Is a piece of paper folded and then unfolded a “drawing”? A curator at the Morgan Library & Museum thinks so. And the Associate Dean of the Yale School of Art agrees with her.
The “folded paper drawing” in question is by “Conceptual artist” Sol LeWitt (1928-2007). It is one of more than a hundred works (few of them meriting praise in my view) featured in the exhibition Embracing Modernism: Ten Years of Drawings Acquisitions, at the Morgan through May 24. Among other unconventional items included in that show is Gavin Turk’s Rosette, a “drawing” he created by placing a sheet of paper on his van’s exhaust pipe and then starting the engine.
Belonging to the old school that regards drawing as the art or act of representing people, places, or things on a surface chiefly by means of lines (as in Picasso’s Portrait of Marie-Thérèse Walter, also on display at the Morgan), I was moved to ask the curator of the show, Isabelle Dervaux, how she defines “drawing.” Surrounded by eager members of the press, she did not hesitate to reply: “anything on paper.” (As was clear from the aforementioned examples, she literally meant anything.) Then she quickly added, rather testily: “I hate splitting hairs over what a drawing is.”
Hardly splitting hairs, Dervaux’s wall label for the LeWitt piece informs us that he
radically transformed the medium of drawing . . . [in part,] by exploring . . . different ways of producing a drawing—for instance, by tearing or folding paper. Here, he created a grid by folding and unfolding the sheet. “I wanted them to be another kind of drawing,” he said. “They do make lines.”
As for Gavin Turk, Dervaux notes that he was one of the Young British Artists “who gained notoriety in the 1990s” by creating “sculptures and installations that question traditional notions of authorship.” Nonetheless, she calls his exhaust pipe drawing “elegant.” Apparently unwilling to split hairs over the meaning of that word either, she ignores that it generally means a “refined and graceful” style and implies discriminating selectivity on the part of the maker. Having replaced himself as maker with his van’s undiscriminating exhaust fumes, Turk has in fact rendered the notion of “elegance” preposterous.
On the very next day after the press preview for the Morgan show, I happened to attend a panel discussion at the Art Students League on the revival of drawing instruction in art education. In the Q&A following the panel’s presentation, I introduced myself as the author of a new book dealing in part with the concerns discussed by the panel, and cited the example of LeWitt’s “folded paper drawing” at the Morgan as cautionary evidence of the contemporary artworld’s ignorance regarding the discipline of drawing.
Far from being applauded as a significant reminder of the challenges to be overcome, my remark met with a load of invective from one of the panelists—the Associate Dean of the Yale School of Art, Samuel Messer. Assailing me for daring to suggest that LeWitt’s work was not a drawing, he accused me of seeking to “impose” my view of art on others through my book—the title of which I had mentioned. None of his fellow panelists ventured to agree with me on the status of LeWitt’s “drawing” (although two of them later confessed privately to wholehearted agreement). Nor did James McElhinney, who teaches drawing at the League and had organized the panel, utter a word in defense of my position. Nor, finally, was there a peep of comment from any of the dozens of people in the audience.
I sat there in stunned silence, waiting till discussion of other points had ended, and then went up to Messer. He was wrong, I said, to impute an authoritarian motive to me without having read my book, the goal of which is in fact to stimulate intelligent debate. With considerable emotion, Messer proceeded to inform me that LeWitt had worked the way he did because he was a “very devout Jew”—as if that explained why he had eschewed all forms of depiction and was driven to creating “folded paper drawings.”
As it happens, the piety ascribed to LeWitt by Messer is not mentioned in any of several biographical accounts I have read. But even if it were true it would scarcely suffice to legitimate Lewitt’s unconventional approach to “drawing.” As another very different show now at the Morgan attests (Hebrew Illumination for Our Time: The Art of Barbara Wolff), Jewish artists have long found ways to engage in pictorial representation without transgressing the Second Commandment—which most authorities agree was intended to prevent idolatry, rather than to suppress all imagery.
Nor does LeWitt’s wanting folded paper “to be another kind of drawing” (since “they do make lines,” to quote Dervaux’s wall label) make them drawings, properly speaking. Because, unlike drawings, they do not represent something, which is the whole point of drawing—a basic fact that is evidently beyond the ken of both Dervaux and the associate dean of one of America’s most prestigious schools of art.*
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*In recent rankings, U.S. News & World Report rated the Yale School of Art first in the United States for its Masters of Fine Arts programs.
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A friend posted your blog on Facebook, and I totally relate to your frustration. A curator who marvels about the work of a conceptual artist who wants to redefine the medium of drawing does NOT want to split hairs about what a drawing is? Now wait just a minute. Who started?!
I remember a curator of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam similarly exclaiming that “video is also drawing.” She too waved away the question why anyone should wish to efface distinguished media, rather than answer it. In her irritated manner of speech she made clear the question obviously came from an ignorant person; as if she had explained it so many times already, and wasn’t willing to repeat it to someone who clearly hadn’t been doing his homework. That is a Sophist’s manner.*
This seems to be part of the Neo-Liberal Ideology that has taken over the West since the 80’s. It’s not only in the Art-world that everything gets twisted. The same is true in science, politics, and economics. So in art, as always, the general state of a culture is reflected. We’re living in sophistic times, in which ideology trumps realism.
*Note: Sophist, as in: a person (belonging to this class after the Ancient Greek period) who, while professing to teach skill in reasoning, concerned himself with ingenuity and specious effectiveness rather than soundness of argument.
In order to understand why an exhaust stain is not art, (besides reading Michelle’s excellent book!) one needs to understand how the human brain/mind perceives and processes our sense data. Since reading Ray Kurzeweil’s book How to Create a Mind, I now understand, in terms of the physical brain, why the exhaust stain is not art.
The brain is basically a pattern recognition machine. It stores sense data, not as whole pictures say, . . . but as tiny pieces that need to be reassembled every time we perceive the same thing. For example, the letter A. We do not store that image as A, we store all the tiny pieces that make up A, the middle bar, the two little stubs at the bottom, the two pieces that form the upper triangle, and so on. These pieces are scattered all over the brain (redundancy in case of damage) and every time we see the letter A all the pieces have to be reassembled. Our brain will also ‘guess’ what is coming and hastily assemble a recognition before all the pieces are assembled—which works most times but explains why sometimes a pile of socks will be perceived as a rabbit or other object for a split second until the brain fully assembles the brain image to match what is being perceived in reality. Ok, so how does this apply to art?
Over our lifetime our brain stores tons of images, colors, sounds, tastes, etc., ready to be reassembled to recognize some aspect of reality. When an artist creates, say, a drawing of a sitting man smoking a pipe, and an observer sees it, the observer’s brain will begin searching for man, sitting position, pipe, smoke, and other things that are recognized by experience. Once the recognition is made the observer has an emotional experience, also based on his life experience and personal values. He may be repelled by the idea of smoking, or may not like the style of drawing, or he may love the light and dark contrasts or the interesting character of the face. So why is a drawing art and an exhaust stain not?
In order to be perceived as “something” an image on paper, say, must represent something in reality, something the brain’s pattern recognition process can assemble and recognize as something. A sitting man smoking is something, an exhaust stain is not because it does not represent anything that can be recognized. It is a random blotch. Now some may argue that we see patterns in nature or in random images. This is true. Leonardo talked about this in his notebooks. He thought it a good exercise for an artist to try and see images in random nature. But this is still seeing something and recognizing something. For example, one actress took pictures of hearts she saw in clouds, rocks, cereal, and published a book (which had to be given away for free) but she was focusing on a heart, a something, not a nothing. Seeing patterns in nature and trying to reproduce them probably even gave birth to art in the cave man days. So it is our nature to perceive and recognize patterns, and art is an artist’s selective re-creation of reality based on his values or mood and is a form of communication, from him to the viewer. So art MUST conform to our nature for us to 1) recognize it as something and 2) for the artist’s message to be communicated. If these two criteria are not met, then it is not art, it is a random splat of nothing in particular. And if that is the artist’s message, he better get a good therapist.
Fashion is not the same as honesty. Ingres said drawing is the probity of art; if folding a piece of paper makes one think more deeply and pointedly about the essence of something, I will accept that. I am not yet convinced. DK
Art is communication. Like all forms of communication, the pause and unadorned can entertain, inspire, and promote discussion and contemplation. Perhaps a paper fold is art, though not the level of art I would enjoy or expect in a reputable exhibition.
The blame lies here, it’s an interesting piece of research:
Did Marcel Duchamp Steal Elsa’s Urinal?
Thanks for the article. Everyday I see more sales and marketing of “art”. In 50,000 years when our civilization is long gone, what will the anthropologists and explorers make of “contemporary art”. Will the non-objective art be like Stonehenge or crop circles are to our discoverers? They will not have a clue about our lifestyles from art based on thought and theories. Great Art passes the test of time.
I’m surprised you haven’t mentioned Damien Hirst needing photo realist artists to paint for him.
Check out this blog about street and mural artists based on the Navajo Reservation in Arizona. I think you’ll find it interesting: http://jetsonorama.net/
Thanks again for your writings.