’s subsequent illustrations, replacing Flaubert’s list of spoken platitudes with a collection of stock images or visual clichés, forming a mode of remembering that translates notions of language from some 100 years ago into today’s visual lexicon.

A Place to Sit, A Place to Read provokes musings on narrative, memory, humor, and originality, and evokes collective conceptions about what abstract ideas look like on paper. After visiting the exhibition, viewers may be inspired to run Google image searches for the more culturally determined terms that appear in Flaubert’s dictionary, such as “cheating”, “foreign”, or “old” in an effort to understand our shared visual language. However, one should be wary of engaging with this practice for too long, lest the eyes glaze over and we lend credence to Flaubert’s mocking definition of “Art”: “Leads to the workhouse. What use is it since machines can make things better and quicker?” – Emily Gaynor, Public Relations & Marketing Officer.

THE BOTTOM LINE is designed to keep you up-to-date on drawing-related events and activities both here and abroad. From exhibition and literary picks to popular calendar listings, it is THE BOTTOM LINE’s mission to keep you engaged and informed of current ideas, trends, and projects within the field. -Stephanie Schumann, Editor

A dance and music event featuring music by Iannis Xenakis; concept, choreography, stage design, and costumes by Luca Veggetti; and lighting design by Roderick Murray. The evening highlights Iannis Xenakis’s lifelong interest in Japanese culture, particularly its music and theater. Click here for more information.

Join us for an art-making workshop and discussion (ages 5 to 8 years) in conjunction with Selections Spring 2010: Sea Marks. RSVP to agood@drawingcenter.org or 212.219.2166×205.

As we continue to explore the ever-expanding definition of drawing, David Reed’s current exhibition at Peter Blum in Soho, on view through March 6th, demonstrates the important role that drawing plays in his painting process. Well-known for abstract paintings that the artist has been creating since the 1970s, this exhibition marks the first presentation of Reed’s working drawings and color studies. The more than 60 works on view meticulously examine the vast possibilities of color combinations and forms that aid in the final painting compositions. Reed adopts two formats for the works on paper—color studies on illustration board that function as small facsimiles of the paintings and working drawings on graph paper that combine the schematics for the paintings with a diary of the artist’s thoughts and decisions. Working on the drawings for extended periods of time, Reed records choices and reactions related to the painting and also visitors to his studio and events happening around him; thus, the drawings become a vehicle through which the artist engages in a dialogue with himself.

Reed’s paintings are incredibly structured and deliberately rendered commentaries on postmodern painting; it is not surprising that the drawings clearly follow suit in revealing the mental labor involved in the process. The question, however, is why the decision to unveil the secrets now after more than thirty-five years of painting? Drawing appears to be a particularly personal act for Reed and one wonders whether it needs to become public to further develop his investigations. – Rachel Liebowitz, Assistant Curator