Drawn Together

by Beth E. Wilson, January 25, 2008

Drawing has traditionally served as a jumping-off point for what was to be the “real” work, the fully realized/finished painting or sculpture that succeeded its sketchy preliminary rendition. In the hands of a master draftsman such as Ingres in the 19th century, drawings could be drop-dead gorgeous, minutely detailed works in their own right, although always still playing second fiddle to classically finished oil painting.

But beginning with the Impressionists, the old academic worldview began to crack, and the painted sketch began to stand on its own as an autonomous work of art. By the early 20th century, drawing (and its scissor-sister, collage) made a strong bid for significance—understanding early Cubism would be impossible without all those analytic pasted newsprint-and-charcoal experiments by Braque and Picasso.

In more recent years, in the wake of postmodernism’s Cuisinart of culture (throw in one part high art, one part mass culture, and hit “pulse”), the old guard modernist distinctions between (and insistence on) specific media have given way to what the theorist Rosalind Krauss has called the “post-medium condition.” A great deal of contemporary art practice has become fluid, transient, and organized around performance or social engagement with the viewer, by whatever means necessary—sculpture, painting, video, creating your own chocolate factory, you name it.

In the midst of this free-for-all, drawing has emerged, with a certain irony, as the preeminent medium of nonmedium-specific art. Perhaps because its uses have historically been so elastic, it has found ways to stretch out and embrace possibilities that something as stringently codified as painting has had a harder time doing. Perhaps it’s because in this current moment of flux, of feeling inbetween (historically, artistically, you name it), the tentative associations of the medium have a special resonance.

Against this backdrop appears the current show at Garrison Art Center, “Drawing Revealed,” curated by Susan English and Jaanika Peerna. (Especially refreshing in this context is the fact that neither of these artists has included her own work in the exhibition—a frequent, if dicey, potentially conflict-laden practice of late.) The artists included in the show memorably chart the enormous territory embraced now by the term “drawing.”
Painter Laura Battle has created a significant body of work in graphite on gray paper, networks of geometrically generated lines that seem to pulse with a delicate energy impossible to capture in reproduction. This work is an important adjunct to her painting practice, yet provides distinctly different opportunities for her to pursue—these are not preparatory sketches in any traditional sense, but freestanding, independent (and gorgeous) works in their own right.