THE POSSIBILITIES OF DRAWING
I
AMERICAN ART, EVEN AT ITS BEST, operates under a heavy dose of draftsmanship and this draftsmanship is, historically, a combination of European Beaux-Arts and the fertile soil of the American outlook. This predisposition has endured all the way from Benjamin West to a “mainstream” artist like Andrew Wyeth (most likely considered, by upper-middle class laymen, the consummate American draftsman); moreover, it encompasses the vanguard. The greatest American art movement, Abstract Expressionism, was, by and large, a re-revolution in drawing and its practitioners were draftsmen. Willem de Kooning, the Dutch-born penultimate Abstract Expressionist, typifies the drawing premise of our first home-grown vanguard style: “De Kooning’s art is traditional and available. He is very much an ‘old master.’ His work is full of the feel of ‘real art,’ of ‘art that looks like art.’ This is because his art picked up and carried on Picasso’s Cubism and it is because de Kooning is by nature an old-fashioned figure-ground draftsman, more so than any important artist since Manet.”1
As for the American outlook, we have always had a pragmatic bent; on the frontier—Kentucky or the moon—useful results are what count. A labyrinthine and creaking nobility, ivory tower idealist philosophers, and esthetes are no match for inventors, politicians and craftsmen. Artists are craftsmen to the degree that they “master” a predetermined and clearly defined skill; the important thing about craftsmanship in American art leading up to our modernist painting is that the practice of the defined skill is thought to come first, that is before the illusive art-quality manifests itself, rather than afterward, as window-dressing to brilliant esthetic ideas:
They knew how to draw!
The elementary vocabulary of these was so plainly learned in drawing. Their mastery of putting down on paper form, space, light, and atmosphere—abstract or representational—exercises its own spell and speaks of the pleasure that any great skill of hand and eye gives its possessor whether he be a juggler or a draftsman. But the very limitations of drawing make clear the point at which skill ends and something else occurs. The creative spirit infuses technical fluency in a manner that is always mysterious but that comes nearer to revealing itself in a drawing because it is so obviously something other than skill, something that transforms those few lines and shadows into a work of art.2
We have, in this country, experienced about fifty years of consciously vanguard art, that is, art which believes that quality resides in something other than the mere recital of venerated techniques, and which posits originality as at least a demi-esthetic virtue. Painting and sculpture, as exhibition material, have gone beyond what was only hinted at before World War II, to the point where sculpture, with the aid of our first-rate and available technology, has looked upon the face of God and is levitating itself into pure energy, light and space, while painting threatens to disappear altogether. Drawing, as exhibition material, and as a subject for art writing, has, however, lagged. This is not to say that good and/or vanguard drawing has not been done. It is just that, for the most part, drawing has been looked upon by even progressive critics and museum people as a skill.
One paints, but one knows how to draw. “Painterliness” and “sculptural” are properties (brushy, loose treatment in a picture and a carved or modeled quality in an object), but “draftsmanship” is, in all its semantic pomposity, all-inclusive, essential to every good drawing. One who draws is not called, in honest awkwardness, a “drawer,” but a “draftsman,” with all the word’s academic baggage. And the artists who populate the established American drawing exhibitions cluster stylistically around Leonard Baskin, with occasional forays into early Larry Rivers and Robert Rauschenberg, clinging all the while to high horizons on the Golden Section, thick-and-thin thistle-like lines, and murky tones of angst grown hothouse in college printmaking departments. Vitriol aside, this is not guaranteed bad art, or even bad drawing, it is merely unadventurous and cloying. (There have been recent American drawing exhibitions to the contrary3, and the present exhibition is certainly indebted to them.) Perhaps the mark-time on the part of these artists is attributable to a feeling that, since drawing is materially simple and unglamorous, it requires the aura of tradition. Painting can possess grand scale, new kinds of paint with increased convenience and effect, and a built-in feeling of permanence; sculpture has even more far-reaching methods than painting in addition to the status of being physically real. Thus, painters and sculptors have, while going out on esthetic limbs, the reassurance of the greater presence of their media. The draftsman can, if the esthetic turns up a bummer, fall back on very little.
The drawing has, self-evidently, no desire to compete with the world-at-large on the world’s terms, and the drawing thus becomes a relatively pure conveyor of information. The drawing asks, rather quietly, to be met on its own ground, a one-to-one contemplative relation in which billboards, jackhammers, laser beams, Happenings, and Techniscope 65 are, by mutual agreement, ruled out. This reduces the static in the mind of the viewer. By extension, the drawing has immediacy: it says what it has to say without benefit (or hindrance) of a technical spectacular. (True, part of what a large painting says is “largeness,” and “mass” is some of the message of a big sculpture, but a small drawing says “smallness,” by axiom, more economically.) Lastly, physical ordinariness in its limiting capacity can be positive; since drawing is not prone to incessant mechanical novelty, it is less often led down the garden path (as was painting, in my opinion, with the “shaped canvas”). “Experiment is not art, discovery and invention are that and no more; newness is irrelevant to art, in which there is change rather than progress.”4 In its continuing self-definition drawing is the most existential art form. (What is drawing? It’s what draftsmen do. What’s a draftsman? Someone who makes drawings.) Seeing good, risky drawings is a profound thrill.
Good drawings today exist not only against a continuing realization of what drawing is, but they are products, more or less, of the modernist art in general. Without attempting a précis of the century’s art, I would like to point out what I take to be two main currents carrying to the present what I choose to call the Constructivist and Surrealist mentalities:
At one extreme this response may be characterized by an analytical attitude to the formal, physical ‘how’ of the object, which we might regard as visual scientific. At the other extreme, the artist may respond to experiences of the world by creating images from his own resources . . .5
The Surrealist is forever making a rational judgment in favor of the irrational: chance and intuition. The dogmatic issues (form v. content, color v. tonalities, separate media v. mixes, and realism v. abstraction) mean relatively little to him, although the implication is that he will opt for content, tonalities, mixes and some kind of illusionism. Associations carrying a great burden, the world-at-large is invited into his art; but the objects in the world are, upon entry, “charged” as they were for the medieval artist: “. . . every aspect of the physical world demanded the full regard of the artist for each object and every part of each object existed as expression of divine will.”6 In a way, we have a new medievalism, re bounding toward magic (“expression of divine will”) as an escape hatch from a pervasive, death-dealing rationalism.
The Constructivist mentality tries to make a better metaphysic out of Rationalism; it proceeds by steps, celebrating and discarding images by constantly testing them against both the world and esthetic idealism. George Rickey, the kinetic/Constructivist sculptor, has delineated the main stays of the Constructivist image:
1.The subject is the image itself.
2.The image is not associative.
3.The image is premeditated and deliberate and precisely adjusted.
4.The choice of the image is the artist’s free will; either geometry or “intuition” are permissible.
5.There is no illusionism, e.g. perspective and modeling.
6.Technique is not part of the image; there is no “surface treatment.”
7.There are no romantic motives or inferences.
8.There are no symbols.
9.The image has not been “abstracted” from nature.
10.The image appears as though it has arrived independently of human thought.^^7, 8^^
I do not mean to suggest that the generic and overlapping labels of Surrealist and Constructivist enclose everything in current drawing, let alone the whole of modern art. Nor do I suggest that every drawing is indicative of either label, only that there is a vital esthetic power in physically ordinary, non-academic current American drawing and that part of this lies in the idea that “any notion which is visual in nature (in fact, possibly any notion at all) conceived in the mind may be given concrete form through drawing.”9
II
There is a desire, especially in New York, to get rid of the esthetic object; it can be regarded in part as an extension of the Constructivist procedure, observing Mr. Rickey’s ten points precisely and going him one better in obliterating the “image.” Walter de Maria, Douglas Huebler, Joseph Kossuth, Eva Hesse, Eugenia Butler, Robert Smithson, Les Levine and several others deal with ideas which, except in being pointed out, require no material form. Huebler’s points, lines and locations are theoretical, coming into being like, in another realm, a starlet’s cleavage, a polite hint at something pretty fantastic. Huebler, a combination Parmahansa Yogananda and Scientologist, traverses an heuristic universe, giving us drawings as faint postcards of exotic vacations. Kossuth and de Maria consent to be more ordinary, simply playing with word-surface-image games. DeWain Valentine and Douglas Wheeler on the West Coast, edge closer to “art,” the drawings being conceptual in the sense that they are blueprints for ultimate physical workings-out. (If Wheeler’s drawing happens to be beautiful, it is only a byproduct of his overall method: precise and, to use a beat-up word, elegant.) Valentine and Wheeler represent a borderline on the most extreme un-physical position, which edges back into what we are accustomed to as “art”: static objects which have, according to perceivable rules or sensibilities, been “balanced out.”
I cite this area of the new drawing first because it is, I believe, the most potentially dangerous. Interviewed on the televised moonshot, novelist Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., mentioned H. G. Wells’ prophecy of the human race’s becoming two distinct species—peaceful, loving flower children capable, however, of only the barest subsistence, and the Morlocks, subterranean but intelligent monsters who operate the Brobdingnagian machinery which sustains the planet. The “engineer types” and the “poet types,” Vonnegut said; artists, heretofore poet types, are willingly metamorphosing into Morlocks. Defenders of the transition maintain that artists have for too long been content with a helpless flower-child existence, at best a subspecies of manual craftsmen and pedestrian romantics, living on crumbs from the “real world” instead of doing their 20th-century homework and raining some relevance to that “real world.” Moreover, it is said, the scientific establishment, whose tools, once discovered (e.g. the laser beam), cannot be re-buried, will become as poetic as the artist will become scientific. This barn, however, has been gone ’round before; the Bauhaus had the same dream. Thus these artists have a faint tongue-in-cheekness, a wariness, casting their projects on such a scale as to predicate an irreversible commitment from the establishment should the projects ever be completed. Or, the works are emphatically immaterial, retaining the poetry of non-marketability. Eugenia Butler’s little drawing, Information Transfer, puts it nicely out of reach of anything but pure, unparticularized, untrammeled thought: the information that this information transfer transfers is the information that this is an information transfer.
The term “Minimal Art,” right or wrong, has become consensus and is used here to enclose a dozen or more independent spirits (Dan Flavin, Robert Friel, Jerry Ballaine, Robert Mangold, Robert Morris, Sol LeWitt, Brice Marden, Robert Grosvenor, Carl Andre and Edwin Ruda) in the hope of indicating a degree of physicality one step more intense than conceptual art. Not many, in their drawings, are working with a strict minimality, with the exception of Sol LeWitt.
LeWitt’s Wall Markings is an obvious drawing, two dimensional in a traditional (indeed, archetypal) medium, pencil, and dedicated to getting across, as simply as possible, a specific, concrete proposition. In its own way (you can argue the quality if you want), it’s like one of those tiny, beist ink Rembrandt drawings. LeWitt, however, deals with art issues directly, not by esthetic implication: 1) true two-dimensionality (drawn on the wall, no paper, no frame), 2) draftsmanship (the drawing was executed, from LeWitt’s plan, by others), and 3) permanence (the drawing must remain part of the wall, or it is cleaned off; it is either priceless or valueless, no in-between).
Most Minimal drawings are Constructivist, and most of them are notes, plans, or preliminaries for three-dimensional work. Most of them, tough-minded and to the point, are physically quite ordinary and make a point about current drawing: that good drawing and “draftsmanship” are much bigger than dead birds and wash effects, that it can have, once removed from the tyranny of neo-Beaux-Arts-ism and preciousness, a solidity and dignity about itself which is, I think, especially American.
The late John Altoon and Robert Rauschenberg represent, together, a kind of late-fifties-derived “master drawing,” that is, an esthetic which is as fine as anything traditional drawing has to offer in the way of handling, balancing, complexity of thought, and sheer style. But it is also a landmark from which much of the newer drawing has sprung. Rauschenberg, whose art is wider-ranging and more physically ambitious, has been the greater influence; it is irrefutable that the drawings of Eugenia Butler and Douglas Huebler owe tremendously to the clearing and planting of Rauschenberg. Rauschenberg’s “acting in that gap between art and life” led to an attention, not only to the art (super-formalism) and life (resurgence of content), but to the gap itself. John Altoon has left his mark in the form of a “why not” on the part of several West Coast artists: why not be terribly deft, why not display facility, why not delicacies, subtleties, second-levels and second-glances, and, most significantly, why not let the imagination (form, content, associations, desires, everything) meander? If there is a third major influence, it would be Frank Stella, who, in his paintings concerning the structuring of painting, has given a boost to the whole “systems” outlook, which leads back into conceptual art and (perhaps) the demise of the object. But Stella’s drawings, unlike Rauschenberg’s, are only adjuncts to his paintings, like footnotes.
Probably the most difficult connection to make in terms of anti-draftsmanship (un-draftsmanship) concerns the group of drawings which are generally trompe-l’oeil in premise. What is unique, in terms of drawing (as opposed to simple choice of subject matter) about drawings which are exercises in copying or approximation? I am thinking of Vija Celmins’ unitary views of the ocean, Edward Ruscha’s illusions of ribbon-writing, Ken Price’s frog-cups, Gerald Gooch’s repetitive human-beings, Wayne Thiebaud’s frontal figures. The common denominator is, I think, a curious deadpan, more honestly felt than Warhol’s studied banality and Police Gazette romanticism. There may or may not be associative meanings (certainly there are associations) in Celmins’ painstakingly rendered waves, Price’s colored-pencil objects and Ruscha’s gunpowder words, but there is a unique formal quality, a love of craft (simply, what’s fun to draw) coupled with a knowingness about mass media and the art world which synthesizes into a detached realism, a realism so fine that what is not real becomes the lynch-pin. The drawing’s significance lies in its reversing itself; it is aware of this and thus avoids simple illusionism. Such drawings, in process, posit accurate, photo-like representation as the apex; once completed, however, it is the stray line, the glistening of the graphite surface which reaches us as the art-quality. Somewhere between the artist and his audience there has been a transfiguration, and the awareness of this probability is what separates these drawings from less self-effacing realisms.
Claes Oldenburg and James Rosenquist, charter member Pop artists, have lived through and out of it, both particular brands of Pop leading in slightly different directions. Rosenquist retains the style as well as the iconography of Pop, but Oldenburg is a strange amalgam of facility (in the orthodox sense: he draws like a 17th-century master) and Surrealist mentality; he is not as limited, as “cute,” as straight Pop would imply. Only Gilbert Shelton, Robert Crumb, and Ron Cobb, messengers from the “underground” could be called Pop from the safety of the fact that their art is intended for popular media and popular consumption, rather than for galleries, museums and connoisseurs.
—Peter Plagens
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NOTES
1. Bannard, Walter Darby, “Willem de Kooning’s Retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art,” Artforum, April, 1969, p. 43.
2. Bauer, John, “Portfolio of American Drawings,” Art in America, No. 4, 1961, p. 64.
3. Among them: “American Drawings,” Guggenheim Museum, New York, August, 1964; “A Decade of American Drawings, 1955–65,” Whitney Museum, New York, April and June, 1965; and “New York—Los Angeles: Drawings of the Sixties,” University of Colorado, Boulder and the University of New Mexico Art Museum, June to August, 1967.
4. Rickey, George, Constructivism: Origins and Evolution, Georges Brazillier, New York, 1967, p. 77.
5. Collier, Graham, Form, Space and Vision, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1967, p. 212.
6. Mendelowitz, Daniel, Drawing, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, 1967, p. 100.
7. Rickey, op. cit., pp. 37–39.
8. Rickey also takes pains to point the direction which these criteria have, in some cases, taken us: “A further extension of Constructivist thought in the last decade, which appears sporadically and by implication in the ‘new tendency’, and more consciously elsewhere, is a resort to nature, but with a difference. Nature as landscape, still-life or portraiture is ignored; but nature, as a great fount of physical phenomena, inexorable laws, and orderly relationships, is investigated by the artist and made the vehicle for his statement. Forces such as gravity, or energy such as light, serve as stimuli for the observer, supplanting those projects of the appearance of the natural world which formerly had made the face of art. Thus nature, as aerodynamics, mathematical relationships, probability, chance, or magnetic lines of force is turned, by the artist’s hand, to confront the observer. The artist himself then withdraws, sometimes covering his tracks by the use of an alter fabricator as his alter ego and a title which reads like a science textbook.” Ibid., p. 81.
9. Collier, op cit., p. 215.
