“The Marks We Make”

In “The Marks We Make,” the drawn line is out for a walk. This group exhibition catches the mobile medium in an exploded field, framing the mark expansively as a cognitive and spatial mapping, as well as wrinkles of the self or furrows in the landscape. Having decisively wandered off the sheet of paper, drawing now dribbles down walls and flies through space. Belinda Blignaut’s Cinderella Is Pissed, 2010, performs the former operation in a projectile spew of pink chewing gum and spit, while William Kentridge’s sculptural maquette, Construction for Return (Conductor), 2008, has evicted part of the letter R onto a nearby wall. The viewer is left to “draw” the fragmented and dispersed image together: first by circling the sculpture predatorily in order to find the point where the mass of torn paper coheres into the word RETURN, then by imaginatively peeling the exiled letter off the wall and “returning” it to its base for legibility.

If Kentridge’s piece forces the viewer to stitch two dimensions into three, pulling drawing into sculpture, washy paintings on paper by Robert Hodgins, Moshekwa Langa, and Marlene Dumas, as well as Claire Gavronsky’s calligraphic pastel-on-paper drawing, all tread the tissue-thin terrain between drawing and painting. Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin’s remarkable series “Red House,” 2006, particularly succeeds in embedding a formal engagement with the slippages of media in a forceful poetics of content: The elegaic tracings and desperate scratches depicted in their photographs are the residues left by Saddam Hussein’s Kurdish prisoners on the walls of the notorious Ba’athist prison. These last images embody the show’s intermedia aesthetics most potently, marrying the mechanical finality of the camera with the drawn-out process of drawing, and underscoring the latter as a gouging out of surface that is always ringed with the aura of the body.