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PERFORMANCE

DRAWING
DRAWING IN

Series editors:

Russell Marshall, Marsha Meskimmon and Phil Sawdon


University of Loughborough, UK

‘Thinking through drawing’ has become a ubiquitous trope across


the arts, sciences and humanities. The rich vein of thinking, making
and visualizing through drawing that is being developed across
these diverse fields affords an opportunity for sustained intellectual
dialogues to emerge within, between or without traditional
disciplinary boundaries. The Drawing In series provides a space for
new perspectives and critical approaches in the field of drawing to be
brought together and explored.

Published titles:

Drawing Difference, Marsha Meskimmon and Phil Sawdon

Drawing Investigations, Sarah Casey and Gerry Davies

Performance Drawing, Maryclare Foá, Jane Grisewood, Birgitta Hosea


and Carali McCall

Forthcoming:

Looking at Life Drawing, Margaret Mayhew

Scenographic Design Drawing, Sue Field

Serial Drawing, Joe Graham

Drawing as Phenomenology, Deborah Harty


PERFORMANCE
DRAWING
New Practices since 1945

MARYCLARE FOÁ
JANE GRISEWOOD
BIRGITTA HOSEA
CARALI MCCALL
BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK
1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA

BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo


are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

First published in Great Britain 2020

© Maryclare Foá, Jane Grisewood, Birgitta Hosea and Carali McCall, 2020

Maryclare Foá, Jane Grisewood, Birgitta Hosea and Carali McCall have asserted
their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be
identified as Authors of this work.

Cover image: ARC: I Draw For You (2010) © Nick Manser

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or


transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system,
without prior permission in writing from the publishers.

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for,
any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given
in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher
regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased
to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data


Names: Foá, Maryclare, author. | Grisewood, Jane, author. | Hosea, Birgitta, author. | McCall, Carali, author.
Title: Performance drawing : New Practices since 1945 / Maryclare Foá, Jane Grisewood,
Birgitta Hosea and Carali McCall.
Description: London ; New York : Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2020. | Series: Drawing in | Includes bibliographical
references and index. | Summary: “What is ‘performance drawing’? When does a drawing turn into a
performance? Is the act of drawing in itself a performative process, whether a viewer is present or not?
Through conversation, interviews and essays, the authors illuminate these questions, and what it might
mean to perform, and what it might mean to draw, in a diverse and expressive contemporary practice since
the 1960s. The term ‘performance drawing’ refers to Drawing Papers: Performance Drawings by Catherine
de Zegher (2001), with origins in live works decades earlier. In this book, it is used as a trope, and a thread of
thinking, to describe a process dedicated to broadening the field of drawing through resourceful practices and
cross-disciplinary influence. The introduction presents a brief historical background and outlines approaches
to performance drawing. As a way to embrace the different voices and various lenses in producing this book,
each author reveals their individual perspectives and critical methodology in the five chapters. While embedded
in ephemerality and immediacy, the themes encompass body and energy, time and motion, light and space,
imagined and observed, demonstrating how drawing can act as a performative tool. The dynamic interaction
leads to a collective understanding of the term, performance drawing, and addresses the key developments and
future directions of this applied drawing process. Featuring a wide range of international artists, the acclaimed
practitioners from the 1960s, such as Alison Knowles, Carolee Schneemann, Richard Long, Robert Morris, Tom
Marioni, Trisha Brown and William Kentridge, have been instrumental in instituting and exposing the relationship
between drawing and performing. This book provides the foundation behind these pioneers, alongside a
platform for current and emerging artists, and for those working between the boundaries of the genre. Merging
experiences and disciplines in the expanded field has established a vibrant art movement that has been
progressively burgeoning in the last few years”– Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020011462 (print) | LCCN 2020011463 (ebook) | ISBN
9781788313841 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350113008 (epub) | ISBN 9781350113015 (pdf)
Subjects: LCSH: Performance drawing.
Classification: LCC NX456.5.P38 F63 2020 (print) | LCC NX456.5.P38 (ebook) | DDC 741–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020011462
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020011463

ISBN: HB: 978-1-7883-1384-1


ePDF: 978-1-3501-1301-5
ePUB: 978-1-3501-1300-8

Series: Drawing In
Series editors: Marsha Meskimmon, Phil Sawdon and Russell Marshall

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CONTENTS

List of figures vi
Foreword viii
Foreword: Drawing life x
Acknowledgements xii

Introduction 1

1 Marking: Line and body in time and space 9

2 Physicality: Running as drawing 45

3 Communicating: Directives and/or instructions that


promote the activity of drawing 79

4 Conjuring: The gift of a surprise 125

5 Illuminating: Live mark making through projected light 171

Conclusion 215

Select Bibliography 221


Index 235
FIGURES

1.1 Jane Grisewood and Carali McCall, Line Dialogue IV, 2011. 19
1.2 Piyali Ghosh, Arabian Sea, My Rasa Rekha, 2015. 21
1.3 Tom Marioni, Drawing a Line As Far As I Can Reach, 1972. 23
1.4 Jaanika Peerna, Am Rand / On the Edge 2014. 27
1.5 Helena Almeida, Inside Me (Dentro de mim), 1998. 30
1.6 Jane Grisewood, Mourning Lines, 2006. 33
1.7 Francis Alÿs, When Faith Moves Mountains (Cuando la fe Mueve
Montañas), Lima 2002. 35
2.1 Carolee Schneemann, Up to and Including Her Limits, 1973. 47
2.2 Carali McCall Work no. 1 (Circle Drawing) 4 hours 15 minutes,
2019. 51
2.3 John Court, Untitled, 2016. 56
2.4 Tony Orrico, performing Penwald: 6: project, recoil (WhyNot!, W139,
Amsterdam, NL) 2011. 58
2.5 Robert Luzar, Two-Legged Idleness, Untaped, 2013–14. 66
2.6 Trisha Brown, Man Walking Down the Side of a Building, 1970. 70
3.1 Alison Knowles, rolling up paper from a work by Fabrizio Manco,
Workshop at October Gallery, London. 89
3.2 Foá, Grisewood, Hosea, McCall, ARC: I Draw For You, 2010. 93
3.3 Counterproductions, InspiralLondon, 2018. 102
3.4 Angela Rogers and Denise Turner, Drawing Conversations, 2016. 104
3.5 Georgiana Houghton, The Flower of Catherine Stringer, c.1870. 107
3.6 Tim Lewis, Mule Make Mule, 2012. 114
4.1 Tania Kovats, Evaporation (Black) 31, 2014. 134
4.2 M. Foá, Lost Borrowed and Found; The SS Great Britain, 2006. 139
4.3 Birgitta Hosea, White Lines, 2009–10. 144
4.4 Phoebe Boswell, Dear Mr. Shakespeare, 2016. 146
4.5 Kreider + O’Leary, Immolation Triptych, 2009. 152
4.6 Jordan McKenzie, Shame Chorus, 2016–ongoing. 158
FIGURES vii

5.1 Walter R. Booth, Comedy Cartoons, 1907. 175


5.2 Photo of Bahman Panahi, 2017. 185
5.3 Foá, Grisewood, Hosea, McCall, Sky vs SKYPE, 2011. 186
5.4 Jeremy Radvan and Paul Sermon, (tele)consequences, 2018. 187
5.5 Vicky Smith, 33 Frames Per Foot, 2013. 192
5.6 Kellie O’Dempsey and Jennifer Wroblewski, Resistance Movement,
2017. 199
5.7 Birgitta Hosea, dotdot dash, 2018. 204
FOREWORD

This book curates and articulates a richly diverse panoply of practices where the
act of drawing is comprehended as a performative undertaking. Written from the
perspective of articulate practitioners, the authors explain the term ‘performance
drawing’, first coined by Catherine de Zegher in 1962, as cross-disciplinary,
variable and evolving. Each of the five chapters discuss, with examples,
strategies by which the artist is leaving – as well as stimulating in others – marks
and traces that operate in space and time, invisibly and materially, aurally and
visually, instructively and reflectively, conceptually and physically, permanently
and ephemerally. The field is quintessentially playful. Conjuring, instruction,
animation, theatrics, even spiritualism, are included.
The body is a leitmotif; as is motion: dance as well as motion picture. The
material agency of the corporeal comes into play, literally. The entire body might
be involved, becoming a total instrument; or the artist’s bodily intervention might
be alluded to in traces made visible, imprinted residues left behind as evidence
of previous action. The artist might be running, or walking (perpendicular, up
a building even, as in Trisha Brown’s iconic postmodern choreography Man
Walking Down the Side of a Building, 1970). She might be making her mark
on film footage as it projects. She might be allographically instructing others in
drawing actions. Vitally, the artist is present, in the sense of rendering the action
of mark making manifest, as a live process, whether analogue and digital.
Classification of the genre is inevitably elusive. No sooner does one read
one definition than another emerges to offer yet another boundary pushed,
another flavour, dislodging traditional assumptions about drawing signifying
two-dimensional mark making on a flat surface. What arises throughout, as a
transverse line running across the authors’ eclectic definitions, is a consistent
democratizing motive at work, unsettling traditional modes of consumption
to promote methodologies of process, and a consensus that the examples
chose to share a collective intention to disrupt spectator consumerism. The
performance-drawn piece is only completed in its symbiotic encounter with its
public. In participatory culture, accomplishment gives way to concept, technique
to process. Art, by definition, becomes the action of making art itself, over and
above the artefact, a recurring post-twentieth-century zeitgeist conversation
FOREWORD ix

to which the authors are uniquely contributing. If this book defines a common
ground of artistic tendencies and their distinctions, it also expresses the very
different perspectives of its authors. It is their respective approaches in gathering
and comparing artists and their work that make this such a useful compendium
for student and scholar alike.
The pieces cited are simple and complex, solo and interactive, urban and rural,
analogue and digital. They belong in their chapters, and yet there is slippage, as
the confines of one topic infiltrates another. This is to be expected. This is a bold
volume about unbounded, often interdisciplinary, practices. United by a common
thread of liveness and performativity, the sundry experiments discussed and
contextualized are positioned to foreground each chapter’s focus, unpacked to
reveal the ways in which drawing, as performative action, continues to inscribe
meaning in space and time. What lingers, once one has put this book down, is
a vivid impression of an expansive field of innovative and boundary-pushing art
practices, persuasively held together by this elastic yet consistently logical term:
Performance Drawing.
Anna Furse
London, March 2020
FOREWORD
DRAWING LIFE

When is a person a line? When is a body a pencil? When is a drawing a thought?


I am swimming and thinking about writing the foreword to this volume as I
make waves in the swirling water. I am stirring vegetables around and around
a frying pan on the stove. I am mowing a lawn that stretches into long verdant
rows. My thoughts follow my hands and arms and propel movement. Just as
we’ve now come to see how much of our daily activity can be understood as
performance, so it is that most of what we do is based on the line – which is to
say, drawing.
The linkage of drawing and performance came rather late to recognition in
art exhibitions and performance scholarship in the post-war period. By now it
is obvious how long the relationship has existed. Drawing is one of the earliest
languages, like dance. Paradoxically, it is non-verbal and yet a form of speech
articulating the body’s vocabulary. A private act turned public. Drawing is gestural
as is performance in its foregrounding. What has it to tell us about the movement
from mind to hand to space? There is so much to discover in such a network of
complex signs.
Drawing is concerned with process not product. It can be a score, a thought,
a study, a map, a walk, an action within a performance, or the performance itself.
Thinking about performance drawing encompasses several forms of art: visual art,
theatre, dance, music. The ethos of performance studies that encompasses all
activity as a form of performance has now been extended to the visual arts where
the ontology of the line overwhelms every medium. Think of William Kentridge
drawing his way through multiple settings or the visual book Robert Wilson
creates for his theatre and opera, first drawing each scene. Think of Francis Alÿs
whose projects make a line in the earth or the processions in a Meredith Monk
performance. Performance drawing is a form of Intermedia, in the very sense Dick
Higgins described, as a union of art media and life media, his own efforts generating
a remarkable number of graphis drawings as occasions for performance.
Visiting the British Library for the 2019 exhibition Writing: Making Your Mark,
I admired the Chinese scrolls and multiple screens with writing as drawing that
turn folding panels into an installation. And what of the publisher Aldus Manutius’s
FOREWORD xi

creation of italics, the performative gesture of the word that first came to life on
a fifteenth-century page?
Drawing is not merely mark making but the imagining of a world. It can
be envisioned with charcoal, crayon, graphite, pencil, light, sound, the body.
Sometimes it is a spurt of ink. Or blood stains. Or dirt. There is drawing as
performance, drawing in performance, drawing for performance. A live
performance or its documentation. Drawing is a form of writing, a line of thought.
Drawing is both noun and verb, idea and image.
In so far as a drawing relates to live action by a body, it represents: an act,
a physical object, an idea, a space. Bodies are not abstractions. Drawing in
performance makes itself known through appearance. This condition goes
beyond the designation of ‘time-based’ work. It demands to be understood
in its fullness as presence. The one performing drawing is a vulnerable actor
in real time in front of live spectators, making gestures toward the unknown,
inchoate beyond: the mind thinking, the hand moving, the body quickening, the
eyes following intuition wherever it may lead. A light tracing in the darkness,
an invisible sound emitting waves in the air. There is so much to comprehend
regarding performance drawing and the narrative, the line and linearity. What
is performance drawing to performance space? Is the drawing a species of
performance or the performance itself?
Performance Drawing: New Practices since 1945 goes a long way in
chronicling how widespread and varied is the bringing together of performance
and drawing in the modern and contemporary histories of multiple art forms. So
many disparate kinds of art making and multidisciplinary artists are taken into its
folds that one begins to wonder where performance ends and drawing begins.
More importantly, it brings closer together the two histories of performance that
continue to isolate performance knowledge in visual art or theatre. The volume’s
contributors explore drawing as it pertains to the environment, the studio and
performance space, each realm shaping its own necessities. Here is a manual of
new ways to think about the line and by extension about the drawing’s relation
to the human body. If we are led to contemplate the longevity of drawing from
the earliest cave markings, the outlines of what performance may become in the
machine-learning experiments of artificial intelligence await our attention.
We are now at the frontiers of what will constitute the dimensions of
performance and drawing in worlds yet to be staged. How will body and line
and time and space be reconfigured in the not yet discernible lines of the future?
What we do know is that expanded art processes and perceptions have redrawn
the poetries of everyday life.
Bonnie Marranca
New York, September 2019
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The final stages of this book were completed during the early months of 2020,
at the time of the Covid-19 pandemic. The authors and editors working on
the manuscript were required to be separated, communicating virtually while
individually working and living in isolation. This separation has highlighted how
performance drawing largely depends on people being physically together,
whether in a collaborative practice or as performer and audience. Whilst artists
continue to make works supported by the advancement of digital and online
technologies, performance drawing was developed over a time when a physical
gathering of people was considered a normal ‘everyday’ circumstance.
The authors would like to thank all those who have supported our performance
drawing practice, research and writing; the copy editors and artists involved, our
colleagues, former tutors, friends, families and all those who stand for a kinder
world.
INTRODUCTION

The practice of drawing has traditionally been assumed as a discipline bound


to two dimensions and dry marking materials. In a contemporary art context,
drawing can be understood as both durational and spatial and comprised
of elements employed in both painting and performance-based practices.
Importantly, drawing can now be understood as a performance when enacted
in front of an audience either live or in anticipation of a future audience through
a recording device.
A number of contemporary practitioners engage with time-based and
performative ways of working that foreground the actions of making over the
final result of those actions. Unbound to observational representation, particular
methods of employment, surfaces or types of materials, these process-based
approaches to drawing reveal themselves as temporal – either during a live event
or through documentation. Thus, performance drawing can be interpreted as
a blended hybrid, containing various and diverse components from different
disciplines and involving both primary haptic engagement and the advancement
of technology.
Intended as a resource for practitioners involved in the expanded field of
drawing, who are looking for a scholarly debate and seek informed references to
underpin their practice, Performance Drawing: New Practices since 1945 gathers
together a range of seminal works that have contributed to these developments
in drawing and, in addition, reconsiders work from other disciplines, such as
dance, theatre, action painting and expanded cinema, as forms of drawing that
today’s artists are inspired by. This will also provide background information for
researchers new to the field.
As today’s artists are shifting boundaries of genres, creative debates are
opened up and generate transformative methodologies. Instrumental in instituting
and revealing the relationship between drawing and performing, the chapters in
this book aim to establish a progressively vibrant and forward-thinking approach
to art that contributes to the expanded field of drawing. At times, it may seem
apparent that successive generations of artists reinvent the wheel and explore
performance drawing across a range of disciplines; the authors, here, aim to give
a contextualization, reaching into diverse yet significantly relevant references of
historical predecessors.
2 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

Although incidences of temporal, process-based approaches to drawing


can be found in a range of historical periods, practices and disciplines, there
has yet to be a book that gathers examples by such themes and investigates
the implications of advancing the interrelationship between drawing and
performance to this extent. While the seminal text ‘Artists Notes 1972’ by Carl
Plackman could be sited as an opening up of the possibilities of drawing from
a contemporary point of view, it was the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition
and catalogue Drawing Now (1976), with forty-five artists such as John Cage,
Robert Morris, Richard Serra and Piero Manzoni, that can be noted to have
significantly contributed to a renewed fascination in processes of drawing. A year
later, in 1977, Martha Beck, former assistant curator of drawing at the Museum
of Modern Art, founded The Drawing Center, New York, which continues to
celebrate the practice of drawing in all its various guises. Although these are
significant examples of thinking about drawing, they do not investigate drawing
in relation to performance.
Furthermore, to drawing’s history, a key exhibition curated by Michael Craig-
Martin, Drawing the Line: Reappraising Drawing Past and Present (1995), posed
a new conversation between historical and contemporary drawing practitioners
with artists such as Leonardo da Vinci, Carl Andre, Paul Klee, Richard Long and
Bruce Nauman. Following this was the exhibition and catalogue Out of Line:
Drawings from the Arts Council Collection, Hayward Gallery (2001), leading to
further institutions opening in the UK, such as C4RD – a UK registered charity since
2004 supporting artists interested in drawing which identifies itself as London’s
museum space for drawing – and Drawing Room. This was initiated by Mary
Doyle, Kate Macfarlane and Katharine Stout in 2002 as a non-profit gallery in the
UK dedicated to contemporary drawing, which hosted Robin Rhode and work
by Tom Marioni in an exhibition titled Sounds Like Drawing (2005) and continues
today to provide a major resource for contemporary drawing with programmes
that include panel discussions, exhibitions and practical workshops.
Another noteworthy exhibition was the 2003 The Stage of Drawing: Gesture
and Act, and the exhibition’s catalogue included a conversation between curator
Catherine de Zegher and practitioner Avis Newman on theory and concepts of
drawing. The former chief curator of The Drawing Center, New York (1999–2006),
de Zegher, then went on to curate the key exhibition On Line: Drawing Through
the Twentieth Century (1910–2010) at the Museum of Modern Art, New York,
in 2011. More recently, editors and writers, such as Bonnie Marranca, in PAJ:
A Journal of Performance and Art; Katharine Stout, in her book Contemporary
Drawing: From the 1960s to Now (2014); and Catherine Wood, in Performance
in Contemporary Art (2018) have contributed significant research to this platform
and have helped shaped the thinking toward the development of this book.
Existing now is an ever-increasing interest and focus on drawing and the
performance of drawing in art institutions and artist-run spaces. It is important
INTRODUCTION 3

to give mention and include here Professor Anita Taylor’s Research Centre
for Drawing (which first opened in Wimbledon, London, and, more recently as
Drawing Projects UK, moved to Trowbridge). She initiated the Trinity Buoy Wharf
Drawing Prize, which was founded in 1994 as a drawing prize and exhibition that
has established a reputation for its commitment to championing the breadth of
contemporary drawing practice within the UK. Also noteworthy is the established
and long-standing research project Drawing Lab Dessin at Concordia University,
Canada, co-founded by artist and educator François Morelli, which provides a
platform for action and discussion around contemporary drawing practices.
Other key notable examples include Loughborough University’s TRACEY
drawing research online journal, annual conference and project space as well as
the recent A History of Drawing, an inaugural exhibition at CCW at the University
of the Arts London (UAL) (2018) curated by Kelly Chorpening, which includes
the work Sweeping Actions (2017) by Rossella Emanuele. Beyond universities,
further key examples include an exhibition titled Performing Drawing (2018–19)
at Australia’s National Gallery, with artists such as Nicci Haynes and Gosia
Wlodarczak; the DRAWING NOW Art Fair (2019) in Paris curated and directed
by Joana P. R. Neves; the Draw Art Fair London (2019), with American artist
Linda Karshan’s work Draw Performance at Saatchi Gallery; Draw to Perform
events, curated by artist Ram Samocha, which, since 2013, has established
annual exhibitions, residencies and an active Instagram and Facebook group.
While the interest in the expanded field of drawing has undoubtedly become well
established, the appeal in performance and drawing has grown on social media
forums and university research hubs, enabling a cross-cultural, international
sharing of practice, processes and ideas. All of these publications, educational
institutions and exhibition spaces can be seen to have planted the seeds that
have nurtured performance drawing practice. However, to date, there has not
been a publication specifically concerned with tracing the genesis, emergence
and development of performance drawing and where it sits now in contemporary
practice.
The term ‘performance drawing’ first appeared in the subtitle of Catherine de
Zegher’s Drawing Papers 20: Performance Drawings, in particular with reference
to Alison Knowles and Elena del Rivero. This volume accompanied a series of five
solo exhibitions at The Drawing Center, New York (2001) of work that ‘explored
the interrelation of drawing and performance’. Since then, performance drawing
has compellingly become an operational term – a trope and a thread of thinking
to describe the process dedicated to broadening the field of drawing through
resourceful practices and cross-disciplinary influence, including dance, audio,
moving image and technology.
This present book is co-authored by four London-based artists, Maryclare Foá,
Jane Grisewood, Birgitta Hosea and Carali McCall, who met as PhD researchers
at Central Saint Martins, UAL, while individually undertaking research in different
4 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

areas of drawing – each sharing an interest in process-based and expanded


methods of working. In addition to their individual artistic practices, since 2008
the artists have collaborated on a range of performance drawing projects that
address the relationship between the body and presence, time and space through
working with graphite and charcoal, light, sound and animation. Working together
collaboratively defies traditional notions of authorship and, indeed, their collective
work was once described by artist Avis Newman as ‘a many headed hydra’.
For the four authors, the choice of working collaboratively has significantly
contributed to the creative process in this book and is underpinned by generations
of feminist practice; however, Feminism is not a primary concern for this text. For
the authors, working as a group has many positive outcomes and has enabled
the combination of ideas from four practitioners with diverse experiences of
expanded drawing practice and different generational perspectives. The subject
of drawing and performance as considered from four perspectives can suggest a
vast number of areas of enquiry. The very title of this book, Performance Drawing:
New Practices since 1945, is problematic in its suggestion of defining and
containing a genre that is not yet extensively analysed or documented (relative to
painting, drawing, sculpture, film and performance) and largely understood today
as being in its formative years. Brought together through the lengthy dialogue,
debate and negotiation that are necessary for collective authorship, Performance
Drawing: New Practices since 1945 seeks to introduce, agitate and open out
the concept of performance drawing rather than offering a narrow, reductive or
categorical definition that would serve to close the field down.
The authors do not wish to fix a categorical or limiting definition of performance
drawing, yet are determined to avoid a nebulous selection of works. Any selection
is by definition a restriction and the extent of the global contemporary art scene
makes it impossible to represent all artists whose practice could be considered
performance drawing around the world. Thus, the artworks and practices that
are included were not chosen on the basis of providing a categorical definition
of performance drawing or an exhaustive chronological, socio-historical account
of its development, but rather these selections are framed around a series of
thematic enquiries that are outlined in the chapters. Although each author has a
different nationality and an effort was made to include a broad and diverse range
of artists, the authors acknowledge that the sample choice has been limited by
having English as a native language, white privilege and being based in London.
Not every work is a performance drawing, or necessarily a performance or a
drawing, but may contain key ideas and/or elements that contribute to the
building of works that engage in this arena.
The authors have critically selected artworks that help give shape to the
particular themes of each chapter: Chapter 1: Marking, Chapter 2: Physicality,
Chapter 3: Communication, Chapter 4: Conjuring, Chapter 5: Illumination. In
creating a structure for this text, Foá, Grisewood, Hosea and McCall each looked
INTRODUCTION 5

at the practical, material and process-based methods that can be identified in


the field of performance drawing from the perspective of their own research
interests. Each chapter aims to find specific approaches yet demonstrates a use
of related themes and concepts that address notions of performance, drawing
and time.
Importantly, each chapter outlines a series of artworks which subvert, challenge
and advance perceptions, to expand contexts, to offer flexible interpretations
and to open up possibilities for further conceptual and practical exploration.
While embedded in ephemerality and immediacy, the themes explored in each
chapter encompass a range of perspectives that span time and movement, body
and action, imagined and observed, light and space, media and materiality –
demonstrating how performance drawing connects a diverse and expressive
collection of work and how such an assembly of artists can bridge and interrogate
what it might mean to perform and what it might mean to draw.
Although the examples involved in the book are predominantly artists’ works
from a Western context, the authors have tried to approach performance drawing
as a worldwide phenomenon. While acknowledging a number of historical
antecedents from the Victorian period onwards, Performance Drawing: New
Practices since 1945 focuses in particular on live works of the Gutai artists, John
Cage, Fluxus and onwards – in which the art object itself becomes dematerialized
and increasingly less important than the ideas behind it and how it was made.
During this time, many artists’ works required photographic documentation to
secure archival evidence. Thus, while the act of drawing itself questions the
performance process, selected artists and their particular artworks bridge and
interrogate what it might mean to perform and what it might mean to draw –
whether the viewer or the camera is present or not.
Chapter 1, ‘Marking: Line and body in time and space’, surveys many artists’
works that merge drawing and performance, exemplifying the body as a tool for
performance, where the dynamic line has defined bodily presence and durational
processes. It introduces the pioneers of contemporary art practice, reflecting
on the action painting of artist Jackson Pollock, who, by engaging his whole
body in his work, challenged traditional conventions. Further practitioners who
introduced radical change through physical action include the Gutai group, Yves
Klein and Ana Mendieta. The chapter brings together artists and artworks such as
John Latham’s One Second Drawing, Tehching Hsieh’s One Year Performance,
Tom Marioni Drawing a Line As Far As I Can Reach and artists who focus on
developing the line to create a sense of space, such as Jaanika Peerna and
Monika Grzymala along with choreographer Trisha Brown who created sizeable
three-dimensional action drawings. Revealing in-between spaces, Helena
Almeida turns herself into a drawing with her body as a place of passage, while
William Anastasi and Morgan O’Hara (in her Live Transmission drawings) draw
tracks of bodies in motion. Finally, the chapter explores the paradigm shift from
6 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

inside to outside, the peripatetic actions of artists such as Richard Long with his
seminal A Line Made by Walking and Francis Alÿs embodying the integral line
in perpetual movement. Overall, addressing drawing as a material residue using
the tool and hand to leave a mark on a surface, it builds a foundation grounded
in past histories of what it means to use the body and draw. Importantly, the
chapter identifies time as a material and key source of concept and means of
working.
Chapter 2, ‘Physicality: Running as drawing’, identifies artworks that focus on
the body and the physical effort involved in performance drawing. Through an
accumulation of artists’ works that recognize the demands of conditioning and
training, it ultimately leads to running ‘as’ drawing and addresses the artist as
athlete. It considers performance-based works that constitute a marking process
such as Carolee Schneemann’s Up to and Including Her Limits and Matthew
Barney’s Drawing Restraint 1–6 and develops the theme of physical/mental
strength central to the work through artists such as John Court, Tony Orrico and
Guido van der Werve. While suggesting how disciplines such as running and
dance have merged to become an ever-engaging mode of working for artists
today, artworks such as Barry Le Va’s Velocity: Impact Run, Martin Creed’s
Work no. 850 and Trisha Brown’s seminal work Man Walking Down the Side
of a Building are described to cultivate the conversation between performance
and the performative, artist and the audience, agency and the physical act of
movement. The approach to this chapter exemplifies extreme but fundamental
forms of human movement, contributing to the legacy of artists refining skills and
enriching the future of performative practice. Following on from Chapter 1, in this
chapter the visible mark is lost and drawing becomes the concept of the line
through the motion of the body in space. Importantly, the subjective experience
of the practitioner during the conscious act of making is key. While the focus
of the chapter is on the body as the primary source of material, it addresses
physical endurance within time-based events.
Chapter 3, ‘Communicating: Directives and/or instructions that promote the
activity of drawing’, investigates drawings made as a conceptual activity that
start with an idea from an artist but are not physically made by them. Rather,
an instruction for an unfinished or ‘open’ work is communicated and its making
is performed by someone else. After Nelson Goodman, the term allographic is
used to refer to this kind of artwork in which the artist’s intention is communicated
as a set of instructions using language or visuals, stored as text or image and
then delivered to another, who will interpret the instructions and carry them out
as a collaborator. Methods of communicating instructions for drawings include
notational systems for dance and music, such as Rudolf Laban’s Kinetograms
and the graphic scores of John Cage and Cornelius Cardew. Text-based
instructions for participants to follow, such as George Brecht’s Event Scores and
Alison Knowles’s Make Something on the Street and Give it Away, are considered
alongside drawn forms of dialogue with the public, such as Stanley Brouwn’s
INTRODUCTION 7

This Way Brouwn, Angela Rogers’ Drawing Conversation and InspiralLondon’s


walking trail. Also investigated in this chapter are historical works in which artists
followed instructions for drawings from the spirit world (including 1860s works
by Georgiana Houghton and 1930s–1960s works by Emma Kunz). The concept
of an instruction for a drawing created to be enacted by another has been a
direct influence on the early pioneers of computational art, such as Frieder Nake,
who defined instructions for drawing in procedural code that was then enacted
by the computer as well as machines for drawing (including works by Jean
Tinguely, Tim Lewis and Patrick Tresset) that follow mechanical instructions to
create drawings on paper. In this chapter, the notion of drawing and the mark
becomes a concept designed as a directive, for example something to be drawn
by another. In the form of a process undertaken through instruction, performance
drawing importantly involves participation and collaboration: there is a letting go
of the individual as a sole performer.
Chapter 4, ‘Conjuring: The gift of a surprise’, investigates an area of
performance drawing concerned with the conjuring of images. This chapter sets
out to explore how the term conjuring has been employed in the description of
still images, what this term has meant in the context of creative practice and how
(because of its potent connection to illusion and surprise) it can now be employed
as an efficient description of live and recorded performance drawing works. Six
different aspects of conjuring in performance drawing are investigated beginning
with the first section, ‘Shadows, memory and the gift of a trace’, in which
Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, Pliny’s Birthplace of Drawing and Jacques Derrida’s
interpretation of Emmanuel Levinas’s text on The Gift of the Trace are studied
alongside William Kentridge’s Triumph and Laments, Laurie Anderson’s Heart
of a Dog and Tania Kovats’ Breath. The second section, ‘Relocating place and
site’, focuses on works made in outside environments among which are Dennis
Oppenheim’s Gallery Transplant and Robin Rhode’s Untitled (Landing). The third
section, ‘Redrawing the self through technology and performance’, investigates
works including Eileen Agar’s Ladybird and Echo Morgan’s Be the Inside of
the Vase. The fourth section, ‘Reinterpreting narratives’, includes artists whose
works address characters from history, such as Phoebe Boswell’s Dear Mr.
Shakespeare, William Pope.L’s Harriet Tubman Spinning the Universe and Joan
Jonas’s Lines in the Sand. The fifth section, ‘Merging disciplines and bridging
technologies’, looks at artists whose works expand the practice of performance
drawing by employing various technologies in the process; the works include
Kreider + O’Leary’s Immolation Triptych and Christian Nold’s Emotional Mapping
Series. And lastly, the sixth section, ‘Sound drawing in performance’, opens
out the process of performance drawing, focusing on the sonic rather than
the visual, proposing vocal sound as a material to draw with through place
and thereby releasing the work from a surface. Works in this section include
Susan Philipsz’s The Lost Reflection and Jordan McKenzie’s Shame Chorus.
In this chapter, an important element of performance drawing is investigated,
8 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

when the act of making can transport the audience, and also the practitioner,
into a state of wonderment. Visual mark making practices of drawing provoke
an unexpected transformation, surprizing the audience in the moment of the
making, and sometimes also the practitioner, as the work emerges.
Chapter 5, ‘Illuminating: Live mark making through projected light’, focuses
on live drawings made with projected light. This final chapter connects a range
of practices from theatrical acts, expanded cinema, live animation, light graffiti
and digital art in which an ephemeral, illuminated drawing is created live in a
performance setting. A range of technological approaches to mark making
in live performance are covered, starting with the lightning sketch drawing
performances, a popular act in the Victorian music hall that directly contributed
to the development of early animation. In some cases, these early animations
were, in turn, projected on stage as part of the act. This tension between the
live act and the pre-recorded document establishes the problematic of ‘liveness’
for the drawing that is projected. Does it need to be static? Can spontaneous
and improvisational drawings that move be created and projected in real time?
A range of approaches to this challenge are demonstrated from contemporary
artists, such as Lisa Gornick, Harald Smykla and Bahman Panahi, who continue
the traditions of the lightning sketch through projections of their live performance
drawing and calligraphy. This continues with expanded cinema works by Annabel
Nicholson, Paul Sharits, Takahito Iimura, Vicky Smith and VALIE EXPORT, in
which moving drawings on analogue film are made as part of live performance.
These hybrid works, which use technologies of the screen, raise questions about
liveness and issues of time – namely, the pre-recorded vs the live and immediate.
The chapter concludes with examples of contemporary artists, such as the Graffiti
Research Lab, Pierre Hébert, Kellie O’Dempsey, Jeremy Radvan and Oliver
Gingrich, who create live animation and digital performance drawings through
the use of technologies such as the Tagtool, Skype and lasers, with techniques
ranging from the projection of live video feeds through to spontaneous digital
drawing and computer-generated mark making. In this final chapter, drawing
is addressed in the ephemeral mark of light perceived by the audience in time-
based media. The performance element is ruled by the work being live and
created only in view of an ‘other’.
The book concludes with a summation of thematics explored and the
anticipation of future research and development in this emerging field, continuing
to insist that performance drawing remain as a highly flexible category, which
should not be confined to any one definition. The four authors aim to explore
what can be described as performance drawing and bring together a trace of
influential artworks and artists to invoke and investigate the term’s history and
emergence in a field of practice. Through elements and aspects of drawing
and performance, the book aims to uncover the emergence of practices that
establish strong relationships between body, line, time and space.
1
MARKING:
LINE AND BODY IN TIME
AND SPACE

Drawing, with its long history rooted in material permanence and its
status as a private and often preparatory activity, may seem at odds
with performance art. Yet drawing has been used by artists engaged
with performance just as it has by painters and sculptors, to record
their actions and for the mapping and preparation of those actions. The
deployment of the unorthodox materials and approaches to the two-
dimensional surface, often involving an intensely physical interaction,
has in many cases rendered drawing an action in itself.
CORNELIA H. BUTLER1

The act of drawing itself transforms the mark into line and the body into action.
This chapter provides a foundation to the interrelationship between performance
and drawing and focuses on the implications of mark making in time-based
artworks. The artists select open creative debates and highlight transformative
methodologies that involve concepts of the line and body, time and space
as means of working. They are instrumental in introducing and revealing the
relationship between drawing and performing in the expanded field today.
Introduced are the pioneers of contemporary art practice and artists such as
Jackson Pollock, Gutai artists and Gego, whose concepts and actions contributed
to the emergence of performance drawing, and acclaimed artists that follow, such
as Helena Almeida, Trisha Brown, Richard Long, Tom Marioni, Ana Mendieta
and Robert Morris, whose physical performances expanded drawing ideas.
Importantly, the chapter engages with works tangibly bound in time that range
from John Latham’s one-second studio drawing to Tehching Hsieh’s epic one-year
performance outdoors, where time is evidenced and embodied in the action itself.
The chapter looks to artists using new approaches that have given way to
thinking about the body as movement and a performative tool. In addressing how
10 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

drawing transforms the mark into line and the body into action, the first section
looks to the transition and opening up of materials – as practitioners in fine arts
have been engaged in the multidisciplinary and performative processes since
1945. It describes the ‘Shifts in painting and drawing’, seeing Jackson Pollock’s
work as an expansion of painting that encompasses a drawing-like trace of the
body in action. The other artists selected in the first section include Yves Klein,
Janine Antoni, Ana Mendieta and Richard Serra – all use a performative action
and help describe an interest and shift of focus to the body involved in creating
the work.
The second section emphasizes the line, and many artists’ long fascination
with the line as a trope, and in particular the notion of the ‘Line in time’. Works
by Piero Manzoni, John Latham, Tehching Hsieh, Elena del Rivero and Robert
Morris introduce key processes, later expanded by contemporary artists such
as Jane Grisewood and Carali McCall, Piyali Ghosh and Kevin Townsend,
whose use of the concept of time illustrates a visualization of the line. The third
section, ‘Materials and actions in space’, includes the artists Tom Marioni, Bruce
Nauman, Trisha Brown and Gego, whose practice highlights the importance of
incorporating a sense of space and has more recently been considered and
taken up by the artists Monika Grzymala and Jaanika Peerna, making artworks
that imply a sculptural drawing in space.
In the fourth section, ‘Trace and record’, the artists Helena Almeida, William
Anastasi and Morgan O’Hara as well as selected works by Jane Grisewood
demonstrate the significance of gesture and tracing motion. Developing how a
mark-making process is embedded and fundamentally part of the conceptual
thinking of many artists, this section brings together artworks that highlight
the complexities between marking and drawing and recording movement. The
final section, ‘Walking as drawing’, builds on these ideas and presents works
by Richard Long, Francis Alÿs, Lygia Clark and, again, Tehching Hsieh to
demonstrate how performance and drawing practices can move beyond visual-
based mark making and identifies how today walking can be a drawing practice.

Shifts in painting and drawing


JACKSON POLLOCK / GUTAI ARTISTS / YVES KLEIN / JANINE ANTONI / ANA
MENDIETA / RICHARD SERRA
The paradigm shift in art from the late 1940s carried an increasing awareness of
the social and political mood; and, from the point of view of many, Jackson Pollock
was the pivotal artist between modernism and postmodernism. A prodigious
impact on younger generations paved the way for artists to experiment and
progress with groundbreaking developments from the vertical (working on walls)
MARKING 11

to the horizontal (working with materials on the floor and expansive spaces),
exposing new forms of art to live audiences and a wider public.
The focus of performance drawing as a medium embodied time and
movement, line and trace, and emerges from a practice with the term defined
as ‘action painting’, introduced by the critic Harold Rosenberg in his 1952 essay
in ARTnews: ‘giving more prominence to process and action rather than the
painting itself’.2 For Rosalind Krauss, art theorist and critic, Pollock’s weblike
shapes were also ‘constituted of pure line, the very stuff of drawing’;3 the curator
Gary Garrels also conveys Pollock in ‘terms of drawing and line and there is a
very blurred boundary between drawing and painting in his work’.4 He subverted
traditional conventions by using his whole body and indulging with his materials,
attracting the viewer to the action behind the marks. ‘Until Pollock, art making
oriented toward two-dimensional surfaces had been a fairly limited act so far as
the body was concerned. At most it involved the hand, wrist, and arm. Pollock’s
work directly involved the use of the entire body.’5
The curator Connie Butler surveyed Pollock’s work, describing his ‘bodily
engagement with canvas or paper and paint with a kind of performance’.6 Amelia
Jones, art historian and curator, coined the term the ‘Pollockian Performative’.7
Pollock’s unorthodox gestures required not only his hands but also extending
his entire body, bending and crouching, stretching and twisting, while
spontaneously splattering, dripping and flicking lines of paint. His methodology
revealed instinctive performance-based gestures, sweeping back and forth over
the canvas that lay flat on his studio floor in Long Island, New York. Butler also
saw in him ‘parallels in modernist dance’8 and dance-like traces left from his drip
paintings. Catherine de Zegher observed: ‘Even when still material, in the “drip”
paintings of Jackson Pollock, line had a new volatility.’9
Pollock’s work is mostly known through the celebrated documentation
of the renowned photographer Hans Namuth. Hundreds of black-and-white
photographs (each holding a residue of time) and film had a powerful impact
on artists, enabling an opening to performance drawing. Namuth’s film Jackson
Pollock 51 (1951) allowed a wider dimension for viewers to experience the art as
performance and spread worldwide, attracting a large audience.
Countless action artists motivated by Pollock spread and are viewed as
transitional figures in changing the art world, affirming physical gesture and
emphasizing lines of paint and body in action. The composer John Cage’s inspiring
works contributed towards Pollock’s expanding vision and practice, as did the
artist Allan Kaprow in his 1958 essay ‘The Legacy of Jackson Pollock’, which
acknowledged far-reaching actions that would profoundly influence subsequent
generations of performance artists, shaping a significant and enduring legacy.
The radical-minded Japanese Gutai artists were also motivated by action
painting and the performed gesture, bridging what seemed to be an interest
in the transformative approach to simply making a mark and engaging with
12 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

materials in new ways. In a further understanding, the emphasis on their ‘playful’


paintings freed them from having to commit to any aspect of their work being
read as a reflection of post-war devastation or emblematic of a given sociopolitical
agenda.10 In The Gutai Art Manifesto, the artist Jiro Yoshihara states: ‘We are
following the path that will lead to an international common ground where the
arts of the east and the west influence each other. And this is the natural course
of the history of art.’11 The act of painting in the unconventional sense provided
a connection and flexibility and, most importantly, a focus on the physical
manifestation of movement and art making.
Pollock produced his action paintings on the floor of his studio, sometimes
with his partner Lee Krasner present,12 whereas the Gutai artists (consisting
of twenty-four members between 1954 and 1957) exposed the process of
performing their work in site-specific outdoor spaces in front of a live audience.
For Gutai artists, it was the temporal process of marking and making that
was more important than the outcome. The physicality of the body became
fundamental to the material, leaving traces that mark evidence of the intensive
corporeal duration. Challenging the boundaries of mark making from the artists,
the Tate Modern curator Catherine Wood affirmed that ‘a history of performance
is evident in the traces of action in paintings […] or indeed, the choreography of
tracks left by the movement of Pollock on his drip paintings’.13
In live performances, Kazuo Shiraga, a co-founder of the Gutai group, used
mud on his feet to create large tactile works and, for Challenging Mud (1955),
rolled and tussled with his body to make sculptural forms. At his first performance
in Osaka in 1957, he suspended himself from the ceiling of the gallery by hanging
from a rope, extending a drawing to incorporate the space, flicking paint on
sheets of paper spread on the floor. In the previous year, fellow Gutai artist Shoza
Shimamoto had substituted the brush for flinging bottles of paint onto paper on
a rooftop floor. Meanwhile, Saburo Murakami, well known for his performances
of throwing objects or leaping through paper, expands his body to burst through
frames of ‘Paper Breaking’ Kami-yaburi (Breaking through Many Sheets of Paper
1956), resonating Yves Klein’s Leap in the Void (1960) and ‘drawing’ in space.
Gutai describes new ways of creating – ‘We discarded the frame, jumped out of
the wall, moved from static time to live time’14 – echoing the performed actions
of Pollock’s large floor drip paintings. Shiraga also spent time painting with his
bare feet on large sheets of paper on the floor.
In 1963, applying a different material, Jiro Takamatsu trailed lines of string
from inside to outside the exhibition space for his performance The String of
1000 Meters. Atsuko Tanaka is known for her ephemeral work exploring drawing
as performance with the constant gestural movement of drawing circles around
her body. Round on Sand (1968) augments the physical actions of her drawing,
creating large-scale circles upon circles, marking lines in the sand bare foot with
a long upside-down pickaxe. Tanaka moves out of the loops to trace the vast
circle drawings that appear on the beach only to be washed away by the tide.
MARKING 13

The drawing and erasure process was documented, redeeming the mark and
wash, in a grainy 16 mm film.
For the French artist Yves Klein, a further radical change in his practice was
no longer to paint from the life model but to employ the body of the model as
a tool for staged events. In Anthropometries (1960–1), ‘Klein replaced Pollock’s
brushes with women’s bodies’.15 Unclothed females drenched in Klein’s signature
YKB blue paint became his ‘living brushes’ – bodily actions as drawings were
made in front of audiences as a performance. Perhaps prompted by Robert
Rauschenberg and Susan Weil’s 1949–51 full-body photogram series, which
were prints made by placing their bodies on blueprint paper, Klein’s work similarly
gave evidence of direct body contact on a surface to leave a trace.
After Klein, decades later, Janine Antoni, a Bahamian-born artist, also became
interested in the body as a tool to leave a mark. Dipping her long hair into buckets
of ‘Loving Care’ brand black hair dye, she used it as a brush, drawing over the
floor of the Anthony d’Offay Gallery in London, 1993. During the performance,
she continued to make sweeping actions with her hair, referencing the labour
involved in mopping a floor – making ‘an ironic provocation of male-dominated
legacies (in this case that of Pollock and Klein)’.16 Disregarding Klein’s body
works as a response to using a model to paint, Antoni used her own body as
the model and the performer. It is rather like the bodily limits of Paul McCarthy’s
Face Painting – Floor, White Line in 1972; lying on his studio floor, he strenuously
drags his body forward, pushing a bucket of white paint with his head and chest.
Similarly, Ana Mendieta’s discarding of the conventional paintbrush allows her
visceral movement to control her own actions and outcomes that have always
been an essential part of her practice. Revisiting Klein’s blue paintings exposed
his artworks through consistent instructions and male ego, whereas ‘Mendieta
became both the instructor and participant in the gesture of her own female
form’.17 Corporeality, transforming the body into trace, identity and landscape
dominate the Cuban-born artist’s ephemeral works. She engaged in a specific
form of performance art, clothed and unclothed, outside and inside. Repetitively
recording her physicality through specific marks and materials, Mendieta
would leave boundless negative body imprints in the deserted Iowa landscape.
Mendieta reveals: ‘My art is the way I re-establish the bonds that unite me to the
Universe. It is a return to the maternal source.’18 ‘Ashes were part of Mendieta’s
performative practice of marking through disappearance.’19
The paradigmatic twist of the body in the iconic Silueta series, where Mendieta
uses blood as a medium for her ‘body tracks’ drawings in several different
locations, addresses the landscape outside and inside. Untitled (Body Tracks)
was first performed in 1974,20 silently creating a dramatic wall drawing for a brief
duration of just over one minute:

Mendieta stands facing the wall, both bloodstained hands and forearms
raised above her head against its white surface; she gradually slides down
14 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

onto her knees, tapering the stained markings from her hands to a place
where they meet at the bottom of the wall but never quite converge in on one
another. This recorded action commences when Mendieta stands, shaking,
and turns to address the audience for a brief moment before exiting the field
of view.21

Retracing the earlier works designed for the camera and documentation led to
Mendieta’s 1982 performance Body Tracks (Rastros Corporales). It took place in
a progressive performance space known as Franklin Furnace in New York City,
founded in 1976. The Body Tracks large-scale drawings, a mixture of blood and
red tempera, leave traces of Mendieta’s body on sheets of paper. ‘Her ghostly
image is seamlessly integrated into the gallery space, a haunting reminder of the
presence of her body as integral to the performance.’22
Encompassing a further shift in painting and drawing and embracing the body,
Richard Serra’s artwork installation Splashing (1968–9) demonstrates a way of
working gesturally with a physical action at the forefront. In relation to Pollock’s
drip paintings, the San Francisco-born artist hurls and splatters molten lead from
a ladle in the space between the floor and wall.23 For Serra, with industrial trade
materials based in sculpture, it is a way of forming a drawing with materials other
than charcoal and pencil. And, more importantly, the title of the artwork serves to
emphasize the process of its making. He considers the action of making integral
to the work and the agency of the body part of the action.
In other works, such as Verb List in graphite on paper (1967–8), Serra keenly
suggests how action has an effect on his art-making practice. He famously
said, ‘Drawing is a verb’;24 and, in the work Verb List, on two sheets of paper,
lists of words that relate to the process of making are made in two columns.
For example, to fold, to tear, to cut, to drop, to splash, to stretch and to mark
are registered. Interestingly, inserted within these lists are words that denote
theme and concept, such as ‘of tension, of gravity, of mapping, of time’. Here,
Serra’s work provides an arena for expanding drawing as ‘thought’ and explores
art, either painting, drawing or splashing, within a particular form and mode of
thinking, suggesting how, particularly since the mid-to-late 1960s, artists used
materials and key processes to reach the corners of fine art practices and make
work based on conceptual constructs.

Line in time
PIERO MANZONI / JOHN LATHAM / TEHCHING HSIEH / ELENA DEL RIVERO /
ROBERT MORRIS / GRISEWOOD AND MCCALL / PIYALI GHOSH / KEVIN
TOWNSEND
MARKING 15

Exploring notions of line in time and boundaries of fine art practices,


Piero Manzoni describes his actions in time as centred in his body, the
body becoming line where the ‘act of making a Line can be defined as a
performance, whether conducted in the solitude of the studio or before an
audience in the street or in a printing house, where the production of the
Lines was collaborative’.25 The body in line and time becomes the vehicle for
articulating his work and, like other artists, he senses an ‘affirmation of the
body itself as a valid art material’.26

Time is something different from what the hands of the clock measure […].
As well as an extension in space, then the line is an extension in time; but not
time in the sense of measurement of a finite period or duration; time, rather,
that just goes on ad infinitum. […] Infinity is endless. It is not a place or even
a point but a conception in the mind.27

A dedicated exponent of the line, measurement and the demarcation of time,


Italian conceptual artist Manzoni sees things differently from ‘clock measure,
and the Linea does not measure metres or kilometres, but is zero, not zero as
the end, but the beginning of an infinite series’.28 With his work, he precludes
canvas, working only with paper, body and ink, focusing on performing the line,
engaged in a position of sharing artists’ process while not pursuing museums
and galleries. The curator Martin Engler claims that the conceptual paradigm
shift in 1960s art had a profound effect on Manzoni, who essentially heralded
the way for art of the future.29 Hauser & Wirth’s New York gallery exhibitions
titled Piero Manzoni. ‘Materials of his Time’ and ‘Line’, 2019’ reveal Manzoni’s
revolutionary approach to unconventional materials, highlighting his broad
influence in contemporary practice.30
From 1959, Manzoni began a series of drawings, titled Lineas (Lines), in his
studio where he performed to the public. Repeated horizontal lines drawn on
long rolls of paper were mostly placed in labelled cardboard tubes and some
in metal cylinders. In documentation, Manzoni is seen standing and holding the
vertical life-size Linea, one of the many early performance drawings. In 1960, he
produced the longest line drawing, Linea m.7,200, in a Danish printing works in
Italy with a machine emitting Indian ink on a large industrial roll of white paper,31
enabling Manzoni to take his lines of just over 7 km for time-based walks.
(Contributing to the idea that a drawing could be a walk, discussed in the section
‘Drawing as walking’.)
More than a decade later, the British conceptual artist John Latham further
explored lines in time. Latham’s event-based practice became influential
in performance art and has contributed to what can now be embraced as
performance drawing. His spray paintings, defined as drawings, became
16 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

fundamental in his work, particularly in the 1970s when he planned a series of


durational One Second Drawings.32 For the task, he devises a list of instructions
that produced a series of sixty 1-second drawings, one per day.33 Holding a spray
gun filled with black acrylic paint and flicking dots on white board, he creates a
cosmic array, representing the briefest moment of time that the technique would
allow, the ‘least event’.
Latham’s instant measure of time was radically different from Taiwanese
Tehching Hsieh’s one-year durational performances. Despite being at extreme
ends of the scale, the effects of time, ‘slits in time’,34 acknowledge the coexistence
of different durations and temporalities. Additionally, in the 1970s, British-born
New York artist Anthony McCall, like Latham, was absorbed in the idea of duration
and measurement, creating a meticulous Five-Minute Drawing (1974/2010).
McCall describes the charcoal line drawings on six sheets of paper as ‘also a
performance – the drawing is really a sign that the performance happened’.35 He
followed with Two Pencil Duration and three-minute performances. He has been
defined as one of those ‘artists whose conceptual and graphic investigations of
line have led them to the performative experiments incorporating the body and
working off its dimensions’.36
Tehching Hsieh’s one-year performance lifework is recognized as ‘something
that sits between performance and record’.37 The British writer and curator
Adrian Heathfield remarks that, when viewing the transient work, like all live
performance, it exists only as material traces in the documentation of daily
notes and photographs. Undertaking his third one-year performance (One Year
Performance 1981–1982), Hsieh’s approach to conceptual art revolutionized the
body in action.
In the extreme contrast of durational time, Latham’s work exemplifies the
briefest moment of time that his technique would permit, while Hsieh chose
a year indoors to be his optimum measure of time in daily life.38 During Hsieh’s
One Year Performance 1978–1979, in the interior ‘Cage Piece’, he methodically
documents time passing at his studio in solitary confinement. This was the
beginning of an immense physical undertaking of his lived experience over eight
years, whose subject and focus was time itself.
For the first year, in Hudson Street, New York, without talking, reading or
writing, Hsieh spent 365 days locked inside a cell-like wooden cage measuring
3.5 × 2.7 × 2.5 metres. Only one friend visited each day to bring food, remove
waste and take just one photograph to record the event. Notching a mark on
the wall to evidence each passing day was Hsieh’s only daily activity. Sequential
interior performances comprise his punching a time clock every hour on the hour,
‘Time Clock Piece’ (1980–1); living entirely outdoors, ‘Outdoor Piece’ (1981–2);39
being tied with an eight-foot rope to another artist, ‘Rope Piece’ (1983–8); and not
making or looking at art, ‘No Art Piece’ (1985–6). Being systematic throughout
his lifeworks, his five One Year Performances convey visceral embodiment of
MARKING 17

experienced time. With tenacity and endurance, he palpably pushes the limits
of durational time as his works stretch beyond prevailing art practice. Tehching
Hsieh’s work ‘Outdoor Piece’ (in relation to walking) is discussed further in the
section ‘Walking as drawing’.
Three decades later, Hsieh’s Doing Time (2017) exhibition at the 57th Venice
Biennale’s Taiwan Pavilion shared two monumental One Year Performances, the
‘Time Clock Piece’ and ‘Outdoor Piece’ installations, along with accompanying
documents, films and photographs. ‘Each of his performances,’ Heathfield
states, ‘makes manifest a bare existence in which resilience is pitched against
adversity, and the fugitive qualities of life are valued in their passing.’40 The
experience of observing Hsieh’s work incorporates the line and trace of his
lifeworks: challenging corporeal limits, enduring extreme durations, inhabiting
edges, merging art and life, fleeting time, walking time, performing time – time
is his medium.
Hsieh’s yearly performances bring to mind Spanish/US Elena del Rivero’s
millennium performance project ‘Story of a Year’. Del Rivero describes: ‘I have
found in paper a perfect medium to recreate the fragility of life. Paper doesn’t
relate to grand narratives. Rather, it connotes the domestic, the everyday. It is
not imposing; it is subtle and silent. Paper, however, can be strong, a herald of
what is to come, as poetry is to literature.’41
Inspired by the passage of time, del Rivero initiated a one-year-long
performance on 1 July 2000, in an attempt to track a year of her life. As she
began to create [Swi:t] Home (the story of a year) and ‘Reference Library’,42
she questions: ‘The tight rope I traverse concerns whether work becomes daily
routine or daily routine becomes work.’43 Placing twenty large-scale sheets of
paper on her studio/home floor in New York, del Rivero commenced her journey
using the body and materials to define her enduring actions. As she walks
backwards and forwards across paper on the floor, traces and impressions of
her actions record her daily routine and mark the evanescence of time, which
connects with the section ‘Trace and record’ in this chapter.
During del Rivero’s one-year performance, she created an imaginative range
of works on paper, including line drawings, artists’ books, diaries, schedules and
photographic documentation. The ‘performative’ and ‘performance’ became
assimilated in 1960s and 1970s drawing practice, but it was not until 2001,
when Catherine de Zegher first published the Drawing Papers 20: Performance
Drawings, that Elena del Rivero’s documentary photographs of her [Swi:t] Home
and drawings were revealed. Inspired by the immediacy and ephemerality
‘of drawing and performance together’, de Zegher designated ‘performance
drawing’ as an official art form. ‘More than a trace of a creative gesture, as a
performative act drawing is the gesture in itself. Sharing the fleeting aspect of
traces in present time and space,’ she writes, ‘the happening of drawing and
performance consists of a multiplicity of experiences shifting between the intimate
18 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

and the social – between the sheet and the street.’44 Time and temporality are
bound within performance drawing, embedding repetition and mutability, which
Heathfield observes ‘lead[s] us back to our elemental physical relation to time,
where time is not simply experienced as linear, progressive and accumulative, but
is also infused with suspension and loss’.45
The complexity of time also influenced New York-based artist Robert Morris’s
1960s drawing, simultaneously questioning measurement: How many minutes
would it take to conceal a surface with repetitive marks? How many times could
a mark be repeated before exhaustion sets in? By experiencing and recording
time, Morris disrupts ‘sequential time by denying a logical order or a sense of
why one thing should follow another, or indeed, why or whether an action would
terminate, an event stop’.46
During the same period, Morris merges into the dance world with Simone
Forti, Trisha Brown and other Judson dancers and choreographers where ‘dance’
became such everyday movements as walking or sitting, stretching or bending.
But it was not until the 1970s that Morris develops ongoing large-scale process-
based drawings on paper. Much of this process comprises predetermined rules
that apply to performed drawings, measured and unmeasured according to
clock time. The art critic Rosalind Krauss claims that ‘the notions of process art
as a form of performance came naturally to Morris’.47
The bodily connection in Robert Morris’s drawings, which were blind in their
making, prioritized touch over vision. The French philosopher Jacques Derrida
would also find himself writing without seeing – the blind tentative movement
is an allegory of drawing itself.48 In his exploratory essay Memoirs of the Blind,
published in 1993, Derrida questions the primacy of sight in drawing while
understanding blindness as implicit in the act of drawing itself, where it might
reflect that all drawing is ‘blind’.49 Derrida prescribes drawing as being in itself
‘blind’, which he may not ‘see’ in its viewing, while addressing the performative
drawings of Morris’s essential touch in his works (Derrida’s Memoirs of the Blind
is also discussed in Chapter 4).
Morris began his intense performed Blind Time Drawings in 1973, reappearing
with drawings again in 1976, 1985, 1999 and 2000.50 The first series of 98 large
drawings multiplied to around 350 in 6 series over a period of 30 years, with each
one performed ‘blind’. With eyes closed or blindfolded, Morris hesitantly fumbles
for the parameters of the paper. These are expressive gestures in action, with
both hands obsessively pressing and smearing powdered graphite mixed with
oil or black ink directly on large sheets of paper with ‘the drawing touching back
the artist’s hands’.51 The drawings, embodying movement and time, each have
instructions to convey before the event – a ‘task performance’. Each drawing is
implicating a task. Drawing attention to the ‘time estimation error’, Morris reflects:

I always timed my working. I started a stopwatch, closed by eyes and began.


When I finished working (eyes still closed) I estimated the lapsed time, opened
MARKING 19

my eyes and looked at the watch. I then recorded the discrepancy as a note or
on the back of the drawing […] estimations of pressure, placement, proximity,
distance, etc., were involved in the production of the works, so it seemed
logical to estimate the lapsed time as well.52

Morris labels and records each action at the bottom of each drawing where he
describes his movement: ‘With the eyes closed, the ten fingers move outward
from the top center making counting strokes. Two thousand strokes are made in
an estimated two minutes. Time estimation error: +45 seconds.’53 He establishes
a conceptual framework for recording the difference between the estimated time
and the actual duration of the performance where the time-based process of
marking is integral to the work. While Morris has abandoned the dominance of
the visual in drawing practice, he finds the staged tactile, timed and measured
perspective unique.54
Influenced by these notions of mark making and linking notions of line and
time, London-based artists Jane Grisewood (New Zealand/UK) and Carali
McCall (Canada/UK) collaborate on large time-based series of live performance
drawings, Line Dialogues (2008–ongoing), marking lines with charcoal and
graphite. Moving alongside the wall, each artist has a specific task: McCall keeps
her arm outreached for as long as possible and draws a line using graphite at her
utmost height, while, for Grisewood, the aim is to stretch and repeat the last line

Figure 1.1 Jane Grisewood and Carali McCall, Line Dialogue IV, 2011, 90-minute
performance drawing in charcoal and graphite, 500 × 220 cm, private art collection,
Vancouver, Canada. Followed in 2012 by the 2-hour 1,200 × 200 cm Line Dialogue V at
the Again and Again and Again exhibition, Vancouver Art Gallery. Photo: Judy Goldhill.
20 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

drawn using charcoal along the wall. Together, the two artists pace continuously
back and forth crossing over and under each other (either at full stretch or curled
retreat),55 experiencing time through persistent and arduous marking. Through
repetitive movement and continuous negotiation challenges, Grisewood and
McCall experience the temporalities of duration and endurance (Figure 1.1).
The artwork’s title, Line Dialogues, was inspired by Grisewood’s research
and investigations into the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and his book Dialogues II.
Similarly, the doubling that occurs in a collaborative context with his colleague
Félix Guattari experienced a ‘double capture’56 when doubling, something
new emerges: ‘Each will know his own […] aided, inspired, multiplied’.57 For
Grisewood and McCall, repeating and moving at their own pace, the artists share
physicality and a particular rhythm with each performance. They first performed
Line Dialogues in 2008 at the University of the Arts London’s Lethaby Gallery58
and later in 2012, the Line Dialogue V, ‘Again and Again and Again’ exhibition
(2-hour performance wall drawing, 1,200 × 200 cm) at the Vancouver Art Gallery.
The artworks followed with further rigorous time-based performances drawings
in London, Liverpool, Lisbon and Venice. The drawings, in front of an audience,
span durations of 30 minutes to 2 hours and across horizontal surfaces on the
wall ranging from 5 to 12 metres.
While indoors performing Line Dialogue back and forth, Grisewood and McCall
are visually tracing and marking repetitive lines on large walls in charcoal and
graphite, whereas the Indian artist Piyali Ghosh performs outdoor on lengthy fabric
marking ink lines – resonating with Grisewood and McCall repeating Manzoni’s
Linea ink on industrial paper. Ghosh’s performances include the Arabian Sea,
My Rasa Rekha (2015), a series of durational three-hour live drawings enacted
in India on remote beaches in Kerala (Figure 1.2). Between water and shore,
Ghosh is creating her work in the low tide water projecting an ethereal beauty
on a lengthy 21 metres of flowing silk fabric. Marking lengthwise with delicate
black ink lines, also back and forth, the bodily gestures become an inextricable
measure of her performance. The durational drawing performances continue with
Ghosh’s Pacific Ocean in Australia (2017) and Atlantic Ocean (2018), performed
in Ireland and also in Russia for the 2018 Biennale.59 In an interview, Ghosh
describes: ‘When I perform I feel like I merge myself into drawing lines, my whole
body movement creates invisible lines in air, I become the line.’60
Between performance and drawing, US artist Kevin Townsend describes his
obsessive and repetitive time-based practice as being in time:

The performative drawings connect to a public perceptual field where the


drawing, audience, and maker occupy the same present. In these pieces, I
become a part of the work – my presence, labor, time, mark-making tactile-
kinesthetic body movement and the topological images they yield all exist
simultaneously. At the outset of these works, each mark embodies only the
moments of its making and exists as a record of both attention and intention.61
MARKING 21

Figure 1.2 Piyali Ghosh, Arabian Sea, My Rasa Rekha, 2015. Durational 3-hour
performance drawing located between land and sea at Chellanam Beach, Kerala, India.
Black ink lines are marked on 21 metres of silk fabric. Photo: Lijo Lonappan.

Dominating the spaces he works in, Townsend’s commanding and meticulous


large-scale drawings endure lengthy durations. His arduous 42-hour A Shadow
Too Heavy (2014) and his equally arduous 16-hour, 2 × 6 metre A Tidal Gravity
(2016) drawings are covered with powdered graphite. Through gestural
movement, he erases and exposes swirling lines on the wall’s textured surface.
Townsend’s performance drawings shift from two dimensions to three, from
inside space to outside. For several hours, inhabiting public urban places, scoring
lines of chalk on windows and pavements, he creates a number of ephemeral
drawings titled Stria: Lost Time, Misplaced Moments (2014), lasting only for the
duration of the work. While Drawing Room No.2 (2015) is a twelve-hour, three-
dimensional work with white chalk lines marking seven blackboards to form
a square room that remains for thirty-six hours. In the same year, Townsend
performed a six-hour durational work, Perceptual Field Drawing / A Heavy Seat.62
Each line, elusive and impermanent, measures time, repeating and vanishing as
Townsend’s chalk is washed away and only the residue remains.
The Looking for a Recollection (2018) site-specific project in two acts on two
walls 12 × 3 metres installed in the gallery in Kansas City is a durational marking
in graphite – erasing and repeating on the wall surface. Townsend’s 48-hour
durational drawing A Granular of Nows (2019) records six 8-hour days over time
created for the Drawing Now exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA)
at Meca in Portland, Maine. His practice in durational drawing and mark making
embraces expanded drawing focusing on temporality and time. ‘Townsend
22 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

produces large-scale ephemeral works that leverage the power and possibility
of drawing to give form to our evolving relationship to time-space.’63

Materials and action in space


TOM MARIONI / BRUCE NAUMAN / TRISHA BROWN / MONIKA GRZYMALA /
JAANIKA PEERNA / GEGO
A seminal figure in the 1960s art scene, Tom Marioni, American artist, writer
and curator, pushed the boundaries of conceptual art in a way that transformed
drawing indefinitely. His performances encapsulate the body gesturing and
tracking in space, concerning recursive movement, duration and measurement,
control and chance. His multidisciplinary passion for making connections
with drawing, sculpture, photography, music and performance is particularly
significant as he considers drawing to be the foundation of his art. It has inspired
the simultaneous embodiment of gestural mark making through contingency
and bodily limits.
Marioni positions his One Second Sculpture as one of his first actions that
linked drawing to performance and sound, which he ardently documents. He
describes: ‘My instrument was a rolled-up tape measure. I threw it into the
air, and in one-second it opened like a spring, making a loud sound, it left my
hand as a circle, made a drawing in space, and fell to the ground as a straight
line.’64 This ephemeral work revealed in the photograph embraced sculpture-
based performance, with or without an audience. Marioni said: ‘One Second
Sculpture is probably the smartest work I ever did because it is a measurement
of both space and time and also incorporates sound as a material.’65 The work
is included in the Drawing Room’s exhibition Sounds Like Drawing (2005). He
continues:

One Second Sculpture (1969) turned out to be a profound piece for me


because it was a sculpture-based performance that was also about sound.
It made a sound and a drawing in space and was also a sculpture that
performed itself. It all happened in one second. That work, like much of what
I’ve made throughout my career, was about taking the idea of sculpture and
moving it into the dimensions of time.66

In 1972, Marioni performed Drawing a Line As Far As I Can Reach at the Reese
Palley Gallery in San Francisco (Figure 1.3) and, in the same year, made his
first visit to Scotland, relating the performances that were made at the Demarco
Gallery in Edinburgh. He writes:
MARKING 23

I did a five-day performance. I did action drawings that produced sounds, a


different drawing each day for four days … I made a drawing called Drawing a
Line as Far as I Can Reach. I hung a long scroll of tracing paper on the wall, so
it continued onto the floor. Then I stood in my socks on paper and drew lines
over and over, each time starting the line by reaching back between my legs
as far as I could, continuing along the paper on the floor, and then reaching
up the wall as far as I could … Doing this drawing was like doing yoga while
holding a pencil.67

During his actions, recording the length of his body moving from standing,
crouching or sitting positions, Marioni rhythmically marks graphite lines, tracing
the motion on sheets of paper, repeatedly retracing, extending the line’s
potential, testing his bodily limit. He describes his meditative line drawings
being related to ‘mechanical repeated bodily movements’.68 His reaching or
throwing, running or walking, jumping or rotating his arm, extends his body
to record the farthest reach (a precursor to Carolee Schneemann’s Up to and
Including Her Limits, 1973–6, addressed in Chapter 2; and the UK-based artist
David Connearn’s work Mappa Mundi: Drawing to the Extent of the Body,
1984). Marioni remarks on the Zen influence of ensō, the circle, in the drawings.
After his travels to Japan in the 1980s, he created circle drawings attaching

Figure 1.3 Tom Marioni, Drawing a Line As Far As I Can Reach, 1972, pencil on brown
wrapping paper, 190 × 122 cm, The Reese Palley Gallery, San Francisco. Collection in
Oakland Art Museum of California. Photo: Larry Fox.
24 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

a pencil to a finger – ‘finger lines’. He defines his practice as ‘out of body’,


amassing a wide range of performative works, including Flying with Friends,
1999 (alone and with friends), jumping and running drawings, and carrying
pencils to mark paper as he walked.69 He tests the scale and limits of his visible
body, documenting drawings of himself photographed in action. ‘Marioni’s
presentations challenged the viewer’s ability to configure his work as individual
and bounded “performances”.’70
For Marioni’s Walking Drawing (2000) he describes an inventive way of
holding his multicoloured pencil at his waist, but not strapped to it. He walks
to record how the body moves when he paces one way only to return to the
beginning and walk the same path. Composed of two verbs, walking and
drawing, it suggests movement that conveys the trace of walking. As Deleuze
and Guattari observe: ‘To follow the flow of matter is to itinerate, to ambulate. It
is intuition in practice.’71
The choreographers and dancers Trisha Brown and Yvonne Rainer integrate
drawing into their performance practice, seeing the body in a space outlined
by its farthest reach, which brings to mind Marioni’s performances. Brown
contemplates that ‘drawing could have the kind of directly evidentiary relationship
to the body at full scale that Marioni pursued’.72 Brown’s drawings were strategic
exercises marking movement within the body while the drawings define the body
through space.
Drawing is inherent in Bruce Nauman’s dynamic process-based conceptual
work. His studio is where his innovative projects began involving repetitive task-
based actions, merging his sculptural and performance practice alongside
notations and sketches. Nauman was conscious of movement and mapping,
describing his works as being nearer dance than art. As an artist, he implements
dance manoeuvres that comprise ‘a kind of tracing of space, an inscription of
the space and studio with the body’.73 Conversely, as choreographer and dancer
William Forsyth remarks, ‘his work is involved with drawing, indeed functions as
drawing, and has made a number of large-scale installations that physicalize the
line in space’.74
Walking around his studio in a defined space, Nauman activates snail-
paced walking or bouncing against a corner in the room. During 1967–8, he
recorded and documented work with a 16 mm black-and-white film and camera,
performing ‘drawings in space’ with explicit titles: Walking in an Exaggerated
Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square; Dance or Exercise on the Perimeter
of a Square; Walk with Contrapposto; and Slow Angle Walk (Beckett Walk). He
began constructing corridors in 1969, walking back and forth, augmenting a lure
to passageways and narrow spaces that would fit his moving body. Visitors were
invited to public places, walking through the corridors and, in so doing, creating
their own performance.
MARKING 25

Nauman had withdrawn his own presence, shifting the focus of his work to
manipulating the movement and experience of the beholder. Performance
Corridor (1969) marks the pivotal moment of this transition. The work originated
as a prop for a solitary, videotaped performance, Walk with Contrapposto
(1968), in which Nauman is seen walking up and down a narrow passageway,
shifting his hips back and forth with each step in an exaggerated imitation of
the conventional pose of classical sculpture.75

Drawing through the body and line in time and space led to further investigations
and new boundaries in the expanding field of drawing, extending Nauman’s
performative interactions. The choreographer and dancer Merce Cunningham
revolutionized dance, introducing walking into his dance steps and collaborating
and experimenting with artists from Robert Rauschenberg, who, by ‘taking a line
around the block […] drew attention to action and time as materials’,76 to John
Cage, who declared significance in his drawings:

These experiences led me in one instance to compose music in the way


I had found to make a series of prints called On the Surface. I discovered
that a horizontal line that determined graphic changes, to correspond, had
to become a vertical line in the notation of music (Thirty Pieces for Five
Orchestras). Time instead of space.77

Over many years, the American Trisha Brown created a large number of
performed drawings on paper, from which the line she draws forms a dialogue
between her body and movement. Brown expresses: ‘My entire body becomes
the agency of visual traces, vestige [sic] of the body’s energy in motion.’78 From
her drawings, she engages in choreography and dancing, devising intricate
methods of notation that can advance the viewer’s sense of the body in space.
It was from the Locas notebook of two-dimensional graphite drawings and
notations that led to inventive body movements.
Making intuitive changes from the 1980s onwards, Brown has been drawing
conceptually and following certain task-based rules: ‘Sitting beside a piece of
paper on the floor and holding a pen between her toes, she used each foot to
draw the other’ as she did with her hands. ‘Left hand drawn by right hand #1’,79
mirroring herself through observation. From 1999, Brown was creating large-
scale drawings that become three-dimensional when in performance. Draw/
Live Feed is a combined drawing, video and piece of music with improvised
movements, marking with charcoal and crayon on larger than body-sized sheets
of paper placed on a gallery floor – Brown’s body fluidly moving, scoring with
her hands, feet and arms to mark the dynamic lines. She describes: ‘I purposely
take [the drawing] one step out of my control by using something other than my
hand to draw it.’80
26 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

Using a sheet large enough to encompass her whole body, she began to
treat the frame of the paper as a stage. Moving across it with pastels or
graphite in her toes, rolling over, pivoting, sitting back, pushing, skidding,
pulling, swooping, breaking her materials, skipping and stuttering them over
the surface (or across the gap between sheets), thrusting, rubbing up the
texture of the floor beneath.81

The critic and curator Klaus Kertess portrays Brown’s drawings as ‘about the
hands as body and the body as hand, about drawing gesture as dance gesture
as writing gesture, about page space as stage space’.82 Brown shaped her
drawings on the floor, expending energy as she intensely marked large-scale
sheets of paper with charcoal, combining drawing and performance. Exhibiting
in the USA and Europe convinced her of the connection between drawing and
dance, continuing the dialogue of the body in space in relation to physicality.
(Trisha Brown’s early work Man Walking Down the Side of Building (1970) is
highlighted in Chapter 2.)
Continuing the notion of the line and body in space, Berlin-based
Monika Grzymala’s works are primarily three-dimensional ‘spatial drawings’
fundamentally implicated by movement. Energetically working alone in her
studio space, or in site-specific locations, she constructs impressive rhizomatic
three-dimensional drawings using vast lengths of adhesive tape or wire to create
installations. The architect Ivana Wingham portrays Grzymala’s artwork ‘as a
natural trajectory’ that emphasizes spatial movement in drawing. ‘Movement
between backgrounds for lines, movement between materials that lines are
made of, movement between your own different performances when creating
lines in particular and different sites.’83 Grzymala describes her durational
process as similar to live performance:

In part, it is performance. This is why I describe my work sometimes in


kilometres of used tape, because I think that these kilometres that I leave
behind in the process of developing a new three-dimensional drawing
best describe the physical […] And the duration – time is a very important
component of my work. The pieces are all like time capsules.84

Grzymala depicts her work as being in a kind of temporality in continuous change


and where the drawings become lines as streams that make ripples of thoughts,
where ‘the body plays a crucial role as it becomes a kind of seismographic
instrument through which to understand space’.85 Coexisting in both real and
unreal spaces, her temporary three-dimensional drawing structures are performed
within the construction of tape and wire attached to walls in studios, museums
and galleries. Lines connect in the artworks, showing a few examples of her
work forming large-scale tangles and horizontal structures, such as: Transition
MARKING 27

drawing with black and white tape (2006); Rhizome with wire and adhesive tape
and Swoosh with black and white tape (2007); Studio with black tape and chalk
(2010); Drawing Spatially – Raumzeichnung (Berg) with 9.2 km silver tape (2017);
and further large-scale installations such as Drawing in Space (2017–18); and
Convexity 1.1 km with silver mirroring tape (2018).86
Grzymala describes: ‘The image carrier (the wall) and image (the drawing)
becomes one. The lines are the elements that coexist with the surface onto
which or into which they are drawn. They create their own topological space.’87
A line synchronous in Paul Klee’s iconic phrase is a reminder that drawing is just
taking a line for a walk having a particular impact on the performative embedded
in drawing and in sculpture. Grzymala’s innumerable lines of tape to lines in
space reference other artists’ works that were included in the exhibition titled
Line at London’s Lisson Gallery in 2016, such as Tom Marioni’s flinging a tape
measure One Second Sculpture and Richard Long’s imaginary 94-mile line in the
ground A Four Day Walk.
Corporeal movement as lines in space, crossing media, sound and light, is
embedded in New York-based Estonian artist Jaanika Peerna’s gestural linear
drawings and live performances, where the material body is the motivation of
her practice (see Figure 1.4). In a solitary studio or a public place, she ardently

Figure 1.4 Jaanika Peerna, Am Rand / On the Edge 2014, 40-minute performance
drawing on three large windows, 12 × 3 metres covered with a mix of marble dust and
sour milk. Layers removed from the glass allow the audience to view from both inside
and outside, while responding to recorded sounds of wind and the site itself, Jää-äär,
Berlin. Photo: Reelika Ramot.
28 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

draws lines sweeping across different surfaces with hands and feet immersed in
graphite, charcoal or chalk, leaving only a residue of the event. Peerna writes: ‘I
see all my work as drawing, whether it be a video or light installation, which I see
both as drawing with light, placing works in a room, drawing in space, leaving
lines on paper, traces of movement […] and now performance, which is focused
on drawing.’88
The art critic Heie Treier reflects on the phenomena of light and line, straight
or curved, which is inherent in Peerna’s practice, where two-dimensional lines
of light on paper transmute into three-dimensional gravitational space. The
executive director Brett Littman of The Drawing Center for eleven years is now
the innovative director of the Noguchi Museum and Garden in Long Island City.
Littman announces: ‘It is always interesting to move drawings into performance
and three-dimensional space. Peerna’s work allows us to see line as a physical
object as well as a trace of her own body and the passage of time.’89 The
curator, writer and artist Fiona Robinson describes her drawn lines filling the
space with paper flowing from the walls and ceilings, again moving between
dimensions.
Peerna’s performance drawing practice has since developed into a wider
field that focuses on sound within space. In Glacier Elegy (2018), a performance
drawing using 15 metres of sheets of Mylar plastic paper, she creates sound
that emerges from movement; marking space with paper, pigment and pencils
as well as the sound of ice, dripping and crackling, the drawing transforms into
sculptural forms. Versions of Glacier Elegy have been performed in Tallinn, New
York, London and Montreal.
While drawing with sounds using the space as an ‘echo chamber’, large
sheets of paper merge back and forth activating loud crunching sounds. Peerna
writes: ‘Drawing is inseparable from movement. And the impetus for movement
comes from deep within where the rapturous and subtle shifts happen, then
ripples through the entire body impacting the plastic surface pulling the audience
into the same resonant space.’90
Peerna’s work depicts traces of the German/Venezuelan artist
Gego’s dramatic three-dimensional wire constructions. Absorbed in the
interconnected lines, drawing in space without paper (Dibujos sin papel y sin
marco), Gego’s Reticulárea transcending space and time was first installed
at the Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas in 1969. Constructed with thick
wires, the work forms a massive web, creating an endless vision contained
only by the walls around it. Gego writes of her own work: ‘I discovered that
sometimes the in-between-line is as important as the line itself.’91 Her work
used the space as multidimensional, creating with lines measured to keep a
distance between them as ‘the presence of the line defined these works as
drawings’.92
MARKING 29

Trace and record


HELENA ALMEIDA / WILLIAM ANASTASI / MORGAN O’HARA / JANE
GRISEWOOD
New York-based Portuguese Helena Almeida’s mesmerizing Inhabited Drawings
(Desenho habitadol) was revealed in 2004 at The Drawing Center’s Drawing
Room in New York. It exemplifies the body as both tool and physical surface,
incorporating the performative dimension in her work. The drawings are
absorbed into duration, with the body situated in time and trace. As Elizabeth
Grosz, Professor of Women’s Studies, has said: ‘bodily existence is endurance,
the prolongation of the present into the future’.93 The body as an ephemeral
place of passage performs and records simply as movable medium and material.
Almeida adds: ‘The image of my body is not an image. I’m not producing a
spectacle.’94

I turn myself into a drawing. My body as a drawing, myself as my own work –


that is what I was searching for. When you make lines on a piece of paper,
vibrant areas inside the drawing come into being, and because of this the
drawing itself isn’t enough. Right away you’ve got to enter another dimension,
move into another area of artistic language.95

Crossing disciplines, Almeida consigns her body to thoughtfully choreographing


motions of everyday transitory objects. Her photographic documentation is
innovative and abstracted, recording black-and-white photographs of herself
adding blue paint that is resonant of Yves Klein. The phenomenological elements
of drawing in the inhabited body interact with the active imaginary figures traced
on the documentation. In her Inhabited Drawing (1975), the line moves from
graphite or ink to her signature stitching with lines of delicate horsehair.96 In a
later photographic series from 1998, Inside Me (Dentro de mim), again Almeida’s
body becomes process and material (Figure 1.5). Set up in her studio, she alone
tests the limits of her body in the surrounding space.
In her performance-based work, she asserts that ‘her place is in the studio
and the studio is her world’,97 a solitary process that is not seen by viewers
until the work is documented and displayed as photographs. Yet, for this
work, Untitled (2010), Almeida is tied to her husband, architect Arturo Rosa,
with plastic-covered wire looping several times round their lower legs, marking
and shuffling back and forth. Dragging their bodies for almost twenty minutes
between wall and video camera, they produced a three-dimensional drawing.
While Almeida explores the body and material in space, echoing Tehching
Hsieh’s durational works, she plays with dimensions in the traces between
30 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

Figure 1.5 Helena Almeida, Inside Me (Dentro de mim), 1998, black-and-white


photograph, 185 × 122 cm. Drawing Papers 43, Helena Almeida: Inhabited Drawings at the
Drawing Center’s Drawing Room, New York. Collection FLAD – Fundação Luso-Americana
para o Desenvolvimento, Lisbon, Portugal. Photo: Laura Castro Caldes and Paula Cintra.

documentation and imagination. William Anastasi perhaps took a more


conventional ‘pencil to paper’ approach of tracing and recording his movement.
A founder of conceptual and minimal art in the USA, Anastasi engages in the
medium of gestural drawing. He considers the trace always in movement. With
a meditative approach, and using chance as a prime element, he abandons
visual control, producing numerous Unsighted Drawings from the late 1960s.
Working ‘blind’, with eyes closed, his covert involuntary drawings provoke
random graphite lines on folded paper in his trouser pocket. During the same
period, Robert Morris, like Anastasi, surrenders to an arbitrary process of tracing
his Blind Time Drawings, premeditated but contingent. In 1969, Untitled (Pocket
Drawings) emerged and is recorded in Anastasi’s wider practice. He explains the
process of his pocket drawing:

You fold a piece of paper until it can fit in your pocket, and then you put it in
your pocket, and you use, usually, a 6B or 8B pencil. Soft. I just put my hand
in my pocket, feel the paper, and draw. If it’s a pocket drawing, I’m usually
also walking.98

Walking itself is performance and an integral part of Anastasi’s work where his
thinking in time and space, trace and record occurs. He observes the origin
MARKING 31

of drawing on the subway from the walking drawings.99 In 1977, revisiting his
Subway Drawings, Anastasi would ride on subway trains daily from his New
York 137th Street apartment to meet for chess games with John Cage in his
downtown studio, and would record this journey through his drawings. Cage,
being renowned for ‘chance’ as method and practice, was very timely with
Anastasi’s random and repetitive bodily actions. ‘Holding a pencil in each hand at
an angle of 90 degrees and with a drawing board on his lap, Anastasi closes his
eyes allowing the vibrations of the subway train to move his hands that produce
the tangles of lines on the paper.’100 In contrast, Anastasi performs large-scale
blind drawings; with eyes closed, he repetitively marks the paper with graphite in
each hand, back and forth, up and down, for lengthy durations, producing One
Hour Blind Drawing (2012) and One Hour with Graphite (2013).
Focusing on the integrity of the drawn line, Morgan O’Hara’s Live Transmission
drawings, which first emerged in 1989, are elusive choreographic works
meticulously observed, performed and recorded in real time. She tracks her
body’s movement through the intricate action of both hands, her dancing hands
simultaneously transmit pencil marks on paper, producing delicate drawings
rather like tiny seismic waves. O’Hara writes:

I draw methodically with multiple razor-sharp pencils and both hands, as


time-based, executing a direct neural transmission from one human action
into another. I condense movement into accumulations of graphite line, which
combine the controlled refinement of classical drawing with the unbound
sensuality of spontaneous gesture. Time-space coordinates for each drawing
are described with precision in the titles.101

Her early years in Japan provided US-born O’Hara with the catalyst for transmitting
her energy, the Zen arts and the pureness of line and trace, which became
inspirational and integral to her work. John Cage’s revolutionary performances
and theories also had a profound influence on her practice, as did his friend,
William Anastasi.
Movement is fundamental; the gestural actions of the body define the
performative. O’Hara records the physicality of movement in all aspects,
tracing the motion of lines onto paper. Skilled at drawing with both hands, she
simultaneously clutches as many as twenty pencils. While there is a range of
pencils and paper, O’Hara works with firm paper and soft pencils using two or
more pencils, the effect is unpredictable until the drawing is finished.
O’Hara’s list of diverse and extensive subjects includes artists, athletes,
conductors, dancers, doctors, farmers, incense makers, martial artists,
musicians, pastry chefs, poets, politicians, psychiatrists, shoemakers and
window cleaners. Her subjects also comprise well-known participants such as
Marina Abramović, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Umberto Eco, Stephen Hawking, the
32 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

Dali Lama, André Previn, Susan Sontag, and ikebana master Ken Katayama.
Their actions postulate the motions of control and chance as O’Hara’s tangled
lines appear across the paper, where she marks and records the title with time
and place along the bottom edge of each drawing.
From the plethora of content accumulated over thirty years, O’Hara has
produced a gargantuan three thousand or so Live Transmission drawings.
Registering movement, tasks and rules, the process of drawing is collaborative
and intense. ‘Through the lens of her work, all activity becomes a kind of a
performance, as she, guided by her own rules, is “performing” drawing.’102
Through documentation, line and durational processes, Jane Grisewood
records time and transience, body in motion, where she observes marking while
moving. She writes:

The body as a drawing instrument, a tool, is embedded in the process, where


the repetitive practice of drawing the line gives way to a more physically
active involvement with the work. While the significance of drawing is still
the personal trace, not only the hand, but the foot also takes its place as an
equal means of mark making, where the line’s connection is with movement,
separating and moving between the inside and the outside.103

Clutching graphite in one hand and a small piece of paper in the other, intricate
seismographic lines appear from the rhythmic shifts in Grisewood’s hand as
she walks from place to place recording duration and distance. Revealing in-
between spaces, she documents drawings, photographs and journals to elicit
interventions ‘that capture a moment in time while simultaneously tracing its
passing’.104 In her journal, she records her daily walks, leaving traces along the
way. Lucy Lippard, writer, art critic and curator, alluded to ‘something revelatory
about walking daily in familiar a place’.105 The autobiographical Line Journeys
maps Grisewood’s passage back and forth between Proustian memorable and
poignant locations.106
In public places, the performative intervention, with and without viewers, is
the focus of her walks. Grisewood’s work Mourning Lines (2005) documents
a 1 km walk that inhabits the rural English landscape between her previous
home and a village burial ground (Figure 1.6). ‘Yet beyond the process-driven
undertaking,’ observes Katharine Stout (the director of Focal Point Gallery,
UK), ‘these works offer a beautiful abstract landscape of sorts, a geological
mapping of a moment.’107 Exploring how to record temporal presence or trace
a spatial experience through the line, ‘the line that is consistent […] is not one
that articulates an imagined object or describes a projected figure, but exists
independently as a mark that delineates materiality, bodily presence, and in
particular, time’.108 Grisewood, like Serra, repeats and reflects on how ‘drawing
is a verb’.109 In other works, such as Drift Lines (2007), walking a stretch of
MARKING 33

Figure 1.6 Jane Grisewood, Mourning Lines, 2006. Video documentation of


performance trails ash on a 500-metre walk between home and a village burial ground,
Suffolk, UK. Filmed and edited by Ron Suffield. Photo: Ron Suffield.

beach in New Zealand revisiting her childhood home; and Ghost Lines (2009),
slow pacing between her current home and former home in London. Her walks
signify her recording transient movement back and forth that holds memory, in
presence through absence. Shifting between the studio and the outside space,
Grisewood’s temporal drawing practice, entrenched in movement with her body
as a device to construct a line in space.

Walking as drawing
RICHARD LONG / FRANCIS ALŸS / LYGIA CLARK / TEHCHING HSIEH
The paradigm shift from the inside to the outside, there and not there, broadens
how drawing in motion becomes the marking of both urban and natural
landscapes. Land artists in the 1960s and 1970s became fixated with the
performative line in the vast outdoors. In the hot, dry Mohave Desert, Walter
de la Maria enacts Mile Long Drawing, two parallel lines drawn in chalk almost
4 metres apart, in contrast to Dennis Oppenheim’s three-mile-long Time Line
Drawing in the icy snow on the border between the USA and Canada, which
would in time leave only transitory marks and traces on the surface.
34 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

Movement, leaving evidence as his trace, in mostly vast, solitary outdoor


spaces defines the British artist Richard Long. With minimal intervention,
covering thousands of miles of walking, he uses his body and a map to record
time in space as he passes across the land. Drawing invisible and visible lines
onto the landscape, Long proposes the simple act of walking as a work of art.
Walking in the 1960s initiated an art practice where many conceptual artists were
influenced by Long and, since then, many artists advocate the walk in their work
in both rural and urban environments.110 Long writes: ‘I am an artist who makes
walks. A walk defines the form of the land in space and time beyond the scale of
sculpture or the fixed image.’111

My first work made by walking, in 1967, was a straight line in a grass field,
which was also my own path, going ‘nowhere’. In the subsequent early map
works, recording very simple but precise walks on Exmoor and Dartmoor,
my intention was to make a new art, which was also a new way of walking:
walking as art.112

In his 1967 seminal A Line made by Walking, Long intentionally and repeatedly
walked back and forth in a field in rural England. He made indentations drawing
a line on the damp grass with his feet, the action leaving residue on the land.
But time pervades the ephemerality of the line as the grass is slowly concealed –
and the performing body is absent. Long observes: ‘A walk moves through life,
it is physical, but afterwards invisible.’113 Long’s walking continues with lines:
tracks in Bolivia, dust lines in the Sahara, water lines in China, snow lines in
Switzerland and, in Australia and India, ash lines, arcs and circles. For the work
Ash Line: Along the 8-Day Walk in Queensland (1994), Long returns ashes to the
landscape, which sees his hands and feet covered with ash.
Long’s work reveals ‘a performance of which the line was a residual trace,
or a sculpture – the line – of which the photograph was documentation, or
was the photograph the work of art, or all of these? Walking became Long’s
medium.’114 Many artists claimed the outdoor urban environment as the platform
for their work – walking the line – where they recall Long’s global odysseys and
wanderings.
Notwithstanding these imposing land-based drawings, performed directly on
the land, one of the most thought-provoking images of the line in movement is
Mexico City-based Belgian Francis Alÿs’s When Faith Moves Mountains (Cuando
la fe Mueve Montañas) (2002) (Figure 1.7). He observed a challenging project
of linear displacement in the landscape ‘to move a mountain’ and to ‘draw a
line’ and to ‘walk the line’. The work ‘attempts to translate social tensions into
narratives that intervene in the imaginary of a place […] a kind of land art for
the landless’.115 In 2002, five hundred volunteers, each walking and carrying a
shovel, formed a line at the foot of a giant sand dune in Ventanilla shantytowns,
MARKING 35

Figure 1.7 Francis Alÿs, When Faith Moves Mountains (Cuando la fe Mueve Montañas),
Lima 2002, in collaboration with Rafael Ortega and Cuauhtémoc Medina. Video
documentation of an action. Some 500 volunteers move in a line on a 500-metre-long
sand dune. Photo: Francis Alÿs.

near Lima.116 By the end of the day, along the lengthy 500-metre dune, the line
had slowly moved a few centimetres from its original position. The project evokes
questions from the philosopher Gilles Deleuze concerning not what the line is but
what it can become: ‘What are your lines? What map are you in the process of
making or rearranging? What abstract line will you draw, and at what price, for
yourself and others? What is your line of flight?’117 Reminiscent of Paul Klee’s
ubiquitous line is taken for a walk that frees his point as it turns into movement
and lines. The drawings and notations reveal that a dynamic line is a point that
can ‘take a line for a walk’ – as referencing the 1925 iconic phrase: ‘An active line
on a walk, moving freely, without goal. A walk for a walk’s sake.’118
In his Walking Distance from the Studio (2004), Francis Alÿs, in measured
movement of the body in time and space, leaves traces as he wanders the
streets, observing from the margins and absorbing the ephemeral and aleatory.
Over the period of his performances titled Fairy Tales (1992–8), Alÿs’s peripatetic
movement through the city streets of Mexico City and earlier performances in
Stockholm were made by unravelling his sweater leaving a long trail of wool
that relates to Jiro Takamatsu’s (1963) and Grisewood’s (2005) string lines. They
each individually carry 1,000 metres of string strewn on their walks, where the
line becomes both trace and drawing. In São Paulo, moving from wool to paint,
Alÿs performed a walk holding a leaking can of blue paint to draw a line marking
36 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

his passage: The Leak (1995). In Jerusalem, he did the same in The Green Line
(2004) but this time the action of dripping green paint was politically provocative.
As he walked through the streets, he retraced the line that marked the divided
territories of the 1949 ceasefire maps.
Over five years, mapping, recording and photographing, Alÿs paced the
streets of London, culminating in Seven Walks between 2004 and 2005.119
Leaving few traces, he has performed many documented paseos (walks),
following performative explorations roaming from place to place in cities in
different parts of the world. Deleuze would define all wanderers as enmeshed
in the metropolitan environment, which recalls the cultural theorist Michel de
Certeau’s study of everyday life.120 (De Certeau’s concepts are also discussed in
Chapter 4.) Walkers amble through the city marking and transforming space. The
wandering movement of Alÿs is integral to the motion of walking and drawing
lines within the urban context.
The Brazilian Lygia Clark developed an interest in walking the line, from line into
form and back again, when she shifted from abstract painting to experimenting
through three dimensions and movement. While walking, sitting and drawing,
Clark makes her Möbius Strip out of paper and glue, cutting endless thin
lines to create Caminhando (Walking) from 1964. The ongoing Caminhando
performances invite a participant to be the maker of the work by drawing through
cutting. Clark explains: ‘Do it yourself the “walking” with a strip of white paper
about 40 cm wide, twist it and join its ends as in the Möbius Strip. […] The
work is your own act.’121 (In Chapter 3, artworks that explore instructions and
audience participation are addressed.)
Clark’s performative practice embraces action and drawing – walking as
drawing and drawing as walking, a randomness of cutting and tangling that
forms a cybernetic maze of line in body and space; this also relates to Grzymala’s,
Peerna’s and Gego’s work introduced earlier in the chapter. With the participation
of the audience endorsing her projects based in both movement and drawing,
Clark’s works are inherent in the dialogue of performance. Her projects in Brazil
and New York led to ‘a radical transformation of the art object in the direction
on performativity’.122 She describes walking, Caminhando, as a turning point, a
freedom, where she can work with the material and the transient.
From 1981 to 1982, Tehching Hsieh made his third One Year Performance
walking the streets of New York City.123 During his arduous, and mostly solitary,
durational ‘Outdoor Piece’, 24 hours a day for 365 days, he roamed downtown
Manhattan, living a dejected peripheralized existence in an expansive urban
landscape. Hsieh shifted from his studio to the streets where he moved outdoors
for the entire year – an outdoor epic – living and walking on the streets of the city.
Each day he is marking time, drawing and recording his wanderings, itinerant
sites on a map, noting the places where he ate and slept. This is an astonishing
perception of the complexity of lived duration. Adrian Heathfield observes:
MARKING 37

‘A joining and a separation – performing and recording, roving and sedentary,


exposed and withdrawn.’124 With the merging of Hsieh’s ‘Outdoor Piece’ and life
and work, in this ‘delicate balancing act the question of belonging is negotiated’.125
Heathfield’s insightful quest captures the complexity of temporal nuances
in Hsieh’s durational work, while seeing him as a lone city drifter in a state of
perpetual exile and unbelonging. Hsieh was an illegal immigrant from Taiwan who
in this work migrated again, living outside in unknown marginal spaces in urban
zones.126 His daily walks as a marginal and dispossessed figure bear witness to
the increasing fragmentation of the contemporary metropolis where city dwellers
do not necessarily feel at ‘home’. The action of repeatedly walking the streets
amplifies a sense of awareness while paradoxically being in a non-place.

Conclusion
Tehching Hsieh stated:

My performance work is about different perspectives on thinking about life:


‘Life is passing time’ and ‘life is free thinking’ […] I never ask myself how to
pass the day. I’m just passing time. But I know I did pass yesterday, and I
have confidence that I will pass today, and I hope that I can pass tomorrow.

‘There is Only Movement’, states Gilles Deleuze, and this chapter begins and
ends with time as its primary focus, flowing back and forth. The line exists as
a mark that delineates materiality and bodily presence, while mark making and
duration encompass the performance drawing dimension that has emerged in a
predominant contemporary art practice.
The interrelation between drawing and performance in real time occupied
various practices and disciplines over many years. Drawing practice from the
1950s to the 1970s, particularly through conceptual and process art, became
the moment in time when the line as subject in itself was propelling drawing
into a significant position. By advancing a new paradigm that allows artists to
freely expose time and movement, drawing practices have been enhanced and
expanded. Inimitable material gestures are let loose, increasing the interaction
and influence in current performance drawing arising from multidisciplinary and
experimental practices. With various backgrounds it seems artists are crossing
similar points in their practice to question how movement and mark making
correlate to draw the visceral body in time.
The dynamics of movement in drawing is synchronous with line as an open-
ended trope to question the shift in artists’ practice from working indoors to
outdoors, studio to landscape, optic to haptic, hand to foot and body to action
have been identified in the different sections in this chapter. The artists’ locations
38 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

move between working inside, recorded in ‘Line in time’ and ‘Material and action
in space’; both inside and outside in ‘Shifts in painting and drawing’ and ‘Trace
and record’; and moving outdoors in ‘Walking as drawing’. The ephemerality of
drawing and tracing instigates walking as art practice, marking seen and unseen
lines in the rural and urban environments.
The artists mentioned in this chapter are resourcefully extending performance
and drawing practice beyond the single acts of marking and walking, resulting
in identifying wide-ranging links and methodologies. A multidisciplinary,
transnational approach is where artists engage with choreographers, musicians,
art historians, philosophers and scientists that augment what is happening now.
Subsequently, the vitality of performance drawing through the body and line,
time and space, transitory and enduring is where the temporal resides in the
dynamics of the line in movement. It will have a profound effect on arts and artists
from this time on, where the ontology of the line makes ongoing connections that
provide links between and beyond.

Notes
1 Cornelia ‘Connie’ H. Butler was curator of the Live/Work: Performance into Drawing
exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, from 31 January to
21 May 2007.
2 The critic Harold Rosenberg introduced the term ‘action painting’ in his 1952 essay,
‘The American Action Painters’, ARTnews, giving more prominence to process and
action rather than the painting itself. See Barbara A. Macadam, ‘Top ten ARTnews
stories: “Not a picture but an event”’, ARTnews, 1 November 2007, https://
www.artnews.com/artnews/news/top-ten-artnews-stories-not-a-picture-but-an-
event-181/ (accessed 2 March 2020).
3 Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Art since
1900: Modernism, Antimodernism and Postmodernism (London: Thames and
Hudson, 2004), p. 357.
4 Gary Garrels, ‘The line between drawing and painting’, in Ivana Wingham, Mobility of
the Line (Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag, 2013), p. 44.
5 Robert Morris, Continuous Project Altered Daily: The Writings of Robert Morris
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), p. 77.
6 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), ‘MoMa exhibition explores performance and
drawing through works in the collection’, Press Release for Live/Work: Performance
into Drawing exhibition, 31 January to 21 May 2007, https://www.moma.org/
documents/moma_press-release_387120.pdf (accessed 5 March 2020).
7 Amelia Jones, Body Art: Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1998), pp. 53–9.
8 Cornelia H. Butler and Catherine de Zegher, On Line: Drawing through the Twentieth
Century (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), exhibition catalogue, p. 182.
MARKING 39

9 Ibid., p. 163.
10 Joan Kee, ‘Situating a singular kind of “action”: Early Gutai painting 1954–1957’,
Oxford Art Journal, vol. 26, no. 2 (2003): 123–40.
11 Jiro Yoshihara (1905–1972) was an influential avant-garde artist and the Japanese
leader of the Gutai group, http://www.nak-osaka.jp/en/gutai_yoshihara.html,
(accessed 7 May 2019).
12 Ines Englemann, Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2007),
p. 44.
13 Catherine Wood, ‘What is performance art now?’ Tate Etc. Magazine, no. 38,
October 2016, p. 58.
14 Paul Schimmel, ed., Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object 1949–1979
(London: Thames & Hudson, 1998), p. 148.
15 Jones, Body Art, p. 86.
16 RoseLee Goldberg, Performance: Live Art since the 60s (New York: Thames &
Hudson, 2004), p. 137.
17 Erin Dziedzic, ‘Ana Mendieta: Earth Body, Sculpture and Performance 1972–85:
One Universal Energy Runs Through Everything’. Drain Magazine. http://www.
drainmag.com/contentNOVEMBER/REVIEWS_INTERVIEWS/Ana_Mendieta_Review.
htm.DrawinDr (accessed 3 February 2019).
18 Jane Blocker, Where Is Ana Mendieta? Identity, Performativity and Exile (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 1999), p. 57.
19 Blocker, Where Is Ana Mendieta?, pp. 29–30.
20 Untitled (Body Tracks), 1974. There is a 35 mm slide and Super-8 colour silent film
documentation of the performance at Galerie Lelong & Co., New York.
21 Dziedzic, Ana Mendieta.
22 Megan Heuer, ‘Ana Mendieta: Earth body, sculpture and performance’, The
Brooklyn Rail, September 2004, https://brooklynrail.org/2004/09/art/ana-mendieta-
earth-body-sculpture-and-pe (accessed 1 June 2020).
23 Gary Garrels, Bernice Rose and Michelle White, Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), exhibition catalogue, p. 207.
24 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), ‘Richard Serra’, MoMA website, https://www.
moma.org/collection/works/152793 (accessed 5 March 2020).
25 Shinichiro Osaki, ‘Body and place: Action in postwar in Japan’. In Paul Schimmel,
ed., Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object 1949–1979 (London:
Thames & Hudson, 1998), p. 147.
26 Goldberg, Performance Art, p. 147.
27 Briony Fer, The Infinite Line (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 36.
28 Ibid.
29 Piero Manzoni, When Bodies Become Art (Frankfurt: Städel Contemporary Art
Collection, 2013), exhibition catalogue. Martin Engler is the curator and head of the
Städel’s Contemporary Art Collection in Frankfurt (2013).
30 Rosalia Pasqualino di Marineo, Piero Manzoni, 2 vols (New York: Hauser & Wirth
Publishers, 2019), exhibition catalogue.
40 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

31 After the performance, Manzoni’s large roll of paper was sealed in a zinc container,
which he displayed in front of a local shirt factory.
32 John Latham, Least Event, One Second Drawings, Blind Work, 24 Second Painting
(London: Lisson Gallery, 1970), exhibition catalogue.
33 Each piece in One Second Drawings was carefully annotated, for example, with the
time of execution: (17″ 2002) – the second, minute, hour (the 17th second of the
20th minute of the second hour); followed by the date (14 December 1972) and a
numerical code referring to different features of the work.
34 Andre Breton cited in Bryony Fer, ‘Some translucent substance, or the trouble
with time’, in Carolyn B. Gill, ed., Time and the Image (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2000), p. 70.
35 Ivana Wingham, ‘Durational lines’, in Wingham, Mobility of the Line, p. 123.
36 Butler and de Zegher, On Line, p. 176.
37 Adrian Heathfield and Tehching Hsieh, Out of Now: The Lifeworks of Tehching Hsieh
(London and Cambridge, MA: Live Art Development Agency and MIT Press, 2009),
p. 27.
38 The decision behind choosing a year, Hsieh said, ‘was that it was the largest single
unit of how we count time in our daily lives, the time it takes for the earth to circle
the sun’.
39 See the discussion on Hsieh’s artwork titled One Year Performance ‘Outdoor Piece’
in the ‘Walking as drawing’ section in this chapter.
40 Heathfield and Hsieh, Out of Now, p. 27.
41 Elena del Rivero, ‘Elena del Rivero’, in Catherine de Zegher, ed., Drawing Papers 20:
Performance Drawings (New York: The Drawing Center, 2001), exhibition catalogue.
42 Elena del Rivero’s year-long performance included [Swi:t] Home (Five Dishcloths);
Six [Swi:t] Home drawings; [Swi:t] Home sound piece; Floor Plan/Studio Home; and
‘Reference Library’ of 15 works: Book of Routines; Book of Hours; Book of Time;
Book of Numbers; Book of Blank Pages; Book of Past Wounds; Book of Lost Hair;
Book of Quotations; Book of Expenditures; Diary; Scrapbook; Silence; Index Cards;
Photo Album; and Calendar.
43 Del Rivero, ‘Elena del Rivero’, p. 44.
44 Ibid., pp. 44–9.
45 Adrian Heathfield, ‘End time now’, in Adrian Heathfield, ed., Small Acts:
Performance, the Millennium and the Marking of Time (London: Black Dog
Publishing, 2000), p. 106.
46 Fer, ‘Some translucent substance’, p. 71.
47 Rosalind Krauss, Robert Morris Recent Felt Pieces and Drawings (Leeds: Henry
Moore Sculpture, 1997), exhibition catalogue, p. 90.
48 Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and other Ruins, trans.
by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1993).
49 While researching the relationship between drawing and blindness, Grisewood
came across a particularly poignant essay discussing Derrida’s Memoirs of
the Blind by a young freelance writer David Bradford, written after he was
MARKING 41

diagnosed with an eye disorder that causes the gradual loss of peripheral vision
and may lead to blindness: David Bradford, ‘Littoral blindness: Writing across
sight lines’, 2008, http://dbfreelance.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/
littoralblindness.pdf. (accessed 17 November 2017).
50 Blind Time included six series: the first (1973); the second made by a woman who
was blind from birth (1976); the third (1985); the fourth inspired by the writings of
the philosopher Donald Davidson (1991); the fifth, Melancholia (1999); and the sixth,
Moral Drawings (2000).
51 David Antin, Maurice Berger, Jean-Pierre Criqui, Rosalind Krauss, Annette
Michelson, W. J. T. Mitchell and Kimberly Paice, Robert Morris: The Mind/Body
Problem (New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1994), p. 244.
52 Jean-Pierre Criqui, ed., Robert Morris: Blind Time Drawings 1973–2000 (Göttingen
and Prato: Steidl and C.Arte Luigi Pecci, 2005. Exhibition catalogue), p. 15.
53 Robert Morris, ‘Blind Time I’, record of the drawing, graphite on paper, 88.5 ×
116.5 cm (1973).
54 Criqui, Robert Morris, p. 14.
55 Jane Grisewood, ‘Marking time: Investigating drawing as a performative process for
recording temporal presence and recalling memory through the line, the fold and
repetition’ (PhD diss., University of the Arts London (UAL), 2010), pp. 36, 66–7.
56 Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II (London: Continuum 2002), p. 7.
57 Deleuze speaking of his collaborations with Guattari in Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. by Paul Patton
(London: Athlone Press, 1988), p. 3.
58 In 2008, Jane Grisewood and Carali McCall, with Maryclare Foá and Birgitta Hosea,
were artists-in-residence at UAL Lethaby Gallery for the summer, where they formed
their ongoing ‘Drawn Together’ collective.
59 Ghosh’s performance drawing ‘Daughter of Volga, My Rasa Rekha’ was performed
at the Shiryaevo Biennale, Russia, 2018.
60 Jane Grisewood interview with Piyali Ghosh (31 October 2017).
61 Kevin Townsend, www.kevin-townsend.com/new-page-1/ (accessed 17 July 2017).
62 Kevin Townsend, https://www.kevin-townsend.com/drawing (accessed 1 June
2020).
63 Artworks, for example, Kevin Townsend, Looking for a Recollection (2018) and A
Granular of Nows (2019).
64 Tom Marioni, Beer, Art and Philosophy, A Memoir (San Francisco: Crown Point
Press, 2003), p. 93.
65 Kathan Brown, ‘Overview: “Tom Marioni: Know where you are and what is going
on”’, Crown Point Press Newsletter (April 2016), p. 2.
66 Terri Cohn, ‘Interview with Tom Marioni: In-depth, critical perspectives exploring art
and visual culture on the West Coast’, ArtPractical, 17 October 2017, https://www.
artpractical.com/column/interview-with-tom-marioni/ (accessed 5 March 2020).
67 Marioni, Beer, Art and Philosophy, pp. 123–5.
68 Ibid., p. 19.
69 Brown, ‘Overview: “Tom Marioni”’, p. 2.
42 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

70 Nick Kaye, ‘One time over another: Tom Marioni’s conceptual art’, PAJ: A Journal of
Performance and Art, vol. 35, no. 2 (2012): 26.
71 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Nomadology, trans. by Brian Massumi (New York:
Semiotexte, 1986), p. 100.
72 Peter Eleey, ‘If you couldn’t see me: The drawings of Trisha Brown’, Walker Art
Center website, https://walkerart.org/collections/publications/performativity/
drawings-of-trisha-brown/ (accessed 12 June 2017).
73 Butler, ‘Walkaround time: Dance and drawing in the twentieth century’, in Butler and
de Zegher, On Line, p. 144.
74 Ibid., p. 198.
75 Ted Mann, ‘Bruce Nauman: Performance Corridor’, Guggenheim website, https://
www.guggenheim.org/artwork/3148 (accessed 7 August 2017).
76 Wood, ‘What is performance art now?’, pp. 58–9.
77 John Cage, ‘An autobiographical statement’, johncage.org website (originally written
in November 1989), https://johncage.org/autobiographical_statement.html.
78 Eleey, ‘If you couldn’t see me’.
79 Ibid.
80 Trisha Brown cited in ibid.
81 Ibid.
82 Kertess cited in Butler, ‘Walkaround time’, p. 193.
83 Ivana Wingham, ‘In/of/through/out’, in Wingham, Mobility of the Line, p. 130.
84 Katharine Stout, Contemporary Drawing: From the 1960s to Now (London: Tate
Publishing, 2014), p. 153.
85 Wingham, ‘In/of/through/out’, p. 133.
86 Grzymala’s works also include: Raumzeichnung (2016), a site-specific spatial
drawing using 3.7 km black tape and clear polypropylene tape; and Raumzeichnung
(2011), a site-specific spatial 3D drawing using 3.3 km, black tape, London; Studio
(2010) black tape suspended sculpture and 3D white chalk drawings, Berlin;
Rhizome (2007) 3D wall drawing with wire and tape, Braunschweig; Swoosh (2007)
spatial drawing with black and white tape, Glasgow; Transition (2006) spatial
drawing with black and white tape, New York. Raumzeichnung (Berg) (2017) 9,2 km
silver tapes, Reykjavik; and Convexity (2018) 1.1 km silver mirroring tape.
87 Butler and de Zegher, On Line, p. 116.
88 Fiona Robinson Writings on Art, ‘Jaanika Peerna’, Fiona Robinson Writings on Art
website, 6 March 2014, https://fionarobinsonwritings.wordpress.com/2014/03/06/
jaanika-peerna/ (accessed 18 August 2017).
89 Brett Littman cited in ‘Quotes on Jaanika Peerna’s work’, Jaanika Peerna website,
https://www.jaanikapeerna.net/quotes (accessed 14 June 2017).
90 Jaanika Peerna, ‘Glacier Elegy project’, Jaanika Peerna website, https://www.
jaanikapeerna.net/copy-of-current (accessed 17 May 2019).
91 Gego, ‘Testimony 4: You Invited Me,’ in Sabiduras and Other Texts: writings
by Gego, ed. by Maria Elena Huizi and Josefina Manrique Cabrera (Houston:
International Center for the Arts of the Americas, 2005), p. 167.
MARKING 43

92 Ibid., p. 163.
93 Elizabeth Grosz, The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2004), p. 14.
94 Helena Almeida, Kettles Yard website, http://www.kettlesyard.co.uk/wp-content/
uploads/2014/10/almeida (accessed 17 June 2017).
95 Helena Almeida, Drawing Papers 43: Helena Almeida: Inhabited Drawings
(New York: The Drawing Center, 2004), exhibition catalogue, p. 3.
96 The Inhabited series includes Inhabited Painting and Inhabited Canvas (1976).
97 Helena Almeida, Drawing Papers 43: Helena Almeida: Inhabited Drawings
(New York: The Drawing Center, 2004), exhibition catalogue, p. 6.
98 Rachel Nackman, ‘William Anastasi: In conversation with Rachel Nackman’,
NOTATIONS: Contemporary Drawing as Idea and Process website, http://
notations.aboutdrawing.org/william-anastasi/ (accessed 5 March 2020).
99 Ibid.
100 Grisewood, ‘Marking time’, p. 61.
101 Morgan O’Hara, ‘Statement’, Morgan O’Hara.com, website, http://www.
morganohara.com/statement.html (accessed 23 May 2017).
102 Ibid.
103 Grisewood, ‘Marking time’, p. 69.
104 Ibid.
105 Lucy Lippard, Overlay: Contemporary Art and the Art of Prehistory (New York: The
New Press, 1983), p. 125.
106 Line Journeys exhibited at the Centre for Recent Drawing (C4RD), in London,
2009.
107 Katharine Stout, ‘Marking Time: Jane Grisewood’, Firstsite Papers (2007), http://
www.janegrisewood.com/Downloads/Jane%20G%20article%20pdf%20(4).pdf
(accessed 20 November 2019).
108 Ibid.
109 Ibid. See also Lizzie Borden, ‘About drawing: An interview [1977]’, in Richard Serra,
Writings, Interviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 51.
110 Other walking artists in the 1960s and 1970s include Yayoi Kusama (Walking
Piece, 1966); Bruce McLean (Taking a Line for a Walk Piece, 1969); Adrian Piper
(Catalysis, 1970–1); Hamish Fulton (John O’Groats to Lands End, 1973); and
Sophie Calle (Suite Venitienne, 1979).
111 Richard Long, Five, Six, Pick Up Sticks. Seven, Eight, Lay Them Straight (London:
The Curwen Press for Anthony D’Offay Gallery, 1980).
112 Ben Tufnell cited in ‘Richard Long: A Line Made by Walking 1967,’ at Tate.org:
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/long-a-line-made-by-walking-ar00142
(accessed 7 March 2020).
113 Anne Seymour, ‘Walking in circles’, in Richard Long, Richard Cork and Hamish
Fulton, Richard Long: Walking in Circles (London: Anthony D’Offay, 1988),
exhibition catalogue, p. 58.
114 Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking (London: Verso, 2001), p. 270.
44 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

115 Francis Alÿs and Cuauhtémoc Medina, When Faith Moves Mountains [Cuando la fe
Mueve Montañas] (Madrid: Turner, 2005), p. 102.
116 Alÿs found social unrest and hardship in Lima, Peru, in 2000. Many people had
been displaced from Lima to shantytowns in the giant dunes nearby.
117 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 203.
118 Paul Klee, Pedagogical Sketchbook, intro. and trans. by S. Moholy-Nagy (London:
Faber & Faber, 1925), p. 16.
119 James Lingwood, ‘Making Seven Walks: Rumours’, Artangel website, https://www.
artangel.org.uk/project/seven-walks/ (accessed 7 March 2019).
120 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California,
1998), pp. 91–110.
121 Stout, Contemporary Drawing, p. 119.
122 Butler and de Zegher, On Line, pp. 146–7.
123 De Certeau’s urban landscape in New York City is Manhattan, and one cannot
help feeling destabilized by the opening sentence in his essay, ‘Walking in the city’,
written in the late 1970s: ‘Seeing Manhattan from the 110th floor of the World
Trade Center.’ He could not have contemplated the trauma of 9/11, which forever
altered the city, nor the impact of his words: ‘once a familiar landscape, now only
in our memory, in memoriam, and in the visual record’. Michel de Certeau, ‘Walking
in the city’, in The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. by Steven Rendall (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1988), pp. 91–3.
124 Heathfield and Hsieh, Out of Now, p. 45.
125 Ibid., p. 43.
126 See H. G. Masters, ‘No time like passing time: A conversation with Tehching
Hsieh (Part 2)’, ArtAsiaPacific, 15 September 2017, http://artasiapacific.com/
Blog/NoTimeLikePassingTimeAConversationWithTehchingHsiehPart2 (accessed
11 March 2019).
2
PHYSICALITY:
RUNNING AS DRAWING

Uncovering what the term performance drawing has brought to contemporary


art practice opens up different perspectives on the role of the body. As seen in
Chapter 1, a collection of artworks can expand and contract critical elements in
the field and explore key themes such as marking, time, action, line and walking.
In this chapter, the discussion is developed to revolve almost entirely around the
body as the source and site of the work and it considers to what extent drawing
and performance may be useful for artists working today in multidisciplinary and
performative contemporary practices.
Focusing on the physicality of drawing and artworks that provide a context
and operative means to explore duration and expenditure of energy, the chapter
is shaped to propose that drawing is not only connected to movement but can
be located in a more extensive enquiry into the performative nature of human
activity – ultimately building an argument that the physical act of running can be a
form of drawing. It considers performance-based works that constitute a marking
process, introducing the focus of physical strength and active involvement central
to performance drawing through artworks such as Carolee Schneemann’s Up to
and Including Her Limits (1973–6) and Matthew Barney’s Drawing Restraint 1–6
(1987–9) as well as artists such as John Court, Katrina Brown, Tony Orrico and
Guido van der Werve who recognize the demands of physical conditioning and
endurance training specifically for the work and means of making.
Through the lens of female (and feminist) artists, these artists and artworks
are grouped together in an attempt to chart the dominant inspiring examples of
a specific approach to using the body in contemporary fine art. It is an attempt
to trace the works that have led artists working today in the field of drawing to
express a physical yet optimistic sensibility. It is important to note, and should
be explained, that the selection of artworks can be linked to various and very
different critical contexts. For example, the artists Carolee Schneemann and
Matthew Barney were working with very different audiences and intentions that
powered their distinctive artworks. However, for the purpose of this text and to
convey an interest in the physical athleticism of performance drawing, although
46 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

it is important to acknowledge various critiques, such as the feminist critique


significant for Schneemann’s work, this text draws attention to the action rather
than authorship and focuses on the shared interest in the body – the personal
and subjective rather than the collective.
The chapter identifies a trajectory of art practices that stimulate the
conversation between mind and body, sound and sight, as well as performance
and performativity.1 It aims to define ‘artist as athlete’ and looks to the fabric of
movement to describe how disciplines such as running (and, for example, dance)
have merged to become an ever-engaging mode of working.2 In demonstrating
this development in thinking – artists and artworks such as Barry Le Va’s Velocity:
Impact Run (1969), Martin Creed’s Work no. 850 (2008) and Melanie Manchot’s
film Tracer (2013) have been selected to help present lines of movement – from
using the body as a tool for mark making to challenging the urban environment
as trace(less) forms. Not every work discussed in this chapter is a performance
drawing, or a performance or a drawing, but they are seen to contain or help
unleash key ideas that can be employed in the build-up to thinking beyond the
conventions of fine art. Artworks in this chapter are used to identify engaging
elements within key works that have shaped contemporary drawing and exercise
a new relationship to performance.
Continually engaging and attempting to locate the body within the canon
of performance and drawing, artists working today encounter themes such as
duration and endurance and dig to uncover and re-establish the importance
of existential and philosophical concepts that underpinned previous works.
In describing how artworks produced over the decades have demonstrated
in various ways a strong relationship between artist and viewer, this chapter
identifies Trisha Brown’s seminal Man Walking Down the Side of a Building
(1970) and reveals how some artists today are notably sourcing and tracing both
philosophical and historical references and rely heavily on these art-historical
references in current practices.
In the continued context, since 1945, and the experimental shift of the
1960s – when conservative attitudes of the body (and sexuality) were being
questioned and overturned – this chapter closes by looking to the public and
social connections seen keenly through the combination of sport and art – the
changes in public and institutional contexts and key elements of harbouring a
cultural identity that strives for progression and exchange.

Physical/mark making
CAROLEE SCHNEEMANN / MATTHEW BARNEY
To return to the earlier identification of mark making, this section looks at how
the mark can be representative of a form of presence and type of movement
PHYSICALITY 47

but also how the mark and approach to recording the body are a mere catalyst
for physical action, intention and mental effort. The focus of the mark here is
not to give evidence of the trace of the body but rather hold a kind of means
and method of process that invokes a quietness and stillness, as well as inner
sensibility.
Carolee Schneemann’s Up to and Including Her Limits (1973–6) and Matthew
Barney’s Drawing Restraint 1–6 (1987–9) are two key works that lead to a
particular use of the term performance drawing, giving a specific demonstration
of how artists use their own bodies as a primary source and material for making
and evidence a physical act beyond any conventional understanding of what
drawing might entail to develop the concept of a mark, line and body. While
also calling on restraint and resistance as the central elements, these two
works connect the increasing engagement of extreme subjectivity and embed
the 1960s and early 1970s performance-based methodologies as a means of
working.
In Carolee Schneemann’s Up to and Including Her Limits (1973–6),
performed live and as part of a video installation, the artist is both restricted
and supported by a harness, actively exploring the relationship between body
as subject and drawing device (Figure 2.1).3 Suspended from the ceiling by a
rope, unclothed, propelling herself in circular and back and forth motions, the
artist’s performance involves the whole body as an extension of the line. With
a crayon in hand, and marking the white-paper covered walls and surrounding

Figure 2.1 Carolee Schneemann, Up to and Including Her Limits, 1973. Photo: Henrik
Gaard.
48 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

floor, Schneemann’s aim at the limits and furthest reach of her body reveals how
both resistance and restraint can increase and emphasize the body’s presence.
Widening the artist’s range of movement and the involvement of her body in the
work, the artwork presents an attention to process and develops the concept of
the body as subject and material. This focus within Schneemann’s work can be
identified in a single photographic image. It depicts a female artist undergoing
the task of drawing and can be considered to be creating gestural movement
through line. Politically charged, it addresses the role of a female artist during
a specific time period4 – on further reflection, the importance of the work and
the photographic image identifies an artist becoming the work and making the
work. Consciously exploring the act of being present, in its foundation, it evokes
an all-embracing bodily experience, generating an interest in movement and
thinking of the body as an agency of drawing – desiring contact and the act of
mark making. The potential exchanges between the body as subject and object
underpin what drawing may present and, evermore, making the performative
element in drawing a key avenue for expanding into physicality. Developing
further the previous definitions in Chapter 1 of the line and its conceptual and
philosophical uses in practical means for experimentation, here the thought
of drawing as mere movement cultivates an additional understanding that
aims to focus and expose both visible and non-visible marking processes of
performance drawing – as well as explore both a ‘gesture’ (defined here as a
subtler and slower movement) and a more intense and physical movement to
establish the body as line.
For example, Matthew Barney’s works illustrate the body as an extension
of the line and the athletic body as site and material – also referencing
Carolee Schneemann’s Up to and Including Her Limits; both works can be
used as examples that help shape the groundwork for performance drawing
and demonstrate the artist as athlete. Through reaching and stretching and
ambitiously moving to make contact with surrounding walls, emphasis is
put on resistance and testing the limits of the body – occupying space and
expressing a concentrated focus and determination. (Discussed in the section
‘The act/stillness’ are artists such as Robert Luzar and Charlie Ford, who make
performances moving slowly – so much so that actions appear motionless.
These types of movement encourage and challenge a range of embodiment and
a deepening understanding of physicality.)
The Drawing Restraint series by Matthew Barney is the first and longest
ongoing artwork of his career. It explores the body as an athletic issue and creates
a structure and framework for his ritualistic references and actions. Also tied to
the process of mark making, as well as the limits of the body (and sexuality),5
Barney’s work clearly identifies a practice working with drawing materials and
constructs a very particular relationship with his environment and body as site in
performance-based work.
PHYSICALITY 49

In early Drawing Restraint works, apparatuses such as ramps, harnesses and


flexible cords were used to frustrate the ease of drawing. Climbing gallery walls
with planned routes and structures, he made the act of willpower and reaching
to draw the fundamental crux of his work. From the start, he was interested in
using the body and referencing his own experiences as an athlete in the work.6
He states: ‘Form only takes shape when it struggles against resistance’;7 he
suggests that similar to how resistance is used to build muscles, obstacles can
be used to strengthen an artist’s output, therefore leading every action as a
critical development to the conditioning and training of the work to follow.
Constructing situations that, comparable to Schneemann’s, embody the
concept of restraint, however, enables a lengthened, stretched-out movement;
Barney’s Drawing Restraint 1–6 (1987–9) works were exhibited as video
installations, incorporating the sculptural and architectural elements of how the
work took place.8 Performing to camera, the work engaged in repetitive athletic
actions, filmed in enclosed spaces with no viewers present.9 In Drawing Restraint
6 (created in 1989 and re-filmed/re-performed in 2004) Barney jumps and
extends his body to exercise physical limitations and mark making abilities. In
this work, a mini-trampoline was fixed onto a base on the floor with a 15-degree
angle and, over the course of a day, he would jump using the trampoline –
powering his body upwards, constructing a series of single marks with graphite
on the ceiling. Directing his movement, the focus went from the lower part of his
body (bending his knees and stabilizing his body at the core) to transcending
energy and placing intention and the line of movement to the end of a marking
device. In finding power – stretching, bounding and reaching – the act of drawing
in Barney’s work awakens the entire biological body as a muscle and develops
the athletic body as an expressive tool.
More akin and comparable to Schneemann’s work, Barney’s Drawing
Restraint 11 (2005) uses a harness and technical climbing rope to scale the
walls of the gallery. Ascending the empty space, the architectural space and
gravity additionally become restraining elements in the work; and marks and
traces are left as evidence of the artist’s interaction with this environment.10 As
an installation for Drawing Restraint 11, Barney performed three consecutive
ascents at various heights (intended to indicate the phases of a larger enquiry
into the human form and sexuality).11 Again, creating a relationship between
the body at the threshold of physical limitations and making visible marks, the
infrastructure and the use of ropes and attachments give a new meaning to
these drawing elements and materials; by enabling the body and challenging
and developing the physical role in the process, it lengthens and increases the
severity of distance, gravity and risk.
Conforming and negotiating a relationship with the act of drawing and the
materials involved in Barney’s Drawing Restraint series, the taut rope, harness
and jumping structure mutually support and extend the body’s reach; however, as
50 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

another aspect, they also create uncomfortable conflict – as the artist struggles
against the confinement of being either attached to the fixed length of material
or restricted to the dimension and conditions of the space. In either case, the
individual effort to drive the body upwards – to make a line and become the line –
creates a particular space for performance drawing.
In looking to the interactions and current discussions on the body, gender
and performativity and addressing the politicized body and material as site, from
the position of exploring the individual and the personal competitive nature of
testing ability and sustain resistance, Barney’s and Schneemann’s works present
a way for each artist to uniquely engage with the body and drawing materials,
acquiring a personal sense of mental and physical focus that advocates growth
and development. Despite the different contexts, both artists demonstrate a
deepening connection with the materials and use the line as both a formal part
of the work and one that embodies expression.
While becoming increasingly aware of a number of artists who use graphite
and drawing materials as part of a very physical performance, similarly, like
Matthew Barney and Carolee Schneemann, additional contemporary artists
in this area include Katrina Brown (UK/Netherlands), John Court (UK/Finland),
Robert Luzar (Slovenia/Canada), Carali McCall (Canada/UK), Tony Orrico (USA)
and Ram Samocha (Israel/UK), to name a few. Artworks that demonstrate a
particular bodily effort and determination of simple mark making can be located
within this umbrella of physicality. The artists explore the potential of the body not
only as the tool to make work but as central to the work, that is, the condition of
training, timing and integrity of movement to execute a performance.
In the development of artists who use the body as a physical device, it is
important to note again and emphasize the concept of the line as a trope.
As identified in the Introduction and Chapter 1, since the 1960s the line has
increasingly been given primacy. A line is a natural bodily movement and these
works bring to the forefront the entire body and energy to its making. Artists
indebted to these foundations have used the line as a means for context and
greater understanding of the expanded field of drawing.
Since the 1960s and the new areas of practice opening up, drawing has
become a line made by walking (Richard Long, 1967), cutting through a house
(Gordon Matta-Clark, 1974)12 or a process of ‘thought’ (Robert Morris, 2000).13
Moving the discussion forward and providing examples that critically question the
role of the artist, the line as a conceptual tool is used to orchestrate a particular
way of thinking that helps to cross boundaries, disciplines and generations
of artworks. To reference Tim Ingold’s book, Lines: A Brief History (2007), an
analogy can be made between drawing the line and map making: that ‘lines
have a real phenomenal presence in the environment, or in the bodies of those
organism that inhabit it – our human selves included’.14
An ongoing series that prompted artist Carali McCall’s initial questions into
drawing, Work no. 1 (Circle Drawing), involves a process of mark making with
PHYSICALITY 51

graphite and performing in front of an audience and/or camera. As part of a


trajectory of art practices that consider the body as site and material of work, it
references works such as Tom Marioni’s Out of Body – Free Hand Circle (2004)
as well as Matthew Barney’s and Carolee Schneemann’s works described earlier
in this section. Endurance and exhaustion are incorporated as key elements in
McCall’s research and approach to performance drawing. In each performance,
standing in front of a wall with a stick of graphite in hand, McCall captures the
length and extension of her arm drawing a full circle as a feat of endurance.
Shaped by the anthropometric limits of the body and a single continuous line,
Work no. 1 (Circle Drawing) addresses time, energy and the physical process of
drawing (Figure 2.2). The task is to continue the activity for as long as possible,
exploring limits of mental and physical strength and to materialize the effect and
impact of the process set in motion on paper.
Each drawing is named according to its duration, usually between two and
three hours; developing and building on the very action of drawing a circle, the
performance demonstrates a collision between chance and order, generating
its own aesthetic. In these works, an important aim is to maintain a constant
movement and draw a visible line that embodies effort, energy and a rigorous
pace. As a conscious act of finding the limits of endurance, decisions have to
be made, for example how fast and how much energy to put into the role of the
body drawing? At many points during the public performance, the whole body is
noticeably putting strained effort into drawing circles. In time, fatigue eventually

Figure 2.2 Carali McCall Work no. 1 (Circle Drawing) 4 hours 15 minutes, 2019. A
live performance drawing for the opening reception of McCall’s solo exhibition at Mac I
Gryder Gallery, New Orleans, 2nd – 30th November 2019. Photo: Daniel Hughes.
52 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

becomes a factor and muscles become weak. The performance ends when either
the graphite stick drops or the decision is made to stop – as mental exhaustion
accumulates and levels exceed endurance. In some performances, the paper rips
and if the drawing is made on particularly rough surfaces the skin on the knuckles
tears and traces of blood appear. These markings are another unpredictable
outcome of long durations, traces of the body and energy in the drawing.
Attached to the athletic body is a philosophy that tries to establish a positive
mind-set and approach to thinking through the body. Aiming to create a focused
commitment to the physical act, there is a battle between thinking about the
body and trying not to think about it. Prompting further enquiry into how ‘thought’
can impact and alter perceptions of the body in Ben Rubin’s We Believe We Are
Invincible (2004), Rubin interviews track athletes to examine the mental edge
they try to develop as they prepare moments before a competition. Despite the
rush and adrenaline in the moments before the race, one runner states how the
body slows down. Time slows down.

In that moment when they say take your marks, set, I become the gun, so
when that gun fires, it’s almost like I am the bullet being fired out of the pistol
and that’s my reaction. When I hear that sound […] I am the bullet.15

This idea of mentally imagining oneself becoming something ‘other’ to achieve an


aim that may be nearly impossible can seem elusive; however, as a personal and
practical way to deepen the sense of embodiment, thoughts and feelings and
ideas of building a relationship with the self (such as a firing gun) demonstrate
how performance athletes and artists can potentially compress the body’s
movement and relation to time; and, by mentally training and acquiring skills to
transform perceptions of limits and physical boundaries, new perspectives of the
body can be created.16
In terms of testing limits, long durations can place an extended emphasis on
one’s focus. The experience involved can demand a particular mental strategy
that is taxing on the body’s understanding of itself. An implication of endurance
adds a new perspective to the role of the body, bringing the relationship of
drawing closer to human activity and physical concerns. Some moments of
performing can best be endured under the close eye of an audience member,
making a declaration, or thinking of the body as something other beyond the
state of the situation.

Endurance
GUIDO VAN DER WERVE / JOHN COURT / STUART BRISLEY / TONY ORRICO
Since the 1970s, in particular, durational artworks have become a framework and
a vital form of art that not only used the body as both subject and medium but
PHYSICALITY 53

also employed endurance as a way to explore physical, mental and emotional


limits. As identified in Chapter 1, artworks can span from one-second, as in Tom
Marioni’s One Second Sculpture (1969), to multi-day performances, as with artists
such as Tehching Hsieh, creating bonds between themselves as artists (object of
art), audiences and time. Endurance can be described as a subjective measure
of the body’s effort – an experience that can extend preconceived expectations
of restraints. Such mental and physical exertion can be characterized by pain and
struggle, as the experience of enduring long hours and expending high amounts
of energy without recovery can generate a considerable amount of distress.
Artists have long been connected to suffering, testing limits and risking
failure, such as Chris Burden (Shooting, 1971), Stuart Brisley (12 Days, 1975),
Orlan (The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan, 1990) and Bas Jan Ader (In Search
of the Miraculous, 1975).17 Moreover, artists are recording performances and
consolidating concepts of the body that interconnect and cross disciplines. For
the Dutch artist Guido van der Werve, as part of his autobiographical, historical
and film-based practice, running and endurance sports have played a central
part. In his work Nummer Veertien: Home (2012) the film involves the artist
completing a self-constructed three-week triathlon (which included a 27 km
swim, 1,400 km bike ride and 300 km run) from Warsaw to Paris.18
Trained as a classical musician, repetition and reluctant practising are a way
of working for van der Werve. He completed his first marathon in 2009 and,
since 2007, has sought to incorporate acts of physical endurance into nearly
all of his artworks – as a way of identification, van der Werve is a contemporary
artist with the accomplishments of an endurance athlete.19 Part of a recent group
show, titled Melancholia – a Sebald Variation, at Somerset House, London,
van der Werve’s video Nummer Veertien: Home sits between a wide range of
international artists’ works that provoke reflection about the European condition
and the nature of melancholy itself.20 In a recent public talk, van der Werve
spoke of running and the importance of the activity in his daily routine. He also
spoke of his long admiration for the composer Frédéric Chopin and explained
that he felt compelled to commemorate and honour Chopin in his work.21 In
an earlier interview, he said: ‘if you think about how composers work, they use
very, very personal feelings, and they basically abstract them in a more universal
language.’ He went on to explain: ‘that’s also what I’m trying to do.’22 In staging
the 1,727 km triathlon, the work began when he filled a chalice of soil in Poland
near the birthplace of Frédéric Chopin and it ended a few weeks later when
he arrived at the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris’s 20th arrondissement and
emptied the chalice at Chopin’s gravesite.23
The reason for this route was that Chopin was buried in 1849, and his sister
Ludwika had his heart removed from the proceedings, which, at the composer’s
request, was placed in an urn and spirited back to Warsaw. Therefore, in carrying
the soil with him as he ran, swam and cycled the path from Poland to France,
as the writer Reid Singer suggests, this was van der Werve’s ‘attempt to retrace
54 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

the line that connected the place of Chopin’s birth to the place of his death’.24
By making this work, van der Werve, as he commented, hoped to translate his
feelings about Chopin into something everyone could understand.25 Although
the physical struggle and painful acts of endurances are suggested in his work,
there is also a romantic and personal attachment to the poetics of longing for
home.
Notably, van der Werve’s admiration is not only for the composer Frédéric
Chopin but perhaps also for artists such as Bas Jan Ader who includes
absurdity and irony in performance-based work; van der Werve has performed
many stunts for the camera, such as setting himself on fire and getting hit by a
car.26 The act of performing in his work has not only tested endurance but also
sustains the humour of surviving. It is the body, his drive and desire to use the
body as medium, that constructs and conditions his work.
Van der Werve’s Number series started in 2003. For other films in this series,
he climbed to the summit of Mount Aconcagua in Argentina, and ran around his
house in Finland continuously for twelve hours. In other works, he guided a small
film crew to the Gulf of Bothnia, in the northernmost arm of the Baltic Sea, to
film himself walking in front of an arctic icebreaker, 50 feet in front of the moving
ship.27 That same year, for the work Nummer Negen, The Day I Didn’t Turn
With the World (2007), he travelled to the geographic North Pole to stand for
twenty-four hours, shuffling slowly to rotate in a circle with the earth.28 The film is
shot and presented in time-lapse (compressed into 8 minutes and 36 seconds),
showing the lone figure enduring time and the cold temperatures.
In a final example of van der Werve’s work, as part of the annual performance
at the art festival Performa, held every year in New York on a Sunday morning,
van der Werve invites anyone who is interested to join in as he leads a run
called ‘Running to Rachmaninoff’ which involves running from the Luhring
Augustine Gallery (Chelsea, New York City) to the gravesite of the Late Romantic
composer Sergei Rachmaninoff, located in Valhalla, New York, some 34 miles
away.29 Critical to the poetic aspect of van der Werve’s work, he instructs each
participant to carry and place on arrival a bouquet of chamomile flowers at the
base of Rachmaninoff’s grave.30 A clear and poignant purpose for enduring an
act can hold a particular personal and complex connotation and meaning. For
the viewer, it serves to question these notions and ideas as it then conjures and
sparks emotion; the will and desire to wonder and inspire and simply ‘to do’ can
be transformational.
The artist Lisa Stansbie also highlights personal endeavours through pain and
struggle and suggests that the value of the tension that accompanies endurance
is often underestimated. In her article ‘The Performance of a Channel Swimmer’,
she states:

Although it may be the case that tension causes destruction and harm, it is
equally likely that it can open up new avenues for creation, adaption, and
PHYSICALITY 55

change. Tension can be used as a conceptual tool for thinking about the
moments when bodies collide with time and space, and each makes its
presence known.31

In Stansbie’s video artwork Acclimatisation (2012), the viewer witnesses the


body in extreme elements: holding and speaking to the camera after swimming
in 14 degrees Celsius seawater, as part of her training sessions which last
from 30 minutes to up to 2 hours. Presented in a series of clips over several
weeks, the body uncontrollably shakes, exemplifying its response to the extreme
temperature and adaptation. The artist uses the cold environment and the
English subculture of swimming the Channel to extract the discipline and place it
within her practice and research.
For practitioners, long periods of a single activity can feel like a lost sacrifice.
However, what endurance can enable in terms of a discussion around duration is
to offer a more subjective position and illuminate the processes involved. Recalling
Ben Rubin’s work, when the body becomes something ‘other’, it is perhaps the
fact that the artist is dealing with the paradoxes of time and allows for the mind/
body relationship to collapse. Moments while enduring, other measurements
and relationships between mind, body and time open up. According to Adrian
Heathfield, the physical giving (of oneself) that incorporates and illuminates the
notion of time is where other temporalities can be explored.32 Duration can involve
the collapse of objective measure and reveal the spatial sense of the body – the
giving of oneself to space and time.33 As discussed in Carali McCall’s Work no. 1
(Circle Drawing), an interest in endurance may be considered due to a longing for
an unpredictable outcome, a self-driven challenge and the desire to explore the
elasticity and conflict between mind and body. However, practices that focus on
constraints or thresholds of pain and physical exertion can raise the idea of what
duration, discipline and physicality can contribute to a work.
The Finland-based British artist John Court frequently uses drawing and
performance in his practice. Based on long six- to eight-hour durations, his
work focuses on the ethics of working and harbouring methods of mediation.
While performing repetitive acts, he immerses himself in breathing exercises and
the recollection of personal memories. In early works on paper, he addresses
issues of language and builds on the processes and systems of learning.34 More
recently, developing his attachment to symbolic structures, Court creates live
performances in spaces using constructed objects and task-based events. He
calls his way of working ‘movement with material’ and suggests the work is ‘a
collaboration’ between him and the objects in the space.35
In the work, Untitled (2016) for the festival ‘Room for Performance’, Court used
blocks of crushed white chalk scattered on the floor and a table constructed with
three legs (Figure 2.3). Resting one of the extended legs of the table under his chin,
without using his hands, Court pushes the table and starts to walk in a clockwise
direction, making full circles of the room. Similar to how Tehching Hsieh would signify
56 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

Figure 2.3 John Court, Untitled, 2016. A 7-hour performance during the festival ‘Room
for Performance’ at Bildmuseet Umeå Sweden. Photo: Helena Wikström.

lapses in time, Court makes a circle on his hands with black marker, counting the
laps and validating the accumulation of rounds. In time, the structure breaks down
and he is left to rebuild it again, repeating this procedure for over seven hours. In the
work, it becomes apparent that, for Court, drawing is a physical activity and that
the resistance and effort placed on moving the structure, which then subsequently
moves the chalk, are a means of marking and tracing an accumulation of time. As
for many of the artists noted, the line and circular movement in performance and
drawing-based actions result in producing imprints and graphic traces.
In identifying themes of labour and repetition, Court’s work sits between
Schneemann’s Up to and Including Her Limits, Hsieh’s Cage Piece, Stuart Brisley’s
1970s performance works such as 12 Days and, more recently, Brisley’s work
DRAWN, where for over four days the artist performed in the space for a total of
twenty-four hours with a selection of pieces of furniture (chairs, tables, a mirror)
and materials such as clothing, paper and long lines of twisted cling film to present
to the audience a way of moving objects and drawing in space. He explains:

DRAWN as in hanged drawn and quartered and as in drawing. Drawing as


to draw out, to make a drawing, to describe, to express through drawing.
Hanged drawn and quartered: to hang, cut down while still alive, disembowel
and cut in pieces for exposure in different places.36

In this work, like Court’s, the artist as subject is performing and focused on
the task; the aims seem to be driven by a belief and the intentions adopted to
PHYSICALITY 57

develop a structure that will support the artist and material to adhere for long
durations. Importantly, the materials used are not stable and have a tendency
to alter in accordance with the artist’s actions and surroundings; for example,
‘the long lengths of Clingfilm which cling to become like string’, Brisley states,
‘[are] elastic, this flexibility was one of the central parts of the action of DRAWN
and conformed to notions of drawing as they were used. Other materials were
previously formed into objects such as chairs, tables etc., which were then
disassembled over the time span of the performance.’37 For artists such as Brisley,
this disassembly, fracture and dispersion is understood dialectically whereby the
conditions of what exists in the frame of the work fluctuates between moments
of doing and undoing – of visual coherence and disharmony, which implies it is
not so much a question of contemplation, but of risk taking because the actions
are neither choreographed nor tested a priori.38 The work reveals an element of
setting particular conditions, allowing the performance to unfold and the work
itself to become unstable.
In Tony Orrico’s Penwald Drawings (2009–15), a series of geometrical drawings
are made by repeating extended arm movements on the floor with graphite sticks
in each hand. Engaging his entire body over the surface of paper, in particular his
hands, feet and abdominal muscles, Orrico turns and pushes his body in circular
rotations. Similar to the work of the artist Heather Hanson, over time, drawings
emerge that resemble spirograph-like shapes (also known as hypotrochoids and
epitrochoids).39 Trained as a dancer, Orrico is a former member of the Trisha
Brown Dance Company and Shen Wei Dance Arts and his departure from the
stage to the gallery demonstrates an acutely timed and meditative approach to a
very physical drawing practice. His works are constructed to incorporate breath
and recovery within every work.
In Penwald: 6: project, recoil (2011), Orrico performs by propelling himself
forward using the architecture of the space (Figure 2.4). Extending his entire
body in a line with as much strength and power as possible, he then pushes
himself back against the wall using his core and limb strength to repeat the
action. The results of the ordered, repetitive actions appear as large calculated
markings of graphite on paper. The outcome of the drawings, through lines
and circular shapes, records with precision and symmetry Orrico’s mental and
physical commitment. The drawings can be defined with human scale and
measurements of the body’s mathematical and operative output – with links
between Marina Abramović’s endurance approach, Tom Marioni’s geometrical
shapes and Pollock’s physically immersive floor paintings.
Most performance drawing practices are mediated through photographs
or video documentation, and often the performance element is evidenced in
markings or tracings as drawings that remain as archival material from the live
performance. The connection between performance and documentation can
usefully be exploited and can redefine where the work sits – a controversial
issue for many in performance art history as it can also become an entangled
58 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

Figure 2.4 Tony Orrico, performing Penwald: 6: project, recoil (WhyNot!, W139,
Amsterdam, NL) 2011. Photo: Bart Dykstra.

conversation (with regard to authorship and ownership). For the purposes of this
chapter, live performance and documentation of the work act as two parts of a
larger whole. Similar to how many artists are trained in different mediums and
techniques to make work, artists experiment and incorporate various recording
methods. Although, for many, the camera is a tool to reflect and simply archive,
for others, the material of the footage becomes another extension of the work;
documentation becomes an avenue for concept and clarification and is an
expected consideration. The artist Stuart Brisley explains, ‘the camera can stand
for the audience; the presence of the camera is quite important. Sometimes it
becomes more important than a person because it represents a certain sort of
future.’40
For artists such as McCall, Court and Orrico, there sometimes lacks an
obvious audience while drawing; the performance is performed to camera
and therein the key concerns are the documentation through time-based
means for sharing. What can be linked more closely to the processes of early
performance art practices is the reception of many endurance-based events by
still documentation and labels of duration. A notable strategy is to capture clearly
identifiable moments of the beginning, middle and end, as well as evidence of
an audience (camera and/or live persons). However, perhaps more important
in terms of still documentation are the images that grasp at the artist’s focus
and their perseverance in working with their materials and intentions – aiming
to give evidence of their commitment to the act and the use of the body as a
PHYSICALITY 59

muscle. Performance drawing, in this definition, aims to uncover the embattled


and strong relationship artists have with their material (therein their body as well
as an extended tool).
Using the camera as an instrument, an extension of the body and a device to
capture specific key movements helps explain the action, method or narrative.
(This may lead to drawing with light or the camera, as Chapter 5 recognizes.) In
doing so, the camera becomes ‘the other’ and, as a result, acts of performance
progressively turn towards processes of recording and looking at the expanded
field of drawing. In the next section of this chapter, the artist as film-maker is
developed further in the discussion of Melanie Manchot’s film Tracer (2013).
To explore temporal presence and transient states of consciousness,
performance events that include mediums such as cameras and sound recording
devices can become problematic, albeit exciting for new methods of drawing to
be established. Through threads of multimedia-based discussions and moving
image practice, the problem of suggesting the leaving of a mark or evidence
of movement perhaps starts to conflate the understanding of the body and
physical presence. Consider drawings that use Global Positioning System (GPS)
devices and follow a pre-planned route to create large-scale images. However,
the works selected here rely heavily on the many tactics and processes of fine
art practice to present a critical engagement with the audience and documentary
processes – not to describe the experience of drawing as a practitioner or an
audience member but to address how, in the emerging field of drawing, some
artworks have become the foundations and stepping stones to uncovering a
further need for new definitions of the body.

Running/movement
BARRY LE VA / MARTIN CREED / MELANIE MANCHOT
Informing physical processes of drawing that encompass performance
practice, running introduces new and radical definitions of what practices since
1945 based in process and conceptual art have produced. In the pursuit of
finding the boundary, and the extent to which something can be considered
performance drawing, there is a shift in thinking about the body and the
performative act. Importantly, the moving body in the work is an internalized
declared activity. With the emphasis on subjectivity, the performative – and
the concept of performativity as defined by the philosopher J. L. Austin, which
is ‘not to describe my doing … it is to do’41 – helps give shape to the defining
and narrowing of what this chapter identifies as performance drawing in today’s
fine art realm. It also looks closely at the means of sound and the ways of
deepening an embodied practice.
60 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

Instead of attempting to redefine terms associated with drawing or


performance, the artworks cited in this section are used to help define a particular
way of illustrating how some artists, whose concern is with the physicality and
testing the margins or the parameters, bridge similar concepts around the artist
as athlete and/or artist as runner. As artworks that continue to use alternative,
unconventional constructs to describe drawing, the following examples
demonstrate the extension of how performance drawing, as an operative term,
can carry an influence and unfold a broader field. The physical act of running as
a method and form of drawing practice encases the notion of performativity in its
being – running while thinking about running is a ‘performative act’.
The role of sound in the experience of drawing or running contributes to
the tactile sensibilities and contributes to the transition of thinking about the
body as both object and subject. In durational performances, artists such as
Marina Abramović have used the intervention of microphones to amplify bodily
sounds (for example, breath and heartbeats) and increase the intensity of the
performed action. In the context of drawing in front of an audience, in hearing
the weight of the material, the exhausted breath of the artist and the scrape
of a tool, sound can be emphasized as an element of drawing that – although
it can be subtle – can also empower the drawing process. At the point of
contact, when drawing materials connect or the body exerts a certain exhale,
a connection beyond sight and vision is sensed and drawing can become
even more bodily.
Barry Le Va’s Velocity Piece: Impact Run – Energy Drain (1969) consists of
two speakers at opposite ends playing a recording of Le Va running back and
forth in the gallery.42 The sound of him sprinting and colliding with the wall, as
well as the marks and traces left by his body (including blood), exemplifies a
conceptual position in art making.43
From Jackson Pollock’s paintings to Trisha Brown’s choreographic gestures
and the indexical imprint of Le Va’s moving body on the surface of the wall, this
direct type of contact has been an inspiration for many artists: the irrefutable
physical evidence of the artist’s presence becoming a trace, a print or a
recording recycled and recirculated to bring an understanding to performance.
Through reflection upon Le Va’s approach, artists have since experimented with
ways in which particular physical qualities related to the expenditure of energy,
such as velocity, speed, acceleration and rhythm, produce sound and question
movement, and further represent the human body.
The soundtrack of Le Va’s sprinting laps, with not so subtle collisions, suggests
more than an act of movement but embraces a conceptual meaning and stages
a particular aesthetic form. Although seeming somewhat violent and aggressive
in nature, the performative aspect creates a simple, delicate and rather humorous
notion of physicality. The concept that sound can help materialize and shape an
understanding of the body is a profound tool.
PHYSICALITY 61

In 1971, Le Va stated that his work was about time, place and the physical
activity; everything our existential experience is about.44 Works such as Le Va’s
identify the growing concern of a number of artists working in the 1960s and the
early 1970s whose interest was in expanding the experience of art and exploring
what art could be in terms of communicating a humble approach to being present
and what it means to have a body.45 At a time when artists were expanding
forms of practices and placing new emphasis on the viewer’s experience, with
works such as Velocity Piece, where visitors could enter a gallery space and
experience a single non-visible work (rather than view a space filled with objects),
this expanding field of the 1960s and 1970s had a direct influence on and has
affected the direction of this area of performance drawing.
Le Va’s work clearly identifies the human body as both a non-object and an
object that occupies space – in the way the physical act of running connects
the viewer with the environment, as well as the size and scale of the human
form. Through sound and rhythm, the act of running depicts how a body, like a
drawing material, can become depleted and exhausted, unstable and tenuous,
yet can mark and trace. And, in the case of Le Va, running can be a method of
measuring – the sound of running can define physicality in terms of experience
and intervention and shape one’s thinking.
As referenced in Chapter 1 in the discussion of Richard Long’s A Line Made by
Walking, while there are numerous artworks that use walking, running is prevalent
and instrumental in the expansion of new drawing processes. This suggests
there is more to uncover in the use of running as a method and skill related to
the discipline of physical strength and training in a primordial activity. Running is
a method of movement and, according to the biologist Dennis Bramble and the
anthropologist Daniel Lieberman, it is more than merely an extension of walking –
it is also claimed that it emerged nearly two million years ago as part of Homo
sapiens’ evolution and is one of the most single transformative events of human
history; they assert it is running that made us human.46 In a fine art discourse
concerning the body’s limits, these concepts have consequently introduced an
athletic, powerful approach to many practitioners’ methodologies.
Artists have used physical activities such as swimming the Channel (British
artist, Karen Throsby), wrestling (American artist, Jennifer Locke) and, as identified
earlier, triathlon (Dutch artist, Guido van der Werve) in works that decentralize the
competitive quality of athletics and rather explore the synergies between action
and context. Each artist uses the disciplines of both art and sport to uncover
modes of physical effort and strategy and advocate for reluctant repetition and
self-controlled determination.
Additionally, there is a long list of choreographed movements through dance
and sport that can also be considered an expression in this field of intense
physical pursuit. Many of the 1960s collaborations between Simone Forti and
Robert Morris, Robert Rosenberg and Trisha Brown and, more recently, artists
62 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

such as Katrina Brown and Rosanna Irvine have produced works that draw on
the legacy of the seminal Judson Dance Theatre and Steve Paxton’s teachings
around weight and the sensation of weight, momentum and gravity.47 Brown
and Irvine’s commissioned work surface/sphere (2016) is a video installation
based on particular movements in relation to the spine – twist, roll, spiral – and a
conceptual event of exploring processes from their ongoing work between paper,
charcoal, the body and breath.48 There are many examples of practitioners who
intersect dance and fine art, for example artists currently participating in studies
at the London-based Siobhan Davies Dance studio, with recent workshops such
as Where Dance and Art Meet (2017).49 Evident in its title, the direct influence on
performance drawing can be linked and considered.
Reflecting on drawing as movement, artists have developed and demonstrated
the activity of mark making processes, both visible and non-visible, or rather
marking and non-marking, and refer to the temporal and ephemeral (as discussed
in Chapters 1 and 5). Via conceptual avenues, these boundaries between
performance, drawing and human activity are cognitive processes whether using
an instrument such as graphite or using the body as a tool in conceptual or
temporal approaches. The action – and context in which the action sits – is an
act of thinking through the body, again emphasizing that the approach taken by
the artist themselves goes beyond drawing as an objective process and moves
into the workings of performativity and subjectivity: to perform with a particular
intention is at the root of performance drawing. Hence, running, as a voluntary
endurance and extreme action that triggers a more demanding notion of
responsibility for action thus producing an experience that characterizes control
and agency, feels appropriate.
In the past, ancient Greek games, as well as the early modern Olympics,
embraced both sport and art within the same occasion.50 However, there
are ways in which sport and art can do more than simply operate alongside
each other and instead imaginatively bring together grounds for research into
movement. Aesthetic experiences can be seen in artists’ works that cross a
larger field of research. Humanities and research groups such as Fields of Vision
and RUN! RUN! RUN! are actively providing platforms and research models to
fill this gap. The organizations recognize that sport and art present opportunities
to broaden the field in both disciplines and can positively impact contemporary
society.51 For artists, bringing elements of sport into practice as a meaningful and
sustainable method enriches a critique of movement but also stretches works
into a new arena. As a subject for research, running and drawing have provided
artists with inspirational forms of movement and physicality, developing new
forms of practice and representation of the body, almost through a scientific lens.
As an opportunity for a dialogue to emerge between disciplines and bridge
previously confined ideas and ways of thinking within the act of running the
process moves the body from a position of the everyday and into an act of
PHYSICALITY 63

enduring resistance against time, science and technology. Training techniques


allow the performer (athlete or artist) to adapt and acclimatize and prepare
for environmental pressures and physical demands.52 Through repetition and
understanding the pressures of situation, the body can act accordingly and allow
the intention of the work to be communicated.
The crossover and merging of selected artists’ practices rely similarly on the
expertise of a skilled and experienced practitioner to focus on the body as a
muscle and power to generate performance. Where, in sprint training, athletes
use resistance and speed to build muscle and achieve a faster, stronger body
and train at higher altitudes or in different temperatures and on different terrains
to challenge their regular training patterns, perhaps the artist – like the athlete –
defines a practice by certain rules, the testing of material, scheming technique
and pattern and prepares a routine following a strict regime to enhance the
possibility and the shaping of knowledge through practice.
Martin Creed’s Work No. 850 (2008) consisted of a series of runners, sprinting
consistently through the Duveen Hall Gallery at Tate Britain, London. For the
duration of the exhibition, every 30 seconds an individual ran the 86-metre length
of the space. After a runner has made the sprint (which took about 12 seconds)
there was a 15-second pause – according to Creed, like a rest in a piece of
music. Then the next runner would dash forward.53 In full sprint, the runner’s
sound and rhythm reverberated and, according to the writer Katharine Stout,
the work presented the presence of a runner as the object of art.54 In many
ways, it was a performance, drawing a line in space. Similar to Le Va’s work, the
simplicity of running in a particular space created the context and framework
and the action became the art. For the viewer of the live performance, a chain of
repetitious actions and tensions was created in the act of each run; a contrast
in the dynamic movement and posture of each runner could easily be noted.
Each runner was instructed to focus and, in Creed’s words, run ‘as if their life
depended on it’.55
In Melanie Manchot’s video installation Tracer (2013) (19 minutes and 43
seconds),56 the work presents professional, semi-professional and amateur
parkour runners.57 The work focuses on the movement of both body and
camera through urban and rural landscapes and, as Manchot describes, draws
attention to how human agency may act upon built environments and question
the authority inherent to architectural form58 but also provide a heightened sense
and understanding of how certain movements produced can generate a different
kind of space.
As mentioned, in many applications of recording performance drawings, a
camera is used to trace and represent the body making a mark. In Manchot’s
work, the film-maker speaks of the methods and tactics used to produce the
visual representations, as line, and that, for both the artist and runners, it is
the philosophical aspects of moving through a landscape that is of interest.59
64 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

Manchot explains that, when recording the work and thinking about the viewer, it
was important for the film to represent a series of linear movements, by following
each parkourist in long cinematic takes as they delineate a given space.60
Through the lens of the camera, the trace(less) materiality and thought of the line
are demonstrated.
In the film, runners move from one side of the screen to the other – a similar
approach to Martin Creed’s work at Tate Britain. It creates a singular forward
movement with a line connecting the individual runner to their environment.
Runners are signalling a temporal, ephemeral line. Also, in comparison to Creed’s
work, it focuses on how running can function as a non-competitive discipline or
practice. The practice of parkour can be referred to as an ‘art of displacement’;61
the runners aim to change the perception of urban environments and alter one’s
ability to use the body in relation to structures that define our surroundings.
It brings an expression of freedom and identity and highlights the tension and
formalities between social perceptions, creativity and public space. These issues
of the self and the environment are further discussed in relation to Trisha Brown’s
performance Man Walking Down the Side of a Building (1970) in the ‘Embodying
historical references’ section.

The act/stillness
ROBERT LUZAR / CHARLIE FORD
Based on the idea that drawing can manifest an immediate and direct experience,
performance drawing can be delineated as movement, or a mode of thinking.
The physical act, as well as the mere thinking about a physical act, can correlate
with how artists relate to themselves inwardly as well outwardly. An intention
of and commitment to ‘being’ and consciously thinking about drawing as
movement can elevate the physical experience and operate under philosophical
investigations of existentialism. Building on how the moving body in the work
is an internalized declared activity, this section shifts gear and looks to the
performative as stillness and how thinking relates to the self and world.
In addition to Marina Abramović’s current practice that is entrenched in
exploring duration, her early collaborative works included Abramović and
Ulay’s Nightsea Crossing, a series of twenty-two performances between 1981
and 1987, where the key to duration was an aspect of endurance and being
motionless. Abramović and Ulay sat still in silence facing each other for an epic
ninety days in total, with each performance consisting of seven daily hours of
concentration.62 In an interview discussing the work, Abramović states: ‘unless
we become an object, the piece would be entirely unbearable […] it’s another
kind of survival.’63
PHYSICALITY 65

Beyond attempting to re-establish the materiality of drawing, here the works


focus on the importance of intermittent movement and inner presence. Therefore,
it is not only the medium of what drawing can be that is considered but also,
at a time when performances are streamed online in real time and presented
on various electronic media devices, an integral element of the work is how the
artist/performer can demonstrate and convey a rigorous thought process to the
viewer.
In contemporary works by Robert Luzar, Sonia Boyce, Maria Hupfield, Greig
Burgoyne, Didier Morelli and Charlie Ford – who are critical of how movement
is employed in their performances and apply a certain approach to gesture,
context and scrutiny of sculpture or drawing – their practice can be related to
a type of art that presents aspects of stillness and obstruction, embodying a
further concept of restraint.
Particularly in Robert Luzar’s or Charlie Ford’s practice, most artworks hold a
peculiar sense of unease and self-consciousness. In Luzar’s Two-Legged Idleness,
Untaped (2013–14), the body in space, as well as the gestures made while the
audience members watch, presents a pensive and subtle tone that challenges not
only the extent of drawing but movement – an awkwardness that questions if the
action (blowing balloons, sticking pieces of tape to the wall, lying on the floor and
resting legs against the wall) is to be humorous or incredibly serious (Figure 2.5).
The presence of a disciplined body is portrayed, as well as a willingness and
intention to use a great amount of controlled energy for a somewhat minimal
result. The search for balance creates a muscular tension. In Luzar’s work,
standing and lying in subtly still positions provides a way to rethink a collective
understanding of the medium of drawing – to take account of the potential to
rather quietly present a physical presence and be critical of movement. Perhaps
the work is layered with an attempt to have profound control – demanding of the
viewer time to contemplate and question subtle idleness and inactivity.
Drawing can acknowledge movement not only in the visual traces of an action
carried out in time but also by utilizing philosophical and theoretical concepts
to conceive a form of mark making – performance strongly places ‘the act’ as
a moment simply questing for a sense of presence and liveliness. Through the
conscious intention to draw and/or perform, this section considers artworks that
build on manifesting a presence as well as the already accepted idea that the
line is a means of exploring theoretical and philosophical concepts including the
subjective body as a key material element in the work.
Luzar’s Two-Legged Idleness, Untaped is a two-person live-art event and
Internet-streamed video.64 Performing against a white wall with the light from the
projector casting shadows of the body, the performance addresses time-based
elements. The video is streamed only in one direction and the projected video
appears only in the gallery for the audience members to see (the performing
artist cannot see the audience or the other artist).
66 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

Figure 2.5 Robert Luzar, Two-Legged Idleness, Untaped, 2013–14. Artist collaborating in
work is Johannes Zits, photograph of the work is from the exhibition Life and Limb, at the
Orillia Museum of Art and History, Canada, April 3 – June 14, 2014. Photo: Ed Pien.

The artist’s body becomes the agency of obstructed movement, and the
notion of drawing is established without the need for the evidence of the mark.
For Luzar, ‘drawing is how you start something, how you go on’.65 The only
documentation of the live drawing performance is through a selection of still
photographs and the collective memory of the audience members present. In
Two-Legged Idleness, Untaped (2013–14), there are no specific instructions
between the two artists. However, from the pairing of actions and movements
made by both, it becomes apparent that one artist appears to respond to
the other. The slow-moving silhouettes of both artists’ bodies and the tape
adhered to the wall (that eventually drops) are what shapes the narrative.
Perhaps the anticipation of ‘nothingness’, or an emptying, as if something
becomes nothing, is what makes up the conditions of this work. Between
discernment, balance, stillness and movement, the condition indicate an
attempt to understand more about spatial awareness and, more broadly,
persistence and transience.
Luzar considers the work obstructed in the way the two subjects decide to
consciously ‘make work’ and perform with these materials and in this specific
time without an explicitly formed instruction but to be in the space; every action
and decision is scrutinized and almost painfully thoughtful and considered. In
some way, the absence of instructions makes for an artwork that is to say barely
working.66 Nevertheless, for the viewers, the pace of movement and the choice
of materials seem constructed and somewhat choreographed. Like a dancer
PHYSICALITY 67

who counts to music, it appears like a John Cage composition: Luzar’s subjects
are in time and reflective of movement in small increments.
For Luzar, he selected materials based on consumables and everyday
commodities – scissors, wood, sticky notes, Blu-Tack putty, (non-marking) tape
and paper – and spaces that resemble home and work offices. His focus is to
iterate conceptual problems with materiality and inactive movement. In the area
of performance drawing that keenly questions the medium and material and site,
Luzar’s work addresses the immediacy and effort of even the simplest of tasks. It
challenges terms such as ‘liveness’ and presence in relation to movement. There
is no formal recording of the event or possibility of the entirety of the work being
seen in the flesh.

The playfulness of (unmarking) tape can sometimes drop, signalling an


awareness of gravity and loosening the ideals of material – the ideals of
materiality being both as Luzar suggests ‘this-is-that and here-and-now’ –
substances, the qualities and elements of all things known become.67

Inspired by theoretical and philosophical elements of point, line and plane,


Luzar’s work questions gesture and how the body can consistently remain in
states of becoming and moving forward.68 For him, the notion of trace(less) is
best addressed by making work that sits in two locations at once. It therefore
fundamentally obstructs the sense of ‘where’ the work sits and physicality
lies. When asked about the materials and context, in contrast to the line, he
writes:

A ‘point’ … [is] where a work seems to both start and strangely end … all
the while perpetually seeming to keep open. It is the ‘betweeness’ of space
stretching, the metaphors of indeterminate grey shifting to a stranger pale
blue.69

Perhaps the future of performance drawing is this kind of ‘point’: how


artists make something from a constructed context and, rather than leaving
something of a mark/trace behind in physical space, moves something on – or,
in Luzar’s words, ‘traces’ something towards a future form.70 It may be a critical
understanding of where drawing and performance intersect, a moment in an
artist’s practice that emphasizes the shift from mark making (and potentially
risking failure of this) to embedding the simple act of presence as process.
The vigour in performance drawing perhaps identifies a particular treatment of
presence and the perpetual emptying of material – like the expending of energy
in a good run.
In Charlie Ford’s current practice, he considers his performance and video
works as a type of ‘drawing in space’.71 Similarly, his focus is on gesture and
he considers his performances as mark making, measuring and tracing but,
68 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

moreover, addresses thresholds of movement and performs the small details of


everyday actions to obstruct their meaning. He writes:

Performative actions both allude to everyday life – the objects, costumes,


and bodily movements – and disrupt their familiarity through pacing, gesture,
and tone. Within this choreography, the stage is set to reconsider the world
around us through the space between: stillness and action, object and body,
seriousness and humor, control and failure.72

In considering the lens of performance drawing as a tool, in Charlie Ford’s work,


he moves from using the body and drawing with charcoal – and what he calls
tracing space with marks and representations – to using concepts of drawing to
make performance work that uses an object to draw traceless forms – to frame
and sculpt and structure space.73 It seems to address how the mind almost
separate from the body can move and be present and be evidenced as doing so.
In Ford’s series titled Sometimes (2017), the work is durational and specific
to the length of the wall. In a room with a DIY shelf sitting loosely on brackets
and items such as a jar with water, a stone, brick, some paper and a small pile
of gravel on top, as well as a dangling live microphone to amplify sound, the
performance starts with the artist taking the shelf at head height and moving
it along the side of the gallery wall to the other fixed brackets – which are on
the same wall but very close to the floor. Attempting to hold the shelf upright
and steady, due to the awkward movement the artist stumbles and alters the
evenness of the shelf and, unsurprisingly, the glass jar spills and items fall, tumble
and break. For the audience members, Ford’s slow and awkward movements,
despite being thoughtfully planned, capture a focused but failed attempt at a
task. Despite Ford completing the set tasks, remnants of gravel, broken glass
and water lie on the floor and his body lies flat in a resting position, signalling both
the mind/body at ease and the performance being over.
Trained in dance and choreography from UK, Ford has used the methods
and processes of drawing in movement theory and, similar to Robert Luzar, has
recently become more interested in describing a suspended space between
physical and conscious movement in relation to stillness. Directed now by a fine
art and philosophical approach, Ford explores tension, which can be described
as the positive and negative conflict of things. Through themes of control and
precision, for example, with reference to artists such as Mel Brimfield (On Board,
2010), Erwin Wurm (One Minute Sculptures, 1996–ongoing), John Wood and
Paul Harrison (Board, 1993) and Bruce McLean (Pose Work for Plinths, 1971),
alongside the seriousness of body and movement, the stillness and simplicity of
the task in these works demonstrate a sense of personality and character – like
a comedic deadpan stare, humour is imbued.
PHYSICALITY 69

Embodying historical references


DIDIER MORELLI / TRISHA BROWN / CARALI MCCALL
In many works since the 1960s, stemming from Marcel Duchamp’s subversion of
ready-made objects (as early as 1913) and the birth of conceptualism, performance
art can generally be defined by ideas and actions that transform objects; artists
have tested and experimented with ways to make work and evolved processes
to challenge and inspire new ways of thinking. Ultimately, by forming a new
relationship between artist and audiences through dematerialization and shifting
the attitudes towards the role of the artist, performance drawing has emerged
from this legacy and way of working with a certain rigour and intellect.
In addition to this, the body as a figure and object of art has long been an
aspect and element of practice; what performance drawing does is activate the
corporeal and bodily presence as participatory, not only transforming the art
object but de-emphasizing its use and captivating the immediate and sensorial
physical acts of movement and making for viewers. The term contributes to
conceptual, process-driven artworks that embody historical references, and
engaging audience members strikes the core of performance drawing.
In the claim that performance drawing can be identified in terms of being
physical, instructional and ephemeral – which links to the 1960s conceptual
modesty and humour – the political content and contribution to fine art practice,
in terms of methods and expanding definitions of what art can be, perhaps
brings the most value. Alongside key themes and artworks that incorporate the
entire body, in seminal works such as George Brecht and Fluxus’s Event Score
(as described in Chapter 3) and Tehching Hsieh’s Cage Piece (see Chapter 1),
engaging audience members and creating a sense of participation are critical.
Studio-based work has proven to be a key root system for experimental
processes and collaborating with both materials and peers (studios can create
a space for thinking); performance elevates the importance of the public realm
and exchanging ideas, influences and inspirations – it creates a different kind of
space for making.
The artist Didier Morelli keenly addresses historical references as well as
notions of materiality, spectatorship and limits of the impossible/possible. In his
ongoing project Walking Through Walls, Morelli engages with building structures
in urban and public spaces by pressing and pushing up against them –
bringing focus to the specific parts of the body, he wrestles and struggles to
find ease and movement in the absurd act of trying to walk through the wall.
Holding conversations with passers-by on the street – Morelli’s performances,
documented on film, critically look to social engagement and perspectives on
authority and empowerment. He states: ‘I often find myself identifying with
marginalized groups where “otherness” and failure to “succeed” is not viewed
70 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

as a state of passivity and inaction but one of potential growth, empowerment,


agency and knowledge.’74 Referring specifically to both Barry Le Va’s and Trisha
Brown’s works mentioned in this chapter, Morelli has a deep connection to
athleticism and the infrastructure of a city. Looking at the body in space, like
in many works discussed in this chapter, he works with repetitive, cyclical acts,
addressing time and timelessness and attempting an exploration into physicality.
Trisha Brown’s Man Walking Down the Side of a Building (1970) was first
performed in New York, making architecture the basis for a choreographic
score and live public performance (Figure 2.6).75 The work featured a dancer
poised perpendicular to the ground, descending the facade of a seven-storey
building.76 Altering the ordinary act of walking, it became an achievement of
athleticism and a form of physical expression.77 This work has since become
a key foundation and resource in connecting the disciplines of dance and fine
art, architecture and performance, and championing how different forms of
site-specificity and explorations of public places can bring together notions of
movement, suspension and stillness.
In ways that challenge the naturalized movement through urban spaces,
Brown’s work poses questions of aesthetics and materials; it addresses access
and mobility in terms of the physical as well as communal public spaces; and, in
terms of gravity, it challenges the perspective of our relationship to the body in
space, and what that can do to our imagination.78

Figure 2.6 Trisha Brown, Man Walking Down the Side of a Building, 1970. Photo: Carol
Goodden.
PHYSICALITY 71

In referring back to the parkour running in Manchot’s film Tracer, the potential
to engage with the possibilities presented by the environment and architectural
buildings invokes a question around context and the role of the performer in a
public space. For Brown’s Man Walking Down the Side of a Building, the original
performance took place as part of a self-organized programme titled Dances
in and Around 80 Wooster Street and was conducted outside of institutional
authority.79 Directing attention to what artists have to offer in thinking about
space and creating opportunity for performances in public spaces conjures a
collaborative and institutional approach to working.
In reference to the seminal work Man Walking Down the Side of a Building
(1970), the artist Carali McCall’s proposed performance Run Vertical: Running
Up the Side of a Building makes a direct link to a way of thinking, in that artists
today are nostalgists just as much as they are Futurists and they seek to find
re-signifance.80 Considering this act of drawing on architecture and public
space to construct a live performance, and redoing the past, there is an act of
facilitating and acknowledging history, yet a drive for an unmediated experience
in the present. A belief that existence can be enriched if one sets about the task,
and acts as if those limits can be exceeded, albeit repeated or performed with
confidence, and in recognition that they are not completely original.81 Without
delving into comparing and contrasting the works, like many of Brown’s recent
re-performed or re-enacted performances, most importantly the performances
are part of programmes and must therefore be institutionally sanctioned.82 There
is also an essential understanding of questioning how each new work sits in
relation to the previous. This contextual shift is an example of the new arenas
artists have adapted to since the 1960s.
For the performance Run Vertical, the artist Carali McCall proposes to run
towards the Tate Modern’s chimney and then seamlessly transition to the vertical,
running up the entire building using a harness, ropes, mechanical equipment and
a team of engineers. Leaning on the artist’s earlier practice and previous artworks
that utilize running as a method of making work, it also builds on the interest in
reactivating the histories of performance, paying homage to and addressing the
bewilderment that the artist and audience experience and that artists studying
and working in the field of performance today adhere to and follow. For historians,
Run Vertical signifies a nod or rather a nudge to the artworks made in the age of
questioning what the position for a female artist is, as well as starting to examine
and expose how institutional bodies govern permissions and health and safety
risks. McCall’s work, like Brown’s, also seeks to reactivate and address how
the city can be used as a surface to engage with as a material and source of
inspiration – albeit, rather than walking, demonstrating and promoting running as
an empowering and artistic activity.
Returning to the physical act of running ‘as’ drawing, the work embraces the
idea that the body is not passive in the act of drawing but that the artist brings a
72 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

particular agency to the work; comprehensive training is involved for an artwork


and the artist’s experience is one that exceeds the object of art (be it through the
body in a live performance, video or sound recording).83 Run Vertical is another
example of the body’s necessity to build muscle and develop an understanding
of balance and gravity as a personal relationship to then engage the public
audience.
Like many artists discussed in this chapter, McCall arrived at her professional
practice from an interest in the body as a physical tool and consequently
developed a performance drawing practice that uses running and trace(less)
forms as an integral methodology. Presenting a development in thinking – from
using the body as a tool (for mark making) to challenging the urban environment
and its buildings with the action of running as an ‘authorized’ form – the work can
be traced to an influence shaped by the concept of the line, task-based works
and physicality in fine art practice. It facilitates history and establishes a practice
in running that uses architecture to create another avenue for ways to consider
limits and a perspective of the body in art.

Conclusion
According to the cultural history writer Thor Gotaas, there was a significant
boom in the 1980s of Western cities and the public participating in the activity
of running,84 and, since the turn of the twenty-first century, there has been a
rise in the number of people who use running as a fundamental part of their
professional practice. As mentioned in this chapter, more and more platforms
are available that account for the swell in interest and the desire to endorse
the simplicity of a creative action, and thinking of it so; however, this raises the
problematic issues of the symptoms of ‘art as a form of life’ and that ‘anything
can be art’, which can cause division between practice and theory.
Highlighting seminal works that have inspired this emerging field of
performance drawing and discussing various uses as an operational term, this
chapter celebrates how art and everyday actions can connect and diverge
into cross-disciplinary practices. For artists working in the realms of drawing
and performance, which can be underpinned by philosophical questions of
line and movement, the chapter closes by opening up the social connections
and cues from experiencing performance and a live drawing work, and
attempting to enrich the strong relationship between body, time and space
and contribute to the legacy of artists honing their skills and enriching the
future of drawing.
Addressing how the body in art begins to appear in wider multidisciplinary
modes of research, and exemplifying new practices and methods of
communicating, the artworks presented in this chapter have aimed to reveal
PHYSICALITY 73

how practitioners have come to understand and utilize the body as material and
site – and, moreover, endorse the primitive and familiar discipline of running to
suggest that running, like drawing, can be an extreme but fundamental form
of human movement and discovery; further, in the event of scrutinizing and
suggesting stillness, the performative act and being consciously aware of the
body and any movement can also be identified at the core of an artist’s work. With
these configuring elements and methods of art practice that illuminate shifting
attitudes towards drawing and the variable extent of how drawing and movement
can be classified and described alongside performance, it is inherently interesting
to consider the future potential of using the body as a drawing device – making
lines through the landscape and exploring new territory; ultimately, linking these
drawing processes to what makes us human and creating new practices with
agency, sincerity and drive.

Notes
1 Performativity refers to the term performative according to J. L. Austin and later
described by the theorist Judith Butler, and can be defined as to ‘repeat the
meaning in an act’. See Judith Butler, ‘Burning acts, injurious speech’, in Andrew
Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, eds, Performativity and Performance (London:
Routledge 1995), p. 197.
2 In reference to Matthew Barney’s notebook on his Drawing Restraint series as a
student, he writes: the athlete is the alchemist, in Matthew Barney on the Origins
of Drawing Restraint (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2006), video, 1min
32seconds, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83WTxmkye04 (accessed 3 May
2020).
3 Carolee Schneemann, More Than Meat Joy: Performance Works and Selected
Writings (New York: McPherson & Company, 2003), p. 231.
4 In ‘Interview with Kate Haug’ in Carolee Schneemann, Imaging Her Erotics: Essays,
Interviews, Projects (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), Carolee Schneemann
states: ‘Could I include myself as a formal aspect of my own materials? Could a
nude woman artist be both image and image maker? Those were critical concerns
at the time. I was constantly told that I shouldn’t even be painting: You’re really good
for a girl, but …’ (pp. 21–44).
5 Guggenheim, ‘Matthew Barney’, Guggenheim website, https://www.guggenheim.
org/artwork/artist/matthew-barney (accessed 7 November 2017).
6 Matthew Barney states from the start he wanted to put his body into the work,
as well as his own experiences. The most profound experiences Matthew Barney
had at that point were from the football field, in Matthew Barney on the Origins
of Drawing Restraint (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2006), video, 1min
32seconds, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83WTxmkye04 (accessed 3 May
2020).
7 Neville Wakefield, ed., Barney: Prayer Sheet with the Wound and the Nail (Basel:
Laurenz Foundation Shaulager, 2010), exhibition catalogue, p. 13.
74 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

8 Nina Papazoglou, ‘Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle and the ordeal of value’ (PhD
diss., Goldsmiths, UAL, 2013), p. 112.
9 Ibid.
10 Drawing Restraint 1–6 (1987–9) are a set of studio experimental works that were
documented using video and photography. Drawing Restraint 10–16 (2005–7) are
site-specific performances that recall the earlier works. In other phases of Barney’s
Drawing Restraint series, the project developed into a more complicated structure,
incorporating narratives taken from biographical foundations and mythological
constructs and working with wider cultural themes such as sexuality, war and death.
See Papazoglou, ‘Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle’.
11 Carali McCall, ‘The line is a brea(d)thless length: Introducing the physical act of
running as a form of drawing’ (PhD diss., Central Saint Martins, UAL, 2014),
p. 103.
12 Tania Kovats, ed., The Drawing Book: A Survey of Drawing: The Primary Means of
Expression (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2005), p. 14.
13 McCall, ‘The line is a brea(d)thless length’, p. 7.
14 Tim Ingold, Lines: A Brief History (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 47.
15 Ben Rubin, We Believe We Are Invincible (New York City: National Track and Field
Hall of Fame, 2004) video, 9 minutes 18 seconds.
16 McCall, ‘The line is a brea(d)thless length’, p. 14.
17 Distinct from ‘body art’, which can highlight the visceral or abject aspects of the
body, and focusing on bodily materials or the ability to suffer flesh-like pain, see, for
example, Amelia Jones’s survey: Amelia Jones, Body Art/Performing the Subject
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).
18 Guido van der Werve, Nummer Veertien, video, http://roofvogel.org/ (accessed
25 November 2017).
19 Reid Singer, ‘Endurance sports as performance art. Literally’. Outside, 6 December
2013, https://www.outsideonline.com/1920461/endurance-sports-performance-art-
literally (accessed 1 June 2020).
20 Van der Werve, Nummer Veertien.
21 Guido van der Werve, ‘Guido van der Werve in conversation with John-Paul Stonard’,
Somerset House London, 13 November 2017; event attended by Carali McCall.
22 Singer, ‘Endurance sports’.
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid.
26 Van der Werve, Nummer Veertien.
27 Ibid.
28 Guido van der Werve, Nummer Veertien (The day I didn’t turn with the world) (LIMA,
2007), video, 8 minutes, 36 seconds, http://www.li-ma.nl/site/catalogue/art/guido-
van-der-werve/nummer-negen-the-day-i-didn-t-turn-with-the/11379 (accessed
26 November 2017).
29 Singer, ‘Endurance sports’.
PHYSICALITY 75

30 Ibid.
31 Lisa Stansbie, ‘The performance of the Channel swimmer: Time-based rituals and
technology’, in Kristy Buccieri, ed., Body Tensions: Beyond Corporeality in Time and
Space (Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2014).
32 Linda Montano, Performance Artists Talking in the Eighties (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2000), p. 331.
33 McCall, ‘The line is a brea(d)thless length’, p. 119.
34 Using the outline shape of written words, Court made drawings that present a basic
unit of understanding and a symbolic structure. See, Steve Pratt, ‘Mirroring dyslexia:
The power relations of language, The drawings of John Court (2006–2007)’, in
John Court Drawings (Oulu: Kaleva Print, 2007), pp. 1–4.
35 John Court, interview with Carali McCall, 13 September 2017.
36 David Roberts Art Foundation (DRAF). ‘DRAF Studio – Stuart Brisley, DRAWN (2–5
Mar 2016)’, DRAF, website, http://davidrobertsartfoundation.com/live/draf-studio-_-
stuart-brisley/
37 Interview with Carali McCall, 24 February 2019. Brisley went on to say: ‘Imagine the
pencil being held between finger and thumb, being drawn metaphorically into the
body, where the action of drawing might take place in the ways the human figure
moves and negotiates substances and forms etc. The title DRAWN also refers to the
body and its own disassembly found in sources of European art.’
38 Stuart Brisley, interview with Carali McCall, 24 February 2019.
39 Raphael Rosen, Math Geek: From Klein Bottles to Chaos Theory (Holbrook, MA:
Adams Media Corporation, 2015), p. 241.
40 Stuart Brisley, ‘Biography’, Stuart Brisley website, http://www.stuartbrisley.com/
pages/21 (accessed 22 October 2017).
41 See J. L. Austin, How To Do Things With Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1975), p. 6.
42 Rhea Anastas, Pamela Lee, Paul Virilio and Ingrid Schaffner, Accumulated Vision: Barry
Le Va (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, 2005), exhibition catalogue, p. 84.
43 Peter Eleey,‘If you couldn’t see me: The drawings of Trisha Brown’, Walker Art
Center website, http://walkerart.org/collections/publications/performativity/
drawings-of-trisha-brown (accessed 12 June 2017).
44 Liza Bear, ‘Discussions with Barry Le Va’, Avalanche, no. 3 (1971): 66.
45 Rosalind Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the expanded field’, in The Originality of the Avant-
Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1979), pp. 277–90.
46 Lee Siegel, ‘How running made us human: Endurance running let us evolve to
look the way we do’, ScienceDaily, 24 November 2004; McCall, ‘The line is a
brea(d)thless length’, p. 123.
47 Katrina Brown, Translucent surface/Quiet body, a choreographic report, in
Performance Research ‘On An/Notations’ Vol. 20 Issue 6 (Dec 2015) pp. 101–5.
48 Katrina Brown, interview with Carali McCall, 28 November 2017. Katrina Brown and
Rosanna Irvine’s work surface/sphere (2016) was commissioned by Siobhan Davies
Dance/InDependent Dance for the WHAT Festival 2016: What remains… Anatomy
of an Artist.
76 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

49 Siobhan Davies Dance, newsletter, September–December 2017, http://www.


siobhandavies.com/media/uploads/files-downloads/sdd-newsletter-autumn-2017-
web.pdf (accessed 17 November 2019).
50 Fields of Vision: A Manifesto for the Arts and Sport Together; Manifesto, https://
artsinsport.wordpress.com/a-manifesto-for-the-arts-and-sport-together/ (accessed
10 September 2017).
51 Ibid.
52 In considering the developments in technology and the advancements in human
capabilities, work presented at the Wellcome Trust’s ‘Superhuman’ exhibition in
2012 holds potential interest.
53 Charlotte Higgins, ‘Martin Creed’s new piece for Tate Britain: A show that
will run and run’, The Guardian, 1 July 2008, https://www.theguardian.com/
artanddesign/2008/jul/01/art.tatebritain1 (accessed 30 November 2017).
54 Katharine Stout, Martin Creed, No. 850 (London: Tate Publishing, 2008). Published
on the occasion of the 2008 Tate Britain Duveens Commission by Martin Creed:
Work No. 850, 1 July–16 November 2008.
55 Higgins, ‘Martin Creed’s new piece for Tate Britain’.
56 Commissioned by Great North Run Culture, Melanie Manchot’s film Tracer (2013)
features ten parkour runners, or traceurs, from the north-east of England making
their way along the course of the Great North Run, http://greatnorthrunculture.org/
aboutcommission198a.html?commid=63 (accessed 14 November 2017).
57 Melanie Manchot, Tracer, video, 19 minutes and 43 seconds, http://www.
melaniemanchot.net/category/tracer/ (accessed 14 November 2017).
58 David Whetstone, ‘Interview: Film-maker Melanie Manchot on Great North Run
culture’, The Journal, 13 September 2013, http://www.thejournal.co.uk/culture/film-
tv/interview-film-maker-melanie-manchot-great-5922312 (accessed 14 November
2017).
59 Melanie Manchot, interview with Carali McCall, 31 March 2020.
60 Originating in the suburbs of Paris in the late 1980s, ‘art of displacement’ and
‘free-running’ are terms referred to as parkour. It can be described as a physical
activity adapted to the prevailing environment and is a dynamic interaction with that
environment. Practitioners of parkour are also sometimes referred to as ‘traceurs’
from the French word meaning bullet. Niell Brown, ‘The art of displacement: Parkour
as a challenge to social perceptions of body and space’, http://www.aughty.org/
pdf/art_of_displacement.pdf (accessed 31 March 2020).
61 Pomeranz Collection, ‘Marina Abramovic & Ulay’, Pomeranz Collection website,
http://pomeranz-collection.com/?q=node/39 (accessed 28 November 2017).
62 Montano, Performance Artists, p. 331.
63 Robert Luzar, interview with Carali McCall, 16 August 2017.
64 Ibid.
65 Ibid.
66 Ibid.
67 Robert Luzar, ‘Rethinking the graphic trace in performative drawing’, Theatre and
Performance Design, vol. 3 (June 2017): 50–67.
PHYSICALITY 77

68 Robert Luzar, interview with Carali McCall, 16 August 2017.


69 Ibid.
70 San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI), ‘Charlie Ford: Between’, SFAI website, http://
immaterial.sfai.edu/post/163452915440/charlieford (accessed 16 August 2017).
71 Ibid.
72 Ibid.
73 Didier Morelli, ‘About Didier Morelli’, Didier Morelli website, https://didiermorelli.com/
About-Didier-Morelli (accessed 28 July 2019).
74 Susan Rosenberg, ‘Trisha Brown (1936–2017): Remembering the choreographer
who forever changed the landscape of art and dance’, Frieze, 31 March 2017,
https://frieze.com/article/trisha-brown-1936-2017 (accessed 14 November 2017).
Man Walking Down the Side of a Building (1970) was performed on Brown’s
building of residence at the time, 80 Wooster St, New York. It was recorded on
16 mm film and has since been transferred to video; it exists as a silent, black-and-
white film, 2 minutes in duration, and was gifted to MOMA in 2017: https://www.
moma.org/collection/works/117939?locale=en (accessed 9 September 2017).
75 Ibid. See also Susan Rosenberg, Trisha Brown: Choreography as Visual Art
(Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2016).
76 Ibid.
77 Acatia Finbow, ‘Trisha Brown, Man Walking Down the Side of a Building 1970’, case
study, Performance At Tate: Into the Space of Art, Tate Research Publication, 2016,
http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/performance-at-tate/case-studies/
trisha-brown (accessed 9 September 2017).
78 Ibid.
79 Luke Turner, Metamodernism Manifesto, http://www.metamodernism.org/
(accessed 10 March 2018).
80 See also Timotheus Vermeulen and Robyn van den Akker, ‘Notes on
metamodernism’, Journal of Aesthetics and Culture, vol. 2 (2010).
81 Ibid.
82 Most recently, Man Walking Down the Side of a Building was performed by
BANDALOOP in 2016.
83 McCall, ‘The line is a brea(d)thless length’, p. 5.
84 Thor Gotaas, Running: A Global History (London: Reaktion Books, 2009), p. 267.
78
3
COMMUNICATING:
DIRECTIVES AND/OR
INSTRUCTIONS THAT
PROMOTE THE ACTIVITY
OF DRAWING

Following on from discussion in earlier chapters of the physicality of movement


expressed through the line, the focus here changes from the material and the
bodily to address the communication of an intended concept behind an artwork
and how the realization of that intention may come about through collaborative
drawing. Drawing is explored as a conceptual practice in which an idea is
manifested as a mark through the performance of another. The artworks gathered
come from the fields of performance art, experimental music, spiritualism,
mechanical sculpture and computer art, but they all share an investigation into
the act of communication and how this might be translated into action.
In his essay ‘Encoding/Decoding’,1 the cultural theorist Stuart Hall presents
an argument that meaning is not inherent or innate in a message transmitted
through mass media. It is not fixed and determined by the original author but is
part of a whole process of communication. Any message (and this includes a
work of art) made for public viewing goes through a number of separate stages
to create a process of communication. The message is first produced and put
into a form in which it can be circulated and is then distributed and displayed
before being viewed and consumed. Hall likens this process of communication
to coding. The production process involves firstly the artist having an intention
to make something and then secondly carrying out that intention to make a
work. In Hall’s terms, the artist’s intention is encoded into the work and, as this
happens within a specific historical, economic, cultural and social context, these
ideological factors are also encoded into the work. After it has been made, the
message (or artwork) is then open to interpretation by the receiver (or viewer) who
may operate within an entirely different historical, economic, cultural and social
80 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

context. Thus, Hall considers the act of viewing to be a process of decoding,


which may lead to a re- or misinterpretation of the original message if the viewer
does not have access to the same codes as the original author. Whereas Hall’s
theory of communication could apply to any artwork, what is relevant to this
chapter is the concept of a process of ‘encoding’ when the work is made and
‘decoding’ when the work is viewed.
The artworks under consideration in this chapter are not personally
completed by the artist, but, through an act of communication, they utilize the
participation of another to decode and enact their instructions. This is not in the
manner of a Renaissance studio in which a ‘master’ artist directs apprentices
to complete their paintings for them in the master’s own signature style but
rather a conceptual choice to create something only partially finished so that it
can be completed with different variations added by the contribution of another.
To use Hall’s terms, the first stage of this process is the act of encoding, when
the artist expresses their intention for a work of art using a form of language
or visuals to create a plan. Next, these ideas are stored as text or image and
delivered to another, who will interpret (or decode) these instructions and then
carry them out. This approach to art practice is what Umberto Eco has called
an ‘open’ work.2 There is no single, fixed outcome or product; these works are
explicitly designed to be interpreted in different ways. Examples of this form of
practice covered in the chapter include instructions defined in the form of text
as a ‘score’ before being publicly performed as a drawing; notation drawings
created to serve as instructions for performances; coded messages from the
spirit world enacted as drawn images; and programmed drawings generated by
digital algorithms and machines.
The discussion starts with a focus on John Cage and his influence on avant-
garde performance practice in which different forms of notation are used to
communicate an idea that participants execute to complete the performance.
This has a direct bearing on the work of Alison Knowles, whose #5 Street
Piece (1962), as stated in the Introduction, prompted the first usage of the term
performance drawing by Catherine de Zegher.

Directives for performance: Event scores


and instruction paintings
Musical scores are used by composers to give specific instructions to musicians
about how to reproduce a piece of music in a particular manner. Notation in the
form of lines, notes and a system of symbols forms a shared language about
musical scales, duration and rhythm. In his essay ‘The Poetics of the Open
Work’ (1962), Eco describes this thus:
COMMUNICATING 81

a classical composition […] posits an assemblage of sound units which the


composer arranged in a closed, well-defined manner before presenting it to
the listener. He converted his idea into conventional symbols which more or
less oblige the eventual performer to reproduce the format devised by the
composer himself.3

Experimental use of the score in avant-garde performance practice was


popularized in the art world of the 1950s through the influence of the composer
John Cage.
Considered today as a seminal work that heralded multi- and cross-
disciplinary performance and collaboration, Untitled Black Mountain Piece
(1952) can be seen as a reflection of the sociopolitical discord of its place and
time. In the shadow of the Cold War, the influence of McCarthyism continued to
cast its paranoid spell (Charlie Chaplin was denied re-entry to the USA for his so-
called un-American activities), the USA was testing atomic bombs in the Pacific
Ocean and US troops were fighting in the Korean War, and at the same time the
iconic Hollywood film Singing in the Rain premiered. Bearing in mind this schism
of activity and thinking, Untitled Black Mountain might in its context of 1950s
America seem to be a logical response to those chaotic times. Cage’s method of
producing a performance event used chance due to the multiple possibilities for
individual interpretation of a minimal set of instructions whereby each artist was
given a randomly allocated time period:

Projector:

Begin at 16 min.
Play freely until 23 min.

Begin again at 24:30


Play freely until 35:45

Begin at 38:20
Play freely until 44:25
Untitled Black Mountain Piece, 19524

After his death, one unsigned page of Cage’s score for Untitled Black Mountain
Piece was discovered with these simple instructions written down. The staging
was influenced by poet and playwright Antoine Artaud’s The Theatre and its
Double,5 in which Artaud altered the traditional positioning of stage and audience
by placing the audience at the centre of the action. Although no images have been
found to date that were made at the time of the work, Mary Caroline Richards,
one of the artists who took part in the event, drew a floor plan from memory for
the writer William Fetterman in 1989.6 Richard’s remembered floor plan positions
the audience in the centre of the event, while another plan reconstructed in 1965
82 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

(in an interview with Cage)7 has the audience seated in four triangular sections,
the wide aisles between each section forming a cross.8
In addition to how it was staged, Untitled Black Mountain Piece expanded the
perimeters of contemporary practice to include multidisciplinary (dance, poetry,
performance, music, sound, visual art) collaborative scored and directed works.
Recollections by the collaborating artists of what actually happened are various
and, at times, contradictory. Some recall that Merce Cunningham was chased
by a dog9 while dancing through the performance space – the Black Mountain
college dining hall (and also while dancing outside). David Tudor played the piano
(and a radio). Cage delivered a lecture from the top of a ladder (some have said
Cage spoke from behind a lectern) on Zen Buddhism (though some witnesses
have said it was the Declaration of Independence and Cage himself recalls giving
his Juilliard lecture which ends ‘a piece of string, a sunset, each acts’).10 Robert
Rauschenberg played Edith Piaf records on an old-fashioned phonograph.
Tommy Jackson did impressions in ink. Nicholas Cernovich projected a film.
Richards and Charles Olson climbed ladders and recited poetry.11 Perhaps
the absence of an original comprehensive score (if indeed there was one),
the joyously unfixed and sometimes contradictory recollections by the artists
involved and the lack of visual documentation of the event have all contributed
to this work’s legendary reputation, despite the fact that, according to William
Fetterman, ‘the significance of this performance was not appreciated at the
time’.12 Indeed, Untitled Black Mountain Piece subsequently came to be known
as the first ‘Happening’.13
This seminal work marked an important shift in fine art practice, breaking
away from the traditions of a conventional theatrical performance, whose shape
in space and time depends on a fixed physical position and a written script,
towards an embrace of flux, both in the composition of the instructions and in
the means by which those instructions may or may not be followed.14 Thus, the
end product of the scored instructions are not prescribed; rather, the process of
individual interpretation and the response to the instructions become the focus
of the work: the chain of events and the possibility of chance iterations.
Cage’s approach to composition represented a paradigm shift in music:
away from melody, harmony and rhythm as the basis of musical experience to
an exploration of duration, sound and silence. He aimed to relinquish authorial
control by the composer, open the mind of the listener and engulf them in the
present moment. Cage had come to think of music ‘not as a communication
from the artist to an audience, but rather as an activity of sounds in which the
artist found a way to let sounds be themselves’.15 His work uses the form of
music to reflect upon the concept of music. In his composition 4′33″, a period
of time – four minutes and thirty-three seconds – is specified during which no
instruments are played nor sounds of any kind made. Originated in 1952, the
score for this piece was expressed through a series of different conventions.
COMMUNICATING 83

Initially described in conventional musical notation, graphic notation was


subsequently used in the form of two continuous vertical lines framing either
side of the white space of a paper page in 1953 and, finally, during 1958–60,
it was written out as descriptive text.16 This silent work foregrounds the
context in which it is performed rather than the musical performance itself.
Anything that is heard comes from the listener’s active attention to noise in
the ambient environment. As in many of his other works, this composition
shows the influence of Zen Buddhism, on which Cage had attended lectures
by the Japanese author and teacher Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki at Colombia
University from 1949 to 1951, just a few years after the end of the Second
World War.17 Indeed, 4′33″ recalls a form of meditation known as Mindfulness
of Listening in which the instruction is simply to pay close and undivided
attention to sound.
From 1958, Cage taught an influential course in Experimental Composition at
the New School for Social Research in New York. Founded in 1919 by progressive
teachers from Columbia University who took a stand against the USA joining the
First World War, the New School proposed ‘a more relevant model of education
in which faculty and students would be free to honestly and directly address the
problems facing societies’.18 By this time, Cage had come to think of music ‘not
as a communication from the artist to an audience, but rather as an activity of
sound in which the artist found a way to let sounds be themselves’.19 Many artists
and composers who attended Cage’s course would later be identified with the
Fluxus group, such as George Brecht, La Monte Young, Alison Knowles, Dick
Higgins, Allan Kaprow, George Maciunas and Toshi Ichiyanagi. Students were
encouraged to go beyond conventional ideas of how music is made and to think
of it as ‘events in time-space’ and ‘time-structures’.20 They were encouraged
to experiment sonically using toy instruments and objects such as radios. The
course outline from the New School Catalogue gives a sense of the ideas that
would be explored:

Course Outline: (Experimental) Composition

Experimental music, a course in musical composition with technological,


musicological, and philosophical aspects, open to those with or without
previous training. Whereas conventional theories of harmony, counterpoint,
and musical form are based on the pitch and frequency components of sound,
this course offers problems and solutions in the field of composition based on
other components of sound: duration, timbre, amplitude, and morphology;
the course also encourages inventiveness.
A full exposition of the contemporary musical scene in light of the work
of Anton Webern, and present developments in music for magnetic tape
(musique concrete: electronische musik).21
84 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

Cage’s students, in particular George Brecht, Allan Kaprow, La Monte Young


and Alison Knowles, experimented with a combination of art, performance and
musical form. One such outcome was the Event score, pioneered by minimalist
artist and composer George Brecht and later adopted by many other artists for
Fluxus performances. Prior to working with Cage, Brecht had been studying
strategies for the creation of unpredictable outcomes through chance operations
in the work of Duchamp, Jackson Pollock, Dada and the Surrealists in order
to uncover methods for transcending the ego and moving away from intent.22
Brecht’s Event scores comprised a written proposal and/or instruction for
action – and so, the instructive score became a method that could encompass
any manner of actions and might also be repeated in different sites and various
ways. Between 1959 and 1962, he had written more than a hundred of these
in the form of a few lines of text written on a white card.23 Brecht’s Word (1961)
consists of one solitary instruction – ‘Exit’. The simplicity of this direction can
be interpreted by a multitude of different actions – exiting a room, making an
Exit sign, exiting through an Exit, planning a stage exit and so forth.24 Brecht’s
Event scores can be read and enacted as live performance with or without an
audience or even simply imagined in the mind of the reader. They are designed
to apply the kind of focused attention normally reserved for a work of art to
an everyday occurrence and resist closure with their many different possible
iterations representing constant change. Brecht compared his Event scores to
the haiku – a form of three-line Japanese poetry in which words are kept to a
minimum and the reader must use their imagination to complete the scene.25 The
Event scores need to be contemplated or interacted with in real time to make
sense of them. In this there is also evidence of the influence of the Zen Koan –
short poetic riddles that novice monks contemplate as part of their training and
journey towards enlightenment.
Inspired to apply Cage’s notion of ambient sound as music to performance,
Brecht incorporates actions from everyday living into his Event scores, mixing
art and life. Indeed, just as Cage’s musiques-concrète (1939) – musical
compositions constructed from elements of found sound26 – extended Marcel
Duchamp’s idea of the ready-made object to sound, with his Event scores
Brecht extended the ready-made action into performance, through using simple
activities from daily life as material27 – like the telephone ringing – as the following
works demonstrate:

Three Lamp Events

on. off.
lamp
off. on.
[1961]28
COMMUNICATING 85

Three Window Events

opening a closed window


closing an open window
[1961]

Three Broom Events

broom
sweeping
broom sweepings
[1961]29

Encompassing everyday activities, Brecht’s scores are accessible for others to


enact and are also iterative. Another person completes the instruction, which
adds the element of chance. Rather than a one-off creation, they can be repeated
by others with many different variations according to the personal interpretation
of the participant.
Another student of the New School for Social Research, the artist and graphic
designer George Maciunas, founded the short-lived AG Gallery in New York in
1961, where he hosted exhibitions and literary and musical programmes with
artists, writers and composers whose works included concepts of collaboration,
code and directive, such as George Brecht, La Monte Young and Yoko Ono.
Together with Dick Higgins, in 1961 he planned a magazine to include artworks
and writing that would be called Fluxus. Although the magazine did not
materialize, the term he had coined continued to be used to refer to this loosely
associated, international network of people who were connected through
publications, festivals, events and concerts.30 Echoing the 1920s Dadaists, the
(initially) European anarchical artist movement responding to the horrors of war,
Maciunas outlined that the purpose of Fluxus was to ‘promote a revolutionary
flood and tide in art, promote living art, anti-art’.31 He organized the Fluxus
Internationale Festspiele Neuester Musik (Fluxus International Festival of Very
New Music), the first official Fluxus festival in Wiesbaden 1962 (including
performances by artists such as Nam June Paik, Alison Knowles and Dick
Higgins)32 and went on to co-ordinate many other Fluxus events.
Following on from the Cold War with its climate of espionage and paranoia
and leading up to the growing wave of protests against the Vietnam War
(1955–75), a perfect storm had brewed in America for the explosion of non-
conformist creativity. The New York critic Irving Sandler was witness to one
significant moment highlighting this dramatic shift in creative practice. Sandler
recalled that in 1958 the artist Allan Kaprow in an Abstract Expressionist ‘hang
out’ declared, ‘I am convinced that painting is a bore. So is music and literature.
What doesn’t bore me is the total destruction of ideas that have any discipline.
86 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

Instead of painting, move your arms; instead of music, make noise. I’m giving up
painting and all the arts by doing everything and anything.’ Sandler went on to
explain that, like his mentor John Cage, Kaprow was calling for artists to break
down all barriers between art and non-art and that the avant-garde art world
would never be the same.33 Kaprow’s declaration heralded the burst of multi-,
cross- and interdisciplinary works, Happenings, Action Painting, Performance
and expanded Theatre in New York’s 1960s art community.
Although Brecht is often credited with the invention of the Event score,
anticipating these by several years, Yoko Ono’s instruction paintings also
invite the viewer to use their imagination to complete a scenario that she has
constructed and, in some cases, this involves mark making. She is often thought
of as influenced by Fluxus; however, Ono’s ideas were established prior to the
foundation of this group and can more accurately be considered as proto-Fluxus.
Although they share similar concerns to the Event score, her instruction paintings
predate the formation of Fluxus by several years.34 One of her earliest pieces is
Lighting Piece (1955):

Lighting Piece

Light a match and watch it go out


1955 autumn35

As this work shows, Ono had discovered the concept of score independently
from the Fluxus artists through a combination of her own musical training and
interest in Japanese haiku poetry from an early age in Japan.36 In her 1966
statement To the Wesleyan people, she points to a childhood influence: ‘The
painting method derives from as far back as the time of the Second World War
when we had no food to eat, and my brother and I exchanged menus in the air.’37
Ono initially called these works ‘unfinished paintings’ as they need to be
actively completed by the viewer.38 The dialogic form of the Zen Koan, a form
of experiential, intellectual puzzle given by a teacher to novice monks in which
the meaning is not immediately apparent and needs to be actively engaged with
in order to gain the wisdom behind the lesson, clearly inspires how the work is
engaged with. Ono was not concerned with public display or theatricality but
‘a dealing with oneself’.39 Her work inspires a contemplative and conceptual
reading that goes beyond the surface of representation and requires the viewer
to perform or visualize the instruction painting for themselves according to their
own interpretation of her instructions.40 In a statement made in 1966, Ono said
of her instruction paintings:

Instruction painting separates painting into two different functions: the


instructions and the realization. The work becomes a reality only when
COMMUNICATING 87

others realize the work. Instructions can be realized by different people in


many different ways. This allows infinite transformation of the work that the
artist himself cannot foresee, and brings the concept of “time” into painting.
It immediately eliminates the usual emphasis put on the original painting, and
art comes down from the pedestal.
Instruction painting makes it possible to explore the invisible, the world
beyond the concept of time and space. And then, sometimes later, the
instructions themselves will disappear and be properly forgotten.41

The action of walking features in her Map Piece (1962), which combines the
imaginary with everyday lived experience and suggests drawing as a form in
which to do this:

Map Piece

Draw an imaginary map.


Put a goal mark where you
want to go.
Go walking on an actual street according
to your map.
If there is no street
where it should be according
to the map, make one by putting
obstacles aside.
When you reach the goal, ask the name of
the city and give flowers to the first
person you meet.
The map must be followed exactly, or the
event has to be dropped altogether.
Ask friends to write maps.
Give your friends maps.
[Summer 1962]42

In Painting to be Stepped On (1960), the viewer literally completes the work


through marks made by their own physical activities:

Painting to be Stepped On

Leave a piece of canvas or finished painting on the floor or in the street


[1960]43

Deceptively simple, Painting to be Stepped On was intended as a reference


to the persecution of Christians in Japan in the 1600s. Those suspected as
Christians were tested by being asked to step on a painting of Christ or the Virgin
Mary. If they refused, they were assumed to be Christian and crucified.44 The
88 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

action of walking over a painting also challenges the idea of permanence and
painting as a valuable material object of economic exchange.
Ono’s first show of instruction paintings, at the AG Gallery in 1961, featured
canvases with instructions attached to them but was widely misinterpreted as a
collection of calligraphic works since the text was written by hand.45 Thereafter,
the text was printed and displayed as a work in itself. Of this conceptual leap
Ono said:

in 1962, I did an exhibition of instruction paintings at Sogetsu Art Center in


Tokyo. A year before, I did a show of instruction paintings at AG Gallery in
New York, but that was exhibiting canvases with instructions attached to
them. Displaying just the instructions as paintings was going one step further,
pushing visual art to its optimum conceptualism; it would open up a whole
new horizon for the visual arts. I was totally excited by the idea and its visual
possibilities. To make the point that the instructions were not themselves
graphic images, I wanted the instructions to be typed.46

With a background in music, Ono organized a series of concerts with La Monte


Young in her Chambers Street loft apartment. During one of these, Ono created
one of her first performances. Involving mark making in an enactment of her
Kitchen Piece, she smashed and smeared eggs, jam and ink onto a canvas and
then subsequently set fire to it.

Kitchen Piece

Hang a canvas on the wall.


Throw all the leftovers you have
in the kitchen that day on the
canvas.
You may prepare special food for
the piece.
[Winter 1960]47

Although a painting is conventionally considered as a closed act of artistic


production, like the Event score, Ono’s instruction paintings resist traditional
notions of individual authorship and are open to how they will be enacted. In
this they have a relationship with musical notation. Described by a musical
score, the composition of a piece of music is typically thought of as the work
itself, with each performance of the composition an iterative interpretation. The
experimental composer La Monte Young had been another of John Cage’s
students at the New School for Social Research and was also inspired to extend
the paradigm of the composition to describe both music and other kinds of
actions. His 1960s compositions were concerned with duration and repetition.
In Composition 1960 #7, musical notation depicted the notes B and F♯ with the
COMMUNICATING 89

accompanying direction ‘to be held for a long time’.48 With Composition 1960
#10 the instruction ‘Draw a straight line and follow it’ has a similar concern with
duration, a continuation of one activity and holding at a constant level. His own
performance of this instruction involved sighting with plumb lines and drawing
on the floor with chalk.49
At the Fluxus Internationale Festspiele Neuester Musik in Wiesbaden, 1962,
the experimental composer and media artist Nam Jun Paik presented a free
interpretation of Young’s Composition 1960 #10. Since musical compositions
are written for musicians to interpret, authorship in the moment of performance
becomes intertwined between composer and interpreter. Although he followed
Young’s instructions, Paik’s Zen for Head (1962) was very different from Young’s
earlier version enacted with chalk. Paik dipped his own head into a bucket of
ink and, using his hair as a brush, dragged his head along an extended sheet
of paper to paint a line. This act referenced the traditional art of Zen calligraphy
on paper scrolls,50 in which the careful creation of text serves as an act of
meditation. Similar to Ono’s Kitchen Piece, there is an implied mockery of action
expressionism and (but unlike Ono, who is very respectful) also perhaps of the
fetishization of Zen Buddhism by his fellow artists. Brought up within this tradition
himself, Paik had a more critical approach to it and he is recorded as regarding
Zen as responsible for poverty in Asia.51 Through his physical act of mark making
to interpret Young’s composition, Paik’s version adds new layers to Young’s
original composition in a collaborative act of combined intentionality.

Figure 3.1 Alison Knowles, rolling up paper from a work by Fabrizio Manco, Workshop
at October Gallery, London organized by the International Centre for Fine Art Research
(ICFAR), University of the Arts (UAL), 2009. © M. Foá.
90 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

Also associated with the Fluxus group, Alison Knowles (see Figure 3.1) has
employed the Event score form since the 1960s, and she has established a working
process in which performance, drawing and sound are intrinsic components
of her practice.52 At a time when the second wave of Western Feminism was
at its peak, women fought for workplace equality, and reproductive rights, yet
continued largely to be objectified in the contexts of mass media and everyday
life. Knowles’s actions, sometimes employing domestic items and sometimes
enacted out on the street, were audacious in their quiet yet continual challenge to
the conventions of the female positioning of those days. Significantly, her works
can also be seen to have had a direct influence on the evolution of ‘performance
drawing’ as a concept. Her interest in ‘simple actions … ideas, and objects
from everyday life re-contextualized as performance’53 is demonstrated in the
following street-based works:

#5 Street Piece (1962)

Make something in the street and give it away.


Premiered in Aug, 63.
#9 and #11 are really variations on this piece.

#9 Color Music #2 (1963)

Print in the streets.


1st movement: orange
2nd movement: black
3rd movement: blue
Performed on Canal street, NY, in 1963.

#11 Printing Piece

[On 30 May 1964 at Fluxhall in New York, Alison Knowles silkscreened images
on any and all objects, animate and inanimate, which were brought to her for
imprinting. Felt to be too close to #5, this piece is officially deleted from Alison
Knowles’s canon.]54

Based on #5 Street Piece, Giveaway Construction was performed in 196355 and


was also later recorded as being performed at a Canadian ‘Works’ Festival in
the 1970s.56
Giveaway Construction was explicitly referenced in 2001 by The Drawing
Center, New York, when, to accompany a series of five solo exhibitions of
work by ‘artists who explore the intersection of drawing and performance’,57
they published their Drawing Papers 20: PERFORMANCE DRAWINGS Make
something in the street and give it away – Alison Knowles, Street Piece, 1962.
This use of the term ‘performance drawing’ to describe a drawing that took place
as a performance is arguably the first time that the term was used and, therefore,
COMMUNICATING 91

it can be claimed to have been coined by The Drawing Center’s then director,
the writer and curator Catherine de Zegher. Additionally, the publication of
Drawing Papers 20 can be argued to mark the genesis of a specific genre that is
performance drawing, allowing for a reclassification (and perhaps reclarification)
of previous works (such as La Monte Young’s Composition 1960 #10 and Nam
June Paik’s Zen for Head (1961) – described earlier in this chapter). By naming
Knowles’s work in the subtitle of Drawing Papers #20 and the year it was first
performed, The Drawing Center underlines the era when fine art was freed not
only from traditional practices but also from the physical confines of interior
spaces.
Knowles’s multidisciplinary practice evidences the interwoven relationship
at that time between emerging methods of creativity, physical performance,
mark making, drawing, the musical score and the newfound freedom to make
work in environments beyond the usual four walls of fine art white cube spaces
on the streets and in other places. In her essay ‘The Drawing as Instrument’
in Drawing Papers 20, Elizabeth Finch explains how this creative practice,
merged from the joining of two different disciplines, was naturally inclined to
leave its original habitat: ‘[a]s drawing gained prominence, precisely because of
its ability to register gesture, it was shifted out of the studio and into the world
at last’.58 This shift from private interior space to public exterior space marks a
dramatic change. The shift is not only in context but also in terms of process
and clarification because, when a work is made in the public domain, that work
becomes subject to the gaze of the passers-by, the other, and therefore the
work can be said to be a performance. In addition, a work that is beyond shelter
in a public outside environment is exposed; that is, the materials, the performer
and the outcome are subject to influences of the unexpected and unscripted.
Serendipity comes into play when work is performed outside, both in terms of
natural events (rain, shine, hail) impacting the work and in relation to the passer-
by, the unprepared witness who may respond in any manner. They may cheer
or harass or they might ignore the performance altogether. Whichever they
choose to do becomes an integral aspect of that performance; whether related
by word of mouth or recorded in text or images, every response is archived
as evidence of the work. Writer-director and performance artist Laurie Carlos
acknowledges that the other’s role, as witness/responder, is actually in itself a
crucial and ‘performing’ component of the live art process. In her essay on live
performance, Carlos goes as far as to say that current critical theorists believe
the presence of the other ‘is essential to the completion of the work’59 and
that the other’s ‘live immediate response to art work’60 is also a performance.
Tom McDonough describes Knowles’s 1960s New York street events as
focusing on the context of the performances, the position of the practitioners,
and the audience in relation to those performances made outside in public on
the streets.61 ‘Spectators were entirely optional,’ McDonough explains ‘and the
92 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

performers were often the only witnesses to the undertakings.’62 McDonough


notes that Knowles described collaborators as ‘adopt[ing] a perception of a
free-floating attention’. Knowles herself states that she aimed to draw attention
to the act of listening in the present moment.63 As McDonough observes, the
process of the performance is of primary importance, not the end product,
and the works expressed ‘the fundamental logic of the drawing: the production
of a line that … marked the separation of and joint between two spaces’,64
concluding ‘event scores’ were ‘proposals for drawings in real space, to be
inscribed into the realm of everyday life’.65
Since the early Fluxus works, other artists have worked with the concepts of
scores and multiple authorship for the production of indeterminate outcomes.
Inspired by the Event scores of Knowles and Brecht to create works explicitly
conceptualized as performance drawing, Foá, Grisewood, Hosea and McCall
work together as a group to create projects that reject individual authorship and
explore procedures to introduce improvisation, spontaneity and chance into their
multimedia mark making. During a residency in the Centre for Drawing’s research
space at Wimbledon College of Art in London, they developed a collaborative
performance, ARC: I Draw for You (2010), (see Figure 3.2) which combined live
action mark making through graphite and white light with sound and animation.
Following earlier experiments, including work for Joined Up, a contemporary
collaborative drawing exhibition in 2009, for which they combined different material
surfaces and marking tools to follow a series of rules in the surrealist tradition of
‘exquisite corpse’, the group sought a democratic methodology to allow each
individual practitioner to come together in the making of the work and also to be
able to bring in external contributors. Referencing the written directives of Fluxus
and developing an idea from her Driftsong Drawing series, M. Foá created ARC,
a method to include artists from different locations in collaborative works.
The concept of ARC grew from a visualization of communication technology:
the image of a signal beaming from its source (in one location) and arcing over
to its receiver in another place. These short written scores were Action Relayed
Collaboration, hence they were referred to by the acronym ARC. The potential
of a range of social media and teleconferencing technologies was explored
to aid creative collaboration between different locations and time zones, such
as documenting our work in progress through blogging and YouTube, writing
collaboratively with Google Docs and publicizing our events through Facebook.
To enable a broader and more interactive collaboration, national and international
artists were invited to complete an instruction or suggest one, thus adding
further variation and layering in the project.66 During the period of the residency,
the ARCs were transmitted by handwritten or typed notes, telephone, SMS
messages, email and Skype. The mobile phone became a key tool to deliver
ARC instructions irrespective of location, providing an intimate and immediate
connection. This methodology of collaboration between group members and
invited guests kept the work developing, alive and full of surprises.
COMMUNICATING 93

Figure 3.2 Foá, Grisewood, Hosea, McCall, ARC: I Draw For You, 2010. A live
performance drawing at the Wimbledon Centre for Drawing, London. Photo: Nick Manser.

Multimodal in their conceptualization of mark making, the ARCs explored vision,


touch, light and dark, time and duration, sound and mapping. Some rules denoted
particular durations and materials while others were open to interpretation. The
instructions included:

• Draw 40 circles in light


• Take two sticks and make a rhythm. Mark that rhythm on the wall.
Duration: 2 Minutes
• With eyes closed and kneeling on the floor draw a continuous line on the
wall to the silent count of 100
• Holding your breath draw a line around someone else’s drawing for as
long as you can hold your breath67

The materials used to action these scores ranged from basic drawing
mediums of charcoal and graphite, through sound, to virtual ephemeral marks
generated from digital light that weaved back and forth in interaction with the
physical marks on the wall. This was created by a Tagtool – an instrument for
performance drawing with light linked to a projector, computer and Wacom
tablet.68
During the ARC: I Draw For You performance, the instructions for ARCs
were transcribed onto index cards and laid face down on the floor for the four
performers to pick up and action at random in front of an audience. One ARC
94 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

invited a member of the audience to participate – this fell to artist Avis Newman.
Instructed to use ‘the light tool’ (intended to refer to the Tagtool), Newman’s
interpretation was to draw very lightly and with the lightest material available.69
Because what was written on the cards was subsequently carried out, the
ARC instructions can be seen to have animated the participants. Therefore, in
her reflection on the work, Birgitta Hosea considers this performance as a live
animation: a layered moving drawing that emerges over time. Partially drawn in
graphite, partially drawn in light, it echoes the media of traditional drawn animation
and is recorded in sequential photographs and video documentation.70
Newman’s interpretation of the ARC instruction in a manner unintended by
the artists raises the issue of the creative possibilities that result from different
interpretations or even misunderstandings of text. The Australian artist Nicci
Haynes works with text to generate her drawings, and costumes that she
performs in, in a process of becoming drawing. Often the focus of this is the
struggle to translate her lived experience of the world into language. In a series
of works, Her Words My Body (2012–13), Haynes sent drawings to the poet
Angela Gardner who, in return, sent lines of poetry back. Haynes describes their
process thus:

More than verbal communication, the dialogue between us occurred via the
images, words and prints that we posted to each other. The exchange began
with photocopied gestural etchings, Nicci to Angela. Words were returned.
The poem travelled back and forth; crumpled, collaged, photocopied, layered,
printed on a costume, as performance documentation. Text was liberated
from the page and found its way back again, gestures interchanging with
words as they moved between the page and the body.71

Their collaboration resulted in a performance at the Queensland Poetry Festival


in 2013, in which Gardner read poems to a backdrop of moving images made
by Haynes. This video was created from photographs documenting drawings,
drawn costumes and actions that Haynes had performed for the camera in
her studio. However, the interchanges between their different disciplines and
manners of articulation were not always straightforward. Haynes relates:

After the postal back and forth was completed I confessed that I had not
understood some of the poetry and selected a line of poetry, asking what it
meant. Gardner, in response, pointed to marks in my etching asking me what it
meant. I understood by this interaction the word of the poet to be itself a gesture.72

Thus, the artist understood the line of poetry physically in terms of gesture and
the poet understood abstract marks linguistically in terms of poetic metaphor:
each adding an unforeseen dimension to the other’s contribution.
COMMUNICATING 95

As a means to relinquish control over the execution of their artistic intention,


the written score allows the artist to, in the words of Eco, ‘reject the definitive,
concluded message and multiply the formal possibilities of the distribution of their
elements’73 and thus introduce an element of chance through the unpredictable
variable of the participant who carries out the work. By his conceptualization
of the ‘open’ text, Eco is not referring to a finished work of art that contains
sufficient ambiguity to invite a number of different interpretations; indeed, he
notes that in a sense any artwork can be thought of as ‘open’:

on account of its susceptibility to countless different interpretations which


do not impinge on its unadulterable specificity. Hence, every reception of a
work of art is both an interpretation and a performance of it, because in every
reception the work takes on a fresh perspective for itself.74

Rather, the works he refers to are quite literally ‘unfinished’, and ‘the author
seems to hand them on to the performer more or less like the components
of a construction kit. He seems to be unconcerned about the manner of their
eventual deployment.’75 However, there is a caveat. Eco cautions as to how
open the ‘open’ work really is. The artist has already defined the parameters of
the rules and named this as a work made through their own authorship:

The possibilities which the work’s openness makes available always work
within a given field of relations. […] it is not an amorphous invitation to
indiscriminate participation. The invitation offers the performer the opportunity
for an orientated insertion into something which always remains the world
intended by the author.76

Graphic notation for performance


In addition to the role of language in the form of written text to delineate
instructions for a work of performance, visual forms of communication have
also been used to enable a greater degree of indeterminacy and variability in
how the instruction is interpreted. In 1940s Rio, the Brazilian composer Heiter
Villa-Lobos had ‘dr[awn] the outline of the mountains he saw onto his music
paper […] and used that drawing as his melodic line’.77 However, it was the
French composer Erik Satie whose ‘pre-compositional rhythmic structure’ for
René Clair’s film Entr’acte (1924)78 could be said to be a point at which traditional
musical notation broke away from a conventional form. Satie’s unique approach
in re-forming the musical score, ‘us[ing] measures […] that most closely matched
the average length of a single shot in the film’,79 encompassed ‘jump-cuts, anti–
variation, non-development, directionless repetition’80 and looked like a tumble
96 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

of numbers, letters and notes running down the page in an unruly list. In addition
to the influence on him by visual artists such as Duchamp and Rauschenberg,
Cage thought Satie’s work ‘indispensable’81 to the development of experimental
music, and its break from traditional notation heralded the visual score.
In New York, during the early 1950s, Cage was associated with three young
composers, Morton Feldman, Christian Wolf and Earle Brown. According to
the composer and writer Michael Nyman, Feldman was the first to use ‘non-
representational graphic representation. His Projections of 1950–1 are aptly
named since his aim was not to “compose” but to project sounds into time,
free from a compositional rhetoric that had no place here’.82 Feldman’s graphic
scores had an ambiguity in comparison to classic music notation that Cage called
‘indeterminate with respect to its performances’.83 Earle Brown’s December
1952 (1952) is a contender for the first noteless graphic score. Inspired by
Alexander Calder mobiles, this series of horizontal and vertical lines on a page
was generated mathematically through the use of random sampling tables.84 The
image was designed to be open to a number of musical interpretations; as Brown
stated, it could be played ‘in any direction from any point in the defined space
for any length of time and may be performed from any of the four notational
positions in any sequence’.85
In one of his own experiments with the representation of music, Williams Mix
(1952), Cage used a reassemblage of magnetic tape recordings and made a
score on graph paper with gridded squares that ‘did not remotely resemble
a traditional score’.86 Cage stated: ‘Since so many inches of tape equal so
many seconds of time, it has become more and more usual that notation is
in space rather than in symbols of quarter, half, and sixteenth notes.’87 Thus,
the ability to transcribe compositions that no longer needed to comply with
any traditional musical convention expanded the possibilities of what a score
could actually be, both in content and in visual form. Helen Molesworth believes
that it was the work Williams Mix that ‘led Cage towards his lifetime of chance
procedures’,88 yet Michael Nyman would have it that ‘Cage’s use of the I Ching
[…] as a pre-indeterminancy method of “letting sounds be themselves,” [was] as
much the logical outcome of his earlier methods as they were evidence of his
deepening attachment to the Zen philosophy of non-involvement’.89 The use of
chance procedures resulting from the interpretation of images was also used in
performance art. Alison Knowles included images in the form of found printed
ephemera and drawings in her event scores and directions.90 Indeed, Knowles
and Cage worked together to compile Notations (1969), a book of graphic
scores and texts by composers selected from the archives of the Foundation for
Contemporary Performance Arts. Chance-based operations were used to select
typefaces and the amount of words through the use of the I Ching.
During the 1960s, Cage’s, Brecht’s and Young’s verbal and visual scores
were a source of inspiration to the experimental composer Cornelius Cardew,
COMMUNICATING 97

whose work spanned the visual and the musical in its concerns with the
use of drawing as a tool to engage with improvisation and collaboration.
Classically trained at the Royal College of Music in London, Cardew served as
Karlheinz Stockhausen’s assistant in Cologne for three years between 1958
and 1960. Upon his return to London in 1961, he took a course in Graphic
Design and worked intermittently as a graphic designer as well as teaching
classes in composition.91 While working as a designer, Cardew produced
Treatise (1963–7): 193 pages of symbols, lines and abstract shapes without
any explanation as to its meaning beyond an empty series of five-line staves
running across the bottom of each page to indicate that the interpretation
should be musical. His intention was to get away from classically notated and
prescribed music in order to create a system that would enable musicians to
develop spontaneity rather than being bound by formal musical conventions
or traditional hierarchies. However, Cardew feared that classically trained
musicians would not be able to freely improvise but would instead fall back
on remembered cliché and learned, automatic responses. His ideal musicians
would therefore be ‘musical innocents’ who, while unskilled in reading
conventional sheet music, were able to respond skilfully to visual images and
convert these into sound:

Mathematicians and graphic artists find the score easier to read than
musicians; they get more from it. But of course mathematicians and graphic
artists do not generally have sufficient control of sound-media to produce
‘sublime’ musical performances. My most rewarding experiences with
Treatise have come through people who by some fluke have (a) acquired a
visual education, (b) escaped a musical education and (c) have nevertheless
become musicians, i.e. play music to the full capacity of their beings.92

Following this score was intended to provide coherence and structure to link
together musical improvisations by a group of individuals who would provide a
series of responses to this central act of authorship.
Cardew began teaching a class in experimental music at Morley College,
London, in 1968, which brought him in touch with other musicians with similar
interests in experimentation. In conjunction with Michael Parsons and Howard
Skempton, he formed the Scratch Orchestra in 1969, a large experimental
group who toured in the UK and internationally. This collective was intended to
question the definition of music and how it was presented, as noted in the draft
constitution:

Definition: A Scratch Orchestra is a large number of enthusiasts pooling their


resources (not primarily material resources) and assembling for action (music-
making, performance, edification).
98 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

Note: The word music and its derivatives are here not understood to refer
exclusively to sound and related phenomena (hearing, etc). What they do refer
to is flexible and depends entirely on the members of the Scratch Orchestra.

The Scratch Orchestra intends to function in the public sphere, and this
function will be expressed in the form of – for lack of a better word – concerts.93

Anyone could join and the aim was to:

change the traditional forms of music so that anyone, whether musician,


painter, bank clerk, teacher, student or labourer could participate. This was
a reaction against the elitism in the classical and avant-garde music circles.94

As opposed to having a conductor or artistic director, their concerts were


‘designed’ by rotating members of the group – starting with the youngest. The
members were encouraged to devise ‘improvisation rites’ to build upon in their
performances, which were defined as follows:

An improvisation rite is not a musical composition; it does not attempt to


influence the music that will be played; at most it may establish a community
of feeling, or a communal starting-point, through ritual.95

One such rite by Richard Reason is given as follows:

All seated loosely in a circle, each player shall write or draw on each of the ten
fingernails of the play on his left.
No action or sound is to be made by a player after his fingernails have received
this writing or drawing, other than music.
Closing rite: each player shall erase the marks from the fingernails of another
player. Your participation in the music ceases when the marks have been
erased from your fingernails.
(Groups of two or more late-comers may use the same rite to join in an
improvisation that is already in progress.)
(blank pages for addition).
[#14 Richard Reason, 1969]96

Graphic scores were used instead of traditional musical notation and created
collectively. They were built from experiential research that each member would
record in a Scratchbook – incorporating text, drawings, maps, diagrams,
photographs, actions, ephemera and even snippets of musical notation. Any
kind of visual material was regarded as a potential score for a performance.97 This
assemblage of materials would then be interpreted by the others in the form of
‘musical’ performance. Any member who created a composition through these
COMMUNICATING 99

methods could have their work trialled by the orchestra.98 Personally acquainted
with Brecht, who came to the UK to teach at Leeds College of Art in the late
1960s and participated in several concerts of theirs between 1969 and 1970,
the orchestra also performed works by Cage, Brecht and Young – or even of all
three at once, as in their performances at the Commonwealth Institute, London,
in 1967.99
Following a period in which the group reviewed their working practices and
politics, the group split into two factions in 1971. Those who wanted to continue
with formal experimentation left and those who stayed adopted a more politically
engaged Marxist-Leninist position to create work that would be popular with
the people. Issues of discontent that led to the split included complaints that,
despite using accessible methods to make music democratically, individual
members did not always show commitment to the ideals and what they created
was not always appealing to a popular audience:

We found, in practice that what we wanted to achieve did not happen. What
actually happened was that only a handful of people wanted to hear us play,
and most of those who did come left well before the end of the performance […]
To know how to play an instrument properly was considered a disadvantage;
though we were a group, supposedly working together, members of the
group performed as individuals, doing their own thing regardless of the group
as a whole; ordinary people thought our music was meaningless, the only
section of the public to take us seriously were the very elite we were rebelling
against.100

The group was no longer operational by 1974, when, in a book entitled


Stockhausen Serves Imperialism, Cardew came to denounce his own work, as
well as that of Cage and Stockhausen, as too liberal and insufficiently revolutionary.
His work changed direction to explore the form of the folk song to raise popular
consciousness. Andrea Phillips argues that the work of Cardew raises important
issues about the nature of collaboration and improvisation, with implications
for contemporary concerns with participation and relational aesthetics.101 His
work followed a trajectory from the rejection of conventional music structure
in his search for methods to embrace spontaneous improvisation; then to an
exploration of practical and ethical methods in which to mix trained and untrained
practitioners in a non-hierarchical group for creating collaborative practice; and
then finally a return to more popular forms of song in order to have relevance to a
wider audience. Phillips asserts that the process of improvisation can have more
relevance to the artist as a method of production than to the audience:

If improvisation in its utopian forms is an ethical promise to the player (in that
it offers the potential of equality; of an aesthetics born of the desire for true
100 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

democracy) then in performance it cannot be that for the listener … whose


role is extraneous in many ways to the capacity of the work.102

However, she considers Cardew’s work as a useful case study for forms of art
practice that go beyond using improvisation as a superficial, stylistic device and
seek social engagement through the process of how and where they are made
and through constant reflection and analysis.
Graphic forms of notation have been in use not only for the creation of
music but also for other forms of performance such as dance. Whereas graphic
notation in music is intended as an imprecise vehicle of expression that requires
the contribution of a musician’s act of interpretation, dance notation such as
the Beauchamp–Feuillet notation, recognized by a French act of Parliament
in 1666, or the Labanotation system provides choreographers with a precise
manner in which to transcribe, store and communicate specific information
about movements of the human body in three-dimensional space.103
Graphic information can also be used as a form of directive for more
spontaneous, collective social activity and chance encounters with public
space. In her book Wanderlust: A History of Walking, Rebecca Solnit suggests
that Suriname-born Dutch artist Stanley Brouwn, who was associated with the
international Fluxus group, was most likely the first artist to transform walking into
performance.104 Absorbed in line and movement, duration and measurement,
Brouwn was influenced by Cage’s systems of indeterminacy and his work is
included in Cage and Knowles’s Notations book. Brouwn’s works explore chance
and randomness through ready-made marks from the actions of everyday
encounters in the urban environment. In Steps of Pedestrians on Paper (1960) and
View of a City in 24 Hours (1963), he captured the marks of passing pedestrians
and/or cyclists on sheets of paper laid out on the street. From the 1970s onwards,
he recorded his own footsteps in different cities on index cards that were stored
in grey metal filing cabinets.105 The traces of footprints and wayward directions of
his works augment the allure of his own absence and presence.
Working with sets of rules, a number of his works are participatory and activate
the spectator to record or respond to codified instructions for him. Anticipating
the later work of Richard Long, in 1962 he composed a ‘work concept’ on a
typed card: ‘a way across a field on exactly the same straight line from A to B:
every day, all year long’.106
This was a proposition to be completed in the mind of the viewer who could
imagine the line that would be created by such activity and shows an affinity with
Brecht’s Event scores and Ono’s instruction paintings. Later, in 1971 he built on
this earlier work. In his gallery in Amsterdam, he displayed a monitor showing live
action footage from an adjoining side street with a caption underneath saying,
‘Walk from point A to point B.’ Unwitting passers-by would follow his instructions
with no knowledge that they were performing for him in the gallery.107
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In his project This Way Brouwn (1962), he asked pedestrians to draw


directions to another part of town for him. In his own words:

Brouwn is standing somewhere in the world. He asks a random passer-by to


show him on paper how to get to another place in town. The next passer-by
tells him the way. The 24th, the 2,000th, the 11,000th passer-by tells Brouwn
the way. This way Brouwn. Every day Brouwn makes people discover the
streets they use.108

He would later stamp these explanatory sketches with the text ‘This way
Brouwn’ and exhibit them. Finally, he compiled them into an artist’s book. In
this project by Brouwn, drawings are created that rely on networks of relations
generated through a series of chance encounters, but the nature of these
interactions remains unexamined. In asking for directions from passers-by, he
positions himself as an outsider, as a stranger, lost and unfamiliar with which
way to go or how to navigate the city. It is not recorded whether the notoriously
private artist experienced racism while soliciting these drawings on the streets of
1960s Europe or if the work was intended as a comment on feelings of cultural
dislocation as a migrant to Europe.
Brouwn’s work engages with directives in several ways. His ‘work concepts’
invite others to walk for him, but this is turned around with This Way Brouwn in
which he invites strangers to make instructional drawings in the form of sketched
mappings of the city that he himself could carry out. Cage also used mapping
as a form of instruction. In a later work, 49 Waltzes for the Five Boroughs (1977),
a tribute to the city of New York, Cage created a graphic score directing his
audience to listen to the auditory experience of the streets. This urban sound
map was created by Cage by superimposing forty-nine triangles onto a map
of New York City and inviting listeners to go to the different places on the map
where an apex of a triangle had been drawn. In this way, Cage directed his
audience to listen or record the sounds at those places in New York City. Cage’s
drawing became a geographical score in real time and place, ever-changing,
unfixed, unpredictable and encompassing the character of the city.109
Engagement with the city and social relationships through a geographical,
graphic score can also be seen in the contemporary work of InspiralLondon
(see Figure 3.3). This is an ongoing, artist-led project, initiated and facilitated
by Charlie Fox and Counterproductions, in which a loose collective of artists,
writers, architects, geographers, planners, urban explorers and walking
enthusiasts join together to follow a 300-mile trail defined by a spiral line drawn
upon a map of London. This line hacks into existing routes, turns through
London six times and crosses the river Thames ten times to reach its final
destination at Gravesend North.110
102 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

Figure 3.3 Counterproductions, InspiralLondon Metropolitan Walking Trail, 2018. ©


InspiralLondon CIC.

InspiralLondon developed out of De/Tours, a series of artists’ interventions


for decentred space during the Marseille–Provence European Capital City of
Culture celebrations in 2013 that included ‘performances, situations and artistic
research practices, which interrogated the implicit assumptions that underpin
the production, creation and reception of such large-scale public festivals’.111
The artists worked with the GR2013 walking trail as a site for their works – a
newly established, semi-urban walking trail over 365 km that encircles Marseille.
Their projects sought to interrogate notions of capital, culture and public art in
the city, to reinvigorate radical practice from the margins and to consider the
position of the outsider, the foreigner.
In the InspiralLondon project, the shape of the spiral trail defines the site that
the walkers encounter by chance and, as such, influences the inspiration and
setting for their actions and encounters, as Fox describes:

The in/spiral shape of the walk is a drawing, but as a form of mapping or


direction. In that sense it acts as the directive for the project. Without that
simple act of marking the trail form, designing or creating a walk trail would
involve a myriad of criteria and be dependent on a host of potential directions.
In that sense the drawing of a snail spiral shape on a map of London acts
as the foundation for the walk. It gives its reason to be and its structure.
From that point on any adjustment or deviation refers back to the initial form.
Inevitably, the form then becomes a potential space and line of activity on
COMMUNICATING 103

which invention, experiment and exploration is allowed. Suddenly the drawing


has given us license to call the walk a trail, to make it public, to talk about this
new possibility.112

Members of the group take turns to lead the walk and adopt various strategies
for artistic interventions in the city, performances, site-specific readings and
performative tour guiding in the role of various characters. Divided into thirty-six
segments, the core group initially walked them on a monthly basis, taking three
years to complete the trail in its entirety. Following a spiral line through London
defies the time-stressed logic of taking the quickest and most direct route from
A to B and passes through unexpected and unfamiliar streets. This becomes a
way to discover and engage with the social reality of the city as the walkers visit
a mixture of suburbs and inner-city estates not usually considered as obvious
leisure destinations. In the words of the organizers:

The walk is both an artistic assembly and a form of democratic action


allowing members of the public, walkers and participants to use the trail as
a pathway to discover and experiment within the metropolis London. We
use the whole of the City and its hinterland as one vast art space in which
to rethink and re-imagine the built environment, as a place of extraordinary
variety, contrast and potential, and as a tour of the places we no longer see
or have forgotten.113

With the establishment of the trail, the group organize regular walks and art
events along different segments that are open to the general public.
While the InspiralLondon walking trail is a way to create chance social
encounters and bring art into the city through following the trail of a drawn line,
in Angela Rogers’ Drawing Conversations series (2006) drawing is used more
explicitly as a process to notate social encounters (see Figure 3.4). Practitioner
and researcher, Rogers114 uses dialogic drawing to facilitate social encounters
and invites a stranger to make a drawing with her. She has done this in random
everyday contexts such as during train journeys but also within the more formal
setting of a gallery. Her work draws upon Martin Buber’s notion of ‘images of
the inbetween’ – the space in between people in which innovation and invention
could take place.115 After drawing with people during a project at the Phoenix
Gallery, she asked them questions about their experience of the process of
making a drawing with her. Rogers’ resulting interviews raise interesting issues
about the process of collaborative drawing and reveals a number of anxieties
that the participants had about connecting to another on an intimate, non-
verbal level: about the judgements that could result from relative levels of skill
between the two parties; about a potential power struggle to take the lead on
visual direction and a fear about the loss of complete control over the drawing.
104 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

Figure 3.4 Angela Rogers and Denise Turner, Drawing Conversations, 2016. © Angela
Rogers.

Considering the use of graphic notation in music by Cage and Cardew,


alongside the use of visual directives in works by Brouwn, InspiralLondon and
Rogers illustrate how drawing can be used not simply to record a representation
of audio, urban and social encounters between participants but also to direct
and inform these activities. Indeed, Rogers concludes from her own work that
‘drawing’s potential as a social activity is unrealised’.116 If participatory drawing
can be used as an activity to connect both people and different geographical
spaces, could it also be used to transcend the human body and communicate
with the spirit world?

The allographic: Messages from the other


side
Cage had not been alone either in using imagery to transcribe the auditory
experience of music or in being influenced by spiritual practices. The visualization
of music inspired some of the pioneers of abstract painting, such as Wassily
Kandinsky, with his Composition series (1910–39) in which geometric shapes
reference musical notation and colour is intended to represent musical sound.
Inspired by the Theosophist Madam Blavatsky to produce a ‘new manner of
expression’ that could ‘clothe the new truths’,117 Kandinsky aimed to go beyond
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the conventional, representational painting style of his era. As detailed in his


book On The Spiritual in Art (1911), where, for example, he considers light blue
to be like a flute and dark blue like a cello,118 Kandinsky argued for the use of
music as a model for an art that could go beyond the representation of objects
in order to achieve insights into spirituality and consciousness:

A painter who finds no satisfaction in the mere representation of natural


phenomena, however artistic, who strives to create his inner life, enviously
observes the simplicity and ease with which such an aim is already achieved
in the non-material art of music.119

Although he is often referred to in the canon of Western art as the first abstract
artist, there were others before him who used abstract imagery to express
spiritual dimensions.
So far in this chapter, art practices have been examined in which either text-
based instructions are used to describe an activity or drawing that another
will perform or drawings are used as a directive for action. In this process of
communication, an artist’s intent is codified into language or visuals, stored as
text or image and then delivered to another, who will interpret the instructions
and carry them out. In the works that follow, the artist is not the originator
of the intention behind the drawing. Indeed, the artist sees themselves as a
means for another to make a drawing, in other words, as a medium. Predating
the Surrealists and their experimentation with séances and automatic writing,
directed by the guidance of a number of spirits, Georgiana Houghton produced
155 striking watercolour drawings, which she exhibited at an ambitious solo
show in Old Bond Street in 1871. It was uncommon for women artists to have
their work shown at this time, certainly not in a solo show, and, more significantly,
abstract work such as this had never been seen before. It predates Kandinsky by
several decades. Her colour palette was so unusual that her cousin feared her
work would give her brain damage: ‘the action of those brilliant colours would
be injurious to the brain and produce all kinds of dreadful calamities’.120 Although
she received some money through entrance fees, one sale and a commission,
the exhibition was a commercial failure and left her in dire economic straits.121
The brave and startling work she displayed received mixed reviews, ranging from
ridicule in the popular press to lavish praise in Spiritualist circles, a movement
that was widespread in the Victorian era.
Spiritualism originated in America with the Fox sisters in 1848 and arrived
in the UK with the American medium Mrs Maria Hayden in 1852.122 During
Spiritualist séances, participants would attempt to contact the spirits of departed
loved ones who were considered to have crossed over to the spirit world. Certain
individuals, known as mediums, were considered to be more sensitive to these
spiritual presences and able to pass on their messages to the earthly realm.
106 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

These messages could be verbal or given in the form of ‘automatic’ writing


or drawing. One of the first medium artists to be documented is Anna Mary
Howitt. She had previously trained at Henry Sass’s Art School, at the same time
as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, had exhibited her paintings at the Royal Academy
and established a group called ‘Sisters in Art’. However, after criticism of her
work by John Ruskin, she gave up her former practice and under the influence
of Spiritualism began to produce automatic drawings. Her spirit drawings are
possibly the first to be shown in public and were reproduced in a book on
Spiritualism by Camilla Crosland in 1857.123
Many of the leading figures in the Spiritualist movement were women and
it proved an empowering environment for them to be involved in where their
endeavours were taken seriously. Georgiana Houghton was part of a genteel
network of ‘private mediums’ who did not charge for their services, and she
regularly attended séances with many of the key figures of Victorian Spiritualism
such as Madam Besson, Agnes Guppy, Daniel Dunglas Home, John Murray
Spear and spirit photographer Frederick Hudson. Although many of these
were later exposed as outrageous frauds and the descriptions of séances she
provides at times strain credulity, the impression she gives in her autobiography
is of deep commitment to Christian spiritualism and a genuine conviction in her
work. She went through a period of intense training in order to develop her
mediumship, developing skills in meditation and trance through gazing into a
crystal for an hour every Sunday evening124 and then, after three months of daily
trying for about half an hour at dusk, herself and her mother slowly began to have
success in communicating with spirits through the alphabet in a process known
as ‘table tipping’.125 After seeing spirit drawings by Mrs Wilkinson, in 1861 she
managed to contact a spirit called Henry Lenny, who she claims taught her to
draw spirit flowers – a form that represents each person in the spirit realm – with
her hand guided directly by his instructions.126 As she grew more experienced, a
series of ‘High Spirits’ and ‘righteous men of both the Old and New Testaments’
guided her to create works of increasing technical and conceptual complexity
and her work often includes long notes detailing the esoteric meanings of the
‘Sacred Symbolism’ behind the colours and forms used in the work.127 As her
mediumship developed, the spirits spoke through her, using her as if her body
had been taken over and used as a vehicle for their intentions:

It is curious to look back on it now, and to remember how perfectly natural it


even then seemed, that in my own voice and with my own knowledge, I should
be first someone else and then myself, talking alternately, discussing and
arguing matters; as, for instance, I did with Henry Lenny, who, in explaining
one of my drawings, rather told me that I was ‘only a machine’, to which
I demurred, and brought him to acknowledge that I had taught him much
about modern colours, although he guided my hand in the use of them, but I
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could always leave off when I pleased; so he admitted his error, and promised
never to call me a machine again.128

This quotation gives a sense of the process of mediumship as a collaboration


between the spirit and the medium who received and interpreted the message,
adding some of her own artistry to the drawings she produced. (see Figure
3.5) Her autobiography contains references to an art education and previous
experience of flower painting, but no details are given.129
Interest in Houghton’s work grew and, from 1863, she had regular
Wednesday afternoon receptions at home during which visitors would come
to see her drawings. At times, her receptions would go beyond viewings of the
drawings to include demonstrations of her mediumistic gifts, such as for one of
her visitors, Mr L:

I had two drawings in progress, and began upon the one that was nearly
finished, so he watched with deep interest the fine lines that went on so
smoothly and so unerringly under my hand, never failing to reach exactly
their purposed destination, notwithstanding that I was fully engaged in
conversation with him all the time; and there would be sudden changes of
detail, and methods of manipulation, which clearly did not require my mind to
be concentrated upon them, which must have been the case had self been

Figure 3.5 Georgiana Houghton, The Flower of Catherine Stringer, c.1870. © College of
Psychic Studies.
108 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

the operator, even supposing the possibility of my powers being equal to such
perfect work […] he marvelled indeed at the wondrous effects of colour that
were produced … acknowledging that it would baffle any merely human artist
to produce such harmonies.130

This quote illustrates that a performance of her drawing process to others


confirmed her claims for genuine mediumship.
Houghton’s drawings were created in a context of Spiritualist experimentation
with automatic processes that would later be explored by the Surrealists. Not
just done in private, creating spirit drawings in public featured as a collaborative
activity in the séances she attended, as she describes of one such occasion:

We all saw the lights, much the same as I described on a previous occasion,
and we soon heard our spirit friends busily engaged with pencils; they did
three small drawings, but without much defined form, presenting one of them
to Mr Leighton, for him to take away with him.131

Although the drawings of Georgiana Houghton were not originally


conceptualized by her as performance drawings, it is evident that the process
of their being made took precedence over the form they took and that public
demonstration of that process was integral to their authenticity. Whether
or not there is cynicism about her claims, it can be surmised that denying
responsibility for her own authorship and attributing her drawings to the work
of spirits allowed her to take up the ‘unfeminine’132 position of pride in her
accomplishments and to inhabit the seemingly incompatible positions of
‘woman’ and ‘artist’ that, although not possible in the art world of the time,
was accepted in Spiritualist circles.
The researcher and healer Emma Kunz, who lived from 1892 to 1963 in the
German-speaking part of Switzerland, is another artist who can be interpreted as
using concepts associated with a score or directive system in her work through
channelling information from the psychic realm. Heralding John Cage’s use of
the I Ching, in a process employing gravity and motion, Kunz used a divining
pendulum as a device to direct her mark making through dowsing. The way that
the pendulum moved over graph paper would determine geometric structures
that she would spend hours completing in pencil and crayon. Drawing mainly
at night, often to the point of exhaustion with sometimes over twenty-four
hours in one sitting, she considered this to be a systematic, therapeutic and
predictive research process in which she would map psychic energy fields for
her patients. The use of the pendulum absolved Kunz from the responsibility of
decision-making by directing her where to draw lines on her paper.133 As part of
the process of divination, Kunz would ask a question and each time a different
image would evolve.134 In the context of this chapter, this is reminiscent of Cage’s
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process of consulting the I Ching. As he explained around a hundred years later,


‘When you use chance operations […] you’re not making choices, you’re asking
questions.’135
While Kunz was a practitioner of drawing who did not seek an audience
in the art world, her witnesses were those individuals for whom she acted as
healer and shaman. Her drawings were created in a kind of ritual performance
in which endurance and exhaustion must have played a part. The images aided
her in diagnosis, enabling her to both receive and transmit forces that enabled
healing.136 Selecting a drawing from her archive of preconstructed works, Kunz
would ‘read’ her drawings in a divinatory performance in which her maps of
psychic energy were consulted for the purpose of healing a client.137 Thus, it
could be said that the drawings Kunz made in turn also directed her work as a
therapist.
Leaving aside any judgement on whether or not Houghton and Kunz were
actually following the instructions of spirit guides to transcribe esoteric codes
into drawings, their work raises the contrast between the autographic – drawings
defined by a personal, signature style that is clearly identified as made by the
hand of a particular artist – and its complement, the allographic – drawings that
have been designed to be made by another. The term allographic art is taken
from Nelson Goodman’s book Languages of Art (1968),138 in which he considers
this to be a form of practice in which an intention for an artwork is inscribed into a
system of signification, such as a literary script, a musical score or a mechanical
process, in order to be carried out subsequently by another. The concept of the
allographic, which, in its original sense, refers to the act of writing a signature on
behalf of someone else, can be considered as an opposition to the autographic,
which epitomizes the artist’s own distinctive and authentic style of mark making.
In claiming their work as allographic and channelling communication from the
spirit world, Houghton and Kunz deny their own personal autograph and yet, as
women artists, gain authority through the spirits who speak through them. They
follow the directives they are given without question, like a secretary or even a
computer, to create bold, abstract drawings that speak to the future rather than
the past.

Machines for drawing


The insight that codified instructions can bridge different disciplines (and
dimensions) to be used as a collaborative method of information sharing that
has the potential to repeat was observed by the mathematician Ada Lovelace,
considered to be the first software programmer, when she wrote her (1843)
notes on Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, ‘[the engine] might act upon other
things besides numbers […] the engine might compose elaborate and scientific
110 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent’.139 The mechanics of this


theoretical computing machine were influenced by the Jacquard loom, which
used a system of punched cards to store information about complex patterns
that could then be woven into cloth. This primitive form of binary code is in itself
a score that describes the actions needed to produce the pattern it encoded.
The mechanical loom performs the instructions to create a predetermined line.
Working in secrecy in Bletchley Park during the Second World War as part
of the British effort to crack the encrypted messages made by the German
Enigma machine, Alan Turing’s work in code-breaking and mathematics led
him to conceptualize the first universal digital computer that could electronically
store both programs and data.140 While it is unclear as to whether Babbage’s
concepts directly informed Turing’s code-breaking Enigma machine,141 there is a
clear link between codification in mechanical devices, mathematics, music and
digital computing that exists within our contemporary culture and these systems
can be readily employed by creative scored practices of all genres. Indeed, the
use of a computer program or mechanical instruction can be seen as a form of
allographic art.
Concerned with proving that visual values are objective and could be created
through mechanization, László Moholy-Nagy set about creating an artwork over
the phone. As his wife later recalled of the making of EM 1–3, 1922:

He dictated his painting to the foreman of a sign factory, using a colour chart
and an order blank of graph paper to specify the location of form elements
and their exact hue. The transmitted sketch was executed in three different
sizes to demonstrate through modifications of density and space relationships
the importance of structure and its varying emotional impact.142

Influenced by the Constructivists, Moholy-Nagy wanted to produce radical art


that spoke of the modern, machine age of industrialization for the masses and
to stand against the representational art of the Academy. EM 1–3 were made
with industrial processes of enamel on metal, in three sizes, with a design based
on a grid. However, this story of mechanization has become idealized. Unlike
a contemporary process where an instruction might be digitally inputted and
printed remotely with little intervention by human hands, these instructions were
interpreted by a foreman and carried out by sign writers using mechanical tools.
With his series of wall drawings that he started in 1968, Sol LeWitt began
an extensive project of allographic drawing in which he conceived of a series
of mechanical rules for a drawing that a team of assistants would complete for
him. Reacting to Cage, Duchamp, the ready-made and the outraged response
from the audience, he wanted to explore seriality and to create systems of
permutations. With one such instruction being ‘Using pencil, draw 1,000 random
straight lines 10 inches long each day for 10 days, in a 10-by-10-foot square’,
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LeWitt tried out varying degrees of personal interpretation in the carrying out of
his concepts:

What it looked like wasn’t important. It didn’t matter what you did as long as
the lines were distributed randomly throughout the area. In many of the wall
pieces there is very little latitude for the draftsman or draftswoman to make
changes, but it is evident anyway, visually, that different people make different
works. I have done other pieces that give the draftsperson a great liberty in
interpreting an action. In this way the appearance of the work is secondary
to the idea of the work, which makes the idea of primary importance. The
system is the work of art; the visual work of art is the proof of the system. The
visual aspect can’t be understood without understanding the system. It isn’t
what it looks like but what it is that is of basic importance.143

The autographic expression of the artist’s subjectivity, the craft skills employed
in the making, affect – emotional, physical or sensational responses evoked in
the viewer – none of these were as important to him as the rational logic of the
idea:

In conceptual art the idea of concept is the most important aspect of the work.
When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning
and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair.
The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.144

These ideas from conceptual art of creating systems and instructions for
drawings directly influenced the pioneers of digital image making, such as Frieder
Nake, who first exhibited his digital art in Stuttgart in 1965. Working before the
invention of the mouse or commercial software, he created drawings through
the use of computer code. In works such as Hommage à Paul Klee, 13/9/65
Nr.2 (1965), he defined a series of instructions for a visual image into computer
programming language, which had a number of random variables written in. The
computer then interpreted this information and it was output using a pen plotter,
a mechanical device for holding a pen that is attached to a computer.145 Frieder
Nake now oversees compArt database Digital Art (daDA), an extensive archive of
early digital art from 1950 to 1979 at the University of Bremen.146 He forms part
of a group of international artists, such as Roman Verostko, Manfred Mohr, Vera
Molnar, Hiroshi Kawona and Harold Cohen, who have been writing their own
original algorithms since the 1960s as forms of instructions for making artworks,
and were given the name Algorist artists by Jean-Pierre Hébert in 1995.147
Pioneering digital artists in other parts of the world, such as Japan, were also
inspired by avant-garde art movements to produce algorithmic art. Influenced by
the idea of creating systems of permutations, the Computer Technique Group
112 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

(artist Masao Komura and programmers Makato Ohtake and Koji Fujino) created
the plotter drawing Running Cola is Africa for the groundbreaking Cybernetic
Serendipity exhibition held at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1968.
The image shows the outline of a runner morphing into a bottle of cola and then
a map of Africa.148
In these early digital works, the computer is treated as a collaborator that
adds its own contribution to the drawings that are produced through random
mark making or the computation of variables. This raises the issue of whether a
machine is necessarily a tool or whether it can be a collaborator: do mechanical
aids to drawing provide perfect reproduction of the signature of their maker or
might they add an element of indeterminacy through malfunction or planned
disobedience? During the Industrial Revolution engineers explored the
mechanization of many handmade processes. Resulting from his investigation
of the movement of pendulums, the professor of mathematics Hugh Blackburn
invented the Harmonograph, whose manufacture is first mentioned in a
publication from 1893.149 This device uses a series of pendulums swinging in
different directions to manipulate both the action of a pencil and the angle of
the surface to which paper is attached. In combination, these motions produce
drawings consisting of complex interlocking spirals. As it is near impossible to
set the pendulums in motion with the exact same force and direction each time,
there was a degree of indeterminacy in the drawings produced by the device.
As part of the kinetic art movement of the 1950s and 1960s, the Swiss
artist Jean Tinguely created a number of mechanical sculptures, also known as
‘useless’ machines since they performed no utilitarian function.150 Some of his
earliest devices, such as Méta-Malevich (1954) and Méta-Kandinsky (1956), hint
at his interest in Constructivism and ironic commentary about the materialism
of the art world. During the late 1950s, he made a series of drawing machines
known as Méta-matics that were designed to produce original art works. Méta-
matic No. 10 (1959) demonstrates some of the properties of the Harmonograph.
Participants can control the speed of a machine, which rotates and agitates a
piece of wood that forms the support for a piece of paper on one axis while the
pen that draws upon it moves in different directions. It is possible to change
the pen or drawing medium that the device holds and influence the direction of
the parts. Owing to chance and faulty mechanics, each drawing was unique as the
machine was simple unable to reproduce the same exact series of actions each
time.151 With their stuttering, spasmodic movements, these machines satirized
the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock and the painting performances
of Georges Mathieu as they imply that the original, autographic mark of the artist
can be reproduced by a machine.152 Originally, Tinguely claimed full authorship
of the drawings that were produced by his machines. He signed each drawing
personally and also filed a patent with the French government arguing that his
devices created abstract drawings and paintings that were important enough to
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be collected and exhibited in their own right. This attitude towards authorship
shifted over time and he began to stamp the paper with the text ‘Painted in
collaboration with machine No …’ to reflect the contribution of the device itself.153
Although they produced drawings, with the theatrically of their construction and
unpredictable outcomes, Stephanie Jennings Hanor considers these machines
in motion as performance pieces in their own right, extending the lineage of
Constructivist, Futurist, Dada and Bauhaus theatre and cabaret that celebrated
mechanization.154
Contemporary artist Patrick’s Tresset’s robots are explicitly made to perform
within the installations that he creates. Initially a painter, Tresset started to
experiment with robots that create drawings when he experienced a crippling,
creative block. Although he lacked finances, having a background in computing
as a child, he began by recycling old computers discarded by offices and
experimenting with making them usable again. Influenced by the Algorist artists,
he learned how to program and to develop robotics that could make drawings
based on his own accumulated knowledge of mark making from personal
experience.155 Over time, his focus shifted from the aesthetics of the drawings
that his robots make to the overall performance that they create and he now
considers them to be puppets within a theatrical scenario.
In Human Study #4, shown as part of the Merge Festival in London’s Bankside
in 2017, a camera mounted to a table at the front of a room of 1970s school
desks seems to communicate to a classroom of robots through its movements
and in Morse code. Using black ballpoint pens, the multiple robot arms mark time
on school jotters in accord with instructions on a video blackboard at the front of
the room. Each behaves slightly differently, to which the viewer cannot help but
project emotional qualities such as boredom, rebelliousness or industriousness.
Finally, all but two start scribbling over their previous marks. The impact of this
installation does not just come from the sight of robots drawing, but the theatrical
set up of the whole tableau and the contribution of the sound of the servo motors
and the bleeps of Morse code all contribute to an uncanny echo of 1970s
schooling. In the same exhibition, his installation Human Study #1, 3RNP mimics
a life drawing class. Members of the public are invited to make appointments to
be a sitter for the robots, who are again mounted on old school desks with pieces
of paper attached that are placed around the sitter’s chair. The whole process
takes around forty minutes to produce three drawings from the different angles.
A small camera is placed in the position where the eyes would be, if the system
was a human. This camera is programmed to face the sitter directly and then
move down as if it were facing the paper, which gives the impression of the act
of observation. These actions are not necessary for producing the drawings, but
add to the experience. A black ballpoint pen is used to create portraits through
gestural evocation rather than strictly delineated by the photographic information
captured by the camera. This is based on Tresset’s own left-handed drawing
114 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

Figure 3.6 Tim Lewis, Mule Make Mule, 2012. © Tim Lewis/Flowers Gallery.

style, which he describes as a ‘controlled loss’ that resembles a perambulatory


stroll rather than a direct route: ‘With a promenade you do not have a direct path
to an aim, but at the same time you are still going somewhere.’156 The system is
capable of a small amount of variation in the drawings produced according to the
positioning of the servo motors on the robot arms, the angle of the pen, whether
the pen is full or running out of ink and variations in light levels. The signatures on
each robot drawing are not his own but taken from a random, unintended mark
that one of his robots once made. As each successive sitter is drawn an archive
of images is created and displayed on the walls.
While Tinguely’s and Tresset’s works foreground the machine as a performer,
the drawing machines of Tim Lewis investigate the act of drawing itself. The artist-
engineer Lewis specializes in mobile sculptures and mechanical interventions
that incorporate found objects and finely crafted mechanics. These include a
series of machines that create drawings inspired by historic automata.157 With an
unsettling combination of the human, the animal, the digital and the mechanical,
several of these comment directly on the notion of the autographic and the
allographic. In Auto-Dali Prosthetic (2002), a motion sensor triggers a Victorian
prosthetic arm to continuously sign Salvador Dali’s signature on rolls of paper in
a humorous comment on Dali’s commercial exploitation of his status as an artist
during his later years. With Mule Make Mule (2012), an automaton in the shape
of a mule can be manipulated through a hand crank to draw crude self-portraits
of itself on pieces of A5 paper (Figure 3.6). For Lewis, these machines are an
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extension of his own drawing practice and continuously enact the process of
drawing in the present moment. He explains: ‘Other than the obvious content of
the image drawn, they predominantly concern a means of achieving a longevity
through repetition rather than monumental physical permanence.’158
The visual information for the drawings produced by these two machines
is stored mechanically on cut metal cams. Depending on the force with which
the handle is turned, the sharpness or positioning of the pencil, mechanical
friction and the environmental conditions in which the machine is placed,
a slight deviation or wobble to the line can occur, thus adding an element of
indeterminacy to the lines it makes, although not to the extent of Tinguely’s
machines.
Another mechanical sculpture, Mona Hatoum’s + and − (an earlier version
was called Self-erasing Drawing) (1994–2004) also foregrounds the act of
drawing itself. Owing to an electric motor, a range of parallel, circular lines are
mechanically inscribed in sand and then continuously erased.159 No human
labour is evident and yet the process of making is foregrounded. The drawing is
never finished but continually in a state of becoming. Constantly in motion and
reproducing a series of lines that were determined by the artist, it could also be
considered an animation.
In addition to purpose-built machines for drawings, artists have also
repurposed automata to make drawings. In Gutai performance events in Japan in
1957, Akira Kanayama attached cans of paint to toy cars to make a series of live
action paintings all entitled Work, 1957.160 Many years later, in his performance at
Draw to Perform 4, Brighton, 2017, another artist, River Lin, combined paint with
a mechanical toy to create an automated action painting using a wind-up yellow
plastic duck for his disturbing and thought-provoking work.161 Concerned with
‘the everyday and ritualistic of specific cultural contexts’,162 Lin’s performance
began as a humorous interaction with the little automatic toy while it waddled
playfully in circles around his feet on a long strip of white paper. But, as Lin
poured paint onto the toy, imposing his will to leave a mark and employing the
witless object as his tool, the performance gradually became a troubling series
of actions and suggestions. The toy continued to waddle determinedly trailing
circles of colour in its wake, and despite its obvious lack of cognition – the
suggestion of many kinds of imposition teased the audience into an emotional
response – ‘the toy’ had indeed been used to make drawings, and the audience
as witnesses were complicit in that narrative.
The use of the mechanical in art is not without criticism, and images created
through technology are frequently regarded as having lost the authenticity implied
by the physical gestures and materiality of the subjective hand-drawn mark.163
This point of view associates hand drawing with the expression of individual
consciousness and digital imagery with mechanized, mass production.164 It is also
underpinned by the assumption that art making is only a handmade, autographic
116 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

process and discounts conceptual approaches. However, an examination of


allographic art practices reveals the complex interplay between artist, intent,
means of production and audience. It also demonstrates the potential for
mechanical or digital imagery to be created with a conceptualization of the tool as
participant through the introduction of the unexpected – imperfection, glitches,
randomness and indeterminacy in its design. Thus, while the understanding
of performance underlying this chapter has encompassed two nuances of the
concept’s usage – (1) an activity intentionally carried out in front of audience and
(2) the execution or accomplishment of a task – it also draws attention to (3) the
manner in which or the efficiency (or otherwise) with which something reacts or
fulfils its intended purpose.

Conclusion
This chapter has considered the process of communication in allographic
performance drawings that employ scores, directives, instructions and codes.
In this form of practice, the work of art becomes a collaboration in which
another will realize the making of an artist’s original intention rather than the artist
being the one to produce the finished article. Allographic art enables different
disciplines to come together – as one form may be translated into another – and
an element of chance and unpredictability to be present in the end product.
It counters traditional assumptions of the artist as sole author. Although the
Fluxus artists can be seen to idealize collaboration and the aleatory process,
the works of Cardew and Rogers reveal anxiety and tension in collective activity.
However, the projects of InspiralLondon, Foá, Grisewood, Hosea and McCall
as well as the Computer Technique Group reveal that, when a group of peers
come together to collaborate, there is an excitement in the unexpected ideas
of the others. Each has their own skills and independent practice outside the
group, providing access to a wider pool of knowledge than each individual has.
Ultimately, allographic art works oppose a modernist or humanist perspective
that places the individual artist at the centre of meaning. Umberto Eco’s caveat
about how open the ‘open’ work really is notwithstanding, these works involve a
measure of collaboration or collectives and emerge through dialogue and social
interaction. They can be seen as a series of strategies to manage participation
and develop an ethics of the means of production.

Notes
1 Stuart Hall, ‘Encoding/decoding’, in Paul Marris and Sue Thornham, eds, Media
Studies: A Reader, 2nd edition (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999),
pp. 51–61.
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2 Umberto Eco, The Open Work, trans. by Anna Cancogni (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1989).
3 Umberto Eco, ‘The poetics of the open work’, in Eco, The Open Work, pp. 2–3.
4 Volker Straebel, ‘The mutual influence of Europe and North America in the history of
musikperformance’, Volker Straebel: Thoughts on Music and Related Arts website,
http://www.straebel.de/praxis/index.html?/praxis/text/t-musikperf_e.htm (accessed
1 August 2017). This text is what exists of John Cage’s unsigned score for Untitled
Black Mountain Piece (1952).
5 Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double, trans. by Mary Caroline Richards
(New York: Grove Press, 1958).
6 Mary Caroline Richards (Richards collaborated in John Cage’s Untitled Black
Mountain Piece, 1952) drew a floor plan from memory in 1989 for the writer
William Fetterman. William Fetterman, John Cage Theatre Pieces: Notations and
Performances (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1996), p. 100.
7 Fetterman, John Cage, p. 99.
8 ‘The audience was seated at the centre of all this activity. Later that summer … I
visited America’s first synagogue to discover that the congregation was there seated
precisely the way I had arranged the audience at Black Mountain.’ John Cage,
Silence Lectures and Writings (London: Calder and Boyars, 1968), p. x.
9 Justin Wolf, ‘John Cage artist: Overview and analysis’, TheArtStory.org website
(2017), http://www.theartstory.org/artist-cage-john.htm (accessed 26 November
2017).
10 Cage, Silence Lectures and Writings, p. x.
11 Fetterman, John Cage, pp. 97–103.
12 Ibid., p. 104.
13 Mary Emma Harris, ‘John Cage at Black Mountain’, The Journal of Black Mountain
College Studies, vol. 4 (Spring 2013). It was Allan Kaprow who first introduced the
term ‘Happening’ in his work 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (1959). Fetterman, John
Cage, p. 104.
14 Straebel, ‘The mutual influence of Europe and North America in the history of
musikperformance’.
15 David T. Doris, ‘Zen vaudeville’, in Ken Friedman, ed., The Fluxus Reader
(Chichester: Academy Editions, 1998), p. 96.
16 Julia Robinson, ‘From abstraction to model: George Brecht’s events and the
conceptual turn in art of the 1960s’, October, vol. 127 (Winter 2009): 80–2.
17 Doris, ‘Zen vaudeville’, p. 96.
18 The New School for Social Research (NSSR), ‘About us’, NSSR website, https://
www.newschool.edu/nssr/about-us/ (accessed 10 December 2018).
19 Richard Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage (New York: Limelight, 1988), p. 42.
20 Anna Dezeuze, ‘Origins of the Fluxus score: From indeterminacy to the “Do-It-
Yourself” artwork’, Performance Research, vol. 7, no. 3 (2002): 80.
21 Laura Kuhn, ‘John Cage at the New School (1950–1960)’, John Cage Trust official
blog (2014), http://johncagetrust.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/john-cage-at-new-
school-1950-1960.html (accessed 18 March 2017).
118 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

22 Doris, ‘Zen vaudeville’, p. 94; Robinson, ‘From abstraction to model’, pp. 82–5.
23 Ibid., p. 77.
24 Hannah Higgins, ‘Fluxus fortuna’, in Friedman, The Fluxus Reader, p. 32.
25 Dezeuze, ‘Origins of the Fluxus score’, p. 91.
26 Larry Miller, ‘Transcript of the videotaped interview with George Maciunas,
24th March 1978’, in Friedman, The Fluxus Reader, p. 184.
27 Ibid., pp. 191–2.
28 In 2013, Martin Creed won the Turner Prize for his Work No.227 The Lights Going
On and Off – echoing Three Lamps Event.
29 Ken Friedman, Owen Smith and Lauren Sawchyn, Fluxus Performance Workbook
(n.p.: Performance Research e-Publications, 2002), p. 23.
30 Owen Smith, ‘Avant-gardism and the Fluxus project: A failed utopia or the success
of invisibility’, Performance Research, vol. 7, no. 3 (2002): 4.
31 Tate, ‘Art term: Fluxus, Tate.org website, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/f/
fluxus (accessed 10 December 2018).
32 Fluxus derives from the Latin meaning flowing loose and slack; it is also the historical
name for dysentery. See Emmett Williams and Ann Noël, Mr. Fluxus: A Collective
Portrait of George Maciunas, 1931–1978 (London: Thames & Hudson, 1998), p. 32.
33 Robert C.Morgan, Wolf Kahn and Irving Sandler, ‘Allan Kaprow (1927–2006)’,
The Brooklyn Rail, 9 May 2006, https://brooklynrail.org/2006/5/art/allan-
kaprow-19272006 (accessed 28 December 2018).
34 Eva Yi Hsuan Lu, ‘Instruction paintings: Yoko Ono and 1960s conceptual art’, SHIFT
Graduate Journal of Visual and Material Culture, no. 6 (2013): 2–3.
35 Friedman, Smith and Sawchyn, Fluxus Performance Workbook, p. 86.
36 Chrissie Iles, Yoko Ono: Have You Seen the Horizon Lately (Oxford: Modern Art
Oxford, 1997), p. 30.
37 Yoko Ono, ‘Instruction Pieces’, Yoko Ono, 4 July 2107, http://www.a-i-u.net/
yokosays.html (accessed 4 July 2017).
38 Lu, ‘Instruction paintings’, p. 10.
39 Iles, Yoko Ono, pp. 10–11.
40 Ibid., p. 17.
41 Ono, ‘Instruction Pieces’.
42 Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 178.
43 Friedman, Smith and Sawchyn, Fluxus Performance Workbook, p. 86.
44 Iles, Yoko Ono, p. 128.
45 Lu, ‘Instruction paintings’, p. 7.
46 Ono, ‘Instruction Pieces’.
47 Iles, Yoko Ono, p. 28.
48 Dave Smith, ‘Following a straight line: La Monte Young’, JEMS: Journal of
Experimental Music Studies – Reprint Series (8 April 2011): 1.
49 Ibid., p. 3.
COMMUNICATING 119

50 Doris, ‘Zen vaudeville’, p. 121.


51 Ibid., pp. 126–7.
52 Alison Knowles, A Great Bear Pamphlet (New York: Something Else Press, 1965).
53 Ibid.
54 Ibid.
55 ‘The score reads: “Find something you like in the street and give it away. Or find
a variety of things, make something of them, and give it away.” I heard from the
people in the festival that they had a wonderful time making little handheld objects
from things they found in the street but the problem was to actually give away the
things they had made to strangers. As far as I know, this is the only live performance
of this score. As a score it is reproduced in “Technicians of the Sacred” by Jerome
Rothenburg.’ Alison Knowles, ‘Giveaway Construction (1963)’, Alison Knowles
website, http://www.aknowles.com/giveaway.html (accessed 28 January 2018).
56 ‘Works’ were festivals of short plays initiated by the Canadian playwright and
founder of the Factory Theatre Lab in Toronto, Ken Gass. Jeffrey M. Heath, Profiles
in Canadian Literature, vol. 8 (Toronto: Dundurn, 1991), p. 43.
57 Catherine de Zegher, ed., Drawing Papers 20: Performance Drawings (New York:
The Drawing Center, 2001), exhibition catalogue.
58 Elizabeth Finch, ‘The drawing as instrument’, in de Zegher, Drawing Papers 20, pp. 50–4.
59 RoseLee Goldberg, Performance: Live Art since the 60s (New York: Thames &
Hudson, 1998), p. 9.
60 Ibid., p. 9.
61 Tom McDonough, ‘City scale and discreet events: Performance in urban space,
1956–1969’, in de Zegher, Drawing Papers 20, pp. 22–4.
62 Ibid, p. 24.
63 Ibid.
64 Ibid.
65 Ibid.
66 Drawings were sent from the UK, Canada, Germany, Romania, Finland and the USA
and displayed on the wall. Contributing artists included Mary Banda, Carolyn Bew,
Traian Boldea, Julie Brixey-Williams, Maija Burnett, Jax Horswill, Greg Murr, Lucy
O’Donnell, Laura Perrin and Clare Smith.
67 Maryclare Foá, Jane Grisewood, Birgitta Hosea and Carali McCall, ‘ARC: I draw for
you’, Studio International, 29 January 2010, http://www.studio-international.co.uk/
index.php/arc-i-draw-for-you (accessed 4 February 2018).
68 The tool was developed as an Open Source project in which programmers
collaborated to develop the software and was made by Birgitta Hosea and her
father according to instructions freely available on the Internet: http://www.
instructables.com/id/How-to-build-a-Tagtool-Mini. (accessed 1 May 2020). For more
about art projects with the Tagtool, see Chapter 5.
69 Foá et al., ‘ARC: I draw for you’.
70 Birgitta Hosea, ‘Drawing animation’, Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, vol. 5,
no. 3 (2010): 364.
71 Nicci Haynes, ‘Her Words My Body: Artist’s statement’, Unpublished essay, 2019.
120 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

72 Ibid.
73 Eco, The Open Work, p. 3.
74 Ibid., p. 4.
75 Ibid., p. 4.
76 Ibid, p. 19.
77 Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses (New York: Vintage Books, 1990),
p. xvii.
78 Michael Nyman, Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999), p. 34.
79 Ibid.
80 Ibid.
81 Ibid.
82 Ibid., pp. 50–3.
83 Ibid., p. 53.
84 Piotr Grella-Mozejko, ‘Earle Brown: Form, notation, text’, Contemporary Music
Review, vol. 26, no. 3/4 (August 2007): 463.
85 Ibid., p. 462.
86 Helen Molesworth, Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College, 1933–1957
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), p. 56.
87 Cage, Silence Lectures and Writings, p. 11.
88 Molesworth, Leap Before You Look, p. 56.
89 Nyman, Experimental Music, p. 51.
90 Alison Knowles, Footnotes: Collage Journal 30 Years (New York: Granary Books,
2000). See p. 16, ‘Notes on Transvironments’ (term dreamed up by George Quasha)
and p. 37, ‘George Brecht Event Score’.
91 John Tilbury, ‘Cornelius Cardew biography’, in Kate Macfarlane, Rob Stone and
Grant Watson, eds, Play for Today: Cornelius Cardew (London: The Drawing Room,
2008), p. 108.
92 Cornelius Cardew, ‘Towards an ethic of improvisation’, UBU, website, http://www.
ubu.com/papers/cardew_ethics.html. (accessed 11 April 2017).
93 Cornelius Cardew, ‘A Scratch Orchestra: Draft constitution’, in Macfarlane, Stone
and Watson, Play for Today, p. 14.
94 Anonymous, Scratch Orchestra, ‘Art for whom’, in Macfarlane, Stone and Watson,
Play for Today, p. 19.
95 Cardew, ‘A Scratch Orchestra’, p. 14.
96 Ibid., p. 15.
97 Michael Parsons, ‘The Scratch Orchestra and visual arts’, in Macfarlane, Stone and
Watson, Play for Today, p. 76.
98 Cardew, ‘A Scratch Orchestra’, pp. 14–15.
99 Parsons, ‘The Scratch Orchestra’, pp. 72–5.
COMMUNICATING 121

100 Anonymous, Scratch Orchestra, ‘Art for whom’, p. 19.


101 Andrea Phillips, ‘The revolution will (not) be improvised’, in Macfarlane, Stone and
Watson, Play for Today, pp. 38–9.
102 Ibid., p. 42.
103 See Ann Hutchison, Labanotation: The System for Recording Movement (London:
Phoenix House, 1954).
104 Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking (London: Verso, 2002), p. 272.
105 Oscar van den Boogaard, ‘In search of Stanley Brouwn’, Frieze, 12 March 2014,
https://frieze.com/article/search-stanley-brouwn (accessed 3 March 2018).
106 Antje von Graevenitz, ‘“We Walk on the Planet Earth”: The artist as a pedestrian:
The work of Stanley Brouwn’, Dutch Art and Architecture Today, vol. 1 (June 1977):
6–7.
107 Ibid.
108 Ibid., p. 2.
109 Maryclare Foá, ‘Sounding out: Performance drawing in response to the outside
environment’ (PhD diss., University of the Arts London, 2011), 135.
110 Charlie Fox (Counterproductions), ‘About InspiralLondon’, InspiralLondon website,
https://www.inspirallondon.com/about/ (accessed 12 April 2017).
111 Charlie Fox, ‘DE/TOURS: Tales from Marseille-Provence 2013: Performing and
reforming capital as culture’, in Charlie Fox, ed., DE/TOURS: Artistic Journeys into,
through and after Marseille-Provence 2013 (London: Counterproductions, 2014),
pp. 7–8.
112 Interview with Charlie Fox, by Birgitta Hosea, email, 16 March 2017.
113 Fox (Counterproductions), ‘About InspiralLondon’.
114 See the artist’s website, Angela Rogers: https://www.angelarogers.net. (accessed
1 May 2020).
115 Angela Rogers, ‘Drawing conversations: Drawing as a dialogic activity’, TRACEY
Journal What is Drawing For?, no. 1 (2007): 3.
116 Ibid., pp. 5–9.
117 Wassily Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art, trans. by Hilla Rebay (New York:
Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1946), p. 26.
118 Ibid., p. 65.
119 Ibid., p. 35.
120 Georgiana Houghton, Evenings at Home in Spiritual Séance, Welded Together
by a Species of Autobiography, First Series (London: Trübner & Co, 1881), p. 23.
121 The impression given from Houghton’s autobiography is that the exhibition was
quite well attended. However, the account book detailing the entrance fees
received went missing. She never suspected it, but was she defrauded by the
gallery owner?
122 Simon Grant and Marco Pass, ‘“Works of art without parallel in the world”:
Georgiana Houghton’s spirit drawings’, in Ernst Vegelin van Claerbergen and
122 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

Barnaby Wright, eds, Georgiana Houghton: Spirit Drawings (London: The Courtauld
Gallery, 2016), p. 10.
123 Grant and Pass, ‘“Works of art without parallel in the world”’, pp. 13–14.
124 Houghton, Evenings at Home in Spiritual Séance, p. 165.
125 Houghton, Evenings at Home in Spiritual Séance, p. 4.
126 Ibid., pp. 14–16.
127 Ibid., p. 17.
128 Ibid., p. 20.
129 Ibid., p. 23.
130 Houghton, Evenings at Home in Spiritual Séance, p. 29.
131 Ibid., p. 84.
132 The use of the term ‘unfeminine’ is intended to be historically specific and related to
the era in which she lived.
133 Catherine de Zegher, ‘Abstractions’, in Catherine de Zegher and Hendel Teicher,
eds, 3x Abstraction: New Methods of Drawing (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2005), exhibition catalogue, p. 127.
134 Ibid., p. 134.
135 Holly Martin, ‘The Asian factor in John Cage’s aesthetics’, The Journal of Black
Mountain College Studies, vol. 4 (Spring 2013).
136 De Zegher, ‘Abstractions’, pp. 29–30.
137 Ibid., p. 132.
138 Cited in Edna Čufer, ‘Don’t’, in Catherine Wood, ed., A Bigger Splash: Painting
After Performance (London: Tate Publishing, 2012), p. 32.
139 Ada Lovelace, ‘Translator’s notes to L Menabrea’s memoir’, in Richard Taylor,
ed., Scientific Memoirs, Selected from the Transactions of Foreign Academies of
Science and Learned Societies, and from Foreign Journals, vol. 3 (London: Richard
and John E. Taylor, 1843), p. 694 (extract from Note A 1842).
140 Margaret Boden, Mind As Machine: A History of Cognitive Science (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2006), p. 165.
141 Ibid.
142 Sibyll Moholy-Nagy, Moholy-Nagy: Experiment in Totality (New York: Harper &
Brothers, 1950), pp. 30–1.
143 Saul Ostrow, ‘Sol LeWitt’, Bomb Magazine, 1 October 2003, http://bombmagazine.
org/article/2583/sol-lewitt (accessed 16 April 2017).
144 Sol LeWitt, ‘Paragraphs on conceptual art’, in Alexander Alberro and Blake
Stimson, eds, Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1999), p. 12.
145 Hosea, ‘Drawing animation’, p. 359.
146 compArt: Centre of Excellence Digital Art, compArt database Digital Art (daDA),
http://dada.compart-bremen.de (accessed 11 June 2017).
147 Roman Verostko, ‘The Algorists’, Roman Verotsko website, http://www.verostko.
com/algorist.html (accessed 11 June 2017).
COMMUNICATING 123

148 Jean Ippolito, ‘Dare to be digital: Japan’s pioneering contributions to today’s


international art and technology movement’, in ACM SIGGRAPH 2005 Electronic
Art and Animation Catalog (Los Angeles: ACM, 2005), p. 1.
149 Anita Chowdry, ‘Ingenious machines for drawing curves: The archives’, Anita
Chowdry Journeys with Pattern and Colour (blog), 6 October 2014, https://
anitachowdry.wordpress.com/2014/10/06/ingenious-machines-for-drawing-
curves-the-archives (accessed 15 April 2017).
150 Stephanie Jennings Hanor, ‘Jean Tinguely: Useless machines and mechanical
performers, 1955–1970’ (PhD diss., The University of Texas at Austin, 2003), p. 7.
151 Ryszard W. Kluszczyński, ‘Machines like gods: Introduction to reflections on
creative machines and the art of Patrick Tresset’, in Ryszard W. Kluszczyński, ed.,
Human Traits: Patrick Tresset and the Art of Creative Machines (Gdańsk: LAZNIA
Centre for Contemporary Art, 2016), p. 19.
152 Hanor, ‘Jean Tinguely’, pp. 75–8.
153 Ibid., p. 81.
154 Ibid.
155 Özden Şahin, ‘Robots, nostalgia and loss of control: In conversation with Patrick
Tresset’, in Kluszczyński, Human Traits, pp. 185–8.
156 Ibid., p. 190.
157 A selection of Lewis’s devices can be seen on his gallery’s Vimeo page: https://
vimeo.com/14114458.
158 Email from Tim Lewis to Birgitta Hosea, 19 March 2017.
159 Catherine Dee, ‘Plus and minus: Critical drawing for landscape design’, in Marc
Treib, ed., Drawing/Thinking: Confronting an Electronic Age (London: Routledge,
2008), p. 60.
160 Ippolito, ‘Dare to be digital’, p. 5.
161 Founded by the artist Ram Samocha, Draw to Perform has held an annual event
(in different UK locations) since its initiation in 2013. Showcasing artists who have
experimented in the field of performance and drawing, practitioners from many and
various countries participate.
162 River Lin, ‘Duck Walk’, River Lin website, https://riverlin.art/Duck-walk-2017.
(accessed 1 May 2020).
163 For a more detailed elaboration of this argument, see Birgitta Hosea, ‘Made by
hand’, in Caroline Ruddell and Paul Ward, eds, The Crafty Animator: Handmade,
Craft-Based Animation and Cultural Value (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).
164 Hosea, ‘Drawing animation’, p. 355.
124
4
CONJURING:
THE GIFT OF A SURPRISE

Enraptured by the miraculous conjuring of images from thin air, I


had early on succumbed to the lure of drawing and that curious
abandonment to the power of the infinite that tempts the drawer to
withdraw from the world and map herself into a scenography of a
different order.
JEAN FISHER, ‘ON DRAWING’1

The excitement of the unexpected in collaborative practice (addressed in


Chapter 3) is also a significant facet in the process of a conjuring. This chapter
looks at drawings in which conjuring can be said to occur and investigates
performance drawing works (live, recorded and edited) where different forms of
conjuring exist, both for the practitioner and for the audience.

Drawing, performance drawing and


conjuring
In a contemporary context, a work that can be classified as a drawing is one in
which there is evidence of an intentional presence.2 A drawing may be marked,
formed, sounded, implied or suggested; in two-dimensional, three-dimensional
or time-based media; and received by the audience as a visual, imagined or
heard experience. In their introduction to Drawing Now (2007), the editors Simon
Downs, Russell Marshall, Phil Sawdon, Andrew Selby and Jane Tormey confirm
drawing’s potential unfixed and exploratory characteristics by focusing their
book on the ‘ambivalent qualities’ of drawing, ‘its propensity to speculation and
its contradictory condition’.3 Carl Plackman, in his ‘Artists Notes 1972’, identifies
the tesseract (akin to TARDIS – Time and Relative Dimension in Space, with
an external of three dimensions and an internal of extended dimensions), as a
characteristic of drawing by stating: ‘A drawing contains more time than it takes
to look at it.’4 Three decades later, the inherent expansion and fluidity of drawing
126 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

was described by Catherine de Zegher at Tate’s 2006 conference ‘With a Single


Mark’ when she stated that the process of drawing can contain its conventions
within it while also being ‘always in a state of uncertainty fragmentation and
flux’.5 Emphasizing this instability, and acknowledging its potential for freedom
and connectivity, ‘Line,’ de Zegher tells us, ‘has [now] become a moving trace
in time and space, stressing interreliance and transsubjectivity […] from grid to
web.’6 Michael Craig-Martin in his 1995 Drawing the Line text contextualizes
these characteristics of drawing practice when he says, ‘Spontaneity […]
creative speculation […] and undogmatic qualities’ in drawing have been ‘highly
appropriate models for art in a century characterized by fragmentation of both the
systems of belief and the languages of expression’.7 And, just as fragmentations
in society, politics and beliefs persist, and agitate, today, and practitioners of
drawing continue to ‘expand its boundaries through experimental approaches’,8
so these exploratory, speculative characteristics evidenced in contemporary
drawing are also to be found in the varied live and recorded processes of
performance drawing. Inherent in the unfixed discipline of performance is the
potential for serendipitous happenstance. Through unexpected material results,
audience response or site-specific impacts, a performance work may change
during its process, therefore holding the potential to break conventions and
explore new ground, particularly in a contemporary context when live works
are woven with pre-recorded and live digital material of expanded cinema, as
examined in Chapter 5.
Performance drawings are beyond any fixture to a surface, or limit in process,
method or type of employment or material. Imbued with awareness of past and
contemporary concepts and philosophies in both performance and drawing
practices, performance drawings are made in front of an audience either in real
time, live or in front of a recording device, because a recording device creates
(time-based media) documentation and/or editable footage and therefore
anticipates an audience.9 What then are the connections between conjuring,
drawing and performance drawing?
The term conjuring, with its obvious association with magic tricks, can
be understood as an action or event in which the audience is surprised by
an unexpected visualization that occurs in front of their eyes. Lamont and
Wiseman, in their 1999 Magic in Theory, explain conjuring as being an action
in two parts, ‘effect and method’,10 under the umbrella term of ‘misdirection’.
In Magic and Theory, nine different categories of conjuring methodologies are
identified, the most relevant to this investigation into conjuring in drawing and
in performance drawing is that which Lamont and Wiseman title ‘Appearance’,
with the subheading ‘Object is not actually there but appears to be’.11 This
condition of ‘not actually [being] there but appear[ing] to be’ echoes the familiar
collective deception of traditional drawing, in which practitioners mark a two-
dimensional surface and propose those marks as three-dimensional forms.
CONJURING 127

While these marks may be recognized (in our Western culture) as the forms
they represent, still the element of trickery (sleight of hand) lies at the heart of
the process of a traditional two-dimensional drawing. However, in as much as
performance drawing expands boundaries through experimental approaches,
the performance drawing process may also contain elements of conjuring,
because of the dimensional shift in the live narrative and/or recorded work; and
a performance drawing conjuring can also exist in edited film, as the editor’s
sleight of hand manages a visual surprise. All of these forms of performance
drawing, the live (layered narrative), the documented (of multiple dimensions) and
the edited (a tesseract of narrative and dimension) result in a visual experience
that could be described as ‘contain[ing] more time than it takes to look at it’.12
E. H. Gombrich, in his 1960 Art and Illusion, tells us: ‘All representation relies
to some extent on what we have called guided projection’;13 and, recalling an
experiment on visual perception in which subjects were directed to anticipate
seeing light on a screen and repeatedly mistakenly did so, Gombrich explains:
‘To the students of the visual image, these experiences are of relevance because
they show how the context of action creates conditions of illusion […] Their
[…] expectation led to hallucination.’14 Gombrich concludes that, in relation to
visual guidance and misdirection, ‘there is no class of people better able to bring
about such phantom perceptions as conjurers’.15 This chapter proposes that
practitioners making drawings (their sleight of hand misdirecting the viewer by
manipulating visual dimensions, and the performance process itself potentially
containing more time than it takes to look at it) might also sometimes be classed
as conjurers.
While the word conjuring is employed in texts and documentation to describe
still images that produce, evoke or suggest an alternative or unexpected
visualization, it is the motion in the process – as Gombrich identified ‘action
creates conditions of illusions’ – that most often produces what can be described
as a conjuring. Yet Avis Newman, in her conversation with Catherine de Zegher,
reveals a type of motion in the process of all drawing when she explains: ‘drawing
is akin to an interior monologue emerging to the surface in our actions’.16 So,
if we know that, in general, a drawing (during its practical process) emerges
through actions (from the thought in the practitioner’s mind out into the physical
world), then we need to clarify that a drawing that conjures extends beyond that
general emergence, beyond the expectations of the witness and perhaps even
sometimes beyond the intention of the practitioner.
In her 2016 text A Recent History of Drawing, Katharine Stout concisely
observes how the process of drawing is perceived today: ‘for some [it] is
more aptly described as an activity [rather] than a medium’;17 and, addressing
changes over time in concepts related to drawing and the reception of the
activity of drawing, Stout confirms that the completeness of a drawing today
is ‘less of an imperative than [the] process’.18 This shift of focus away from the
128 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

end result towards acknowledging the value of the process in contemporary


drawing offers space to detect and investigate a myriad of possible drawing
actions, including conjuring.

Enraptured by the miraculous conjuring of images from thin air, I had early
on succumbed to the lure of drawing and that curious abandonment to the
power of the infinite that tempts the drawer to withdraw from the world.19

When Jean Fisher watched her mother draw it was the experience of seeing the
motion of her mother’s hand ‘as it perform[ed] its little arabesques with the crayon
over the paper’20 which so entranced her. Fisher was aged ‘[t]hree, maybe’21 when
she asked her mother to draw ‘anything! a horse, a cat, Grandpa’s house’ and
‘gazed in excited anticipation, mesmerized by her [mother’s] hand’.22 But, in her
memory of the event, instead of describing what her mother drew, Fisher recalled
how her mother, the drawer, had been ‘tempted to withdraw from the world’ as she
made an image and also how Fisher, the witness, had been ‘enraptured’ as she
watched ‘the miraculous conjuring of images from thin air’. Fisher’s description
clearly shows us how a drawing that conjures can entrance the witness and at
the same time transport the practitioner in the process of making.23 However, it
is also possible that a conjured drawing may sometimes be wilfully actioned by a
practitioner to gift themselves and the witness a visual surprise. When the writer
and artist John Berger, in his 1972 book Ways of Seeing, writes ‘[i]mages were
first made to conjure up the appearances of something that was absent’,24 he
is speaking of still images made many thousands of years ago, when pictures
were traced, scratched, smeared, daubed and spat, for the purposes of sharing
recorded, imagined or wished-for information. Berger’s statement that these first
images conjured up appearances of something absent speaks much to his faith
in the potency of drawing. Berger believes drawing is not so important because
of how it records something observed ‘but for what it leads [the practitioner] on
to see’.25 This process, as he suggests, of retrieving and returning something
visually lost, whether or not the practitioner plays with the concept of erasure
and retrieval to heighten the audience’s desire, may perhaps be understood as
the giving and receiving of gifts: the observed giving a gift of further knowledge
to the practitioner in repayment for the practitioner’s attention, and the gift from
the practitioner to the audience returning that which was lost back into their
gaze. Yet not all drawings that conjure are made with the intention of retrieval,
or of gifting things into the visual realm; nor are they by definition, as Berger’s
‘something’ might imply, a figuration. When Avis Newman explains that ‘[t]he
line manifests a division that conjures the “this” and the “that” and in so doing is
symbolically the mark of language’,26 Newman’s use of the term conjure suggests
(in this instance) that, in the process of making a drawing, the practitioner has
unexpectedly witnessed some familiar visual element within an abstracted form.
CONJURING 129

Whether this visual surprise came about through an altered dimension, a change
in scale, a reversal, a merging from a familiar into something else altogether or
a momentary slip in time, the practitioner’s surprise at the unexpected visual
familiar may momentarily transport them into an altered state of consciousness,
much as a child becomes transported in the process of discovery and play.27
And so it can be understood that within a conjured drawing today there
are a number of different factors that may be at play. There is an element of
motion in the process of drawing beyond the general emerging of a drawing
(‘action creates conditions of illusions’);28 there is the practitioner’s ‘guided
projection’29 or misdirection (sleight of hand altering the visual dimensional form),
in which a visual ‘[o]bject is not actually there but appears to be’;30 with the
added possibility of a tesseract (‘[the] drawing contains more time than it takes
to look at it’),31 there is the audience’s ‘expectation lead[ing] to hallucination’,32
their ‘enraptured’33 surprise as they see an unexpected visual (either figurative
or abstracted, ‘the this and the that’);34 there is the possibility of the audience
retrieving something lost, or receiving an intentional gift from the practitioner;
and there is the possibility of the practitioner and the audience being equally
enchanted by witnessing the unexpected and being ‘tempted to withdraw from
the world and map [themselves] into a scenography of a different order’.35
Chapter 5 (on illumination) investigates lightning sketch performances and
other performed drawing processes (such as live and interactive animation)
which, in their time (around 1900), surprised audiences with their seemingly
magical visual transformations. These and other similar drawing performances
from that time may have been perceived (by audiences) as magically ‘conjured’
into being, but, despite the similarities in the reception of lightning sketches and
contemporary performance drawings that can be described as having been
conjured, there are significant differences. An animation process differs from
conjuring in that animation generally adheres to a sequential series following a
preconceived thread, and a conjuring can be understood as a visual surprise
(sometimes both for the practitioner and for the audience) in one or more
hallucinatory-like images. The advancements in the technology employed in
the process of performance drawing that conjures (in documented and edited
recorded film contexts as well as live works) have also expanded the possibility
of multiple retrievals (the finding of lost things) and of layering present and past
times; these may now appear together at the same present time, facilitating
practitioners to advance their play with loss and retrieval. Examples of multiple
edited layering, losing and retrieving, can be found in Laurie Anderson’s 2016
Heart of A Dog, discussed in the section ‘Shadows, memory and the gift of a
trace’ in this chapter. A dancing with time and the extended layering of narrative
also allow the practitioner to perpetuate their audience’s surprise to a greater
degree than was ever possible within the technological limitations of the heyday of
lightning sketches. In addition, the development of drawing practices sometimes
130 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

merging with different disciplines (for instance, drawing in science, Wellcome


commissions, S.T.E.A.M. practice, etc.) has informed practitioners and their
audiences of intention, thereby heightening awareness and consciousness in
the process of making and witnessing visual practice and also of altering the
reception of performed and recorded imagery. Lastly, and importantly, works
that can be said to conjure today are viewed with the significant knowledge and
influence of past and present cinematic and screen visualizations. As Western
contemporary society is optically and psychologically steeped in the influence
of the screen, our collective reception of contemporary visual narrative, the
signs, the edit, the shorthand, ever quickens and has equipped us with a visual
comprehension far in advance of, for instance, the audience who watched the
Lumière Brothers’ Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat. While that 1895 audience may
not (as legend has it) have panicked and run out of the cinema, they were in all
likelihood more astonished than we would be now if we watched a film of an
approaching train. We have been deeply immersed in imagery for many decades,
from the extraordinary computer-generated imagery (CGI) of Hollywood (such as
James Cameron’s 1984 Terminator and 2009 Avatar films) to the holographic
performances of deceased entertainers on stage (Celine Dion’s 2013 American
Idol duet with Elvis Presley conjured into life). These technologies and the
everyday perpetual immersive imagery of our personal computers, tablets and
phones have brought us to an age of far greater visual distraction than Guy
Debord’s cautionary text Society of the Spectacle (1967) predicted. Imagery
influences our lives in a stream of moving and endlessly updating visualizations,
and we have learned to read pictures with more awareness and experience than
those witnesses who lived even just one lifetime ago. So it is that our reception of
a drawing that can be said to be conjured today is understood through the prism
of our historical knowledge and visual awareness.
The influence of images on our society and the distraction they cause us
through our everyday could perhaps be perceived as an act of visual trickery
or, significantly (for the focus of this chapter), it could be interpreted as a form
of collective misdirection. This being the case, perhaps we should question
whether or not society is being conjured before our very eyes.
Plato, in his Allegory of the Cave, imposed a misdirection on his imagined
captives. More conjured trick than visual surprise, Plato sets the scene – the
prisoners in a cave are tied in place so their view of the world is fixed and they
can only see the wall in front of them. Behind the prisoners there is a low wall
and, behind that, people are moving back and forth ‘carrying all sorts of things
that reach up higher than the wall: statues and other carvings made of stone or
wood and many other artifacts’.36 The bright sunlight casts those objects being
carried as shadows on the wall in front of the prisoners. The shadows are all
the prisoners can see, and they believe those shadows to be the real world,
a world of statues and carvings. While the concept of a ‘real world’ may be
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problematic in the context of contemporary fine art, and also for the (arguably)
media-orchestrated societies of today, still Plato’s most powerful sleight of hand
might not have been to conjure forms that bewitched the prisoners in Plato’s
own time but to hold a mirror to his audience, many years in his future, posing
a question for contemporary humankind, asking whether the world that is seen
now is mistakenly perceived as ‘true’. And indeed as fake news, propaganda
and advertising messages are spread worldwide on repeat through social media,
each pressing their audience to believe them, a clear view becomes even more
difficult to achieve.
It should be explained that, for the purpose of determining where a conjuring
exists during the process of drawing, a wide range of drawing practice has
been investigated and through this enquiry particular areas of focus have
been identified. These areas concern ‘Memory’, ‘Environment’, ‘Technology’,
‘Narrative’, ‘Merged Disciplines’ and ‘Sound’. To address these concerns,
a selection of works by artists whose practical, generational, racial, cultural,
political and contextual positions are markedly different from each other have
been chosen. Rather than the juxtapositions of their different identities and works
imposing a reductive comparison, the intention is to celebrate diversity in the
process of a drawing understood to be a conjuring; it can also be understood
that within all the selected works are common threads of being, presence
and narrative. At a time when fake news, regressive politics, propaganda and
advertising may fog our view of our climate, pesticide, petroleum and plastics
challenged world, a constructive and kind collective awareness of the human
condition in any cultural context place or time may be the common thread that
protects us from activating our own annihilation. Towards that intention, this
chapter proposes inclusivity in the gifting process of a conjuring.

Shadows, memory and the gift of a trace


WILLIAM KENTRIDGE / LAURIE ANDERSON / TANIA KOVATS
The South African artist William Kentridge dances with facts and fictions in his
performed and recorded drawings that examine the social, political and racial
through animations, documentations and flip-book motions. In the case of
his Triumph and Laments: A Project for Rome (2016), made to celebrate the
founding of Rome, Kentridge echoes Plato’s Allegory of the Cave with a live
event, in which performers holding silhouettes of various figures and objects
above their heads parade in front of a wall on which Kentridge, by erasing the
patina there (scratching the surface and thereby revealing the lighter coloured
stone), has drawn more than eighty figures in a theatrical frieze along the river
Tiber. The ‘silhouetted procession’,37 that is, the live performers, the banners
132 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

they hold above their heads, together with the scratched figures on the wall,
‘explor[e] dominant tensions in the history of the eternal city from past to
present’.38 Kentridge is dancing with the various and shifting ways in which light
can illuminate a reality. In the live performance and within the documentation of
the event, Kentridge conjures a tripling of shadow play, as the performers holding
silhouettes (shadows in outline) cast their own shadows onto the wall on which
other silhouettes are already scraped and drawn. In a 2016 conversation with
Imagine presenter Alan Yentob, Kentridge explains that his Triumph and Laments
was inspired by the debunking of a truth he had long accepted. Kentridge tells
us:

at art school you learned from the Italian renaissance … later on I understood
about the [Jewish] Ghetto in Rome – I’d always assumed that that was in
fact a medieval project … the shock was in discovering that in fact NO it’s a
project of modernity. The Ghetto was established in 1570 – the same time
they were building St Peters Cathedral. This heroic history of Rome and the
shameful history of Rome came together.39

In her 2016 feature film Heart of a Dog, the artist, musician and performer
Laurie Anderson brings together imagined narratives and personal memories.
Playing with truth, she retells stories using drawn animation, the spoken word,
performance and music, tracing around the loved ones she has lost to capture
them momentarily and for as long as she desires. Beginning with a still charcoal
drawing, the film pans around the sketched image of drifting people and dogs,
accompanied by the mournful sound of Anderson’s violin. Anderson then begins
to tell a story. The image on the screen turns into a self-portrait – animated
lines loosely drawn, perhaps from a photograph. Anderson says: ‘This is my
dream body, the one I use to walk around in my dreams.’40 Speaking directly to
the individual (so it seems), Anderson draws the audience into her confidence,
transporting them into her imagined landscape. In this way, it is both her voice
and her images that conjure the scene. Anderson then takes the audience into a
hospital room to witness a gruesome procedure:

I had arranged to have Lolabelle sewn into my stomach so that I could give
birth to her … she kept barking and trying to get out … it was really a mess …
anyway … I kissed her on her head and said … I will love you forever.41

Anderson’s film then fades into old photographs, family scenes – houses and
backyards. Her voice continues to perform her story: ‘When my mother died
she was talking to the animals that had gathered on the ceiling.’42 In this way,
Anderson extends her trace to embrace another of her lost loved ones.
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While Anderson breaks the fourth wall – talking directly to her audience –
Kentridge, in his Interview for Studio School 2010: Drawing Lesson 47, chooses
to talk to and with himself by doubling himself in his film. He also draws himself
into his stories, becoming different characters: Felix Teitlebaum in his 1989
Johannesburg, 2nd greatest city after Paris, Kentridge’s ongoing drawing for
projection (as he calls his drawn animations), and in The Tide Table (part of
Johannesburg, 2nd greatest city …), Kentridge drawing from old home movies
‘shifts’ the order (of time and ancestry), by posing as his own grandfather, and
by having his son perform the role of his father. In conversation with Alan Yentob,
Kentridge explains ‘so you had in a way four generations – and [it’s] about our
relationship to our younger selves’.43 Within most autobiography there is a sense
of grief for the loss of a time that can never be repeated, yet there is also, in
every retelling, an act of capture. The retelling traces around the events that
have occurred in a past time, capturing and fixing those events, and therefore
gifting the memory (at least) to be repeatedly revisited and conjured again into
the present time.
An early (around AD 79) and frequently referenced example of drawing in
which an event has been captured, and which can be described as a conjuring,
is recorded by Pliny the Elder in his Natural History: A Selection. In this story,
sometimes known as the birthplace of drawing, the drawer traces around her
lover’s shadow, trapping him in time as a gift to herself. Pliny tells us: ‘all agree
that it began with tracing an outline round a man’s shadow’.44 He goes on to
explain:

Modelling portraits from clay was first invented by Butades, a potter of Sicyon,
at Corinth. He did this owing to his daughter who was in love with a young
man, and she, when he was going abroad, drew in outline on the wall the
shadow of his face thrown by a lamp. Her father pressed clay on this and
made a relief.45

Even now this story of drawing and impending loss continues to be retold and
differently interpreted. Jean Fisher observes that, because the potter’s daughter
turned away from her lover to draw round his shadow, her drawing was ‘a
displacement; as with Orpheus’s surrender of Eurydice to the underworld, the
poem, the drawing, or song can only emerge, it seems, through the absence of
the loved one’.46
The professor of art writing Michael Newman, in his reading of the story he
calls Pliny’s Shadow, considers the presence of gifts and signs. If Butades’s
daughter’s drawing ‘begins with … the shadow … then it may be … as
philosopher C.S. Peirce calls an “indexical sign”, … as … track in the snow [is]
to the animal that leaves it’.47 Newman also sees Butades’s daughter’s drawing
as ‘a gift of memory, to herself and the other’.48 He notes that in the daughter’s
134 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

grief of her lover’s departure and in her substituting the drawing in his place
there is the echo of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle,49 a concept of loss
and retrieval – in which a child learning to endure the departure of his mother
repeatedly throws and retrieves his bobbin.
In her 2007 introduction to The Drawing Book, the artist Tania Kovats also
sees Butades’s daughter’s drawing as ‘an act of love and grief’.50 Recognizing a
sometimes elemental emotion in the drive that activates drawing, Kovats observes
that ‘Boutades’s (sic)’51 daughter’s drawing not only attempts to fix a moment in
time but also is made by ‘using a marker from the source of light and shadow
itself’.52 In her series of drawings titled Breath (2001), Kovats revisits the elemental
by using her own breath blown through a straw to move ink across graph paper,
thus ‘exhaling’ her ‘experience and thought’ from her ‘consciousness … onto
the paper’.53 As Kovats writes in her introduction to The Drawing Book, ‘to draw
means to take in’,54 and with her breath it could be said that Kovats conjures a
bridge between internal thought and external consciousness. The ink blown by
Kovats’ breath sometimes traces serendipitous pareidolia, visualizing forms and
conjuring unexpected yet familiar shapes. Kovats has addressed the elemental
on a larger scale in her Evaporation Installation work (the second Cape Farewell
Lovelock Art Commission at Manchester Museum of Science and Industry,
2015). Declaring that ‘[t]he health of the planet depends on the health of our
oceans’, Kovats also wonders, ‘Does water have a memory?’ A set of drawings
made through a tidal evaporation process were included in the installation, and

Figure 4.1 Tania Kovats, Evaporation (Black) 31, 2014, ink, saltwater on blotting paper,
framed. Photo: courtesy of Pippy Houldsworth Gallery.
CONJURING 135

throughout the exhibition the traces of salt left embedded in the paper continued
to react to moisture in the air (see Figure 4.1). Perhaps it could be said, then,
that those salt crystals were indeed returning to a memory, if not a conscious
altering then a shifting physical change; as their particles were impacted upon
by the surrounding air, they reverted back to a familiar form. In Evaporation, the
crystals had lost their original shape and then with rehydration they retraced a
memory of their previous selves, bridging their past with their present while also
leaving a trace.55
In his Judaic studies of loss and trauma, the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas
believes that traces can be perceived as gifts left (even unintentionally) by those
who are no longer with us – ‘the trace signifies beyond being’.56 Derrida, in his
re-reading of Levinas’s text, interprets Levinas’s concept in this way:

He will not have been (a) present but he will have made a gift by not
disappearing without leaving a trace. But leaving a trace is also to leave it, to
abandon it, not to insist upon it in a sign.57

And so it can be understood that every mark, brushed, warn, pressed, stepped,
rubbed or smeared, can be interpreted as a gift left (without motive or purpose)
by those who are no longer physically in this world. These traces conjure
memories of loved ones, and through these traces loved ones accompany
the living throughout their lives. While, as Levinas explains, the departed may
leave unintentional traces as gifts for those that remain, Butades’s daughter’s
lover was present when his shadow was traced and captured; he knew that
something of himself would be left with his lover, and so, in his act of sitting for
her while she traced his shadow, he gave her not only the possibility of an object
of physical memory (in the trace itself and her father’s casting of it) but also his
conscious presence during the act of her drawing – in this, his gift was both
present, future and past in time and memory. Even though Derrida clarifies the
meaning of Levinas’s text – ‘he will have made a gift by not disappearing without
leaving a trace’58 – in his Memoirs of the Blind (1993), he interprets Butades’s
daughter’s story by focusing on the idea that the practitioner cannot gaze at the
subject while making a mark, an idea that is no longer credible in the practice of
drawing today. Derrida’s reading of the act of drawing is framed in a conventional
tradition, one in which a practitioner, when drawing, looks up at the subject and
then away from the subject to the surface they are marking. But this repeated
back and forth, up and down broken gaze is not necessarily a method followed
in contemporary drawing practice. Some practitioners draw while staring
uninterrupted at their subject without looking at the marks they are making;
others trace a subject directly (on a transparent surface), thus looking at both the
subject and the marks they make at the same time. Yet Derrida perceives that
‘the origin of graphic representation to the absence or invisibility of the model …
136 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

[occurs] … because their gazes simply cannot meet’.59 Must the act of drawing,
as Derrida would have it, be trapped in a performance of unrequited desire?
Maybe so, but not necessarily in the manner in which Derrida understands or
in the way that is evidenced in the story of Butades’s daughter’s trace. Perhaps
in contemporary drawing, where a practitioner’s efforts to develop their skills
will drive them towards ever-shifting goals, and the ongoing process provides
a progressively clear knowledge of the faults present in the work, that is where
the perpetually unsatisfied desire is now to be found. Nonetheless, Derrida in his
continued investigation of the impossibility of drawing that which cannot be seen
and its association with the desire to retrieve that which is irretrievable, touches
a contemporary ennui:

it is as if seeing were forbidden in order to draw […] as if drawing were a


declaration of love destined for or suited to the invisibility of the other – unless
it were in fact born from seeing the other withdrawn from sight.60

The drawings Anderson makes in her film Heart of a Dog, as she repeatedly
traces the shape of her beloved dog, are seen and also perhaps fashioned
after the death of her companion. As Derrida professed, Anderson’s work is
‘a declaration of love, destined for or suited to the invisibility of the other’.61
But today technology offers shadows (photography, video and film) of beings
that are sometimes long departed, and after their absence their capture is then
conjured into a visibility of present time. And so, the shadows of the other, those
who are departed, are made visible and can be seen and loved by those who
remain; that love is destined to a conjured shadow, suited to a visual that exists
somewhere between invisibility and presence.
Traces in the contemporary age of multiscreen technology may come not
only in physical marks but also in photographic, filmic and virtual guises, as
Kovats’ father (a former engineer) noted: ‘I looked at the screen and I could
see my rotten old heart beating, and it made a drawing like when the earth
moves.’62 These technically various visual documentations extend the possibility
of capture; now, it is possible to revisit those who have died, through multiple
digital, analogue or virtual dimensions, and these ‘shadows’ that can be seen
and their capture, gift those left behind with a bridge that connects the living to
those existing in the dimension of after living. As outlined earlier (in Kentridge,
1989, Johannesburg, 2nd greatest city after Paris, and Anderson, 2016, Heart
of a Dog), this is one of the acts at play that enables a conjuring in drawing to
become a gift to the witness and the practitioner, surprising one or the other
and sometimes both in its sudden presentation of an unexpected familiar. In
current contemporary society, every individual can witness their own traces, in
reflections and documentations visualized and screened in various ways; these
can be interpreted as different versions of the self. Traces can morph time – from
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the past and, with augmented predictive software, from an imagined future. They
may conjure experiences remembered or possibilities yet to be; and, as they are
witnessed, those different versions of the individual shifting and changing are
dancing and slipping with time.

Relocating place and site


DENNIS OPPENHEIM / GREIG BURGOYNE / M. FOÁ / ROBIN RHODE
Another form of slipping and dancing occurs when visual evidence of a place is
situated in different alternative viewing places and spaces. This displacement,
replacement or alteration shifts and plays with perceptions of physical site.
These displacements also trigger and conjure images in the viewer’s mind’s eye.
Dennis Oppenheim navigates time and shifts place in his work Gallery Transplant
(1969), made for the Earth Art exhibition at Cornell University’s Andrew Dickson
White Museum in Ithaca, New York. Oppenheim, ‘by drawing on the ground
using dirt and snow’,63 created ‘a dynamic relationship with the site becoming
a surface for inscription’,64 transplanting a life-size floor plan of gallery number
4 of the Andrew Dickson White Museum, Ithaca, New York, to Bird Sanctuary,
Ithaca, New York. Oppenheim’s action now exists as documentation comprising
various maps, photographs and plans. In an interview with Avalanche magazine,
he discussed his concepts. ‘To me a piece of sculpture inside a room is a
disruption of an interior space … I began to think very seriously about place, the
physical terrain. And this led me to question the confines of the gallery space.’65
Despite these observations, Oppenheim continued: ‘I don’t really carry a gallery
disturbance concept around with me; I leave that behind in the gallery.’66 He
went on, adding, ‘[o]ccasionally I consider the gallery site as though it were some
kind of hunting ground’.67 Whether tracking for ideas to explore or concepts to
disrupt, Oppenheim’s transplants discovered a way to turn the gallery inside
out. His sleight of hand lay in marking ground in an outside area with the exact
measurement of the internal space, thus ‘misdirecting’68 the viewer with the
familiar two-dimensional life-size marks (an ‘[o]bject is not actually there but
appears to be’),69 those signs triggering the shaping of a familiar form into their
mind’s eye. In this way, Oppenheim conjured the internal space into a different
place, and also (in a literal manner) wrenched that gallery cube out of its pristine
white space, questioning its very existence, and perhaps even posing the
question, If an empty parking lot can be a gallery space then why would white
cubes remain the only place for artistic display?
In an alternative form of transplant, Greig Burgoyne’s Walk/Count/Flow/Lost
(2017), a series of three live repeated performances, repositions the dimensions
of a grave taped on an internal wooden floor space out onto a stone path and then
off the path back into a graveyard. Burgoyne defines his performances at Walcot
138 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

Chapel, Bath, England,70 as a ‘vocal instruction and study in patch dynamics,


[…] purport[ing] to the idea that within the vast space that is homogeneity there
are pockets of heterogeneity also, hence – patches of dynamic difference’.71 Like
attracts like, so the saying goes, yet it is also said that differences attract, thus
within areas of similar characteristics otherness may be discovered.
During the documentation of his performance, Burgoyne holds a camera
(phone), its lens pointing to his shoes, and in so doing he fixes his audience’s
gaze to follow the motions of his feet while he speaks the number of steps
he paces, navigating around restrictive rectangle spaces. Once out among the
graves, he releases his audience from his grasp to see the action from a distant
perspective (another camera’s view), revealing the graveyard around his stooped,
halting gait. Burgoyne then uses the film of his feet pacing and his voice speaking
numbers as a directive to navigate the graveyard.72 There is a comic/tragic sense
in this performance as his stance begins to mimic an exaggerated now familiar
pose of the lost pedestrian, gaze fixed on their screen’s GPS direction, repeatedly
stumbling, not looking where they are going. Burgoyne clarifies the intention
behind his work ‘was to explore a space’,73 citing de Certeau’s concepts related
to people in place and space: ‘The “system” in which they move is too vast to
be able to fix them in one place, but too constraining for them ever to be able to
escape from and go into exile elsewhere. There is no longer an elsewhere.’74 This
would imply that Burgoyne perceives he must be perpetually in motion, scurrying
about the space yet unable to escape into another space, and perhaps also
(in our society so consumed by our ceaseless back and forth gaze) unable to
escape the watching documenting eye. In his text The Practice of Everyday Life,
de Certeau also argues that place ‘excludes the possibility of two things being
in the same location’.75 Viewed through a contemporary prism, de Certeau’s
two concepts – the first a system too vast yet also too constraining to allow an
escape to an elsewhere; the second the exclusion of two things being in the
same location – can be understood as related, particularly when considering
works concerned with the layering of histories in place. If different histories can
be layered, evoked and conjured through the same time and place, then an
exile from one narrative dimension of place into another would be effortless and
hence there would be more than one thing existing in a place at the same time.
In order to understand this more clearly we need only look to performance artist
Phil Smith’s ideas of layering histories in place. A decade after de Certeau’s text,
Smith coined the term Mythogeography.76 Mythogeography is the process by
which the individual brings their story to a place, thereby layering a multiplicity
of truths in a physical location. Smith also tells us that by being in a place we
change the condition of that place – we change the stories of that place and we
also influence people’s readings of that place.77 Therefore we can understand
that each place is inhabited by a multitude of different entities and personal and
historical readings. Indeed, Burgoyne discovers a variety of possibilities through
CONJURING 139

his physical process, ‘reiterating that space, one finds less familiarity … [one
finds an] elsewhere’.78 Burgoyne introduced his story (his mythogeography) to
the space and in this way may have found ‘an elsewhere’, perhaps by pacing
out the dead or cautiously re-stepping around his memory of a life. ‘Three, four,
five turn, six, seven, eight …’, Burgoyne’s voice is punctuated by birdsong, wind
and leaves being crushed by footfall; ‘nine, ten, eleven, twelve, turn, thirteen …’,
the documentation of the performance is now split into four images on the
screen ‘indicative of CCTV screens’,79 showing the actions from different points
of view. At Burgoyne’s last count, ‘twenty-five’, he stops, looks up from his
phone, appears to take in his surroundings and then walks back to the chapel.
By acting out and conjuring a contemporary struggle – the constant interruption
of a screen that blocks all direct experience of being in place into a context that
speaks of mortality – perhaps Burgoyne has paced out a warning: better to be
lost and physically experience place than to be trapped in a virtual space while
searching for the path.
Referencing Oppenheim’s transplant action, and a ‘loss’ different to Burgoyne’s
disruption by gaze and screen, M. Foá’s Lost Borrowed and Found (2006),80
made for Southwark Council’s participation in London Architecture week,
replaced life-size floor plans of ships and buildings associated with south-east
London into different park areas of the borough of Southwark (see Figure 4.2).
The largest drawing in the series, a 3,500-metre-long plan of London Bridge,
was drawn onto Honor Oak Park using a games pitch marker and gypsum.

Figure 4.2 M. Foá, Lost Borrowed and Found; The SS Great Britain, 2006, still from
video documentation of the performance in Southwark Park, London.
140 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

Walkers followed the white lines as though magnetically pulled across the park.
The lines had become, as Newman had noted in his text, what C. S. Peirce calls
an ‘“indexical sign”, […] as a track in the snow is to the animal that leaves it’.81
But, in this case, the sign not only referenced the practitioner but evidently also
conjured a safe path to follow. As an animal will follow a track, so a person will
follow a path, because, if well-trodden, that path signals previous repeated and
safe passage through a place and space. Even Thoreau, alone in the woods,
chose to walk along the rails that lead a clear way through, until ‘the bell rings
and I must get off the track and let the cars go by’.82 A smaller work in the series
Lost Borrowed and Found (2006), saw a top-down deck plan of the SS Great
Britain in Southwark Park. Even before the work was finished, children, seeing
the line as a games pitch mark, began throwing balls from one side to the other.
When they understood the drawing was a ship, they stopped, looked along the
curved bow line and, as if entranced – believing the object was actually there,83
the ship’s hull weighing through the trees – jumped, as though to clear water;
landing on their make-believe deck, they called out ‘I’m on the ship, I’m on the
ship’. The writer Bruce Chatwin, in his Anatomy of Restlessness, believes that
childhood experiences are enriched by interactions with paths more than with
people: ‘Children need paths to explore, to take bearings on the earth on which
they live, as a navigator takes bearings on familiar landmarks.’84 The SS Great
Britain’s top-down deck plan remained a visible path for a number of days before
weather and footfall gradually rubbed it away.
The South African artist Robin Rhode plays with the line of a drawn ship in his
work Untitled (Landing) (2005). Rhode, inspired by a schoolboy initiation ritual
‘into the high school subculture’85 of drawing objects onto the wall and then
forcing the younger kids ‘to interact with the drawing’,86 performs with his own
drawings, and in so doing plays with a slippage of dimensions. In his works, he
strives to be with ‘[o]bjects … not actually there but appear[ing] to be’.87 The still
images of his actions are both documentation and the work, because, through
his performance and the documentation of that performance, he conjures within
the flatness of the photographic image a merging of the three-dimensional and
the two-dimensional. In Untitled (Landing), Rhode appears to be struggling up
steep stairs, hauling a black outline that describes a rowing boat; as he interacts
with the two-dimensional line that pretends to be a three-dimensional form,
his stooped physical pose suggests the drawn form is remarkably heavy. It is
through Rhode’s physicality, as he playfully performs an impossible interaction
with the drawn line, that the different dimensions – his own three-dimensional
self and that of his two-dimensional drawing – merge into one within the two-
dimensional photographic image.
In her chapter ‘A century under the sign of the line: Drawing and its extension
(1910–2010)’,88 Catherine de Zegher defines drawing in the twentieth century.
‘With line as the prime element of a language concerned with the imitation of
CONJURING 141

reality, drawing could be both a reliably accurate representation of’ the observed
and ‘a poetically inspired’ imagined ‘representation’.89 Perhaps this delineation,
this marking out of things observed, might also be considered part of the collective
falsehood of drawing because, as has been addressed in the introduction to this
chapter, many practitioners realize there is a sleight of hand in marking a two-
dimensional surface when it proposes to represent a three-dimensional object.
Rhode performs this sleight of hand as prankster and magician, revealing the
falsehoods of the medium and at the same time celebrating the marvels of the
illusions therein. As the art critic and writer Charles Darwent describes in his text
Dreams, ‘[t]he dialogue decides how we re-cast 3 dimensions as two, … how
we shrink a mountain down to paper size or imply a source of light’.90 However,
when the practitioner retains awareness of this falsehood throughout the
production of a drawing, rather than conceding to a convention of received signs
and methods, something new occurs. Perhaps alertness is retained in the work,
as when prompted by the perspective slip of a visual Doppler shift or a multiple
dimension merge (which Rhode deftly achieves). The visual surprise sharpens
the audience’s perceptions, heightening their awareness to the possibilities of
different dimensions existing in space. In his 1993 ‘Essays on painting’, Maurice
Merleau-Ponty explains that perspective drawings show a ‘conjuring away’91
of space, perhaps then the visual surprise occurs in the moment of slippage
when something is reduced from its original three-dimensional state into a two-
dimensional sign, beguiling the witness and suspending the practitioner in the
very act of drawing. This slippage of dimensions may go some way towards
describing a conjuring up (rather than away) in the making and the witnessing of
a drawing, because, in the case of Rhode’s documented actions with drawings,
while his still images do ‘conjure away’,92 by merging his three-dimensional form
into the two dimensions of his drawings, within the two-dimensional photographic
image a visual surprise has been successfully conjured up.
Alongside the merging of dimensions in Rhode’s images, there is also at play
the concept of suspended motion. In a 2008 Modern Painters article, Rhode
discusses his works with the artist William Kentridge. Rhode explains: ‘I’m
beginning to understand performance differently. It’s taking the movement …’93
Kentridge finishes Rhode’s sentence: ‘And holding it.’94 Rhode agrees.
Since Eadweard Muybridge’s extensive photographic examination of human
and animal motion (1872),95 practitioners have physically satisfied their desire to
hold a moment in time by fabricating the suspension of motion. In his work Leap
in the Void, the painter and action artist Yves Klein offers an early and notable
example of captured suspension. Klein declared that ‘in order to paint space he
must go there by his own means’ and that ‘he must be capable of levitation’.96
In an iconic photo-montaged image, Klein is captured as though flying from a
window, the tarpaulin that catches him is masked out, and hidden in the layering
of a number of still images. A holding still of animation, in performance, film
142 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

and drawn or documented imagery, best describes the position in contrast to


movement that appears present in Rhode’s works. His drawings are a capture
of suspended motion, and, through his interactions, he appears to activate a
reanimation – and that moment is held suspended – in a series of sequential
still images.

Redrawing the self through technology


and performance
EILEEN AGAR / ECHO MORGAN / BIRGITTA HOSEA
The Surrealist painter Eileen Agar’s work Lady Bird (1936) evidences a powerful
and early analogue example, through photographic manipulation, both of
holding motion and of altering reality. Lady Bird is a photograph of Agar taken
by the Hungarian writer Joseph Bard, and within it Agar manages an exploratory
example of performance drawing and conjuring. Agar transforms her naked
self by holding in front of her a shimmering sheet of cellophane painted with
drawn lines and symbols that camouflage her face and body. The surface of the
photograph is also embellished with black-and-white patterns and lines, and
the cellophane’s reflective surface, in part creased into random shadows and in
other areas gleaming with light, glare and reflection, contributing to the surreal
quality of this image. The pose Agar strikes suggests she is performing these
drawings within her own dimensional space, somehow emitting the lines and
shapes from her hands and suspending them in the air around her, yet caught
within the two-dimensional still image in which she has also been captured. Agar,
in response to being selected to participate in a 1933 Surrealist exhibition in
London, explained: ‘Surrealism opened up new possibilities in subject matter for
me. It is a constructive art movement, bent on freeing the mind from overdoses
of common sense and opening hilarious new avenues of free thought.’97 Agar’s
multidisciplinary practice, which includes sculpture (from found and constructed
objects), photographic montage, painting and performance, clearly evidences her
fearless appetite for exploring creative concepts, and in so doing she produced
some pioneering works that prefigured the Happenings and performances of
New York by some thirty years.98
More recent technological developments (since the 1980s, from analogue
to digital and to virtual), with filming through multiple and various recording
devices now (relatively financially) accessible, have allowed contemporary live
artists an ever-broadening spectrum of documentation and position works by
such practitioners as the Chinese artist Echo Morgan not only in a different
time and culture from Agar but also in a greatly expanded spectrum of visual
and dimensional possibilities – employing the live, the recorded and the various
methods in which those two materials may now be worked together in live time.
CONJURING 143

Morgan, echoing Agar’s Ladybird work, develops and advances the


concepts of drawing the body and conjuring an alternative reality, using her
own naked body as the surface for her drawing and the tool for her narrative
performance. Documentation images of Morgan’s work contain various and
momentary differences in her facial and bodily gestures and in the shapes
of the flow of water that streaks the paint covering her body. Presenting the
viewer with signs that bring together multiple concepts, Morgan’s durational live
performance work Be the Inside of the Vase (2012) addresses both cultural and
sexual politics. Her naked body covered in white paint is decorated with cobalt
blue bamboo stalks and leaves; in this way, Morgan both imitates (her body
shape echoing a traditional floor standing vase) and references the blue-and-
white ceramics made in China from as early as the fourteenth century. These
signs (the blue-and-white and the painted bamboo) are so iconic that they are
internationally recognized and automatically understood as antique, historical
and Asian, and so the audience may think they are in familiar comfortable
territory; yet the familiar ceramic pattern when painted onto Morgan’s naked
figure and in the context of a live performance strikes a disturbing visual. There
is, in Morgan’s durational and sometimes motionless performance, an elegance
and grace that capture the viewer’s gaze, particularly in the case of her Be
the Inside of the Vase (2017; Draw to Perform),99 performed in a large open
space bustling with various other actions; yet Morgan’s stillness, isolation and
suspended animation attract the eye, suggesting that there may be something
troubled, perhaps even desolate, in the work. Morgan explains that the work
was inspired by something her father had said to her; he told her: ‘Women
should be like vase, smooth, decorative and empty inside!’100 This extreme
objectification of women and the rejection of Morgan’s individual identity and
growth were thankfully countered by her mother’s very different perspective:
‘Don’t be a vase, pretty but empty inside,’ she told Morgan, ‘be the inside, be
the quality!’101 The reasoning behind Morgan’s father’s comment is perhaps
even more tragic than might first be imagined. He was an obsessive collector
of Song Dynasty vases, had neglected his family and fallen into debt. He also
borrowed money from Morgan’s ‘mother to send the vases to auction but they
were all confiscated for being stolen goods’.102
Morgan navigates this tragic and complicated childhood trauma magnificently
through her ‘heart breaking’103 performance, in a number of stages. First through
‘guided projection’,104 conjuring the still beauty of an iconic form (an ‘[o]bject […]
not actually there but appear[ing] to be’)105 onto her own self and then by melting
the blue bamboo away with water and song, she releases herself from being an
objectified relic, and in this way she also loses her father’s reduction, stepping
into and re-becoming her own self again, gifting her deliverance to herself and
the audience. Defining this work Morgan says: ‘This is my voice, my story, my
childhood’; and then, perhaps seeking the other’s continued assistance, she
asks: ‘please break my vase’.106
144 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

Figure 4.3 Birgitta Hosea, White Lines, 2009–10, still from the documentation of
a performance at the Holographic Serendipity show, Kinetica Art Fair and Shunt, a
performance venue at that time in the underground tunnels beneath London Bridge
station.

The practitioner’s body as surface and subject, through drawing animation


and digital technology, is central to the British/Swedish artist Birgitta Hosea’s
work White Lines (2009–10) (see Figure 4.3).107 Inspired by the Chinese artist
Huan Zhang’s performance Family Tree (2001), in which he writes Chinese
physiognomy on his face until his identity is completely obscured by the black
ink, Hosea’s White Lines was first performed as research for her practice-based
PhD dissertation ‘Substitutive bodies and constructed actors: A practice-based
investigation of animation as performance’.108 Created specifically for the Musion
Eyeliner holographic projection system, Hosea – whose research practice and
teaching in the field of expanded animation has contributed to the genre109 –
explains that White Lines (2009–10)110 was also inspired by the 1901 film by
Georges Méliès, L’homme à la tête en caoutchouc (The Man with the Rubber
Head). In the film, Méliès, using early examples of photographic trickery, double
exposure, viewpoint perspective and masking, appears to inflate a replica of his
own head until it becomes so full of air it explodes. Hosea explains that White Lines
is ‘a hybrid of Live performance and animation in which a holographic projection
of white lines came together to form a giant head’.111 The work begins with a
seemingly black empty space, then very slowly lines of bright white light begin to
appear, but they do not fall onto a flat plane as we might expect; extraordinarily,
they hover in space as they shape a three-dimensional form around Hosea’s
CONJURING 145

body and remain suspended there in the shape of a giant head. Thinking back
to the work of Robin Rhode investigated in the section ‘Relocating place and
site’, in which Rhode interacts with a two-dimensional drawing and employs
the photographic record of his action to reduce his presence so as to exist in
the same dimension as the drawing, Hosea, using holographic projection, has
expanded this concept to its ultimate limit, and by

attempt[ing] to animate myself into existence by drawing with light … in the


performance I drew on myself in a mimicry of the actions taken to make
the video projection. So I was performing the making of a drawing within the
drawing itself.112

Hosea does literally exist in the same dimension as her drawing. The head,
constructed from drawn light lines, appears to be conjured from thin air; this
is smoke, lights and mirrors on an advanced level. Another interesting aspect
of this work in relation to drawing in performance is that Hosea, taking a non-
matrixed position in the work,113 merges her hand-drawing with cutting-edge
technology, and, by using both the earliest means of mark making and one
of the most recent technological developments, clearly evidences the leap
that has occurred in photography and film over the past century when used to
conjure spectacle or mirage in performance works. Hosea’s work also signposts
the possible innovative explorations that can be undertaken when mixtures of
primary, analogue and digital visualization are employed together in live drawing
performance.

Reinterpreting narratives
PHOEBE BOSWELL / WILLIAM POPE.L / JOAN JONAS
A mixing together of the primary hand-drawn mark with digitally visualized
animation and a narrative that dances with time in performance are some of
the elements at play in the 2016 film Dear Mr. Shakespeare (see Figure 4.4).
Written and performed as part of the British Council’s Shakespeare Lives
programme (2016) by the British Kenyan artist Phoebe Boswell and directed by
British Nigerian film-maker Shola Amoo,114 Dear Mr. Shakespeare investigates
how Shakespeare addresses issues of race in his Elizabethan play Othello, while
giving the audience a collage of contemporary images and sounding words that
conjure a myriad of visual notions into the mind’s eye.
The various ways in which this play has been reinterpreted, and how these
readings resonate with contemporary culture, are looked at through the eyes of
a visual artist, Boswell herself. The film opens with a scene echoing a life drawing
session: Boswell is sitting at her drawing board facing her subject – a black man
146 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

Figure 4.4 Phoebe Boswell, Dear Mr. Shakespeare, 2016, film still. Courtesy of the
artist and AMI Productions.

playing Othello (the British musician and actor Ashley ‘Bashy’ Thomas), this is
indeed a life class although not of the traditional kind, because in this public
context (we the audience are watching) Boswell has brought a balance; there
is no inequality of modesty, the subject and the practitioner are both clothed.
Boswell puts on her glasses, studies the man and, lifting a stick of charcoal,
strokes it over the white paper. A shower of black dust rains into her lap. As
Kovats poignantly observed concerning Butades’s daughter’s drawing of a
shadow, charcoal is ‘a marker from the source of light and shadow itself’.115
Thomas, playing Othello, speaks Boswell’s words to the camera: ‘I only told her
my stories of the places I’ve been, of the trauma the drama the things that I’ve
seen’. Boswell has stepped Othello out of the play to confide in the audience;
he continues: ‘the far away the exotic, it all seeped into her heart, that’s the only
voodoo I do, you can’t keep us apart.’ Here, Boswell has performed a moment of
chicanery, a magic that extracts a fictional character out of his early seventeenth-
century context and puts words in his mouth to speak to the audience in the here
and now.
In her letter to Shakespeare, Boswell slips time, breaks the fourth wall and then
brings her audience into the performance, as both witness and confidant. This is
the medium of film, a world of light and shadow, and Boswell is concerned with
the lights and shadows of race. While she attempts to draw Othello visually with
charcoal and aurally in spoken words, she is rendering a shadow of a character
conjured in Shakespeare’s original text, so it could be said that she is also
capturing the light illuminating a man who is himself shadowing Shakespeare’s
invention of a man. Thus, Boswell, in this documentation of her performance
CONJURING 147

drawing, captures and conjures with both shadow and light in multiple ways.
And now dressed in a long dark formal gown – the bodice decorated with black
beads and strings of white buttons forming a necklace (echoing cowry shell
jewellery and currency) – Boswell, her hands blackened in charcoal, ‘the source
of light and shadow’,116 speaks to the camera. ‘Did you know Mr. Shakespeare,
for no one is sure, when you decided to draw Othello as a Moor, that his
blackness his otherness would always raise queries …?’ The image changes
from Boswell speaking to the camera to an African woman dressed in a flowing
Dutch Wax gown walking along a contemporary London street, past boxes of
oranges, limes and pineapples, the colourful parade resonating heinous histories
of colonialist trade. Then, the film shows Boswell again, looking into the camera
and speaking directly to the audience, so that we the audience become her
Mr. Shakespeare. Boswell continues: ‘In your own words Mr. Shakespeare you
place black as the devil and create characters who speak race at an astounding
level.’ A dancer117 writhes and flays around her as she speaks. ‘[B]ut then you
subvert the whole thing with the poise and the grace that you give to Othello.’
Now the dancer puts his arms above Boswell’s shoulders and for a moment
he seems to give her a pair of dark fluttering wings; then he is gone. Boswell
continues: ‘and it made me think a little of the art world’s view of the other’. She
pauses and wonders:

as I am a brown female who has yet to discover how to be in the mainstream


of the art world’s white male tower … they like my stories but from a distance
those great titans of power … anyway Mr. Shakespeare …

While the Jamaican cultural theorist Stuart Hall ‘changed the trajectory of creators
like Steve McQueen’118 and ‘inspired generations of students into intellectual
and activist cultural production’,119 problematic racial reception still continues
in contemporary social and creative practice, requiring Boswell, tenacious in
her direct approach, to break from her filmic reverie. She shakes the audience
into the here and now by calling out a disturbing truth, the ‘dismal’120 position
of a woman of colour in the art world today. This regrettable state of affairs,
confirmed by Jean Fisher when she stated ‘the prevailing establishment view’121
that the art world ‘was the domain of white men from which the arts of women
and ethnic “others” were to be excluded as inferior derivative’,122 is lamentably
present today, and still many establishments continue to resist transcultural
expansion, perpetuating an insular reductive and regressive status quo.
The writer and cultural critic Cynthia Carr’s text In the Discomfort Zone
describes how the American performance artist William Pope.L and his Tompkins
Square Crawl (1991) ‘illustrated quite painfully what racism does’.123 Pope.L
attempted to crawl across New York’s Tompkins Square holding a flower pot and
wearing a suit as a comment on ‘the African-American tradition of struggle’.124
148 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

His performance was stopped by a distressed black spectator who told him: ‘I
wear a suit like that to work […] You make me look like a jerk.’125 Carr explains:
‘White artist Chris Burden once crawled down a street […] but he had the
privilege of being identified as an artist […] or a lunatic […] not the representative
of all white people.’126 The America curator Stuart Horodner, in his text Working
with William, explains Pope.L’s position: ‘he puts himself at risk […] rendering
racism and confounding contexts … William is always relevant, always brings an
intelligent inquisition and disarming humor […] He’s a Fluxus guy.’127
Pope.L’s persistently subversive performance practice energetically tramples
racial stereotyping. Storyteller, prankster and jester combined, he reinterprets
clichés of prejudice in a contemporary context, continuing to challenge
perceptions and assumptions, often conjuring for his audience an uncomfortable
surprise. In Bocio, Pope.L’s presentation at the symposium Issues in African
Contemporary Art, 2000, he addressed the critic Cair Craword’s comparison
of his work to West African bocio (empowered cadaver) magical objects, and
said ‘how come one of them [white people] knows more about me than I do?’128
Pope.L then outlined the intentions behind his practice:

I make objects and performances which act on the world in an uncertain and
splintered fashion … within this dynamic of ‘things- at-odds’ there is also the
intention that things interact with the world in specific ways … I hope that the
creation of a state of rupture within contrary art works will foster a pro-active
meditative life in those who apprehend the work.129

In a documentation photograph of his work Harriet Tubman Spinning the


Universe (1992), Pope.L, standing on top of a ladder in Stuart Horodner’s
East Side Manhattan gallery, is drawing directly onto a wall using charcoal and
peanut butter. It is not clear whether this drawing was made as a performance,
although the image could be argued to present the action as so, because
Pope.L, balancing on the ladder in the middle of making the drawing, is fully
aware of the performing position a practitioner takes when being recorded in
the process of making a work. As has been defined in the introduction to this
chapter, performance drawing is a drawing that is performed while viewed by
an audience – and through the documentation process, which anticipates a
witness, a camera is also considered to be an audience. Harriet Tubman (the
African American abolitionist and humanitarian), her multiple limbs seemingly
wheeling round and round at great speed, cannot be stopped, and the peanut
butter from which she was formed was so persistent on the gallery wall that,
as Stuart Horodner bemoaned, the smell and the oil regularly seeped back to
the surface for years after the drawing had been removed, in this way Pope.L
achieved a repeated conjuring. It is unlikely that those who saw those peanut
stains interpreted them as a gift, yet still there is something of a subversive
CONJURING 149

interpretation of Derrida’s reading of Levinas’s idea, in Pope.L’s ‘Fluxus guy’130


type returning: ‘He will not have been (a) present but he will have made a gift by
not disappearing without leaving a trace. But leaving a trace is also to leave it,
to abandon it, not to insist upon it in a sign.’131 In the peanut oil reappearance
of Harriet Tubman Spinning the Universe, Pope.L and Tubman’s stories are
both conjured and retold. Continually and uniquely repositioning past narratives
into the present day, Pope.L refreshes audience’s reception of the racial and
historical. In 2003, he gave a presentation at Tate Modern’s Live Culture:
Performance and the Contemporary conference. Referencing a British colonial
interpretation of the African, from the moment he touched down on British soil up
until the moment he stepped back onto a plane to fly home to the USA, Pope.L.
spoke not one word of sense at all. Thus, for twenty minutes, his presentation
was babbled, burbled, blown, trilled, spat, popped, hissed, whizzed and banged
out rhythmically with his hands on the podium. The audience, astonished into
stunned silence, occasionally interrupted with embarrassed guffaws. That he is
African American positions Pope.L, as Cynthia Carr clearly understood, fixed
to the problematic past and present racist gaze, yet interwoven through his
performances and two-dimensional works can be evidenced his acutely clear
and present view of the human condition, this being so it is possible to describe
this ‘fluxus guy’132 artist who ‘hope[s] that the creation of a state of rupture within
contrary art works will foster a proactive meditative life in those who apprehend
the work’133 as a subversive storyteller and maker whose work gifts his audience
with conjuring and surprise.
From a different generation race and gender, the octogenarian American
performance artist Joan Jonas, in her multimedia work Lines in the Sand, also tells
and makes stories – her Caucasian multilayered mixed media, live time recorded
and drawn performances tend towards a gendered focus steeped in myth and
contemporary narrative and are made from the position of ‘having the privilege
of being identified as an artist […] not the representative of all white people’.134 In
her retelling of the story of Helen of Troy, Jonas dances in a frock while sounding
and drawing. First commissioned by Documenta XI in 2002, Jonas performed
the work in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in 2004, transposing Helen in Egypt
by the American poet H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) ‘to present-day Las Vegas, with the
Luxor Hotel as a key motif’.135 In conversation with Robert Ayres, Jonas explains:
‘I went to Arizona and I was thinking about memories of the American landscape
[…] from before the Europeans came here. The southwest is a perfect example
of different cultures layered on top of each other and next to each other.’136
In Lines in the Sand, Jonas wove together real-time live camera relay,
projecting the visual here and now (varied camera views of the performance
while it happened) and past time from there and then, still and moving imagery
(projections of spectacular vividly coloured dream like neon displays interlaced
with open desert landscape). ‘As soon as I started working with video […] I
150 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

got more interested in complexity and in building the links between things.’137
The multimedia in Lines in the Sand also comprised dance, drawing and the
spoken word, offering many different motions and various views for the audience
to see as the live bodies in action are simultaneously juxtaposed with live and
documented time-based media. Conjuring the present and the past together
into the now, Jonas states: ‘it interests me that people can see the performance
in such different ways, they can miss one thing and see something else […] one
person’s interpretation and experience of it can be slightly different to the next.’138
Clothed in a calf-length short-sleeved floral patterned dress with under trousers
(gently subverting contemporary fine art performers’ usual choice of being naked
or wearing black trouser costumes), Jonas, wielding a rod (approximately the
length of her body) attached with a lump of chalk, performed her drawing onto
a large sheet of black paper on the stage floor, gracefully gesturing white lines
back and forth. She then appeared to use her chalk lines as directions to step-
dance around. The British writer Tracy Warr, in her text What a Performance
Is, explains that Jonas ‘sees her work as in-between dance and sculpture’139
and her ‘performance … repetitive drawing with a piece of chalk attached to
a branch … gestures at shamanism’.140 Since the 1960s, Jonas has made live
works combining video, drawing, dance, installation and sound, performed in
gallery spaces and also in rural and urban landscapes. The now retired director
of the John Hansard Gallery, Professor Stephen Foster, in his catalogue text for
Jonas’s 2004 exhibition at the gallery, explained that in Jonas’s practice drawing
‘runs through the works over a long period’.141 Jonas’s continued exploration
of her many and varied approaches to drawing, whether marking on mirrors
or blackboards, drawing herself onto her own costume or tracing lines on the
ground or onto paper to dance around, have been pivotal to the emergence
of performance drawing as an identifiable genre; yet, as Jonas enthusiastically
employs technologies alongside her direct hand to mark drawings today, she
ensures her practice is not fixed in the 1960s. Once ‘describ[ing] herself as
an “electronic sorceress,”’142 in a 2018 interview Jonas outlined her continued
interested in shamanism and the role women play in society as healers and
sorcerers. And, recalling the online live work made for Tate Modern in 2013, she
noted some of the illusionistic influences that continue now to inform her practice.

J.J.: ‘I composed a video projection in my loft in New York, which was
projected in that room in the Tate, so I was simply moving in the space
of projection … What I liked about that was that it was illusionistic, so
you appear and disappear – its looks as if you’re really embedded in
the space …’
MKP: ‘A sort of conjuring? When you put paper over yourself and disappear
into the projection and when you wear a mask and come forward?’
CONJURING 151

J.J.: ‘Yes, I like very much that perception of the space being ambiguous, so
the audience doesn’t know exactly where you are. It’s three-dimensional
but it’s not, and, also, it’s mysterious and magical. I often went to magic
shows as a child, and the idea of magic and sleight of hand had a big
effect on me.’ 143

The dancers’ hands behind Boswell’s shoulders momentarily becoming her


wings, Pope.L’s peanut butter Harriet Tubman reappearing on a New York wall,
and Jonas and her drawing appearing and disappearing, in these various visual
illusions these surprising conjured gifts, the reinterpreted narratives, are heighten
and transported from their original form into shifted visions, thus offering the
audience the possibility to alter their reception and, in this way, vision, narrative
and audience are each transformed.

Merging disciplines and bridging


technologies
KREIDER O’LEARY / CHRISTIAN NOLD
Beginning their collaboration in the 2000s, the performance collective Kreider +
O’Leary – comprising Kristen Kreider, a poet in expanded contemporary writing
and art practice, and James O’Leary, an architect and installation artist – embrace
a multiple of technologies and mediums, ‘operat[ing] on the edges of disciplinary
boundaries through an integrated visual-spatial-poetic practice’.144 While their
individual professions (architecture and poetry) investigate markedly different
fields, the bridges they create together to link those disciplines (‘building … links
between things’)145 allow for an exuberant and vigorous examination of place.
Interacting together in a site, Kreider + O’Leary revisualize that space with the
live body, the spoken word, drawing and time-based media. These interactions,
such as Immolation Triptych, performed at The Drawing Field workshops at
Camberwell College of Arts, UAL, in 2009,146 are laced through with conceptual
and visual suggestions, triggered by those various interactions (see Figure 4.5).
And, rather than the experience of place and/or the audience’s interpretation
of that place, being interrupted through the prism of a screen (as has been
investigated in the section ‘Relocating place and site’ in the discussion of Greig
Burgoyne’s 2017 work Walk/Count/Flow/Lost), Kreider + O’Leary’s interactions
intensely and directly expose and re-contextualise the site,147 renewing the
viewer’s direct physical and conceptual experiences of place. Engaging with the
final three scenes of Andrei Tarkovsky’s film work Nostalghia (1983), Immolation
Triptych translates and transforms each of these three scenes through word,
image, object and action as well as through the spatial design and construction
152 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

of each shot. By refiguring the narrative and visuals of time-based media in their
live work, Kreider + O’Leary also refigure the space in which they are working.
During the live performance, resonances and emotions are conjured out from
the film into the real time and the place of the live work as it happens, and they
become interlaced into the resonances, emotions and narratives already present
in that site in which they are performing. ‘With archaeological levels of detail,
they […] use images, video and architectural elements to explore the site as the
fulcrum for a number of inter-related systems: from the spatial and historical to the
social or artistic.’148 Theirs is a performance drawing practice celebrating a multi-
and cross-disciplinary process while also joyously employing technologies in an
exploratory manner. As Kreider + O’Leary ‘operate on the edges of disciplinary
boundaries’, they are referencing the performative Happenings of the 1960s and
1970s (see Chapter 3 on communicating) and the film-making of the 1980s, at
the same time signposting the possibilities of materiality and concept in future
expanded performance drawing.
Navigating an alternative and exploratory employment of technologies,
the British artist Christian Nold fuses together different scientific and virtual
methodologies in his practice, reinvestigating place by revealing hidden elements
in place. Nold’s Emotional Mapping series ‘explores people’s relationship with their
local environment’149 and displays the individual’s hidden emotional experiences
in, and of, place. By ingeniously ‘commandeering technology away from its current

Figure 4.5 Kreider + O’Leary, Immolation Triptych, 2009, still from the documentation
of a performance at The Drawing Field workshops at Camberwell College of Arts, UAL.
Photo: Kreider + O’Leary.
CONJURING 153

frequent default position – of separating person from place’150 (smartphones,


film and photography all position screens between people and place, blocking
direct experience of place) – Nold, weaving together GPS technology with
galvanic skin tissue technology, creates visual evidence of people’s emotional
experiences as they interact with a specific place. His Emotional Mappings
were composed during his Bio Mapping workshops across the UK, Europe and
America. Those attending the workshops walked (individually) around selected
locations, their index finger taped with galvanic sensitive material and attached
to a GPS tracker. As the journeys of the participants were recorded through GPS
data onto a virtual street map, Nold collected the information and then gathered
the participants’ emotional responses (from the galvanic skin tissue readings),
reconfiguring them as graphs and superimposing them (in peaks and troughs)
onto the street map: peaks registering, for instance, a shock at a road crossing
and troughs registering perhaps periods of relaxation. The galvanic sensitive
finger band, reading data from the moisture and temperature of the skin, is basic
‘lie detector’ technology, but through his subversive use of this methodology
layered together with navigational data, rather than revealing an abrupt exposure,
Nold manages a gentle and double conjuring. Nold’s Emotional Mappings
reverse the separation between person and place and, through fashioning maps
to register location layered with the individual’s emotion, reveal the individual’s
direct emotional interaction within a place.
Nold’s Emotional Mappings have shown that the invisible GPS signals that
travel from satellites through environments to telecommunications devices
can be revealed.151 And, as those signals are revealed, it can be understood
that contemporary ‘spaces are threaded through [in an electromagnetic river],
with [all manner of] multiple invisible signals. […] generated by mobile phones,
security devices, television, radio and microwave’.152 In the same way in
which electromagnetic signals travel through place, so too do sound waves,
moving from one place to another. Sound is perceived by the ear, tracked and
followed in the mind’s eye and, as the American curator and writer Elizabeth
Finch explains in her text, ‘The drawing as instrument’, by ‘[u]nderstanding that
our visual memories are linked to the sonic – we can know something visually
by hearing it’.153 In this way, it can be understood that sound can be drawing
moving through place and that sound is also an integral material component of
performance drawing practice.
In this chapter, what is meant by conjuring, in the context of performance
drawing, has been identified, and works related to shadow and memory and
practice that plays with the relocating of sites have all been examined. How
practitioners refigure the self during their process and the various ways in which
narratives have been reinterpreted in the practice of performance drawing have
also been investigated. Lastly, the use of multiple and various technologies, and
how merged disciplines within performance drawing practice might continue to
expand the genre, have been considered.
154 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

Performance drawing works in which sound moving through place can be


understood as drawing and in which sound is an integral material component of
the performance drawing process are now examined.

Sound drawing in performance


ALISON KNOWLES / KATIE PATTERSON / M. FOÁ / SUSAN PHILIPSZ /
JORDAN MCKENZIE
While a drawing made with marks journeys across a two-dimensional area –
tracing, delineating and defining that space, and thereby controlling that space –
a drawing made in sound is a travelling sonic wave that leaves no trace. As
that sound wave draws through a three-dimensional place, exploring place and
its own source in relation to place, it moves from one area to another and is
impacted on by the materials it encounters. Despite the differences between
the haptic (felt and seen) and the sonic (heard and visually imagined), the
American curator and writer Anthony Huberman understands that drawing and
sound have shared properties; he clarifies those as being ‘more draft like […]
quicker […] something to do with the line, and to do with mark making’.154 While
visible work may engage a lingering gaze, sonic work can only be experienced
in the moment of the audible event. Sound conjures images received by the ear
and translated by the mind’s eye. It might therefore be understood that sound
requires hearing, memory and imagination in order to engage in an experience of
‘know[ing] something visually by hearing it’.155
In Chapter 3 (on communication), Alison Knowles’s practice in relation to The
Drawing Center’s Drawing Papers 20: Performance Drawings and Knowles’s
event score works have been examined. In her text ‘The drawing as instrument’
for the 2001 series of solo performance drawing presentations at The Drawing
Center, Elizabeth Finch considers Knowles’s works in relation to performance
drawing and sound. Finch writes that Knowles’s works ‘return to the principle
of process as it relates to a host of factors: among them, sound, collaboration,
audience, chance and the studio versus the site of presentation’.156 Finch’s
text, subtitled ‘The acoustic event’, confirms how sound (its presence and/or
absence) is integral to performance drawing and explains that Knowles seeks
‘to create performances that can be enacted by others’,157 stipulating that she
acts with objects rather than imposing herself onto those objects, ‘making
present … rather than bringing forth objects’.158 In her 2001 Drawing Center
performance, ‘Knowles shapes [handmade papers that transform into a paper
suit] … around a performer, while reciting accompanying text.’159 The objects
that are components of Knowles’s performances (some are used repeatedly, e.g.
Loose Pages (1983–2001) – papers that transform into costume, 1983–2001,
CONJURING 155

and Giant Bean Turner 2000) are also traces of her performances, and as such
they are important for both her exhibition and her performance works. Knowles’s
2001 Drawing Center performance also consisted of ‘other visual and sonic
events together with poetry – her own and provided by friends’160 and, while
offering objects and actions for the observing eye, through her recited texts and
various performed sounds Knowles conjured images into the audience’s mind’s
eye. In April 2009, she led a workshop at the October Gallery London for UAL’s
International Centre for Fine Art Research (ICFAR). During the workshop, she
displayed her paper constructs (paper sleeves for arms and legs, and a helmet)
and offered those participating in the workshop the opportunity to try on the
helmet. Participants reported that the sound of Knowles’s hands smoothing the
paper helmet around their ears might have been wind and rain or perhaps even
fire and that photographic documentation of Knowles’s constructions do not
describe them well, because they are made from flax, which crackles loudly
when touched. And, when moved and turned, the beans trapped between the
paper set off a noise like monsoon rain or a hurricane wind rushing through
trees.161 A workshop participant spoke to Knowles about sound in her practice:

Participant: ‘You told us earlier that you felt your practice was about sound
…’

Knowles: ‘Performance and sound, I don’t use sound isolated from any
activity, it’s a kind of focus of my work.’

Participant: ‘Would you say that you draw with sound?’

Knowles: ‘That’s very poetic that I’m drawing with sound, I wouldn’t
have thought of it, you did – at the drawing exhibition I did a
performance at the opening that was my contribution.’

Participant: ‘Were you drawing?’

Knowles: ‘No, I was performing with the bean turner, the huge one, and
in the exhibition I had some still work … I think I read some
text [from The Natural Assemblage] before we walked onto the
street with it – and up to the end of the block.’162

Despite Knowles declining the concept that sound in her work might be
interpreted as drawing, still Tom McDonough, in his text ‘City scale and discreet
events: Performance in urban space 1959–1969’, makes comparisons between
Knowles’s street performances and the process of drawing when he describes her
performances as expressing ‘the fundamental logic of the drawing: the production
of a line that … marked the separation of and joint between two spaces’.163 And in
as much as sound travels through place, beginning at its source and spreading out
156 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

in a directional wave, the motion of sound holds the ‘fundamental logic of drawing’
and its linearity ‘mark[s] the separation of and joint between two spaces’.164
McDonough also defines Alison Knowles’s street performances as intentions to
enact drawings into the real world ‘and to be inscribed into the realm of everyday
life’.165 It can be said that sound as it examines and is impacted by the spatial and
material qualities of place temporarily, in real time, does indeed ‘inscribe [itself]
into … everyday life’. When speaking about her Street Performances (1959–69)
works, Knowles, realizing the impact of sound onto place and practitioner and
also how sound can reveal condition of place for practitioner, explains that ‘[t]he
task’ primarily was for the collaborators, when they went onto the street to make
a piece, ‘to become competent in listening to their sound underneath silence
or noise’.166 When listening to the sounds in Knowles’s work it can be said that,
as those sounds move from one place to another exploring space, they conjure
traces, pictured in the mind’s eye. In this way, the sounds in her works could be
interpreted as drawings conjured through place.167
The British artist Katie Paterson’s 2007 work Vatnajokull (the sound of),
reveals an extraordinary exploration of place through sound and technology
conjured into and interpreted by the listener’s mind’s eye. In June 2007, Paterson
dropped a hydrophone into a glacier in Greenland and rigged up the necessary
audio equipment which was connected to a mobile phone set to auto answer.
For a week, mobile phones anywhere in the world could telephone the glacier
and hear it melting. Paterson, in her online diary entry for 7 June 2007 noted,
‘the phone was jammed yesterday with calls. If you didn’t get through please
try again’.168 Her Vatnajokull (the sound of) could be seen as a contemporary
echo of the bell that Henry David Thoreau heard through a wood. As the sounds
of the bell came from the church to his ear they were ‘to some extent original
sound … not merely a repetition … but partly the voice of the wood’.169 Thoreau
understood that, as the sonic wave from the bell bounced, reflected, refracted
and resonated through the trees, branches and undergrowth to reach the place
where he was listening, the waves absorbed the character of the place and
became sounds woven through with the timbre of the place itself. Vatnajokull
(the sound of) travelled in a very different manner, contained in a device (the
phone’s receiver), propelled and broadcast via satellite, the sound of the iceberg
was coloured by technology and the vast space between its location and the
satellite, all these elements were conjured into the audience’s listening ear to
trigger images in their mind’s eye. The sound artist Chris Watson also recorded
Vatnajokull,170 capturing the sound of the melting glacier on a disc, as the
sounds are heard through the listener’s personal audio equipment (CD player/
laptop, etc.), perhaps it might be said that Watson’s Vatnajokull contains less
distortion from materials of place and space, yet in Watson’s work there is also
a greater dislocation – the sounds having been separated completely from their
original place.
CONJURING 157

Sound’s potent capacity to describe the condition and character of place


is evidenced in Line Down Manhattan, a performance action by Foá made on
New Year’s Eve 2003. Initially intended as a prayer for the closing of one year
and the beginning of another, in the form of a temporary trace (left by a lump
of raw chalk pulled on a length of rope – roughly 14 miles) down Broadway
(from Broadway Bridge to Battery Park), it is the sound in the documentation
of the action that conjures place into the listener’s ear and mind’s eye. While
the film (recorded on a hand-held camcorder) reduces the journey to a series
of monotonous images (white chalk dashed, skipped and slipped over various
pavements), people’s voices, the different languages, vendors hawking wares,
different music, pedestrian’s conversations, children playing, traffic noises, these
sounds are what best describe the districts passed through, and in their variety
of identifiable characteristics they conjure a sense of the multicultural place. Yet
there is also another possible conjuring at play in this work, because the shape of
the island of Manhattan is so iconic, the title of the work, Line Down Manhattan,
does enough alone to conjure an image, in which case perhaps there was no
need to make the work at all. Even so, it was in the physical action of walking
and recording the length of Manhattan that Foá found the sonic harmonics
that expanded and revealed the various and particular characteristics of place.
Therefore, it can be said that the work exists in three different forms: first, the
walking action – being a temporary physical motion through space measuring
while tracing and investigating evidence of place; secondly, the documentation –
capturing some visual imagery and revealing a sonic discovery of the descriptive
harmonics of place; and thirdly, the title alone – triggering a visual conjuring into
the individual’s mind’s eye.
After completing Line Down Manhattan Foá learned of The Great White Way
22 miles, 9 years one Street (2000–9) a work by Pope.L in which he – dressed
as superman – crawled down the length of Broadway. Pope.L’s edgy subversive
action shone a light on the problematic racial implications of Foá’s white
English chalk line, particularly as Broadway follows the indigenous American
Wickquasgeck Trail.171 Consequently, Foá renounced the chalk trace and prefers
to emphasize the fleeting image conjured by the title into the audience’s mind’s eye
and the sonic descriptions of people and place revealed in the documentation.
How sound describes and explores place and space is key to Susan Philipsz’s
work The Lost Reflection.172 Philipsz, who uses her own voice as material in her
works, explained she began to understand singing as ‘a sculptural experience in
your body space’ and then realized that ‘when you project a sound into a room …
it can define a space’.173 Life on Mars’s biography of Philipsz characterizes her
work as ‘ephemeral installations’, in which ‘lie the infinite possibilities of sound
to sculpt both the physical experience of space and the intangible recollections
of memories’.174 Philipsz explains that her work The Lost Reflection was inspired
by a ‘barcarole [boating song of Venetian gondolas] in The Tales of Hoffmann
158 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

[by the German composer Jacques Offenbach in 1881] … it was a duet where
each person seemed to call to the other across the water’.175 In her vocal sound
works, Philipsz manages a multiple conjuring: first, in her soundings across
place Philipsz conjures physical senses of space; and then, through her vocal
song, she conjures memories into the listener’s ear. When the American curator
Suzanne Delehanty, in her 1981 ‘Soundings’ text, tells us ‘sound, gathered from
the space around us by our skin and bones, as well as by our ears, is inextricably
bound to both our perception and experience’,176 we can understand that sound
resonates from the body and within the body and that ‘the sound that surrounds
us, gives us a sense of our proper bodily location in space’.177 As vocal sound
drawing is expressed through the larynx, activated by breath from the internal
place of subjectivity, concept and dream, and sent out to the external place of
objectivity, practice and physicality, it can be argued that drawing in sound is the
three-dimensional expression and measuring of self in relation to place and the
expression and measuring of place in relation to self.178
While Philipsz’s The Lost Reflection evidences a calling across water, so it also
references the human tendency to call out under bridges – perhaps this may be
an instinctive means to ‘sound’ an environment, in the same way that sonar
measures the depth of the sea floor; so calling out inside a structure can conjure
a physical sense of that structure and locate self in relation to the boundaries
of that structure.179 In his Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, Georges Perec
recalls a story concerning how sound can measure and reveal place. An escaped

Figure 4.6 Jordan McKenzie, Shame Chorus, 2016–ongoing, performance at B Side


Festival. Photo: Brendan Buesnel.
CONJURING 159

prisoner, lost at night, ‘came to the banks of a river. There was the moan of a
siren. A few seconds later, the waves raised by the passing boat came and
broke on the bank. From the time separating the moan of the siren, to the
splashing of the waves, the escapee deduced the width of the river … and knew
where he was.’180
The singing voices in Jordan McKenzie’s Shame Chorus181 conjure a
collective hope, an emotional knowing and a strong sense of being together in
place (see Figure 4.6). Presenting his work, McKenzie – collaborating with the
Freud Museum, the psychoanalyst Susie Orbach and the London Gay Men’s
Chorus – quotes the American writer Brené Brown: ‘If we can share our story
with empathy and understanding shame can’t survive.’182 There is in this work a
remarkable calling, one that Susie Orbach recognized as ‘an important way to
find oneself and yet be able to be with others and be different in that same way’.
While Sigmund Freud’s concept of the ‘talking cure’, in which a patient talks to
a therapist to allow them to uncover hidden desires, may have been a starting
point for this work, there is perhaps a more ancient and universal intuition at play
here, one that relates to a deep sense of collective belonging.

On a small mountainous island in Papua New Guinea where local villagers


made their gardens, I saw how people communicated with one another over
great distances (1/2 to 1 mile) from one hill top to another, they called whooping
across the valleys, revealing their own positions, locating one another, and
keeping safe through that network of sound, similar communication networks
exist in rural areas of the Canary Islands, Turkey, Mexico, Greece and Spain.183

That a collective sounding might be geographical as well as local reveals the


vital potency of sound in relation to community and survival, and the London
Gay Man’s Chorus, in singing together for the Shame Chorus projects, perform
a sounding that declares their collective belonging and determination to survive.
Using both the spoken and the sung word, their voices play with harmony and
rhythm relating stories of shame; and their collective sound, the sound of men
singing together, cannot help but also reference plain song and the chanting of
Christian monks in Western churches. In turn, the numerous and abject actions
perpetrated by members of the church onto young choristers is also brought
to mind. And so, there are a multiple of shames present at this Chorus – the
experienced, the sung and the referenced – yet still the men singing together are
so sure in voice and so strong in their collective belonging that those multiple
shames are illuminated, dissipated and overcome, changing the condition of
their life and environment all through the sounding of their collective voices.
Marcel Proust, in his text Swann’s Way, understood the importance of sound
and how it mapped the shape and quality of an environment: ‘I could hear
the whistling of trains, which now nearer and now further off, punctuating the
160 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

distance like the note of a bird in a forest, showed me in perspective the deserted
countryside.’184 The vocal callings, like Proust’s whistling train and Thoreau’s bell
through the woods, not only resonate with the material of the place revealing the
shape and condition of place but also conjure a sonic network across an area
mapping a person in place, situating them in relation to another person located
in a different place. These callings then are acts of survival sonically connecting
one person to another across open spaces, in a system of belonging – just
as McKenzie’s Shame Chorus, answering an acute need in today’s disparate
society, connects individuals in a time and place. The choir contains multiple
voices singing together, and the song resonating within each body reverberates
together as one body in a hopeful and visionary sonic system of belonging.
This chapter has addressed the concept of conjuring in the context of
drawing and performance drawing and showed how a drawing that can be
said to be a conjuring presents itself as a surprise gift for the witness and
sometimes also for the practitioner. These gifts might be premeditated actions,
managed with a conscious sleight of hand misdirecting the witness’s gaze (in
documentation, edited film or live action), yet sometimes they might also occur
quite by happenstance when both the practitioner and the witness are surprised
by a visual familiar or serendipitous pareidolia. The concepts of perception and
misdirection have been referred to in the texts of Plato and Debord and evidenced
in the works made in outside spaces (see the section ‘Relocating place and
site’), where lines drawn on the ground can be mistakenly perceived as signs to
be followed. Yet, as Levinas has said and Derrida has restated, traces may be
left not imposed, and those evidences of past presence can be interpreted as
gifts of memory to those who remain. One such infamous trace was made by
Butades’s daughter. We have seen different interpretations of this story, yet there
is always more to ponder in what exactly did happen as she sat her lover down.
He must have been seated at a precise angle and positioned close enough to
the wall for his shadow to be clear and in perspective, and he must also have
been still for long enough for her to draw around his shadow, thus gifting his
outline to her. In this way, he (perhaps a lover about to travel or a soldier ready
to leave and fight in a war) gave her his attention, his stillness and time, both his
present time and, once he had left, also his past time, allowing her to hold tight
in her time to the vision of his likeness and to embellish and enhance her memory
of him with concrete evidence of his form. The retelling of memory narratives
are also gifts to those that remember: each time their memory is told so the
past event is conjured for a moment into the teller’s present time. In this way,
traces and memories can morph time, dancing back and forth between past and
present. Performance drawing conjuring through cross-disciplinary practice and
the employment of technology in live action, recorded and edited works has also
been looked at in this chapter. And how sound can be interpreted as drawing
that conjures images in the listener’s mind’s ear has been understood. It has also
CONJURING 161

been outlined that heard sound can reveal the condition of place to the listener’s
mind’s ear: a melting glacier transcribed through the broadcast of a satellite and
a mobile phone; the culture of place evidenced by the languages spoken and the
music heard through place; the human voice calling under bridges, resonating
from a body in place; and finally the collective chants that call out, conjuring
a network of hope and belonging across space. A performance drawing that
conjures (in mark, trace, recording and sound) is a gift of a visual and sonic
surprise.
Chapter 5, on illumination, investigates live performance drawing that
employs all manner of light projection from the lightning sketches of the Victorian
theatrical processes through to contemporary projects such as lightning doodles,
expanded cinema and lasers in the present day.

Notes
1 Jean Fisher, ‘On drawing’, in Catherine de Zegher, ed., The Stage of Drawing
Gesture and Act: Selected from the Tate Collection (London and New York: Tate
Publishing and The Drawing Centre, 2003), p. 217.
2 Maryclare Foá, ‘Drawing: A Conversation with Carl Plackman 2009.’ Poem in
response to Carl Plackman’s poem. See Maryclare Foá, ‘Sounding out: Performance
drawing in response to the outside environment’ (PhD diss., UAL, 2011), p. 216.
3 Simon Downs, Russell Marshall, Phil Sawdon, Andrew Selby and Jane Tormey,
Drawing Now: Between the Lines of Contemporary Art (London: I.B.Tauris, 2007).
4 Carl Plackman, ‘Artist’s Notes 1972’, in Arts Council, ed., Out of Line: Drawings
from the Arts Council Collection (London: Hayward Gallery Publishing, 2001),
exhibition catalogue, p. 31.
5 Transcribed by the Maryclare Foá from notes and audio recordings taken during the
conference ‘With a Single Mark’, Tate Britain, 19 May 2006, as research for Foá,
‘Sounding out’, p 10.
6 Cornelia H. Butler and Catherine de Zegher, On Line: Drawing through the Twentieth
Century (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), exhibition catalogue, p. 120.
7 Michael Craig-Martin, Drawing the Line: Reappraising Drawing Past and Present
(London: South Bank Centre, 1995), exhibition catalogue, p. 10.
8 Hester Musson, ‘Drawing together’, Art Quarterly (Summer 2018), https://drawingroom.
org.uk/uploads/Art_Quarterly_Summer_2018.pdf (accessed 4 April 2020).
9 Foá, ‘Sounding out’, pp. 42–3.
10 Peter Lamont and Richard Wiseman, Magic in Theory: An Introduction to the
Theoretical and Psychological Elements of Conjuring (Hatfield: University of
Hertfordshire Press, 1999), pp. x–xi.
11 Ibid., p. 9.
12 Plackman, ‘Artist’s Notes 1972’.
162 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

13 E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial


Representation (London: Phaidon Press, 1960), pp. 170–1.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid.
16 Avis Newman and Catherine de Zegher, ‘Conversation’, in de Zegher, The Stage of
Drawing, p. 78.
17 Katharine Stout, ‘A recent history of drawing’, in Katharine Stout, Contemporary
Drawing: From the 1960s to Now (London: Tate Publishing, 2014), p. 9. (Stout cites
Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, ‘Raymond Pettibon: Return to disorder and disfiguration’,
October, no. 92 (Spring 2000): 37–51.)
18 Ibid., p. 13.
19 Jean Fisher, ‘On drawing’, in de Zegher, The Stage of Drawing, p. 217.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid.
23 Ibid.
24 John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin, 1972), p. 10. While Berger uses
the word ‘images’ in his text, he is referring to the earliest visual renditions made by
humankind, those made on caves and/or stones before any definition or distinction
between a drawing and a painting had been decided. The processes undertaken to
render such images (direct hand or stick, or spit staining or scratching in line, mark
and stained tone) can be understood as being both drawn and painted. Berger’s
use of the term conjuring in this chapter has been quoted as an indicator of its
frequent use in relation to our visual world.
25 Ibid., p. 3.
26 Butler and de Zegher, On Line, p. 109.
27 In reference to how a ‘one-off’ drawing ‘simply rests in its own space’, Professor
Stephen Farthing considers how St Thomas Aquinas ‘eloquently described [this
space as] “the limbo of children”’. Stephen Farthing, Dirtying the Paper Delicately
(London: University of the Arts, 2005), pp. 41–2. And, citing Roy Harris, Farthing
offers an ‘Artspeak’ translation: ‘a poetic space where ideas and information can be
stored in a raw and untranslated state’.
28 Gombrich, Art and Illusion, p. 173.
29 Ibid., pp. 170–1.
30 Lamont and Wiseman, Magic in Theory, p. 9.
31 Plackman, ‘Artists Notes 1972’, p. 31.
32 Gombrich, Art and Illusion, p. 173.
33 Fisher, ‘On drawing’, p. 217.
34 Butler and de Zegher, On Line, p. 109.
35 Fisher, ‘On drawing’, p. 217.
36 Plato, ‘The Allegory of the Cave’, Republic, 514a–517a, trans. by Thomas Sheehan,
https://web.stanford.edu/class/ihum40/cave.pdf. (accessed 1 May 2020).
CONJURING 163

37 Andrea Biagioni, ‘TEVERETERNO: A multidisciplinary cultural project or the revival


of Rome’s Tiber River’ (April 2016), http://www.tevereterno.it/public/2015_TE_
Programming_Report.pdf (accessed 4 April 2020).
38 Ibid.
39 On 14 July 1555 Pope Paul IV officially established the neighbourhood of
Sant’Angelo as the home of the Jewish community requiring that all Jews live within
the confines of the Ghetto. St Peters began being built in 1506 and was completed
in 1626. So Kentridge was correct the two coincided – but a little earlier than his
date. BBC, ‘The Triumphs and Laments of William Kentridge’, on Imagine, BBC,
edited and presented by Alan Yentob (first aired 22 November 2016).
40 Laurie Anderson, Heart of a Dog (London: dogwoof, 2016), DVD; Laurie Anderson,
Heart of a Dog (Nonesuch Records, 2015), audio recording.
41 Ibid.
42 Ibid.
43 BBC, ‘The Triumphs and Laments of William Kentridge’.
44 Pliny the Elder, Natural History: A Selection, trans. by John F.Healy (London: Penguin
Classics, 1991), book XXXV, ‘Painting, sculpture and architecture’, pp. 323–41.
45 Ibid.
46 Fisher, ‘On drawing’, p. 219.
47 Michael Newman, ‘The marks, traces and gestures of drawing’, in de Zegher, The
Stage of Drawing, p. 93.
48 Michael Newman, ‘Marking time: Memory and matter in the work of Avis Newman’,
in Catherine de Zegher, ed., Inside the Visible (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996),
pp. 271–9.
49 Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, bartleyby.com, http://www.bartleby.
com/276/ (accessed 6 March 2017).
50 Tania Kovats, ‘Traces of thought and intimacy’, in Tania Kovats, ed., The Drawing
Book (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2007), p. 10.
51 Kovats uses this spelling of Boutades (rather than Butades) in her text: Kovats,
‘Traces of thought and intimacy’.
52 Kovats, ‘Traces of thought and intimacy’, p. 10.
53 Ibid., pp. 9, 30.
54 Ibid.
55 Kovats’ quote is taken from David Buckland, Tania Kovats Evaporation Cape
Farewell, Vimeo, http://www.capefarewell.com/latest/events/875-lovelock-3.html
(accessed 12 February 2018).
56 Emmanuel Levinas, Humanism of the Other, trans. by Nidra Poller (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 2006), p. 40.
57 Jacques Derrida, ‘At this very moment in this work here I am’, in Robert Bernasconi
and Simon Critchley, eds, Re-Reading Levinas, trans. by Ruben Berezdivin
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 37. Derrida re-reading Emmanuel
Levinas, ‘“Humanisme de l’autre homme”’, Fata Morgana, 1972; LGF, 1987.
58 Ibid.
164 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

59 Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self Portrait and Other Ruins, trans.
by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1993), pp. 49–51.
60 Ibid.
61 Ibid.
62 Sandor Kovats (2005) cited in Tania Kovats, ‘Traces of thought and intimacy’,
p. 303.
63 Jeffrey Kastner and Brian Wallis, Land and Environment Art (New York: Phaidon
Press, 1998), p. 75.
64 Ibid.
65 Amy Ballmer, ‘Avalanche Magazine: In the words of the artist’, Art Documentation:
Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America, vol. 30, no. 1 (2011): 21–6,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/27949563 (accessed 20 March 2017).
66 Ibid., p. 534.
67 Ibid.
68 Gombrich, Art and Illusion, pp. 170–1.
69 Ibid., p. 9.
70 Greig Burgoyne, ‘Walk/Count/Flow/Lost – a study in patch dynamics’ curated by
Fay Stevens, Embodied Cartographies, Fringe Arts Bath UK, 2017.
71 Transcribed from a conversation between M. Foá and Greig Burgoyne, July 2017.
Further information and documentation can be found on the artist’s https://www.
greigburgoyne.com (accessed 1 May 2020).
72 Burgoyne’s 2017 Walk/Count/Flow/Lost performances at Walcot Chapel Bath, UK,
were filmed by Fay Stevens, Kenji Lim and Greig Burgoyne.
73 Transcribed from a conversation between M. Foá and Greig Burgoyne, July 2017.
74 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. by Steven Rendall
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p. 40.
75 Ibid. pp. xx, 117.
76 Phil Smith, Mythogeography (Charmouth: Triarchy Press, 2010).
77 At London’s ICA, during the book launch of A Misguide to Anywhere (Exeter: Wrights
& Sites, 2006), Phil Smith led a walk around the area titled ‘Masses'. Participants
were invited to introduce their personal associations to a space. Smith called this
layering of meaning, narrative and interpretation of place ‘Mythogeography’. He also
explained: ‘If you sit in a space that’s non used you transform it – you bring it back to
life.’ Transcribed by M. Foá during Smith’s Masses walk.
78 Transcribed from a conversation between M. Foá and Greig Burgoyne, July 2017.
79 Ibid.
80 Foá, ‘Sounding out’, pp. 112–13, figs 30, 31.
81 Newman, ‘The marks, traces and gestures of drawing’, p. 93.
82 Henry David Thoreau, The Portable Thoreau, ed. by Carl Bode (London: Penguin
Books, 1982).
83 Gombrich, Art and Illusion, p. 9.
84 Bruce Chatwin, Anatomy of Restlessness (London: Picador, 1997), pp. 100–6.
CONJURING 165

85 Carol Kino, ‘Something there is that loves a wall’, New York Times, 13 May 2007,
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/13/arts/design/13kino.html (accessed 5 April 2020).
86 Ibid.
87 Gombrich, Art and Illusion, p. 9.
88 Catherine de Zegher, ‘A century under the sign of the line: Drawing and its extension
(1910–2010)’, in Butler and de Zegher, On Line, p. 119.
89 Ibid.
90 Charles Darwent, ‘Dreams’, in Kovats, The Drawing Book, p. 201.
91 Merleau-Ponty’s use of the term conjuring was related to his interest in the
individual’s point of view and how space and depth of field was created in painting,
giving the illusion of a vanishing point and or objects enlarging or reducing in scale
within the picture plane. In his ‘Essay on Painting’, Merleau-Ponty understands that:

Centuries after the solutions of the Renaissance … depth is still new and insists on
being sought … it cannot merely be an question of … an interval … between these
trees nearby and those faraway. Nor is it a matter of the way things are conjured
away one by another… as we see … displayed in a perspective drawing. The enigma
consists in the fact that I see things each one in its place precisely because they
eclipse one another … they are rivals within my sight … each one is in its place …
known through their envelopment and their mutual dependence in their autonomy.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘Essays on painting’, in Galen A. Johnson, ed., The Merleau-


Ponty Aethetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, trans. by Michael B. Smith (Evanston,
IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993), p. 140. (Originally published in 1961.)
92 Ibid.
93 ‘William Kentridge and Robin Rhode. Free Forms. The artists in conversation’,
Modern Painters (June 2008), pp. 64–9.
94 Ibid.
95 Muybridge undertook his study to settle a dispute concerning whether a racehorse
in full gallop had all four of its legs off the ground. Muybridge’s image Horse
Galloping, Daisy with Rider, frame 7, plate 67, 1872–8, shows that all four legs
are off the ground in a gallop. Eadweard Muybridge, Animals in Motion (New York:
Dover Publications, 1957).
96 Artistic action by Yves Klein (Titled in his newspaper, Sunday 27 November 1960:
‘Le Saut dans le vide’ (The Leap into the Void), https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-
editorial-yves-klein-tricked-iconic-photograph (accessed 5 April 2020).
97 Ann Simpson, ‘Eileen Agar: The spirit of play’, in Eileen Agar 1899–1991, for the
exhibition Eileen Agar 1899–1991, Ann Simpson, David Gascoyne and Andrew
Lambirth (Edinburgh: Trustees of the National Gallery of Scotland, 1999), p. 27.
98 One obvious example of work prefigured by Eileen Agar’s Lady Bird (1936) is
Carolee Schneemann’s Eye Body: 36 Transformative Actions (1963).
99 Draw to Perform, an international community for drawing performance, holds an
annual symposium and workshops curated by the Israeli artist Ram Samocha. Echo
Morgan’s Be the Inside of the Vase was performed in 2017 during Draw to Perform
4 at the Art Foundation in Brighton, UK, https://drawtoperform.com/draw-to-
perform-page/draw-to-perform-4/ (accessed 5 April 2020).
166 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

100 See the text accompanying the documentary images of Morgan’s work: Echo
Morgan, ‘Portfolio: Be the Inside of the Vase’, Echo Morgan website, http://
echomorgan.com/#/be-inside-of-the-vase/ (accessed 1 May 2020).
101 Ibid.
102 Bill Rogers, ‘Performance art: Echo Morgan’s darkness is undressed in
heartbreaking performance’, cfile.daily, 25 February 2015, https://cfileonline.org/
performance-art-echo-morgans-darkness-undressed-heartbreaking-performance/
(accessed 13 June 2017).
103 Ibid.
104 Gombrich, Art and Illusion, pp. 170–1.
105 Ibid., p. 9.
106 Morgan, ‘Portfolio: Be the Inside of the Vase’.
107 Birgitta Hosea, ‘Substitutive bodies and constructed actors: A practice-based
investigation of animation as performance’ (PhD diss., University of the Arts
London, 2012), pp. 95-106.
108 Ibid.
109 Hosea established a blog on expanded animation in 2010 to share ‘some of the
things I talk to my BA, MA and PhD animation students about … at the University
for the Creative Arts, Royal College of Art and Central Saint Martins, University of
the Arts London’. https://expandedanimation.net (accessed 5 April 2020).
110 This was awarded a Musion Academy Media Arts (MAMA) Holographic Arts Award
(Performance category) in 2009. It was shown in 2010 as part of the Holographic
Serendipity show at Kinetica Art Fair and Shunt, a performance venue in the
underground tunnels beneath London Bridge station.
111 Hosea, ‘Substitutive bodies and constructed actors’.
112 Birgitta Hosea in conversation with M.Foá, 24 November 2017.
113 Michael Kirby, ‘On acting and not-acting’, in Philip B. Zarrilli, ed., Acting (Re)
Considered: A Theoretical and Practical Guide (London: Routledge, 1995). (Kirby’s
article was originally published in 1972.)
114 Shola Amoo ‘Dear Mr. Shakespeare,’ AMI Productions, in Shakespeare Lives.
London: The British Council. 2016. https://www.shakespearelives.org/programme/
(accessed 1 May 2020) See Shola Amoo website https://www.sholaamoo.com/
dear-mr-shakespeare/ (accessed 1 May 2020).
115 Kovats, ‘Traces of thought and intimacy’, p. 10.
116 Ibid.
117 Lanre Malaolu, the British actor dancer and choreographer. Stephen Foster and
Amanda Wilkinson See the dancer’s website: https://www.lanremalaolu.com
(accessed 1 May 2020).
118 Jean Fisher, ‘Stuart Hall and the black arts movement’, Radical Philosophy,
no. 185 (May/June 2014), https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/obituary/stuart-
hall-1932-2014 (accessed 15 June 2017).
119 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Obituary: After Pan-Africanism: Placing Stuart Hall’,
Radical Philosophy, no. 185 (May/June 2014), https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/
obituary/stuart-hall-1932-2014 (accessed 15 June 2017).
CONJURING 167

120 Fisher, ‘Stuart Hall and the black arts movement’. Radical Philosophy, no.185
(May/June 2014).
121 Ibid.
122 Ibid.
123 Cynthia Carr, ‘In the discomfort zone’, in Mark N. C. Bessire, ed., William Pope.L:
The Friendliest Black Artist in America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002),
pp. 48–9.
124 Ibid.
125 Ibid.
126 Ibid.
127 Stuart Horodner, ‘Working with William’, in Mark H. C. Bessire, William Pope.L, p. 55.
128 William Pope.L, ‘Bocia’, in Bessire, William Pope.L, p. 70.
129 Ibid., pp. 71–2.
130 Horodner, ‘Working with William’, p. 55.
131 Derrida, ‘At this very moment in this work here I am’.
132 Horodner, ‘Working with William’, p. 55.
133 William Pope.L, ‘Bocia’, p. 70.
134 Carr, ‘The discomfort zone’, pp. 48–9.
135 Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) is a New York-based international resource for video
and media art and advocates for media art and artists. Joan Jonas, Lines in the
Sand (New York: EAI, 2002–5), video, https://www.eai.org/titles/lines-in-the-sand
(accessed 26 June 2017).
136 Robert Ayres, ‘That’s what we do – We retell stories’, in Stephen Foster and
Amanda Wilkinson Joan Jonas (Southampton and London: John Hansard Gallery
and Wilkinson Gallery, 2004), exhibition catalogue, p. 16.
137 Ibid., p. 11.
138 Ibid.
139 Tracey Warr, ‘What a performance is’, in Stephen Foster and Amanda Wilkinson
(accessed 1 May 2020) Joan Jonas, p. 19. Warr references Joan Simon, ‘Scenes
and variations: An interview with Joan Jonas’, Art in America, no. 7 (July 1996):
72–9, 100–1.
140 Ibid.
141 Stephen Foster, ‘Introduction’, in Stephen Foster and Amanda Wilkinson Joan
Jonas.
142 Warr, ‘What a performance is’, p. 19. Warr references Nancy Hynes, ‘Joan Jonas:
Lines in the Sand: An interview with Joan Jonas’ n.paradoxa, 11 January 2003 pp.
6–13 (interview).
143 MK Palomar, ‘Joan Jonas: “I often went to magic shows as a child, and the idea
of magic and sleight of hand had a big effect on me”’, Studio International, 2 May
2018, https://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/joan-jonas-interview-tate-
modern (accessed 6 February 2019).
168 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

144 The Centre for Drawing (CCW, UAL), ‘The Drawing Field’, at Camberwell College of
Art, participant printed handout, session 3, Kreider+O'Leary, 21 April 2009, http://
www.kreider-oleary.net (accessed 1 July 2017).
145 Ayres, ‘That’s what we do’, p. 11.
146 The Drawing Field was comprised of six presentation workshops at the
University of the Arts London (UAL) investigating some of the diverse possibilities
of performance drawing for students and researchers. At each workshop, a
practitioner performed a presentation that included making a live drawing related
to their practice, and afterwards the presenter led a practical session in which the
audience could participate in a drawing that employed those concepts addressed
in the presentation. The series was curated by M. Foá, supported by the Centre
for Drawing UAL, and the presenters were: Ceramicist Edmund de Waal, Painter
Professor Stephen Farthing, Research Fellow Dr Patricia Lyons, Architect Dr
Penelope Haralambidou, Poet and Architect Kreider+O’Leary, and Storyboard
artist Chris Baker.
147 The Centre for Drawing (CCW, UAL), ‘The Drawing Field’.
148 The Bartlett School of Architecture, ‘Kreider + O’Leary at TATA Britain’, UCL
website, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/architecture/news/2013/jan/kreider-oleary-
tate-britain (accessed 3 April 2020).
149 Christian Nold’s Greenwich Emotional Map (commissioned by Independent
Photography) ran from October 2005 to March 2006. For more information, see
Christian Nold, ‘Greenwich Emotional Map’, Dr Christian Nold (blog), http://www.
softhook.com/emot.htm (accessed 1 July 2017).
150 Foá, ‘Sounding out’, pp. 116–17, fig. 33.
151 Foá, ‘Sounding out’, p. 103.
152 The scientist Mary Somerville’s theories of ‘electromagnetic induction of the earth’
are believed to have influenced the paintings of her friend J. M. W. Turner. J.
Hamilton cited in Foá, ‘Sounding out’, p. 121. The German physicist Heinrich Hertz
discovered electromagnetic waves in 1887. E. Thompson, The Soundscape of
Modernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), p. 34.
153 Elizabeth Finch, ‘The drawing as instrument’, in Catherine de Zegher, ed., Drawing
Papers 20: Performance Drawings (New York: The Drawing Center, 2001),
exhibition catalogue, pp. 50–4.
154 Anthony Huberman, ‘Sounds Like Drawing: In conversation at the Drawing Room
gallery London’, Sounds like Drawing, London: Double Agents no. 3 (2005),
exhibition catalogue,1+1+1.
155 Finch, ‘The drawing as instrument’, pp. 50–4.
156 Ibid., p. 51.
157 Ibid., p. 54.
158 Ibid.
159 Ibid., p. 53.
160 Ibid.
161 Foá, ‘Sounding out’, pp. 28–9.
CONJURING 169

162 Ibid.
163 Tom McDonough, ‘City scale and discreet events: Performance in urban space,
1956–1969’, in de Zegher, Drawing Papers 20, pp. 22–4.
164 Ibid., p. 24.
165 Ibid.
166 Ibid.
167 Foá, ‘Sounding out’, pp. 121–54.
168 Katie Paterson, Vatnajökull (the Sound of) 2007–8, http://katiepaterson.org/
portfolio/vatnajokull-the-sound-of/ (accessed 5 April 2020).
169 Thoreau, The Portable Thoreau, p. 375.
170 Chris Watson, ‘Vatnajökull’, on Weather Report (Touch Records), 2003, https://
youtu.be/CH2o-FGrWdE (accessed 5 April 2020).
171 WWTW, ‘10 streets that changed the world’, WTTW website, https://interactive.
wttw.com/ten/streets/broadway (accessed 18 June 2019).
172 A Sound installation under the Tormin Bridge (Torminbruecke) on Lake Aa,
commissioned for the Munster Sculpture project in 2007.
173 Susan Philipsz C108 Life on Mars interview, by Douglas Fogle, curator of the 2008
(55th) Carnegie International (May 2008–January 2009). Transcribed from the online
interview at https://youtu.be/7U5nLmcHmUU (accessed 16 July 2017).
174 Ibid.
175 Graham Coulter-Smith, ‘Susan Philipsz: The Lost Reflection’, in Brigitte Franzen,
Kasper Koenig and Carina Plath, eds, Sculpture Projects Muenster 07 [English
version] (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Konig, 2007), p. 197.
176 Susan Delehanty ‘Soundings’, from SOUNDINGS, Neuberger Museum, SUNY
Purchase, 1981, on UbuWeb Papers, Ubuweb,http://www.ubu.com/papers/
delehanty.html (accessed 4 April 2020), para 2.
177 Ibid.
178 Foá, ‘Sounding out’, p. 125.
179 Ibid., p. 139, n. 59.
180 Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, ed. and trans. by J. Sturrock
(New York: Penguin Classics, 1997), p. 88.
181 The Shame Chorus ‘is a music project created by international visual and
performance artist Jordan McKenzie, working in collaboration with London based
writer Andy White, psychoanalyst Susie Orbach and the London Gay Men’s
Chorus’, https://www.shamechorus.com (accessed 4 April 2020), http://www.
jordanmckenzie.co.uk (accessed 4 April 2020).
182 Brené Brown, Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the
Way We Live, Love, Parent and Lead (New York: Penguin Life, 2015), p. 75.
183 Chris Morris cited in Foá, ‘Sounding out’, p. 131.
184 Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, vol. 1: Swann’s Way (London: Vintage
Books, 2002), pp. 1–2.
170
5
ILLUMINATING:
LIVE MARK MAKING
THROUGH PROJECTED
LIGHT

The first image that comes to mind in connection with drawing with light may
well be one of the iconic photographs of Pablo Picasso appearing to conjure
images made of light out of thin air.1 Taken by the photographer Gjon Mili for
Life magazine in the south of France in 1949, these photographs of Picasso
were the result of the accomplished photographer’s experimentation with lighting
and long exposures. Mili’s camera was able to capture Picasso’s gestures, while
holding a light source, taking the form of centaurs, bulls, Greek profiles and his
signature, since the slow exposure had a duration of several seconds. Picasso’s
gestures are physical and full of showmanship, yet they are frozen in time. We,
the viewers, do not witness his actual gestures at the same time as he made
them; rather, we see a record of them captured by a photograph.
With the ‘lightning doodle’ project PiKAPiKA, contemporary Japanese artists
Nagata Takeshi and Monno Kazue2 have further developed Milli’s technique of
moving a light source in front of a camera set with a slow exposure. Working
with crowds of participants, they capture drawings of light through photographs
taken with slow exposures that are later joined together in a process of stop-
motion animation to create moving images. As with Mili’s photographs of
Picasso, they can be seen as documentation of a drawing performance that is
made to be viewed by an audience at a later date. These works are designed to
be experienced through photography. And yet what are they? Is this drawing?
Is it painting? Is it photography? Is it animation? This kind of work complicates
preconceived boundaries between all of these disciplines.
This chapter covers an interdisciplinary range of technological approaches to
creating performance drawings with light taken from different art forms. Although
in general this book uses a working definition of performance as an activity
that was either done in front of an audience or recorded in order to be played
172 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

back to an audience at a later date, this chapter limits its scope of examples
to work that is performed live. Although the materials and technologies used
to create the drawn marks in the projects presented may vary – pen on paper,
charcoal, sand, scratch on film, magic lantern slides, lasers, proprietary software
or custom coding – each example focuses on drawing with light that is created
spontaneously during performances in which marks are created live in the present
moment: the audience is witness to a process of becoming. As this chapter is
concerned with uses of technologies of light projection, this avoids confusion
between ephemeral acts of performance drawing – the activity itself – and pre-
recorded animations or films – the trace or documentation of that activity. Thus,
a consideration of performance drawings made with technology raises issues of
liveness, of immediacy and spontaneity, rather than pre-recorded marks recalled
or manipulated, for example through the playback of an animation or by triggering
a database of pre-recorded moving image samples such as with VJ software.3
The notion of liveness as a key aspect of performance is explored by Peggy
Phelan in her chapter ‘The ontology of performance: Representation without
reproduction’ (1996). She argues that a defining feature of live performance is that
it happens now, which makes it non-reproducible, in a state of disappearance
and beyond control or regulation:

Performance’s only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved,


recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of
representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something
other than performance … Performance’s being … becomes itself through
disappearance.4

For Phelan, the experience of live performance is ephemeral – its only trace in
the memory of the spectator. It is a unique event that takes place now, in front
of the spectator’s eyes. Another aspect of liveness is that it involves the element
of chance, the unplanned and the unpredictable. However tightly planned,
prepared and scripted a live performance may be, variations in how it turns out
night after night inevitably result from factors such as the emotional state of the
performers, audience reaction and the different spatial contexts of the venue that
a performance is produced in.5
This chapter is not intended as a chronological or exhaustive survey. In order
to contextualize contemporary practice, thematic examples from the past are
used that are taken from two periods of immense technological and social
upheaval of particular relevance to experimental practice with live drawing and
the projected moving image. These periods are the turn of the twentieth century
marking the beginning of cinema and the 1960 and 1970s when artists had
access to experiment with consumer film cameras. All of the drawings mentioned
are made with projected light in front of an audience. Some are still and emerge
ILLUMINATING 173

bit by bit over time. Others move and can be considered to be live animations.
In order to provide some historical context for works that combine performance
drawing and animation, it is relevant to examine the lightning sketch act.

The lightning sketch


Although performance drawing may be thought of as a recent activity in
contemporary art, it has a theatrical precedent in the lightning sketch, a Victorian
music hall act. Ephemeral as all performing arts are, this act is little remembered
today, with the main interest in it coming from historical studies into the origins
of animation, where it is recognized as playing a leading role in the development
of cartoon animation. Although this act appears as a frequent and popular
attraction on surviving bills and programmes that list the performers featuring
in variety theatre, documentation of the lightning sketch is very scarce. Only a
few traces survive in newspapers, films and personal archives and these have
been studied by animation researchers such as Malcolm Cook and Donald
Crafton. Cook suggests that drawings may have been performed in front of an
audience for many millennia since the production of cave paintings and could
have had a ritual element. He notes references in Victorian newspaper reviews
to a precursor of the lightning sketch from the previous century: ‘writers were
happy to retrospectively label French painter Charles LeBrun ‘a seventeenth-
century “lightning artist”’.6 Cook has found evidence of 100 performers of this
act active in the UK.7 His research indicates that the act emerged in England in
the late 1870s to early 1880s before spreading to the American vaudeville circuit
and that ‘lightning sketch’ or ‘chalk talk’ was more frequently used as a term in
the USA and ‘lightning cartoon’ in the UK, where this term was likely coined by
the artist Edgar Austin.8
The lightning sketch act was a ‘hybrid of graphic and performing art’9 in
which the artist literally stood in front of a blackboard, canvas or paper and
drew rapidly with chalk or graphite or, very occasionally, paint.10 The lightning
sketch performers often came from a background in print, sometimes also
working as newspaper cartoonists and caricaturists. The subject matter of their
drawings included political caricature and therefore these performers extended
the satirical cartoon into a live event. Some acts employed both drawing and
ventriloquism, thus lending a voice to the image. Others involved changing the
facial likeness of one known political figure into another or playing with perception
by drawing portraits upside down.11 Aside from rapid drawing, techniques that
the performers used could include sleight of hand with hidden paper cut-outs
or plays on perception. The act drew attention to the process of drawing but
also, as Cook points out, to how that drawing is then decoded by the viewer.
Successive lines contribute to a particular understanding of a drawing that could
174 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

then be undermined by a skilful practitioner by adding yet more lines to subvert


the original act of interpretation through trickery and optical illusion.12 There is an
interesting resonance between these drawings performed as lightning sketches
and the type of drawings that are defined as ‘conjuring’ in Chapter 4.
The earliest cinema drew upon popular forms of entertainment for its subject
matter and this included the lightning sketch, with stop-motion techniques used
to speed up the drawing. Tom Merry Lightning Artist Drawing Mr Gladstone
(1895) appears to be the first time a lightning sketch act was documented
on film. This was directed by Birt Acres who made four films of Tom Merry’s
work.13 Tom Merry was known for being able to draw upside down as well as
at speed, creating caricatures of the former UK prime minister Gladstone and
other politically topical figures such as German leaders like Kaiser Wilhelm II
and Bismarck. Rather than being projected as we understand films today, they
were initially created to be seen in one of Edison’s Kinetoscopes, a machine for
peeping into in order to view sequential photographic images flipped around by
turning a handle to create the impression of movement. This machine predates
by a few months the first film projections by the Lumière Brothers later that year.14
Robert Paul included the work of Tom Merry in public film projections at the
Alhambra music hall in London the following year and his act was described in
one newspaper review as ‘the performance of a lightning cartoonist who draws
Bismarck is another successful picture’.15 These early silent films, examples of
what Tom Gunning has called the ‘cinema of attractions’,16 were very short –
based not only on the influence of the theatrical variety act but also on the
limitation of the length of film reels available, which had a standard duration of
one minute. Dennis Gifford suggests that the short length of film reels was pivotal
to the development of drawn animation.17 Other lightning sketch artists could
not draw as quickly as Tom Merry, which was a problem because film reels were
too short to contain a recording of their whole act. Consequently stop-camera
techniques were introduced in which the camera was stopped, a part of the
drawing was amended, this was then filmed, the camera stopped again and the
drawing amended again. When played back this had the effect of speeding up
the drawing process. Gifford argues that it is from this simple act of documenting
the lightning sketch that cartoon animation was derived. As a film, the lightning
sketch act could now be distributed and projected in many different venues,
bringing the performance to a wider audience than the one-off theatrical event.
The early cinema was a period of rapid innovation and interdisciplinary
experimentation. Performers who had backgrounds in stage magic and lightning
sketching themselves began to make films that employed their knowledge
of stagecraft. In the first decade of cinema, the terms ‘animation’ or ‘special
effects’ had not yet emerged as the description of a particular technique and
these films were known as ‘trick films’.18 In Paris, magician turned film-maker
Georges Méliès experimented with the lightning sketch on film. In 1896, he used
ILLUMINATING 175

the stop-camera technique to speed up the drawing of caricatures of political


figures such as Chamberlain, Queen Victoria and Bismarck. Using a combination
of stop-camera and substitution, in his 1900 film Le livre magique, the artist
miraculously turns full-sized drawings into real people.19 The pioneering British
animator Walter R. Booth also had a background in stage magic.20 Starting his
career as a lightning cartoonist, ventriloquist and conjurer, Booth went on to
create a number of ‘trick films’ for Robert Paul that drew upon his knowledge
of stage illusion and sleight of hand and applied it to in-camera trickery. In his
film Upside Down; or, the Human Flies (1899), by turning the camera upside
down, he made it seem as if his actors were performing on the ceiling. Other
films show the lightning sketch itself. Political Favourites (1903) featured Booth
rapidly drawing caricatures of Lord Rosebery, Joseph Chamberlain and other
contemporary politicians. His films began to combine magic tricks with lightning
sketching. In his 1906 film Hand of the Artist, a drawing is turned into a living
figure21 and in Comedy Cartoons (1907) an animated chalk drawing of a man
smokes a cigarette of its own volition and a paper-cut of a clown becomes a
real actor (Figure 5.1). This use of moving paper parts is derived from theatrical
practice employed in the lightning sketch act and anticipates ‘cut-out’ animation
in which paper pieces are manipulated for the camera like a puppet. Other
British artists who created lightning sketch-inspired films are documented:
Lancelot Speed, Harry Furniss, Anson Dyer, Dudley Buxton and George Ernest
Studdy. Their work in rapidly creating satirical caricatures was a part of British

Figure 5.1 Walter R. Booth, Comedy Cartoons, 1907. Public domain.


176 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

propaganda created during the First World War. Crafton notes that an Anglo-
Indian performer named Frank Leah was still releasing ‘straight’ lightning sketch
films as late as 1914.22
One of the pioneers of drawn animation in the USA was British-born J. Stuart
Blackton. As a teenager, Blackton performed in drag as ‘Mademoiselle Stuart’
and did ‘chalk talks or lightning landscape paintings’.23 He toured the vaudeville
circuit as the Komikal Kartoonist with the illusionist Alfred E. Smith in 1894 and
then became a reporter and cartoonist for the New York Evening World after this
act folded. His experience with both stage magic and cartooning come together
in his early films. In The Enchanted Drawing (1900), he is shown drawing a face
on a pad. It then appears to smile and frown. He also draws objects – cigars
and a bottle of wine. As he touches them, they become real. Blackton continued
to perform in his own right and featured as the live-action star of the Happy
Hooligan series (1900), which was based on the comic strip of the same name.
His 1906 film Humorous Phases of Funny Faces, in which faces drawn in chalk
on a blackboard appear to move of their own accord, is often singled out as a
unique landmark in the origin of drawn animation, yet was only one of many films
inspired by the lightning sketch.24
The lightning sketch act was also practised in Australia in the early 1900s,
where Alec Laing is credited with being the first Australian lightning sketch
performer.25 Having created political caricatures for animated lightning sketch
films in London for Pathé during the Second Boer War (1899–1902), Laing
returned to Australia with an act that used a magic lantern to project lightning
sketches upon his wife, La Milo, whose speciality was to perform as a classical
statue, the ‘living reincarnation of the Venus de Milo’.26 During his performances,
Laing drew live and upside down on frosted sheets of glass which allowed him to
project his drawings through the magic lantern as he was making them. A review
in the Melbourne Punch explained the result thus:

While the caricaturist rapidly sketches familiar faces on a huge sheet (it is a
magic-lantern effect with their sketches done on a smoked glass) a series
of statues, remarkably well managed, are shown in a garden scene on the
stage.27

Subsequently, Laing began to create animations on film based on these lightning


sketches and to project them during La Milo’s act. Known as the La Milo Films,
these works were first shown in London and then their act travelled to Sydney
and New York.28
In the USA, Winsor McCay pioneered both drawn ‘cartoon’ animation and
drawing as performance and developed the lightning sketch into character
animations that we would recognize today. McCay was a well-known newspaper
cartoonist and his comic strips demonstrate a fascination with movement and
ILLUMINATING 177

the representation of motion in sequential images. He could draw with great skill
at speed and he was signed by F. F. Proctor in 1906 to appear as a ‘featured
novelty act’ at his 23rd Street vaudeville theatre in New York for the sum of
$500 per week. This act consisted of two daily performances using coloured
chalks to musical accompaniment.29 Rapidly drawing twenty-five pictures in
fifteen minutes with chalk on a blackboard,30 this included Seven Ages of Man
in which drawings of a baby boy and baby girl were modified until they reached
the appearance of old age. As an encore, he drew the increasing exasperation
of a husband while he waited for his wife to get ready for the opera. His act was
so popular that he was booked to appear in theatres in the largest cities all over
America and he toured on a regular basis until 1917.31
McCay’s printed cartoon strips show experimentation with the sequential
representation of motion and metamorphosis. From 1909, he began privately
trying to make his drawings move through flipbooks, a form of moving image
he was introduced to by his son.32 Fascinated by motion, he began to make
animated films and to incorporate them into his stage act. Both on stage and in
his short films much is made of the novelty and sheer amount of work involved
in the animation process. Little Nemo in Slumberland (1911), the adventures of a
boy in his dreams, was both his first short film in its own right and part of a stage
act. The opening subtitle to the film version of Little Nemo says, ‘Winsor McCay,
famous cartoonist of the NY Herald and his moving comics. The first artist to
attempt drawing pictures that will move.’33 At the start of the film, McCay is
shown making a bet that in one month he can produce 4,000 ink drawings that
will move. His companions laugh at him. The next scene shows a huge package
of paper and a barrel of ink being delivered to his studio, then him testing the
drawings on a modified Mutoscope. The film dwells on the animation process
in comic-style filmed footage showing an assistant knocking over a giant pile of
drawings. One month later, he returns to see his friends. The hand of the artist is
seen producing a drawing of the character Flip from the Little Nemo comic strip
that he drew for the New York Times and placing it into a wooden slot in front of
the camera. The words ‘Watch me move’ appear above his forehead and the
character then appears to move of its own volition, turning its head from side to
side, smoking a cigar and turning somersaults before calling into being another
two characters and interacting with them as they dance, jump, elongate and
distort. Drawing is used to impart the act of creation and magical transformation.
The character Little Nemo takes it upon himself to draw a princess into existence
and then to draw a rose to give to her before they are both taken away on
a golden throne in a dragon’s mouth. At the end of the film, the hand of the
animator is seen removing the last drawing from the wooden slot before the end
credits roll. A few days after the release of the Little Nemo in Slumberland film,
McCay reused this animation in live performance as part of his vaudeville act at
the Colonial.34
178 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

In 1914, McCay released Gertie the Dinosaur, which was also created as a
stage act and as a film that documents both the process of making the animation
and the stage act itself. Just as in Little Nemo, a filmed prologue and intertitles
replace the stage ‘patter’35 in the film version. Another similarity between the
two films is that the animation is presented as being a seemingly impossible feat
produced by the animator in response to a bet. Both films include some shots
of the production process involved in creating an animation. In the part of the
film that documents the stage act, interactions between creator and cartoon
character reinforce the illusion of physical co-location. McCay is shown in front of
a large screen onto which the cartoon dinosaur is projected. He tosses Gertie an
apple and, just as the real apple goes behind the screen, she catches a cartoon
apple in her mouth as if it were the same one. In the film’s finale, McCay walks
offstage and seemingly returns on screen as a cartoon version of himself. He
brandishes a whip like a lion tamer and then cautiously steps into Gertie’s mouth.
She lifts him onto her back and then carries him off screen.36 It is worth quoting at
length a recollection by another animation pioneer, Émile Cohl, of the Gertie the
Dinosaur act in order to get a flavour of both McCay’s on stage interaction with
his animated drawings and how the animation was perceived by contemporary
audiences as part of the stage act:

Winsor McCay’s films were admirably drawn, but one of the principal causes
of their success was the manner in which they were presented to the public.
I remember one of the first public presentations at the Hammerstein Theatre
in New York. The principal, in fact, the only performer in the film was an
antediluvian beast, a kind of monstrously large diplodocus. In the beginning
the picture showed a tree and some rocks. On the stage, before the screen,
stood the elegant Winsor McCay, armed with a whip and pronouncing
a speech as though he were the ringmaster of the circus. He called the
animal who loomed up from behind the rocks. Then it was like exercises in
horsemanship with the animal always in control. The animal danced, turned
and finished by swallowing the trees and rocks and then curtseying to the
audience which applauded the work of art and the artist at the same time. It
was lucrative for McCay who never left the theatre without stopping by the
cashier to be laden with a few banknotes on the way out.37

Winsor McCay is an example of a showman animator who is clearly marked as


both the author and the performer of animation.38 The virtuosity of McCay’s live
performance and the drawings that are being made are both vital components
of the act. In his work, both animator and animated occupy the same live stage
space. Through the creation of an animated parallel reality that the performer
engages with in front of a live audience, this reflexive performance reveals the
moving image to be an illusion, as is shown in this quote from a review of Gertie
ILLUMINATING 179

by Ashton Stevens in the Chicago Examiner: ‘Thus the camera, that George
Washington of mechanisms, at last is proved a liar … You are flabbergasted to
see the way the reel minds its master.’39
Commenting on the origins of animation, Donald Crafton concludes that the
earliest pioneers of animation – J. Stuart Blackton, Walter R. Booth, Winsor
McCay, Georges Méliès – all had backgrounds in live performance and presented
animation as part of a continuum of stage illusions in which performance
drawings were brought to life.40 There is a demonstrable link between the desire
to document lightning sketch acts on film as part of the remediation41 of earlier
stage acts into content for the emerging new entertainment form of cinema and
the development of what is now known as animation. However, it is important
not to conflate the two practices. The lightning sketch may have partially
engendered animation, but it remains a distinct practice that is defined by taking
place in front of a live audience rather than being pre-recorded. Malcolm Cook
counsels against a simplistic identification of these acts as proto-animation, while
recognizing their points of commonality such as ‘transformation, the movement
of line drawings, and the desire to bring drawings to life’.42 Of relevance to this
study, he argues that the combination of both movement and drawing shown
in lightning sketching anticipates both animation and contemporary time-based
mark making practice:

a line is a history of the movement that made it. The lightning cartoonist
emphasized this movement by the performance of drawing; and we might
assume that the creation of the drawing would have been a dynamic
experience, with the cartoonist working furiously to produce the image within
a few seconds: these were animated cartoons. Thus, the lightning cartoonist,
decades before the twentieth century’s action painters or kinetic sculptors,
introduced time and movement into a primarily spatial art form by virtue of
their performance.43

In the lightning sketch act, the making of a drawing is performed live and some
of the artists then went on to create animation, which in the cases of Alec Laing
and Winsor McKay was then incorporated back into the stage act through the
projection of magic lantern slides or film. However, as animated films became
more commonplace and skilfully made, the moving drawings themselves
displaced their creators’ act of drawing from centre stage. As the animation
theorist Alan Cholodenko points out, the act of magic becomes displaced from
the performer to the illusion on screen:

the magic machine of cinema – the animatic apparatus – would increasingly


displace and replace the human hand of the magician with its own
mechanical prosthetic and demiurgical ‘hand’, making the human magician
180 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

its supernumerary, its ‘sorcerer’s apprentice’, a sleight/slight of hand, the


‘handiwork’ of the ghost writer/drawer.44

No longer on show, the animator now performs out of view, creating the illusion
of animation off screen. It is the product of their drawing process documented
on successive frames that is shown to an audience, not their performance of
drawing.

Mediated acts of drawing: Live video


feeds and projected drawing
Working with projected analogue film images on stage was a labour-intensive
process for the lightning sketch performers. As McCay’s films show, the creation
of the film itself is time-consuming and then the film footage must be developed
and processed before it can be projected. All of these procedures could take
weeks if not months and, therefore, this technology did not allow for spontaneous
mark making on stage. Although Laing was able to achieve spontaneity by
drawing on glass as he projected with a magic lantern, the equipment he
used would have been heavy, cumbersome and very fragile. More recently,
developments in analogue and digital video have made projection technology
more portable, accessible and affordable to a wider range of people. This has
afforded contemporary artists and performers from different fields much more
freedom to experiment with illuminating a process of mark making in front of
an audience. With these kinds of projected drawings, either a form of overhead
projection is used or live streams of moving images mediate the act of mark
making via a video camera and projector.
Performance drawing with illuminated sand has become a popular art
form. If sand is manipulated live on an overhead projector, the light from below
shines through the sand to create a range of tonal values that are projected. At
times, the artist’s hands are also on display. The animator Caroline Leaf drew
attention to the textural and tonal possibilities of illuminated sand as a material
in animated films such The Owl Who Married a Goose (1974), an adaptation
of an Inuit legend, and The Metamorphosis of Mr. Samsa (1977), which was
adapted from Franz Kafka’s short story The Metamorphosis. More recently,
performers have begun to explore sand animation in a live context. In 1996,
Hungarian animator and graphic designer Ferenc Cakó devised the use of
live sand animation – creating and manipulating drawings in sand in real time.
His drawings develop and metamorphose over time into a representation of
something different from their initial appearance – as in the work of the lightning
sketch artists covered in the previous section. Using his hands and his breath
ILLUMINATING 181

to draw with and manipulate sand, he works spontaneously and confidently,


without corrections, to create a series of pictures to musical accompaniment.45
His performances, such as those recorded at the 2003 Seoul International
Cartoon and Animation Festival and Techfest 2004 at IIT Bombay, Mumbai,
India, have won prizes at many festivals and created a sensation on the Internet.
They can be seen on his YouTube channel.46 Despite his attempt to copyright
this process,47 he spawned a genre worldwide and inspired other practitioners
such as the Ukrainian internet sensation Kseniya Simonova, the winner of
Ukraine’s Got Talent in 2009, who was awarded the title of Merited Artist of
Ukraine in 2013. Although her sand animation is sometimes created to illustrate
a musical accompaniment – such as her live performance during Ukraine’s
entry to the 2011 Eurovision song contest – the sequential images in her work
generally involve a narrative rather than a simple process of transformation and
can have sound effects to reinforce the story being told. In You are Always
Nearby (2009), her performance for the semi-finals of Ukraine’s Got Talent, she
created a poignant story of the Second World War and her winning entry in the
finals; Don’t Be Too Late (2009) is a story about a boy who forgets his roots and
the love of his family.48 Sand animation is particularly popular in India, where it
is possible to study a diploma in sand animation; artists such as Rahul Arya can
perform 100 years of Bollywood in 200 seconds and Ronnie Chhibber is the
world’s only blindfolded sand animator.
As well as sand animation, other forms of live image making are increasingly
popular in conjunction with narrated storytelling. Lisa Gornick is a film-maker
and actor who also performs live drawing and storytelling in the theatre. Her
most recent live drawing shows include Grandma Ray Live Drawing Show
(2015) – memories of friendship and secrets shared with her Russian Jewish
grandmother at the Gilded Balloon, Edinburgh Festival, UK – and What (the
Fuck) Is Lesbian Film? (2017) which took place at the Barbican Centre, London,
and the International Women’s Film Festival Dortmund, Cologne, Germany. A
talented comedian, she sketches rapidly and tells highly amusing stories to
accompanying music while adopting an array of different voices. Reminiscent of
the political satires of the lightning sketch, in the most recent show her material
has included caricatures of the then UK prime minister Theresa May and the
German chancellor Angela Merkel imagined in the throes of a passionate love
affair. Unlike the lightning sketch artists whose performance drawings would
have had to have been laboriously shot on film and developed before they could
be projected for an audience, her drawings are shown instantly using a webcam
and digital projector. The digital video equipment she uses allows her to be
seated while making drawings, thus enabling her to draw on an intimate scale
with all the spontaneity and subtlety of watercolour and pen. These drawings are
projected at a much larger scale than they are drawn so the audience can see
all the intricate details.
182 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

Gornick began to work in this way following a series of video art pieces in which
she documented her process of drawing. Noticing how the eyes of viewers of
this work followed the line as it was drawn, she then went on to draw live herself.
This represents a paradigm shift – the work becomes the original process in the
present moment rather than a documentation of it made at a previous time. Her
live drawing performances are often contextualized by film – for example, shown
in conjunction with her films or at film festivals – and yet remain distinct. As
opposed to her practice in film-making, working in live performance allows her
to be spontaneous and to experiment:

There’s a freedom to it. It can be different every time. I can find new things
each time. I don’t have to limit myself to a final cut as you do in film, but each
show I can change it if I want to. There is a live audience responding in real
time to my performance and drawing. They are different each time and bring a
new energy. As a performer, there is the adrenalin, the exposure, the need to
give of yourself more. It feels quite vital, on edge, less control, I like that. Film
is beautiful but is a long studied, thought-out process.49

Performing her drawings live also brings an element of embodied sensuality that
is linked to the tactile act of drawing:

I am not aware of what it feels like for the audience, but I try to explore
sensuality in my shows which have a flirtatious feel as I look directly at the
audience. I usually welcome the audience in by drawing portraits as they
come in, which is more like me chatting the audience up as I try and draw
them whilst talking to them at the same time. My drawing is spontaneous. I
am led by the pen and the watercolour. I don’t try and control it. That for me
is sensuous delight.50

Her latest show explores the niche of lesbian cinema and the desires it arouses –
in terms of politics, economics and passion.51 Using her drawings, she is
able to perform through the characters that she conjures up. She describes
this experience of creating avatars to voice her own thoughts as ‘like a glove
puppet’52 that she can hide behind.
In Gornick’s performances, stories are created through the presentation of
acts of drawing out of which characters emerge. Harald Smykla is another artist
who is influenced by filmic narrative and cinema, although his drawings record
the process of viewing rather than in themselves telling a story. Concerned
with process and the ephemeral, in his Movie Protocols performances, shown
at England & Co Gallery, London, in 2010, and Unspooling: Artists & Cinema
at Manchester Cornerhouse in 2011, Smykla draws rapidly in real time on a
scroll of acetate that is projected through an overhead projector in response to
ILLUMINATING 183

classic films as he watches them, such as Nicolas Roeg’s Insignificance (1985).


He started this series of work as a means to turn the time he spent in passive
viewing into a ‘productive performative act’.53 These ‘pictographic notations of
films’ form a ‘graphic record of every take’ and his performance of drawing lasts
as long as the film itself, which is screened in parallel with his drawing activity.54
The audience watches not only the film but Smykla himself watching the film and
the drawings he makes in response. The result is a scrolling series of drawings
that resemble hieroglyphics.
In addition to telling stories, portraying characters and recording the process
of viewing, live drawing can also be used to evoke and extend the space
and place that actors inhabit, such as in the scenography of Filipa Malva and
Joaquín Cociña. Theatre design has come a long way since the days of painted
canvas backdrops, and contemporary practitioners frequently employ video
technology to augment the imaginary space of the stage. The designer Filipa
Malva believes drawing to be sited at the epicentre of stage design.55 She argues
that, although drawing is conventionally thought of in scenography as a means
to communicate the graphic visualization of plans for construction, it is also a
flexible tool of collaboration between practitioners from different disciplines who
come together to make a theatrical performance. As well as being used to share
ideas in an open-ended manner, it can record the evolution of that collaboration.
Through gestures of the designer’s hand – sketches recorded through pencil
during rehearsals – dramaturgy can be drawn. The bodily movements of the
performers can be captured as marks on paper through sketching and those
performers can, in turn, respond to this with their own embodied knowledge
of physical gesture. In his review of a presentation that Malva gave, John Miers
suggests that Malva’s iterative way of working with actors through drawing
during rehearsals extends artist and researcher Birgitta Hosea’s proposal that
‘the act of drawing is increasingly being seen as the record of a performance,
as the aftermath of an action, the trace of the presence of an artist’s body’.56
He argues that the process of marking need not be finite but is an invitation to a
continuous and generative system of becoming: ‘drawing is not just an aftermath
of action, it becomes a provocation to further action’.57 In Malva’s work, she goes
beyond regarding the use of drawing as a tool for simply communicating and
developing scenographic design concepts. She argues that drawing in itself can
form the scenography:

Mediated through a camera and a screen, a drawing can also change scale,
texture and colour, offering the drawer-scenographer a chance to open a
scene into multiple fictional spaces.58

In the show O meu país é o que o mar não quer (My Country Is What the Sea
Does Not Want) (2014), a testament to the experience of Portuguese immigrants
184 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

living in London that was directed by Ricardo Correia at Casa da Esquina,


Coimbra, Portugal, Malva drew much of the scenery herself during the show.
Using live video feeds of her own drawings made with felt pen and charcoal59
in conjunction with collage, she could transform the space of the theatre. A
tree could be metamorphosed into a pathway. She also used lighting gobos60
to create shapes out of light. As in the work of Gornick, the use of the camera
allowed her to zoom in to an intimate scale as well as the possibility to change the
viewpoint or to track across the images. Through live projections of drawing onto
the walls and the floor, she could evoke other places and emotional contexts for
the actors to perform in.
The artist and film-maker Joaquín Cociña is perhaps better known for his
exhibitions of (static) drawing and video art; however, his theatre design for
Niños Prodigio Teatro’s Mi joven corazón idiota (My Foolish Young Heart), made
in conjunction with Yolin, also included live drawing to create the scenography.
For this play by Anja Hilling and directed by Francisca Bernardi, the cast and
crew use pen on clear film with a number of overhead projectors to project
rapidly drawn cartoon figures and elements of interior architecture during the
performances.61 Mi joven corazón idiota was performed at the Goethe Institut,
Santiago, Chile, in 2007 and also at the Centro Cultural Amanda, Vitacura, Chile,
in 2009. A review of this latter performance gives the sense of the contribution
that the scenographic performance drawing made to the dynamism of the
performance:

another good reason to go to see Mi joven corazón idiota is the scenery.


Or rather, the absence of it. On the stage of the old cinema room there is
nothing more than a white panel and overhead projectors. The ‘scenography’
is created at the same time that the work is happening. In front of our eyes,
visual artist Joaquin Cociña and his brother Vicente are drawing and projecting
the locations and psychological states of the characters. All accompanied by
the music, also live, by Angela Acuña. The result is an exquisite blend of
chorally managed artistic disciplines. More than a play, this is an event.62

Thus, through live drawing the scenography is not a mere backdrop to the main
performance, but is itself performed.
More than simply a means of public entertainment, storytelling or visual
exploration, live projected mark making has also been used in a very different
context, to illuminate a spiritual experience. In his PhD on the animation of
Islamic calligraphy, Mohammad Javad Khajavi explores the kinaesthetic,
plasmatic and transformative aspects of calligraphy and argues that ‘the
process of experiencing a line is time-based’.63 While Islamic calligraphy has a
close relationship to language and the written word that may be absent in the
wider practice of drawing, and, in particular, to the words of Allah as written in
ILLUMINATING 185

Figure 5.2 Photo of Bahman Panahi, 2017. © Bahman Panahi.

the Qur’an, which has the utmost spiritual significance in Islamic calligraphy,64
of interest to this chapter are calligraphic artists who publicly engage with
the performativity of calligraphy, of the coming into being of poetic words. In
contemporary Iranian artist and calligrapher Ahmad Ariamanesh’s Concert
of the Line performed in Tehran in 2013, live calligraphy is created to the
accompaniment of musicians, which forms an interaction between the music
and the emergence of the letterforms. Ariamanesh performed live on stage
through ink on paper that was projected live on a screen behind him.65 Another
artist working in this field is Bahman Panahi (see Figure 5.2). Originally from Iran,
Panahi was classically trained in both calligraphy and Persian classical music
before moving to Paris where he continued his studies at the Sorbonne and his
artistic activities. He has done extensive research on the relationship between
music and calligraphy, which he calls Musicalligraphy.66 In his performances, he
uses different approaches, such as creating large format pieces accompanied
by musicians or by his own recorded music, performing music while projecting
images of his calligraphy pieces, or composing music which corresponds to the
visual compositions of each piece. He also creates performances that combine
these two disciplines, sometimes working with fellow calligrapher Nuria García
Masip. In their performances, a camera relays a live feed of calligraphy in the
process of creation to a large screen that reveals intimate details of the writing
process and its choreography, while music is played in accompaniment.
186 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

Figure 5.3 Foá, Grisewood, Hosea, McCall, Sky vs SKYPE, 2011. © M. Foá, Jane
Grisewood, Birgitta Hosea and Carali McCall.

Using a live video feed to enlarge performance drawings made on stage and
make them visible to a live audience in the same space through projection is
only one use of this technology. Video can do more than simply mediate the
act of drawing within one place: the use of telematic video can also connect
distant locations together and enable a reciprocal process of documentation
and projection. Sky vs SKYPE (2011) (See Figure 5.3) was a telematic drawing
performance by Foá, Grisewood, Hosea and McCall that connected London and
the island of Papa Westray (Papay) as part of the Papay Gyro Nights Festival in
Orkney (See Figure 5.3). The initial concept for this work came from Carali McCall,
who contrasted the ancient method of navigation that uses stars in the night
sky with modern telecommunications satellites that can connect locations at the
speed of light. During this performance, a camera in Papa Westray was pointed
at the night sky and transmitted video images and atmospheric sound live via
Skype to London. The video feed was projected over a whole wall in a gallery
space and the group made spontaneous drawings over the projection as they
charted the passage of the moon through the night sky from Papa Westray. A
camera in London recorded the live drawings as they were created and returned
a live video feed back to Papa Westray via Skype, where it was projected onto
a wall as part of the festival’s opening night. Thus, the live video footage was
originated in Papa Westray, drawn over in London and the modified images
returned and displayed back in Papa Westray. Materials used included graphite
ILLUMINATING 187

Figure 5.4 Jeremy Radvan and Paul Sermon, (tele)consequences, 2018. © Paul
Sermon.

powder, pencil, water, chalk and white light from a torch. The performance
featured spoken word commentary on the weather conditions transmitted by
a second Skype feed from Jane Grisewood, who was in Australia at the time.67
Skype was also used in (tele)consequences, a collaboration between artists
Paul Sermon and Jeremy Radvan working with participants for the Marks Make
Meaning exhibition at the University of Brighton in 2018 (See Figure 5.4). A wall
in the gallery was covered with a large sheet of paper 2 × 1.5 metres high. Onto
this was projected an incoming live video feed from various participants online.
Working in a range of media including felt pen, charcoal and paint, gallery guests,
students and staff could then draw on the paper in response to the video images
from Skype. The camera in Brighton would then send the combined image back
to the participants as well as recording the various stages that were later played
back in the gallery.
The examples of performance drawing in this section differ in terms of context,
approach and intention, yet there are formal similarities. Each is created live and
spontaneously in conjunction with either music or a narrative. The mark making
produced on an intimate scale with traditional, analogue materials such as sand,
ink, graphite, watercolour and felt pen is instantly projected at a much larger size
through either the use of an overhead projector or the mediation of a live video
feed. This enables the audience to observe small details and the materiality of
the drawing process. The live experience highlights the wit and dexterity of the
188 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

artist who can respond freely to the present moment. Similar to many of the
lightning sketch acts in the preceding section, these artists create still drawings
that emerge over time during a performance. As part of the process, the artist’s
hands, while making marks, are often seen. The drawings themselves are static
and, although developing and expanding over time, they do not move. It is
possible, however, to make moving drawings that are projected live in front of
an audience as they are made. Through marking analogue film while it is being
projected, artists are able to go beyond the static image and create animated
drawings that move during a live performance.

Expanded cinema
From the mid-1950s onwards, inexpensive 8 mm and 16 mm film became
available to the consumer market, which enabled amateurs and artists access to
film equipment and the opportunity to experiment with film and how it could be
marked or erased as part of live performance.68 The term expanded cinema was
coined by experimental film-maker and animator Stan Vanderbeek in 196569 and
popularized by Gene Youngblood’s seminal book Expanded Cinema, based on
his writings from the 1960s and first published in the USA in 1970. In his book,
Youngblood comments that, since commercial cinema has a made-for-profit
motive, it is formulaic, manipulative, dulls the senses and cannot express his
globally connected, post-war generation who, spawned in an era of space travel
and mass media, was questioning traditional conventions, institutions, behaviours
and politics.70 Instead, he presents examples of expanded cinema: new forms
of media that could represent and engender expanded consciousness. Unable
to be contained by one discipline, this was part of a worldwide intermedia
communications network which functions like humanity’s nervous system.71
This new form of cinema was not about narrative or telling the audience what
to think – it was poetic, evocative and designed to open minds with multiple
sensory stimuli that leave space for the individual’s own free associations and
thus expand their consciousness.
In Europe, however, argues A. L. Rees, the notion of expanded cinema took
a slightly different trajectory than America.72 Rather than aiming for an immersive,
meditative and psychedelic experience, in general, the interpretation of ‘expanded
cinema’ in Europe tended towards a political attempt to deconstruct the illusionism
and ideological apparatus of the cinematic experience. Avant-garde film sought
to define itself by its opposition to a mainstream or ‘dominant’ cinema that is
marked by its connections with ‘economic and social power’.73 The argument
was that, as it was funded by the ruling classes, cinema represents their worldview
as ‘normal’. Alternative viewpoints are not expressed or distributed. Within the
pleasurable form of realist narrative, complex reality is replaced by escapism
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and the viewer is seduced into believing these representations to be truthful:


‘mainstream cinema “dominates” not through coercion, but through its formal
and stylistic lures and appeals’.74 Thus, the aim of oppositional, avant-garde
film was to challenge realism – making the artifice of the cinematic experience
apparent – and to question narrative and its stupefying effect on the viewer
in order to encourage a more critical attitude. Through an investigation of the
formal, structural and material processes through which cinema is constructed,
the artifice and ideological positioning of the work are revealed and challenged.
In the 1970s, a number of experimental film-makers held live events at which
this investigation of the structural and material properties of film was developed
into a deconstruction of the cinematic apparatus itself.75 These artists included,
among others, those associated with the London Film-Makers’ Co-op – including
Malcom Le Grice, William Raban, Anthony McCall, Annabel Nicholson and Guy
Sherwin; in Austria – Peter Weibel and VALIE EXPORT; in Germany – Birgit Hein
and Werner Nekes, in the USA – Paul Sharits; and in Japan – Takahito Iimura.
These artists used their own bodies and other surfaces as projection screens in
order to interrogate the site of projection. For example, in Anthony McCall’s Line
Describing a Cone (1973), originally shown at the London Film-Makers’ Co-op,
a white line moving slowly across black exposed film to form a circular shape is
projected onto a room filled with smoke or dust particles. This has the effect of
creating three-dimensional, sculptural cones of light that fill the space as far as
the reach of the projection. In this work the animated line is no longer restricted
to the screen. It is made manifest. It can be physically experienced. It is not
imagined. It exists in the present moment.76 Although these cones of light are the
product of a live projection event, Line Describing a Cone relies on pre-recorded
film footage and, thus, according to the criteria applied to this chapter, cannot be
called a performance drawing.
A number of other artists during this period sought to question mainstream
cinema by developing experiments with how films could be projected. These
included live performances in which strips of film were modified – painted,
scratched, sewn, eroded, erased, punctured and otherwise marked – while they
were being projected. This chapter argues for these works to be considered
not just within the canon of experimental film but also as a form of drawing in
time. Since the film is treated as one continuous strip during this process rather
than being worked on over a series of discrete frames, Nicky Hamlyn refers
to this method of generating moving images as ‘frameless’. Indeed, he states,
with a process that operates across a whole film strip ‘there can be no such
thing as a still frame, except as arbitrarily imposed by the framing act of the
project’.77 Paul Sharits’ film S:TREAM:S:SECTION:S:ECTION:S:S:ECTIONED
(1968–71) began as a performance. Over live-action film footage of images of a
stream, which he considered as a metaphor for narrative film, Sharits scratched
sequential lines into the filmstrip as it was passing through the projector. Thus,
190 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

to these representational images were added, and subtracted, marks specific


to the material of film. Through this process, Sharits aimed to ‘subvert any
illusion of reality the images might suggest’.78 This work is an act of drawing that
deconstructs the illusion of film and reveals it as, in the words of Birgit Hein, ‘both
projected image and object (film-strip)’.79 The ‘real’ images of moving water are
slowly erased by scratches that remove the film emulsion and instead allow pure
light to penetrate through the scratched areas.
Rather than modifying the filmstrip by hand during her performance Reel Time
(1973), Annabel Nicholson used a mechanical process to mark film footage.
According to Felicity Sparrow’s account of the original event at the London Film-
Makers Co-op in 1973,80 Nicholson was seated at a small table with a Singer
sewing machine. The audience stood and sat on both sides of her. There was
one projection screen in front of her and another at an angle. An empty projector
shone onto the angled screen and, thus, created a silhouette of herself and the
actions that she performed. A second projector showed a film in which she
herself was sewing. The filmstrip creating this projection took the form of a very
large loop which was attached to the ceiling but also ran through the sewing
machine that she was operating. Threaded through both the projector and the
sewing machine, her sewing over her image resulted in the projected image
becoming increasingly perforated by the needle, with areas of light flooding
through the holes. In the audience, someone read a manual on how to thread
a sewing machine and another read from a manual on how to thread a film
projector.81 As there was no thread in the sewing machine to bind it together, the
filmstrip slowly began to deteriorate. When it snapped Nicholson would repair
it and start the process again until it was no longer possible to fix it anymore
and the image became obliterated by light because of all the perforations.
Sparrow points out the gendered connotations of the use of the sewing machine
traditionally associated with the female and domestic sphere and the film
projector associated with male-dominated technical equipment. There are also
many technical connections between the sewing machine and the film projector,
such as the spools that are used on both to sprocket holes in film. The artist
Vicky Smith points out the challenging physical exertion involved for Nicholson
as it involved pedalling a treadle machine while handling a large amount of
cumbersome material that was splitting and coming apart in her hands.82
Whereas these performances by Sharits and Nicholson involve live mark
making to modify and erase pre-recorded films that already had a series of
images on them, other artists mark directly onto blank film that is either clear
(unexposed) or covered in black emulsion (pre-exposed). In Nam June Paik’s
Zen for Film (1962/4), a continuous loop of clear film becomes increasingly worn
and dirty as it is projected.83 Thus, it is the act of projection itself which creates
an array of slowly changing marks in the form of dust and scratches that emerge
over time in the rectangle of projected light. The title implies the act of viewing
ILLUMINATING 191

as meditative contemplation. The use of the act of projection itself to create a


performance of live mark making can also be seen in BWLHAICTKE (1976) by Lis
Rhodes and Ian Kerr at the ICA Festival of Expanded Cinema in London. Their
installation was in place for a week, during which time 100 feet of exposed black
film and 100 feet of unexposed clear film looped through projectors continuously.
Dragging on the floor for the duration of the event, the film became increasingly
scratched and dirty, with marks such as dust and dirt added to the clear film and
scratches erasing the surface emulsion of the black film. Through their different
forms of modification, by the end of the installation the two types of film come to
resemble one another – the black film lost its surface emulsion and the clear film
was no longer transparent after continued abrasion.84 This process also affected
the part of the film on which the soundtrack is optically recorded and, thus,
produced artificial sounds.85 Another artist who has, more recently, created
performances of live mark making onto blank film footage is Greg Pope. In Light
Trap (2007), an audio/light sculpture first performed at the Kill Your Timid Notion
Festival in Dundee, four projectors that are placed in the corners of a room and
threaded with loops of black film are pointed into the centre of the space, which
is filled with hazy, dry ice. An operator at each projector uses abrasion through
sandpaper and a jewellers’ grinder to graze and scratch away the surface of
the film. This creates random streaks and patterns of light as well as synthetic
sounds from the audio component of the filmstrip.86 Another variation of this
can be seen in Cipher Screen (2010) which uses two overlapping projections in
the form of a cross. Again, precision cutting and grinder tools are used to erase
and erode the surface of the film. As with the previous performance, this results
in not only marks of light but also flecks of black and an optically created live
soundtrack.87
Using automatic processes during a live performance, Paik, Rhodes, Kerr
and Pope are able to utilize chance and involuntary mark making to create
random and unexpected results in the projected image. Although this can also
be seen as an element in the films and performances of the contemporary artist
and animator Vicky Smith, her primary investigation is that of direct physical
encounter between film and the artist’s body. For Smith, there is renewed
relevance for artists today in working with the medium of film since it has become
obsolete as an industrial method of mainstream film production. In addition, film
has materiality – it need not be reserved for mimetic reproduction. The fragility
and physicality of film enables an exploration of sensuality through touch, of
time passing, mortality and decay. Smith considers her work to be ‘tactile film’
since no camera has been used and all marks are made through touch by a
direct, indexical connection between the artist’s body and the film strip. In her
performance 33 Frames Per Foot (2013), she walks over unexposed film in front
of an audience (see Figure 5.5). With paint on her feet, she leaves a trail of
footprints imprinted on the surface of the film. The paint dries quickly and then
192 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

she projects the film shortly after at the same event to create an animation.
Interviewed by email in 2014, Smith said of 33 Frames Per Foot:

I saw the work as a performance of making animated film. I thought of it as


animation in that the process was very incremental in terms of my bodily
movements, and in terms of the intermittent markings made on the filmstrip.88

Through this live performance work, Smith explores the idea that the material of
film is measured in ‘feet’, but this unit of measurement bears no relation to her
own body. The standard British imperial measurement unit of a ‘foot’ is actually
based on a male foot and is much larger than her own female foot. What does
this mean for women film-makers? Could it really be that the material of film is
not supposed to be used by women? Aligning her process with the structuralist,
materialist practices of an earlier generation of film-makers, Smith considers this
work as ‘a performance in which industry rules, measurements and systems
are explicitly rejected’.89 The work 33 Frames Per Foot reveals a gendered bias
behind the basic material of film-making.
In common with the previous artists, the work of Takahito Iimura shares an
investigation into the site of projection, the material properties of film and also
the act of perception at the heart of the viewing process. Internationally active,
his work also connects the avant-garde practices of Japan with the Fluxus group
in New York and the London Film-Makers’ Co-op. Iimura began experimenting

Figure 5.5 Vicky Smith, 33 Frames Per Foot, 2013. © Vicky Smith.
ILLUMINATING 193

with how his films were projected in the early 1960s. In his performance Screen
Play (1963) at the Sogetsu Art Centre in Tokyo, he projected an abstract film he
had made of chemical reactions onto the back of fellow artist Takamatsu Jiro.
He had cut a square hole into the back of Jiro’s jacket so the film was projected
directly onto his naked flesh as he sat, oblivious, reading a newspaper.90 In the
Film as Form catalogue, Birgit Hein91 credits Iimura with being the first artist to
treat projection itself as an object of investigation and, in the same publication,
he himself stresses that his work is not just about the moving image that is
created, but the whole process:

What I am concerned with in my film-installations is not just the screen but


the whole system of projection, and I want to expose that system: the system
which consists of facilities (projector, wall-as screen) and materials (film,
projected and not-projected light) within a space; (not-projected light is when
light is blocked by black film). To expose the system, so that it no longer hides
in darkness or behind the projection booth, every facility and material must be
‘visible’ including non-visible light. To achieve this, I use, rather than a theatre
with seats, an open space like that of a gallery, where people can come and
go at any time, and walk around the installation. I do not darken the space,
but exhibit under normal room light where projected light is still quite visible. I
use either black or clear leader or both as materials, because I regard these
as fundamental ones in film: one blocks light, the other transmits light … The
film installations are a dialectic, positive and negative, which makes apparent
what the film system is.92

Iimura began to punch holes into film in 1970.93 In his performance Circle and
Square (1981), he punches holes at regular intervals into a loop of black film as
it passes continuously through a projector. This results in the projected image
becoming increasingly filled with dancing circles of white until the punctured
filmstrip becomes so fragile that it breaks.94 This concept of erosion or erasure of
the image as a performative act is applied to the screen itself in White Calligraphy
Re-Read (1967/2014). During this performance, a text animation, an ancient
historical chronicle of Japan that has been scratched onto individual frames of
black film leader, becomes increasingly impossible to read. Working framelessly
by writing across the length of the film strip is for Iimura a reference to ancient
Japanese scrolls,95 which are considered by some as a time-based medium.96
As the film progresses, the projected white letters gradually appear to erode.
When the lights go back on at the end of the event, Iimura is revealed to have
been painting the projection screen black and thus destroying its light-reflecting
properties.
Another performance that uses live painting to alter the portions of a screen
that can be projected onto is Guy Sherwin’s Paper Landscape (1975) included
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in the ICA Festival of Expanded Cinema in London in 197697 and still regularly
performed. In this work, Sherwin stands behind a screen of transparent plastic.
He starts to paint it white. As the white strokes begin to cover the plastic, a
film can be seen in the places that are painted white. The film shows Sherwin’s
younger self in 1975. The younger self is tearing away a paper screen in front
of the camera to slowly reveal himself. He then walks into the horizon. The real,
present-day artist who stands behind the painted plastic then takes a knife and
starts cutting a hole in the image until he himself is revealed. Although originally
intended as a way to investigate the combination of interior and exterior space,98
over time this performance has taken on additional meaning as the artist himself
grows older in relation to the original film and has acquired a poignant sense of
memory, nostalgia and loss.
Another artist connected with expanded cinema who used live drawing
during one of her events is VALIE EXPORT. Based in Austria, EXPORT renamed
herself in order to take ownership of her own representation.99 In common with
the other artists in the 1960s and 1970s connected with expanded cinema,
she was concerned with the politics of film and her work was created in an
environment of Happenings, student uprisings of May 1968, Fluxus, Dada,
Situationism, Structural Film and Viennese Actionism (she was acquainted with
but not a member of this group)100 and aimed to be ‘an analysis carried out in
order to discover and realize new forms of communication, the deconstruction
of a dominant reality’.101 Auf+Ab+An+Zu (Up + Down + On + Off) (1968) was
an expanded cinema performance in which the viewer as passive consumer
is questioned. In reference to Bertolt Brecht’s idea of a Lehrstück (a learning
or instructional play that aimed to activate its audience out of passivity), she
considers this a Lehrfilm (learning film), which aimed to eliminate the distance
between creator and viewer in an effort to do away with the traditional hierarchical
distinction between active, creative artists and passively receptive audiences.102
During this performance, a looped 3-minute film shows a 360-degree camera
view circling around a monument. Some of the film footage is obscured by black
geometric shapes. The film is projected onto a paper screen and the audience
is invited to draw upon this paper screen and, thus, complete the image in
partnership with the artist. As the film looped, at intervals the drawings that had
been made on the screen would momentarily fill the missing space again. Made
by audience members, EXPORT called this drawing that attempted to fill a series
of absences the real film.103
Although expanded cinema is usually considering in terms of its context
within avant-garde film practice, it is clear that a number of artists associated
with this movement, such as Sharits, Nicholson, Rhodes, Kerr, Pope, Smith,
Iimura, Sherwin and EXPORT, used forms of live drawing in conjunction with film
projection as part of their investigations. Their inclusion in this chapter is intended
to contextualize their work on film as a form of time-based drawing. Mark making
ILLUMINATING 195

is used to immediately and directly intervene with the projection, material nature
and perception of film. During these performances, the activity of drawing is
seen by the audience as well as the results in the form of projected moving
images. Making marks on the film strip as it is projected, using the process
of projection itself to make marks, painting over the screen to vary opacity
and inviting the audience to participate in the making of images, these works
question the mainstream institution of cinema with its escapist immersion in an
entertaining narrative in order to invite a critically aware engagement with the
constructed nature of moving images and the manipulation involved in watching
classic narrative cinema.

Live animation
Animation is conventionally thought of as an art of the past: images are
laboriously created in a time-consuming process, recorded and then played
back in front of an audience. The time of creation is different from and precedes
the time of viewing. However, this view is bound to a pre-digital, medium-specific
conceptualization of animation. As Hosea has written,

Animation has previously been considered as bound by its relationship to


film: the medium on which it was distributed. In the traditional cinematic
context, each audience member has the same experience, is passive and
their reaction has no influence on how a film is played back. The use of digital
technologies has engendered a paradigm shift and a short or feature film
in a cinema is no longer the only manner in which moving images can be
distributed.104

On the contrary, animation can happen ‘now’, in the present time, through
various processes. This section will consider examples of live animation that
result from performance drawing. The term live animation is used here to define
moving images which are created live and played back in front of an audience as
they are being made. The act of drawing may be seen by the audience, but the
hands or body of the artist do not feature in the moving images that result. Using
a range of digital technologies, drawings are performed live and are projected in
the form of moving images.
The work of the Canadian animator Pierre Hébert creates a bridge between
expanded cinema performances of scratching directly onto analogue film and
the use of digital technologies to create live and spontaneous animated drawings
for projection. Hébert began to experiment with live scratching in 1986, making
marks on a 16 mm black leader loop of film while it was running in the projector.105
In these performances, he was able to improvise, for example producing stick
196 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

figures to illustrate the accompaniment of a poem.106 His motivation behind this


work was to reveal the process and technology of animation:

to set side by side, in clear view, in front of the spectators all the different
components of cinema: the screen, the projector, the strip of 16mm film, the
light table, the engraving tools, the frame by frame work, and the body of the
animator (my own body) doing all this, engaged in a frenetic activity in order
to proceed at the same speed as the projector … In those performances, the
displaying, with full transparency, of the apparatus and of the process was as
important as the result of the work, which was the short 40 sec. looped film
that was completed after more or less one hour of this unleashed activity.107

In the late 1990s, Hébert began to collaborate with the musician Bob Ostertag,
who created software that would allow him to process digital images live.
Relishing the opportunity to ‘profane’ the ‘new triumphant digital technology’,108
Hébert worked with Ostertag under the name of Living Cinema to create live,
immediate improvisational animation and music. This was done through the use
of software such as MaxMSP/Jitter to manipulate live video feeds of objects
and performed drawing and to combine them with processed streams of pre-
recorded images.109 The spontaneous nature of Living Cinema’s performances
enables them to respond immediately to world news and current affairs – such
as the bombing of the World Trade Center, which happened the week before
their first performance. Between Science and Garbage (2001), their first joint
performance at the Walker Center for Arts, Minneapolis, involved Hébert drawing
with marker pens on glass, chalk on chalkboard, blowing dust on mirrors, and
manipulating piles of rubbish, which formed both the subject matter of the
animation and the source of the sound – which was sampled and processed live
by Ostertag. Special Forces (2007) opened in Beirut and was conceived of after
the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006. It combines video game sounds with
video footage from the war and Hébert’s playful animated drawings of planes,
explosions and stick figures.110 A more recent performance, Shadow Boxing
(2012), premiered at the Beethoven International Project Festival in Chicago and
featured an amplified boxing ring, live animation, a video game controller, toys
(weapons, animal and soldier figures), fire, video footage from the location of the
performance and the newspaper from that day.111
For Hébert, his use of the technology is conceptual and extends his earlier
practice of live scratching on film:

The focal point of my work is situated precisely at the level of the interface
and the interaction between the live manual creation of successive images and
the digital processing of those images in terms of modification of order and
speed, of their segmentation in series of distinct loops, and of live composition
ILLUMINATING 197

of those loops. The fact that everything is accomplished from series of images
drawn during the performance, maintains at the center of the process the
bodily dimension and the imperative of speed, which were so important in live
scratched animation.112

He is able to investigate the ‘idea’ of animation and to perform it in an


improvisational manner with an ‘instrumental expression’.113 Rather than showing
pre-recorded images from the past, his work is able to respond immediately to
the present moment – like an improvisational musician.
As well as Hébert’s pioneering work with Ostertag through the use of the
Jitter patch for MaxMSP, there are other software and hardware tools available
to enable the generation of moving digital marks in a live context. The Tagtool, for
example, began as an open source ‘performative visual instrument’114 consisting
of an Arduino microprocessor in a wooden box with sliders linked to a Wacom
drawing tablet and joystick controller. It could be assembled through instructions
shared on the Internet. In 2012, the Tagtool was brought to the iPad as an app
and it was no longer necessary to assemble the components.115 The equipment
enables digital drawings to be created, projected (in conjunction with a projector)
and animated live.
Following Hosea’s experiments with the Tagtool in early 2010 to create
spontaneous backdrops and lighting effects for improvised dance and music
work at a University of the Arts London (UAL) Interdisciplinary Performance
workshop, where she created performances with, among others, the sound
artist Jose Macabra and scenographer Agnes Treplin,116 Foá, Grisewood, Hosea
and McCall began to experiment with the Tagtool during our second residency
at the Centre for Drawing, Wimbledon.117 The tool was used to create drawings
of white light in combination with graphite, sound and actions of the live body
during a performance of ARC: I Draw for You, as described in Chapter 3.
Hosea went on to use the Tagtool in her Medium (2012) performance that was
premiered in the basement cells of a former workhouse in London. The Tagtool
was used to create live automatic writing and ectoplasmic drawings that were
projected over pre-recorded images that formed a backdrop behind her own
live performance. Inspired by Victorian spirit photographs, this tableau vivant or
living picture explores the act of mediation that is involved in the digital image-
making process. Taking the role of a techno-medium, she channels messages
from film and radio through a projection of her pre-recorded multiple digital
doubles in combination with live images of automatic writing and electronic
ectoplasmic drawing. The work is informed by an investigation into the history
of manipulated photography and the connections between a medium, such
as film or digital code, through which a message is encoded, stored and
transmitted, and the psychic medium, a person who transmits messages from
the spirit world.118
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Other artists to use the Tagtool as part of live drawing performances include
UK-based Alys Scott Hawkins – who has been commissioned to make Tagtool
drawings for such events such as the opening of Drawn Together, Drawn Apart
(Southampton Art Gallery, 2013) and the dance performance collaboration
Mark / Shift / Loop (Arena Theatre, Wolverhampton, 2018) – and Kellie
O’Dempsey. Discovering the Tagtool online during research for her Master’s
at the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) Film School in Australia, O’Dempsey
travelled to Austria to build her own at OMAi International as part of an event
they were holding – Tagtool Chink Chank 2010. Struck by the immediacy of
drawing with light, its ephemeral nature and how it could be projected onto
architecture and natural environments, O’Dempsey has used the tool in a
number of performances – often in conjunction with drawing by hand, live-feed
cameras, recorded footage and video projections. Collaboration is an important
part of her practice and she often involves artists from other disciplines or even
the audience in her work:

When working collaboratively; with dancers, musicians, sound and visual


artists the drawn and choreographed line can respond and be responded to.
This can create a binding element where scores associated with improvisation
can re-imagine and generates new methods in making.119

For Draw / Delay (2015), she collaborated with the musician Mick Dick as part
of a public intervention in the city for the White Night festival in Melbourne. Sited
in an alleyway off a busy central street at night, both artists improvised – visually
and musically – in response to the environment in order to demystify the process
of creation. Combining paint, charcoal, a live video feed and digital drawing with
the Tagtool, O’Dempsey creates a richly layered and evolving series of painterly
images.120 The performance itself lasted for 12 hours and it was a challenge
of endurance for O’Dempsey to continue working from 7 p.m. till 7 a.m.121
Another collaboration, Resistance Movement (2017), with the American artist
Jennifer Wroblewski at the Kentler International Drawing Space, New York, also
featured Ben Gerstein on the trombone, Mike Pride on percussion and Jonathan
Moritz on the saxophone (See Figure 5.6). Inspired by Dada cabaret, Resistance
Movement invokes drawing’s capacity to record movement and reframes the
gallery as a site both in which drawing as movement can be explored and in which
a political movement of resistance can be incubated. Using ink, charcoal, chalks
on sticks – sometimes sighted, sometimes blindfolded – the pair responded to
the music and each other’s movements. After the opening night, the drawings
that formed the residue of the performance remained. Video and photographs
that documented the events were projected back into the space to form an
installation that served as the backdrop for other performances, such as Latino
hip-hop outfit M.A.N.I.A.C. Empire.122
ILLUMINATING 199

Figure 5.6 Kellie O’Dempsey and Jennifer Wroblewski, Resistance Movement, 2017.
© Kellie O’Dempsey.

Hosea and O’Dempsey have both employed digital drawing tools that they
have made themselves through following open source instructions online, but
the Tagtool was not of their own invention. Other artists such as Jeremy Radvan
create and programme their own unique drawing tools. Radvan’s digital projects
come out of years of experience in drawing in which he has observed the
difference between the ‘depictive mark, placed on the surface with a concern
for topographical precision’123 and the expressive stroke that employs chaos,
indeterminacy and imprecision.124 Originally, he worked with ‘off-the-shelf’
software. His initial research, as part of an MPhil at the Royal College of Art,
entitled The Use of the Computer as a Tool for Observation, led to a series
of directly observed animations drawn with a mouse and produced in a now
obsolete piece of software called Director. However, it seemed to him that this
process of drawing was a mimicry of traditional media and he wanted to explore
the specific qualities of the digital materials he was using. His work in live drawing
and performance began with Avatar (2005–7), a collaboration with the dancer
Rajyashree Ramamurthi. In this structured improvisation, live animations with
ghostly overlapping ‘onion-skinned’125 frames that leave a trace of movement
behind and layered video feeds were projected into the performance space.
Drawing with a tablet directly into Macromedia Flash, the animations were
created in real time, adding an improvisational choreography of line to the live
performance:
200 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

In Avatar, Rajyashree Ramamurthi and I began to explore the points of contact


between dance and drawing when they take place in the same performance
space … My drawings were created in direct response to Raj’s movement
on stage and I felt that I was drawing alongside her within the performance
space. That was the fundamental idea behind the piece.126

Ever Lasting (2011) was a live drawing performance in collaboration with the
dancer Marina Tsartsara as part of the Body-Culture-Art exhibition at the Royal
Institute of Science and Literacy, Bath, UK. This used Boil, Radvan’s own
custom-coded drawing software, which adds indeterminacy to the lines made
and incorporates randomized components. As opposed to a static line, the term
‘boil’ is used in animation to refer to constant movement that runs through a line,
even though the subject of the drawing may itself be static. For Radvan, this
adds the experience of duration to a drawing:

The drawing device that I have developed shifts the focus of the drawn mark
away from the instant of its making. The qualities are expressed through
constant boil. The qualities are distributed through a broader moment that
lays over that instant of its making … The constant movement gives a sense
of time passing.
These could be described as still images even though something is
evidently happening.
They are still because they employ the visual language of cinema and
within that structure nothing happens.
They are stilled images.127

Radvan sees this use of time in mark making as a way to distinguish between
drawing that demonstrates and drawing that performs.128
Another artist to write software inspired by their own extensive investigations
into drawing practice is James Patterson.129 Named after the Scottish/Canadian
experimental animation pioneer Norman McLaren, his software, Norman,130
allows the user to sketch in three-dimensional space using virtual reality (VR)
controllers in WebVR. Although he normally uses the tool to record animations
rather than perform them live, Irene Alvarado and Jonas Jongejan created an
augmented reality (AR) viewer for the animations that he made with Norman to
allow them to be composited in real time. Thus, they can be explored in three
dimensions through the mediation of a smartphone in which the animation is
superimposed over the actual view of whatever the phone’s camera is pointed
towards.131
Whereas Norman is an artist’s project for drawing in VR, Google’s Tilt Brush132
is a VR drawing application that has been developed commercially. Wearing a
VR headset such as Vive or Oculus and holding one or two handheld controllers,
ILLUMINATING 201

the artist is able to walk around and create a digital drawing in virtual space
through physical gestures that reach into all three dimensions. The controller
enables a variety of different mark making styles to be used in a combination of
sculpting and drawing. In Anna Zhilyaeva’s live performance (working as Anna’s
Dream Brush)133 at the Louvre in 2018, she used Tilt Brush in front of an audience
to recreate Eugène Delacroix’s painting Liberty Leading the People. In the
documentation of her performance on YouTube,134 she is shown as the audience
sees her – a woman with a headset and two handheld controllers moving around
in front of the original painting with a screen beside it showing her viewpoint from
inside the VR headset. This video footage is intercut with renderings from her
own point of view from inside the virtual space of the painting that she is creating.
Another artist to use Tilt Brush in live performances is the Korean artist Broken
Brain,135 who combines drawing in VR in front of an audience with pre-recorded
video and animation clips to create accomplished audio-visual performances
that combine drawing with traditions of the backing dancer to provide visual
illustrations that accompany rousing music soundtracks.
As opposed to using a controller, mouse or tablet to input mark making
information into a drawing programme, other artists use auditory or bodily triggers
to generate marks that can be projected live. On a computer, all information is
reduced to binary code in the form of zeros and ones. This enables multimodal,
synaesthetic connections to be made between different kinds of digital data136
and can result in algorithmic drawings that are generated live from different bodily
processes. In Golan Levin’s Scribble (2000), which was originally commissioned by
the Ars Electronica Festival in Austria, seven interactive Audiovisual Environment
Suites (AVES) programmed by Levin are operated by himself and collaborators
using live coding to produce synthetic sounds and abstract animation.137 In
another performance project, Messa di Voce (2003), Levin’s software transforms
the sounds made by human beings – through speech, shouting and song – into
a range of abstract graphic images, thus making the human voice visible. In
addition to visualizing sound, a number of artists use gesture data to create
drawings that are generated by the live human figure in motion – such as Fei
Jun’s Gesture Cloud Gesture Wall at the Chengdu Museum of Contemporary
Art in 2017. This work employed games technology – an Xbox Kinect motion
sensor – to detect the movements of museum visitors and transform this data
into graphic images. Other artists have begun to work with interior corporeal data
such as that produced by brainwaves. Oliver Gingrich’s Aura (2015) installation
is a real-time holographic projection of lines generated by the viewer’s mind and
measured through an electroencephalogram (EEG) headset. The images change
in colour and form according to the degree to which the viewer concentrates.138
For Gingrich, this work is a way to visualize telepathy and spiritual connections
between isolated individuals.139 Ani Liu’s Mind Controlled Spermatozoa (2017)
also uses an EEG headset and invokes the powers of telekinesis, in which the
202 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

mind alone can move material objects. In this case, the power of a woman’s mind
is used to control something fundamentally male and to manipulate living tissue
through the power of her thoughts. The project was created as an act of protest
against President Trump’s decision to cut US funding for international projects
to promote the reproductive rights of women. In the performance, a woman sits
cross-legged in a meditative posture within a pool of light into which images of
sperm are projected. A brain–computer interface (BCI) reads her thoughts and
transmits degrees of motion via electrophoretic circuits to pools of semen and
the resulting images are projected live via a microscope.140
There are a number of ways in which artists can create live animation with
digital mark-making tools – from processed video feeds of hand-made drawings
through to digital drawing that is created through input by mouse or tablet,
algorithm, voice, bodily movement or brainwaves. All of these examples, however,
rely upon digital technology connected to a projector in order to mediate the act
of digital mark making and to illuminate the drawings for an audience to see. The
marks are not themselves made directly onto the projection surface. A way to
draw directly with light without the aid of a camera or computer software is to
use self-illuminated sources such as LEDs and lasers.

Light drawing without mediation: LEDs


and lasers
The art and technology group Graffiti Research Lab have created tools for
drawing directly into the environment with a system for instantly projecting digital
drawings as they are made onto the walls of buildings. The Graffiti Research
Lab, which has now disbanded, was founded in 2005 by James Powderly and
Evan Roth at the Eyebeam OpenLab in New York. Their aim was to create tools
for digital graffiti art that could empower metropolitan activism in city spaces
that they considered to be dominated by the advertisements of big business.
This was done through developing open source technologies and sharing the
know-how and source code for these tools online. With the ambition to allow
people with scarce means to communicate at the same scale as advertisers
do, Graffiti Research Lab wanted their tools to connect urban street artists with
technological activists so that artists, protesters and pranksters could intervene
in the city with un-curated content. According to Roth:

We see this similarity between graffiti writers and hackers: graffiti writers sort
of hack the city, street artists and pranksters sort of hack public spaces to
twist systems that happens in the city into sort of their own message, and
hackers do that in a digital sense.141
ILLUMINATING 203

An early project that the group created was LED Throwies – LEDs connected
to magnets that could be thrown onto metallic surfaces around the city in order
to emit coloured lights. Another project was the L.A.S.E.R. Tag, a tool that used
a projected laser reflector to draw on the side of buildings. It works through
camera tracking of a green laser point, which is transformed by the software into
custom brush strokes such as dripping paint and then projected. As the finale of
the Microwave New Media Arts Festival in Hong Kong in 2007, Graffiti Research
Lab used the L.A.S.E.R. Tag to ‘bomb’ the city’s iconic skyline with ephemeral
graffiti. Local graffiti artists took turns to use it to paint with light over the exterior
of the Hong Kong Cultural Centre in Kowloon from across the harbour 1,200
metres away.142
Although the L.A.S.E.R. Tag employed a laser to draw with precision, the
marks themselves are not drawn directly onto the building. Rather, gestural
information is captured from the artist, this is then interpolated and mediated
through a computer by software before being transmitted on to the building via
a high-powered projector. As with the use of any software, this can result in a
lack of precision, modification of the intended mark and sometimes even a slight
time lag. Other artists have used lasers as a tool to draw directly with light in
their work without the intervention of a computer. Hosea’s dotdot dash (2018)143
is a participatory light action with laser pointers and voice that she conducts as
part of site-specific experience. The orchestration of this visual music piece is
based on a chance-based score made through walking with paint-covered feet
over musical paper. Coming together in a choral collaboration, participants are
directed to explore the colours and mark making possibilities made by drawing
with laser pointers and to accompany this with the sounds of their own voices.
The effect is a live audio-visual performance of animated lines in red, green and
purple reminiscent of an abstract animation created by directly scratching on
film. Although other artists have done light painting before, such as Nagata
Takeshi and Monno Kazue’s PiKAPiKA lightning doodles covered at the start
of the chapter, this is not the same. It is not a set-up to be recorded on a slow
exposure for a photograph but a live animation of lights and sound that is created
communally through improvisation and experienced in the present moment. It is
not intended to be experienced later through documentation but to take part in
during a live experience.
The work dotdot dash (see Figure 5.7) was originally commissioned in 2018
for the Night Walking North Kent Festival by InspiralLondon, a collaborative
artists’ project led by Charlie Fox of Counterproductions previously discussed
in Chapter 3. The project is based on a 300-mile walking trail around London in
the shape of a spiral created by Charlie Fox and divided into thirty-six sections.
dotdot dash was created to be experienced by walkers as part of a series of
site-specific artworks at the end of the trail in Gravesend. The intention behind
the work was to create a work of animation that could be made collectively by
204 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

Figure 5.7 Birgitta Hosea, dotdot dash, 2018 Live participatory performance of
animated drawing in a tunnel near Ebbsfleet station. © Birgitta Hosea.

the participants on the walk – that was mobile and would not involve carrying
any heavy equipment. Additionally, following discussions with the InspiralLondon
group about privilege and who is able to walk around freely in the dark at night,
dotdot dash is a collective action to reclaim the night through light and noise for
people who may not normally feel safe to walk at night in the city.
Determining a route by chance through this drawing of a line means that the
walk cuts through many unpredictable parts of London. The route involved going
through light industrial areas that are desolate and deserted at night, walking
through a caged walkway over a sheer drop to a chalk pit, through bushes and
undergrowth, past burnt-out motor bikes, across another caged walkway over
a railway line and then to a tunnel through a disused chalk pit near Ebbsfleet
International station. Everyone on the walk was given two laser pens and with
around thirty people present a live performance of animation was created. With
the acoustic amplification of a brass megaphone, Hosea gave instructions as to
what colours and types of marks and sounds the participants should make. The
orchestration of this visual music piece is based on a chance-based score made
through walking with paint-covered feet over musical paper. Coming together in
a choral collaboration, participants are directed to explore the colours and mark-
making possibilities made by drawing with laser pointers and to accompany
this with the sounds of their own voices. The effect is an immersive experience:
a live audio-visual performance of animated lines in red, green and purple that
look like an abstract animation which has been scratched on film. The work was
ILLUMINATING 205

repeated in a different tunnel – on the Regents Canal at Kings Cross, London for
another InspiralLondon night walk for the London as Park City Festival (2018).
A different group of walkers participated in the work. The addition of the water
going through the tunnel added an extra element of bounced light and reflection
to the mark-making possibilities.

Conclusion: Post-medium practice


Performance drawing generally unsettles conventional views of drawing,
because the emphasis is on the activity of mark making, on the process, on
the performance, rather than the end product – the resulting drawing. It can
be argued, however, that any drawing contains levels of performance. During
the process of creation, an artist performs gestures, actions and movements
to make the forms and marks that constitute the finished work. Indeed,
Donald Crafton proposes that contemporary fine art animation is in itself a
performance. He argues that animators who use tactile processes such as sand
or the manipulation of objects create a performance of which the animation is
a recorded documentation.144 Thus, although the only method of documenting
a performance drawing may appear to be photographic, a still drawing or an
animation also record the gestures that the artist used to make each mark.
This chapter has connected together a field of performance drawings that
are made through illumination from an interdisciplinary range of technological
practices in art, theatre and film. What connects them is not one particular
medium, material or process but the use of illumination. With other forms of
performance drawing, a relic is left behind – a trace of the materials used lingering
on a surface. However, when the means of exhibiting the performance drawing
is through projected light, the experience becomes completely ephemeral. A
common-sense understanding of drawing is that it is an activity that leaves a
residue behind on a surface: a material trace of pencil, ink, crayon, charcoal,
pastel and so on.145 Yet drawing with light complicates this as light does not
normally leave a trace behind where it has fallen. It is temporary and fleeting
rather than permanent. Photo-sensitive paper or a photograph may capture
the trajectory of the light drawing, but as documentation and not directly in its
original form as illumination. The experience for the viewer is different. This is
the same point that Phelan makes about live performance146 – that the sensual
perception of it in three-dimensional space and the risk and surprise involved in
spontaneity and improvisation cannot be reproduced: it needs to be experienced
in its original form. This is a perennial question for all performance art – where is
the work? Is it created for the live experience in the present moment or for the
lens of the camera to be watched later? If the latter, how much does the framing
eye of the camera affect or even diminish the work?
206 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

Animation offers another option for documenting a performed drawing, yet it


normally operates within a different temporal zone to a live event. The experience
of watching a performance of light drawing may appear to be like watching an
animation, but there is a fundamental difference. With a conventional animation,
the images have been painstakingly created in the past, recorded and then
played back, whereas with a performance drawing the act of creation takes
place in real time before the eyes of onlookers. It is not a replay of a recording.
However, if the drawn images created during the live performance move, then it
can be argued that this is a live form of animation. Although ‘liveness’ troubles
the usual understandings of animation, certain types of performance drawings
that move and are illuminated and/or projected can be regarded as not only
time-based drawings but also live animation.147
The illuminated works in this chapter are also connected by issues of both
time and movement at the heart of the practice of drawing. The very notion of
drawing with light is at the root of the concept of photography itself. The English
term ‘photography’ combines the Greek terms phōs/phōt (meaning light) and
graphikos (meaning written or drawn). Cholodenko argues that following a trail of
concepts that contain what he refers to as the ‘graphematic’ reveals a range of
practices that are all connected by drawing:

The graphs – hand drawing, drawing with light (photography), drawing


with motion (cinema), and drawing with life and motion at the same time
(animation) – are inextricably interwoven in a tracery, as they are in a chain,
or rather train, of undecidable, substitutable, supplementary terms/modes.148

Indeed, a concern with line and duration persists across all the disciplines
under discussion in this chapter and, in particular, it is argued here for moving
image itself as a form of drawing practice. An example of this can be seen in the
work of Soviet theatre director and film-maker Sergei M. Eisenstein, who drew
incessantly, as was revealed in an exhibition of his drawings at The Drawing
Center in New York in 2000. In a chapter from his memoirs that is reproduced
in the catalogue for this exhibition, he recounts the interconnection between
learning to dance and learning to draw. A particular incident in which a family
friend drew for him was transformational:

He drew wild animals.


Dogs. Deer. Cats.
… Here, before the eyes of the delighted beholder, this outline took form
and started moving. As it moved, the unseen line of the objects traced a
magical path, making it appear on the dark blue coloured cloth.
The line was the track left by the movement.
ILLUMINATING 207

Years later I still remember this acute sense of line as dynamic movement;
a process, a path.149

During his drawing lessons, Eisenstein felt constrained and uninspired with
drawing the volumes of static subjects in ossified poses like a plaster cast. It was
the movement of line that inspired him:

drawing and dancing, which take the route from the same impulse, here
converged.

And the line of my drawing was seen as the trace of a dance.150

He connects drawing with motion, with change, with metamorphic transformation,


with the instantaneous and ephemeral. As a film-maker and theatre director, his
exploration of the line took different forms. For Eisenstein, the choreography of
the line was not just expressed by drawing on paper but the patterning of human
bodies in space in his theatre work and graphic contrasts in his film work. For
him, the line is time-based and about movement.
Eisenstein’s work demonstrates that whatever mark-making technology is
used, drawing is not tied to particular tools and materials but is a concept or
methodology that emerges from the tracing of human gesture. As Ed Krčma
has argued,151 drawing, in its simplicity, can be used as a process with many
other forms of technology. Indeed, perhaps drawing itself is continually evolving
with new forms of technology. Rather than fixating on issues of technique, of
the analogue rather than the digital, of the medium, instead this raises issues
of the body, of the physical making process, of the living, sensing human being
at the centre of the process.

Notes
1 The authors would like to acknowledge the following who made contributions to
the research for this chapter: Lina X Aguirre, Malcolm Cook, Oliver Gingrich, Nicky
Hamlyn, Javad Khajavi, Soirée Nicholson and Richard Wright.
2 Examples of their work can be seen on Takeshi Nagata’s YouTube channel: https://
www.youtube.com/channel/UCfhISR7gmVxLxNEInpNvitg.
3 A VJ (abbreviation for ‘video jockey’) plays samples of moving images as part of a
live show, typically at a night club or music event.
4 Peggy Phelan, ‘The ontology of performance: Representation without reproduction’,
in Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge,
1993), p. 146.
5 Birgitta Hosea, ‘Substitutive bodies and constructed actors: A practice-based
investigation of animation as performance’ (PhD diss., University of the Arts London,
2012), p. 30.
208 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

6 Malcolm Cook, ‘The lightning cartoon: Animation from music hall to cinema’, Early
Popular Visual Culture, vol. 11, no. 3 (2013): 238.
7 Ibid., pp. 237–9.
8 In this chapter, the American term ‘lightning sketch’ is used to stress the centrality of
drawing to this act rather than cartooning or caricature.
9 Donald Crafton, Before Mickey: The Animated Film 1898–1928 (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 48.
10 Cook, ‘The lightning cartoon’, p. 240.
11 Ibid., p. 247.
12 Ibid., pp. 243–5.
13 Dennis Gifford, ‘Tom Merry (William Mecham) (1853–1902)’, Biographical Guide to
Victorian film, Who’s Who of Victorian Cinema, 1996, http://www.victorian-cinema.
net/merry.htm (accessed 19 November 2017).
14 Malcolm Cook, ‘Animating perception: British cartoons from music hall to cinema,
1880–1928’ (PhD diss., Birkbeck, University of London, 2012), p. 248.
15 Cook, ‘The lightning cartoon’, p. 248.
16 See Tom Gunning, ‘The cinema of attraction[s]: Early film, its spectator and the
avant-garde’, in Wanda Strauven, ed., The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded
(Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), pp. 381–8.
17 Gifford, ‘Tom Merry (William Mecham) (1853–1902)’.
18 See Philippe Gauthier, ‘A trick question: Are early animated drawings a film genre
or a special effect?’, Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, vol. 6, no. 2 (2011):
163–75.
19 Crafton, Before Mickey, p. 51.
20 Ibid., pp. 48–51.
21 Dennis Gifford, ‘Walter Robert Booth (1869–1938)’, Biographical Guide to Victorian
film, Who’s Who of Victorian Cinema, 2017, http://www.victorian-cinema.net/
walterbooth.php (accessed 19 November 2017).
22 Crafton, Before Mickey, p. 364.
23 Ibid., p. 52.
24 Ibid.
25 Dan Torre and Lienors Torre, ‘The pioneering years of Australian animation (1900–
1930): From animated sketches to animation empire’, Senses of Cinema, no. 77
(December 2015).
26 Anita Calloway, Visual Ephemera: Theatrical Art in Nineteenth-Century Australia
(Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2000), p. 68.
27 Melbourne Punch, 27 July 1905, cited in Torre and Torre, ‘The pioneering years of
Australian animation (1900–1930)’.
28 Torre and Torre, ‘The pioneering years of Australian animation (1900–1930)’.
29 Crafton, Before Mickey, pp. 89–129.
30 John Canemaker, Winsor McCay: His Life and Art (New York: Harry N. Abrams,
2005), p. 135.
ILLUMINATING 209

31 Ibid., pp. 152, 153–7.


32 Winsor McCay, Winsor McCay: Animation Legend [1911–21] (USA: Argos Films;
BFI, 1996), VHS, Connoisseur/Academy Video.
33 Ibid.
34 Canemaker, Winsor McCay, p. 177.
35 This term refers to the improvised dialogue that showmen would speak. Often
during silent films or lightning sketches there would be amusing or entertaining
chatter by the performers. Also known as ‘banter’.
36 Canemaker, Winsor McCay, pp. 176–7.
37 Cohl [1922] quoted in Crafton, Before Mickey, p. 111.
38 Unfortunately, Winsor McCay’s animation and stage careers were relatively short-
lived. His main employment was as a newspaper cartoonist and his biographer,
John Canemaker, reports that in 1917 W. R. Hearst, his employer, forced him to give
up his act and focus on his work at the newspaper. See Canemaker, Winsor McCay,
p. 177.
39 Ibid., p. 177.
40 Crafton, Before Mickey, p. 259.
41 According to the theory of remediation, an emerging form of new media will
incorporate forms of ‘old’ media that preceded it. See Jay David Bolter and Richard
Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000).
42 Cook, ‘The lightning cartoon’, p. 238.
43 Ibid., pp. 246–7.
44 Alan Cholodenko, ‘The illusion of the beginning: A theory of drawing and animation’,
Afterimage, vol. 28, no. 1 (2000).
45 Ferenc Cakó, ‘Interview’, Sand Animation by Ferenc Cakó, 2012–2017, https://
sandanimation.tumblr.com/interview (accessed 1 June 2020).
46 Ferenc Cakó, ‘Livesandanimation’, YouTube, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/user/
livesandanimation (accessed 18 November 2017).
47 Ferenc Cakó, ‘Legal statement’, Sand Animation by Ferenc Cakó, 2012–2017,
http://sandanimation.tumblr.com (accessed 18 November 2017).
48 Kseniya Simonova, ‘Simonova TV’,Kseniya Simonova website, http://simonova.tv/
en/ (accessed 18 November 2017).
49 Lisa Gornick, interview by Birgitta Hosea, email, 29 October 2017.
50 Ibid.
51 Lisa Gornick, ‘What Is Lesbian Cinema? Live Drawing Show’, Lisa Gornick, website,
http://lisagornick.com/what-is-lesbian-cinema-live-drawing-show (accessed
2 November 2017).
52 Gornick, interview by Birgitta Hosea.
53 Cornerhouse, Unspooling: Artists and Cinema (Manchester: Cornerhouse, 2010),
exhibition catalogue.
54 England & Co Gallery, ‘Harald Smykla: Movie protocols & other activities’, England
& Co Gallery (blog), 12 December 2014, http://www.englandgallery.com/harald-
smykla-movie-protocols-other-activities/ (accessed 3 November 2017).
210 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

55 Filipa Malva, ‘Of lines, zoom and focus: Mediating drawing in performance’,
presentation at the Markings: Festival of Illustration and Performance, Central Saint
Martins, University of the Arts London/House of Illustration, London, 2016.
56 Birgitta Hosea, ‘Drawing animation’, Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, vol. 5,
no. 3 (2010): 363.
57 John Miers, ‘Event review of “Markings: Festival of Illustration and Performance”, at
Central St Martins, 8–9th July 2016’, Spark: UAL Creative Teaching and Learning
Journal, vol. 2, no. 1 (2017).
58 Malva, ‘Of lines, zoom and focus’.
59 In an email to Birgitta Hosea, Malva related that the particular brand of charcoal she
used, Vlarco, is only available through Portuguese art suppliers.
60 These are custom-cut pieces of black metal used to control patterns of light and
shadow in theatrical lighting.
61 Joaquín Cociña, ‘Theater’, Joaquín Cociña website, http://joaquincocina.
com/?page_id=201 (accessed 3 November 2017).
62 POTQ Magazine, ‘Teatro: Mi Joven Corazón Idiota’, POTQ Magazine, 9 June 2009,
http://www.potq.net/noticias/teatro-mi-joven-corazon-idiota/. Translation courtesy of
Microsoft Translator (accessed 3 November 2017).
63 Mohammad Javad Khajavi, ‘Re-animating the script: An exploration of new
directions in calligraphic animation with reference to the kinesthetic, plasmatic and
transformative qualities of Islamic calligraphy’ (PhD diss., Nanyang Technological
University, 2016), p. 79.
64 Ibid., p. 49.
65 Ibid., p. 58.
66 Bahman Panahi, ‘About’, Bahman Panahi website, http://bahmanpanahi.com/
about-me.html (accessed 3 November 2017).
67 Drawn Together, ‘SKYPE vs. Night Sky: A telematic drawing performance’, Drawn
Together website, https://drawntogether.wordpress.com/2011/02/05/skype-vs-
night-sky-a-telematic-drawing-performance/ (accessed 3 November 2017). See
also Drawn Together, ‘SKYPE vs Night Sky: Pictures’, Drawn Together (blog),
19 February 2011, https://drawntogether.wordpress.com/2011/02/19/skype-vs-
night-sky-pictures/ (accessed 3 November 2017).
68 Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (London: Studio Vista, 1970), p. 93.
69 Mark Bartlett, ‘Socialimagestics and the visual acupuncture of Stan Vanberbeek’s
expanded cinema’, in A. L. Rees, Duncan White, Steven Ball and David Curtis, eds,
Expanded Cinema: Art, Performance, Film (London: Tate Publishing, 2011), p. 50.
70 Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, pp. 42, 59.
71 Ibid., p. 41.
72 A. L. Rees, ‘Expanded cinema and narrative: A troubled history’, in Rees et al.,
Expanded Cinema, p. 12.
73 Phillip Drummond, ‘Notions of avant-garde cinema’, in Hayward Gallery, ed., Film as
Form: Formal Experiment in Film 1910–1975 (London: Arts Council of Great Britain,
1979), exhibition catalogue, p. 9.
74 Ibid.
ILLUMINATING 211

75 This term refers to the interconnected elements of the cinematic experience – the
film itself and how it is constructed; the equipment used; the act of projection and
its reception; the institutional context of cinema. See Jean-Louis Baudry, ‘Ideological
effects of the basic cinematographic apparatus’, trans. by Alan Williams, Film
Quarterly, vol. 28, no. 2 (1974–5): 39–47.
76 Hosea, ‘Substitutive bodies and constructed actors’, pp. 100–1.
77 Nicky Hamlyn, ‘Frameless film’, in Nina Danino and Michael Mazière, eds, The
Undercut Reader: Critical Writings on Artists’ Film and Video (London: Wallflower
Press, 2003), p. 164.
78 Stuart Liebman, Paul Sharits (St Paul, MN: Film in the Cities, 1981), p. 13.
79 Hayward Gallery, Film as Form, p. 99.
80 Felicity Sparrow, ‘Annabel Nicholson: Reel time’, Artists’ film, Lux Online, 2005,
http://www.luxonline.org.uk/artists/annabelnicolson/(printversion).html (accessed 6
November 2017).
81 Annabel Nicholson, ‘I was sitting with my back to them, sewing, a beam of light
coming at me from the projector’, in Rees et al., Expanded Cinema, pp. 158–9.
82 Vicky Smith, ‘The animator’s body in expanded cinema’, Animation: An
Interdisciplinary Journal, vol. 10, no. 3 (2015): 224.
83 Hayward Gallery, Film as Form, p. 95.
84 Nicky Hamlyn, ‘Mutable screens: The expanded films of Guy Sherwin, Lis Rhodes,
Steve Farrer and Nicky Hamlyn’, in Rees et al., Expanded Cinema, p. 213.
85 Hamlyn, ‘Frameless film’, p. 163.
86 Steven Ball, ‘Conditions of music: Contemporary audio-visual spatial performance
practice’, in Rees et al., Expanded Cinema, p. 271; Greg Pope, ‘Light trap’, Greg
Pope Live Cinema/Film/Performance (blog), 17 July 2011, https://gregpope.org/
light-trap/ (accessed 17 November 2017).
87 Cornerhouse, Unspooling: Artists and Cinema; Greg Pope, ‘Cipher Screen’, Greg
Pope Live Cinema/Film/Performance (blog), 17 July 2011, https://gregpope.org/
cipher-screen (accessed 17 November 2017).
88 Vicky Smith, interview by Hosea, email, 2014.
89 Smith, ‘The animator’s body in expanded cinema’, p. 234.
90 Julian Ross, ‘Circle the square: Film performances by Iimura Takahiko in the
1960s’, MOMA, Post Notes on Modern and Contemporary Art Around the Globe
(blog), 19 September 2013, http://post.at.moma.org/contentitems/290-circle-
the-square-film-performances-by-iimura-takahiko-in-the-1960s (accessed 14
November 2017).
91 Hayward Gallery, Film as Form, p. 99.
92 Ibid., p. 139.
93 Ross, ‘Circle the square’.
94 Hosea, ‘Substitutive bodies and constructed actors’, p. 1.
95 Duncan White, ‘Artists at work: Takahiko Iimura’, Afterall Online, 2010, https://
www.afterall.org/online/artists-at-work-takahiko-iimura/#.Wg8OSEtpFE6 (accessed
17 November 2017).
212 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

96 See Erkki Huhtamo, Illusions in Motion: A Media Archaeology of the Moving


Panorama and Related Spectacles (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013).
97 Hamlyn, ‘Mutable screens’, p. 214.
98 Guy Sherwin and Lynn Loo, ‘Live cinema’, in Rees et al., Expanded Cinema,
pp. 253–4.
99 VALIE EXPORT, ‘Biography’, VALIE EXPORT website, http://www.valieexport.at/en/
biografie (accessed 18 November 2017).
100 Rosewitha Mueller, VALIE EXPORT: Fragments of the Imagination (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1994).
101 VALIE EXPORT, ‘Expanded Cinema: Expanded Reality’, in Rees et al., Expanded
Cinema, p. 288.
102 Mueller, VALIE EXPORT, p. 11.
103 Dunja Schneider and Nina Kirsch, ‘VALIE EXPORT: Time and countertime’,
information sheet (Linz: LENTOS Kunstmuseum, 2011), p. 19.
104 Hosea, ‘Substitutive bodies and constructed actors’, p. 91.
105 Pierre Hébert, ‘The idea of animation and instrumental expression’, Pierre Hébert
website, http://pierrehebert.com/en/publications/texts/the-idea-of-animation-and-
instrumental-expression (accessed 4 February 2018).
106 Tess Takahashi, ‘Meticulously, recklessly worked upon: Direct animation, the auratic
and the index’, in Chris Gehman and Steve Reinke, eds, The Sharpest Point:
Animation at the End of Cinema (Toronto: YYZ Books, 2005), p. 175.
107 Hébert, ‘The idea of animation and instrumental expression’.
108 Ibid.
109 Pierre Hébert, ‘Cinema, animation and the other arts: An unanswered question’, in
Gehman and Reinke, The Sharpest Point, p. 188. Pierre Hébert, ‘Living cinema’,
Pierre Hébert website, http://pierrehebert.com/en/performance/living-cinema
(accessed 18 November 2017).
110 Lizzy Hill, ‘Special Forces drawing lessons’, The Coast Halifax, 2 April 2009, https://
www.thecoast.ca/halifax/drawing-lessons-in-special-forces/Content?oid=1098798
(accessed 18 November 2017).
111 L’École de Littérature, ‘Shadow boxing: Living cinema’, French Literature
Organisation, L’École de Littérature, June 2014, http://www.lecoledelitterature.org/
shadow-boxing.html (accessed 19 November 2017).
112 Hébert, ‘The idea of animation and instrumental expression’.
113 Ibid.
114 OMAI International, ‘About the Tagtool Project’, Tagtool: Drawing and Animation for
Live Performance – on Stage, on the Street and on the Net, website, http://www.
tagtool.org/wp/about (accessed 10 May 2010).
115 OMAI, ‘Tagtool’, OMAi, website, https://www.omai.at/tagtool (accessed
19 November 2017).
116 Hosea, ‘Substitutive bodies and constructed actors’, pp. 187–8.
117 Drawn Together, ‘Drawing with light’, Drawn Together, 18 January 2010, https://
drawntogether.wordpress.com/2010/01/18/drawing-with-light (accessed
19 November 2017).
ILLUMINATING 213

118 Karachi Biennale 2017, ‘Artists: Birgitta Hosea’, Karachi Biennale 2017, website,
http://www.kbcuratorial.com/artists?page=2 (accessed 19 November 2017);
Birgitta Hosea, ‘Medium (2012)’, Artist’s website, Birgitta Hosea, 2012, http://www.
birgittahosea.co.uk/pages/medium.html (accessed 19 November 2017).
119 Kellie O’Dempsey, interview by Birgitta Hosea, email, 31 October 2017.
120 Kellie O’Dempsey, ‘White Night Festival – Melbourne – Draw/Delay’, Kellie
O’Dempsey, website, http://www.kellieo.com/performance/2015-2/white-night-
festival (accessed 19 November 2017).
121 O’Dempsey, interview by Birgitta Hosea.
122 Ibid.
123 Jeremy Radvan, ‘A description of drawing and time in my work’, email, 14 March
2017.
124 Jeremy Radvan, ‘A Hand-Crafted Digital Drawing Application: Indeterminacy and
Boil’, paper presented at The Crafty Animator, Rich Mix conference London, 2017.
125 The term ‘onionskin’ is used in animation to refer to semi-transparent images of the
frame before and after the one currently being worked on. They are like an echo
from the past and the future of the animated sequence.
126 Jeremy Radvan, interview by Birgitta Hosea, email, 8 June 2017.
127 Radvan, ‘A description of drawing and time in my work’.
128 Ibid.
129 See James Paterson’s website: presstube.com.
130 See the Norman animation tool website: https://normanvr.com.
131 See James Patterson, Norman – Night Street Navigation, YouTube video, 2017,
https://youtu.be/r8Yqm6xfOso.
132 See the Tilt Brush by Google website: https://www.tiltbrush.com.
133 See Anna Dream Brush’s website: https://www.annadreambrush.com.
134 See demonstration on Anna Dream Brush, Live Performance at the Louvre
Museum Paris (Virtual Reality Art), YouTube video, 26 August 2018, https://youtu.
be/Zs3n07Clw7A.
135 See Tilt Brush by Google website: http://brokenbrain.co.kr.
136 Birgitta Hosea, ‘Photosonic synthesis: Hearing colour, seeing sound, visualising
gesture’, paper presented at the Seeing … Vision and Perception in a Digital
Culture: Computers and the History of Art (CHArt) 24th Annual Conference,
University of London, 2008.
137 Golan Levin, ‘Scribble’, Flong, website, http://www.flong.com/projects/scribble
(accessed 19 November 2017).
138 Oliver Gingrich, ‘Aura’, Oliver Gingrich, website, https://olivergingrich.
com/2016/09/23/aura (accessed 4 February 2018).
139 Oliver Gingrich, Alain Renaud and Eugenia Emets, ‘Aura: Telepathy, telepresence
and spiritualism as a mirror of technology’ (Unpublished document, 2017).
140 Ani Liu, ‘Mind-controlled spermatozoa’, Ani Liu, website, http://ani-liu.com/
pussygrabsback (accessed 18 November 2017).
141 Monica Ponzini, ‘Graffiti Research Lab: Writers as hackers as artists’, DIGIMAG:
Digital Art and Electronic Culture, no. 30 (December 2007): 62.
214 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

142 Graffiti Research Lab, ‘L.A.S.E.R. Tag’, Graffiti Research Lab website, http://www.
graffitiresearchlab.com/blog/projects/laser-tag/ (accessed 3 November 2017).
143 Birgitta Hosea, ‘Dotdot Dash’, Expanded Animation, website, https://
expandedanimation.net/2019/01/09/dotdot-dash (accessed 28 January 2019).
144 Hosea, ‘Substitutive bodies and constructed actors’, pp. 70–1; Donald Crafton,
‘Performance in and of animation’, Society for Animation Studies (SAS) Newsletter,
vol. 16, no. 1 (September 2002).
145 Hosea, ‘Drawing animation’, p. 354.
146 Phelan, ‘The ontology of performance’.
147 For a more detailed version of this argument, see Hosea, ‘Substitutive bodies and
constructed actors’.
148 Cholodenko, ‘The illusion of the beginning’.
149 Sergei M. Eisenstein, ‘How I Learned to Draw (A Chapter About My Dancing
Lessons)’, ed. The Drawing Center. Drawing Papers 4: The Body of the Line:
Eisenstein’s Drawings, 22 March 2000, 25. https://issuu.com/drawingcenter/docs/
dp4eisenstein (accessed 8 October 2017).
150 Ibid., p. 28.
151 Ed Krčma, ‘Cinematic drawing in a digital age’, Tate Papers, no. 14 (Autumn 2010),
http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/14/cinematic-drawing-in-
a-digital-age (accessed 19 November 2017).
CONCLUSION

A significant feature of contemporary drawing has been the transition to artists’


engagement with performance-based works, as well as engaging with the
philosophical and conceptual construct of the line. In performance drawing,
there is a strong relationship between mark making, body, line, time and space in
contemporary practices. This book has aimed to gather artworks from different
disciplines, materials and approaches that have either informed the development
of or reflect current concerns in the expanded field of drawing today. Although,
as is symptomatic of the majority of the available literature in English to date,
many of the examples of artists included in the book are taken from the Anglo-
American context, the authors have tried to approach performance drawing as
a worldwide phenomenon. Grounded in a practice-based research perspective
that derives from the authors’ own praxis, the focus has been on process,
whereby ‘drawing’ has come to refer not only to works on paper but to a more
expanded notion of what drawing and performance in combination can mean.
Indeed, throughout the book, drawing is considered as a performed process
rather than focused through the lens of a particular technique, medium,
outcome or aesthetic. In relation to drawing specifically, Chapter 1, ‘Marking:
Line and body in time and space’, introduced artists’ works made by marking
and involving the body to explore duration. Investigating works made in the late
1940s through seven decades to the present day, the chapter identifies how
contemporary drawing, like sculpture and painting, has moved beyond the limits
of recording the visual to engage with temporality, memory, movement and the
sensuality of touch. Starting from the action paintings of Jackson Pollock and
the Gutai artists, pioneering works of performance art are described that expand
drawing into actions carried out in a time-based context. This thread of enquiry is
extended to more recent artists whose conceptualization of time is recorded by
line in movement and space. Jean Fisher once described drawing as ‘suspended
between gesture and touch’,1 and the marks described in Chapter 1 take the
form of material residue resulting from the touch between tool and body during
an act of drawing. From line as a record of movement – where the mark is still
paramount – Chapter 2, ‘Physicality: Running as drawing’, shifts the focus from
mark to maker, whose movement is seen as a performative embodiment of the
216 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

line, where the body becomes the line. The body also becomes the material and
the site of the work, so that running can be drawing and the dynamics of the
artist’s body offer a mark. In counterpoint to the physical demands of extreme
movement and duress is the powerful presence of stillness and being. In the
contrast between stillness and the motion of extreme endurance experienced
through time are possibilities to understand or ‘to know’ different versions of
oneself and uncover the body in multiple and various ways. In this way, the
conscious focus of the practitioner is elevated in performance. Thus, although
it may leave no trace beyond its photographic documentation, the linear
movement and their points in space are proposed as a form of drawing in which
the dynamics of the mind/body supersede the mark. Following a trajectory that
traces the influence of John Cage on approaches to performance practice, in
Chapter 3, ‘Communicating: Directives and/or instructions that promote the
activity of drawing’, drawing becomes further dematerialized from an actual mark
into an idea for a mark – meaning that the idea is stored in the instruction or
directive and interpreted and realized by another. The chapter adopts Nelson
Goodman’s (1968) term allographic to refer to a drawing which is intentionally
made on behalf of someone else and thus, through the contribution of the
hand of another, subverts the idea of the autographic mark, which is unique
and special to an individual artist. Allographic drawing could take the form of a
score or written instructions to describe the making of marks. Equally, it could
also take a graphic form in which a drawing is used as an instruction to make
a musical or physical performance. This process of communicating an idea for
a drawing, whether generated by machine on behalf of the artist or directed by
one artist and made by another, involves a translation of ideas that passes from
one source to another. Involving factors that are beyond the total control of the
original artist, the outcome of this kind of open work is always unfixed, is subject
to a degree of chance occurrences and therefore cannot be precisely predicted.
The unpredictable surprise offered by drawing is also investigated in Chapter 4,
‘Conjuring: The gift of a surprise’, which builds on the notion of the unexpected
visualization that occurs in a conjuring and how, through misdirection and sleight
of hand, a gift of a surprise (in image or sound) is offered to the perceiver. Looking
at stories of drawing and conjuring – from Butades’s daughter’s legendary trace
of her lover; to William Pope.L’s wall drawing of Harriet Tubman Spinning the
Universe, drawn in charcoal and peanut butter (the oil of which reappeared); to
Laurie Anderson’s animated story of her beloved dog Lolabelle; and to Susan
Philipsz conjuring memories into the listener’s ear through her vocal song – the
drawings explored in the chapter address the presence of an absence – people,
objects, places, spaces, memories, lost loves, hidden emotions and sonic
vibrations. The chapter also presents how drawing can be created in visual
marks on a surface or in sound drawn in a sonic wave as it travels through a
space. As Foá has written:
CONCLUSION 217

mark drawing is observed by the seeing eye, while sound drawing is


heard through the ear and its passage through place is perceived in the
mind’s eye.2

From the material mark in Chapter 1, the embodied and implied mark in
Chapter 2, the conceptual mark in Chapter 3 and the unexpected, transformed
mark or sound in Chapter 4, Chapter 5, ‘Illuminating: Live mark making through
projected light’, concludes with an examination of the temporal and ephemeral
mark. The chapter looks at how light has been employed in live performances
of drawing. Considering a range of technological approaches to mark making
with light in live performance, it argues for a consideration of the moving image
as a time-based drawing. It starts with the historical precedent of the Victorian
lightning sketch act that inspired and then incorporated early animation
projections of conjured drawing. Contemporary examples of lightning sketching
from scenography and storytelling are given in which a still image emerges stage-
by-stage through live projected drawing processes. The chapter then explores
moving marks created live during performances of spontaneous ‘frameless’
drawings across whole filmstrips during expanded cinema performances and
on to the digital works of today.
The book’s focus on the process and performing of drawing raises many
facets of discussion around the notion of performance. Grounded in the history
of mark making within live art, in relation to performance specifically, Chapter 1,
‘Marking: Line and body in time and space’, builds a foundation for what it means
to use the body to create drawing through the material trace of lines produced
by the artist’s movements in time and space. In the embodied and process-
driven works presented in the chapter, the actions of doing drawing are of more
concern to the artist than the final outcome. As Grisewood has said:

My practice focused on not what the line is but what it can do or be, where
drawing is predicated on touch and derived from thought and memory, rather
than appearance or observation.3

However, if the focus is on the process rather than the outcome, then questions
arise as to where the artwork resides: whether the work is the material trace left
behind, or the live experience of witnessing the artist engaged in marking a line,
or the photographic document of that process viewed afterwards. Chapter 2,
‘Physicality: Running as drawing’, raises the issue of the usefulness of the
camera and considers examples of performance work that are documented
through photography. McCall writes:

The camera provides a way to record the moment ‘of’ or being ‘in’ the act of
drawing – it also operates as a tool to mediate and reflect on the experience.
218 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

Like the graphite stick that moves with the action when drawing, the camera
can become a tool to both draw and to record the body performing.4

This focus on the artist’s gestures, movement and actions results in a shift away
from the centrality of the mark. The chapter considers performance in the sense
of extreme physicality and testing the limits of the body. It also introduces the
notion of performativity into drawing, as defined by J. L. Austin, as the idea that
the artist not only could produce a mark through their actions but, in addition,
could also embody, inhabit and themselves become the mark.
Destabilizing the conventional understanding of the individual artist as being
in complete authorial control of the autographic mark that reflects their signature
style, Chapter 3, ‘Communicating: Directives and/or instructions that promote
the activity of drawing’, separates having an intention for a drawing from the
actioning of its making. In the mediumistic works of Georgiana Houghton and
Emma Kunz, this is taken to the extent of the artist refuting all responsibility
and attributing their design to the instruction of spirit guides. This raises another
nuance of the term performance related to the degree of quality and efficiency
of an action made: whether a performance is created together with participants,
collaborators or mechanical devices, the element of chance is introduced by the
possibility of error, entropy, misunderstanding or variation in interpretation during
the communication and completion of the given task.
Interpretation and communication are also addressed in Chapter 4, ‘Conjuring:
The gift of a surprise’. The chapter considers the perception of a work in the
moment of its performance, in particular the state of wonderment stimulated in
the viewer (and sometimes also the practitioner) when the unexpected arises.
These surprises (from unrecognizable to knowable and familiar in form or sound)
are achieved through the actions of the performance.
Thus far in the book, the viewer has been considered as experiencing the
performed work in several ways: first, as a witness to a live event; secondly,
as experiencing the material trace of a process as recorded in a drawing; or,
thirdly, as looking at the documentation of that action – the performance of a
drawing recorded photographically through still or moving images. However, the
notion of performance itself becomes complicated when considering drawings
made with light: to what extent they are performed live and to what extent they
are a reproduction of an original performance. In order to differentiate between
live performance drawing in light and the playback of pre-recorded animation
or film, Chapter 5, ‘Illuminating: Live mark making through projected light’,
concentrates specifically on drawing that is created and experienced in the
live context of the present moment. Using projected light as a material means
that any marks made are temporary and do not leave behind an illuminated
trace. As they are not fixed upon a surface or the ground when they are made,
they can only be experienced in their original form as light in the moment they
CONCLUSION 219

are created. In relation to animation and live action film, Hosea has previously
stated that there is a time lag between production – the moment of creation and
inscription – and playback – the moment when the recording or documentation
of the drawing is shown.5 However, using certain forms of projection and moving
image technology, it is possible to produce light drawings at the same time as
they are shown. The chapter contends that only if these two happen at the same
time – if marks are made live and at the same moment that they are projected in
front of an audience – can this be said to be a performance of light drawing or
live animation.
Finally, in its collection of artworks from historical and contemporary artists,
the book has sought to link the past, present and future. In a period of constant
listing and revealing of the present through social media, it is useful to investigate
and acknowledge artists from the past in order to build upon their achievements.
Specifically in relation to time, with its consideration of recording duration,
Chapter 1, ‘Marking: Line and body in time and space’, reveals time itself as a
material. The line is presented as a visual marker of spatial connections between
beginning, middle and end, which becomes a metaphor for a temporal journey
where past meets present and then future. As Grisewood has said:

[Drawing] resides in a gap between, where time itself unfolds and things
are forgotten as well as remembered, liminal and open ended […] a new
theoretical understanding of drawing as generative of memory and as a
process of continual negotiation and temporal becoming.6

As artists, we build upon the memory of works that have gone before us, enabling
the past to survive in the present. In discussing the intertwining of the past with
the present, in his book Bergsonism (1988), Gilles Deleuze said:

We have great difficulty in understanding a survival of the past in itself because


we believe that the past is no longer, that it has ceased to be. We have thus
confused Being with being-present. Nevertheless, the present is not; rather it
is pure becoming, always outside itself. It is not, but it acts […] The past, on
the other hand, has ceased to act or be useful. But it has not ceased to be.7

Indeed, an ‘elasticity of past-present-future’8 can be read throughout the different


approaches to performance drawing presented in this book: in the influence on
the present when fulfilling goals for endurance within physical and time limits that
were set in the past (Chapter 2, ‘Physicality: Running as drawing’); or in defining
an action in the present that is intended to be carried out at some point in the
future (Chapter 3, ‘Communicating: Directives and/or instructions that promote
the activity of drawing’). Concepts of memory and how a trace of the absent
past survives in the present are considered in Chapter 4, ‘Conjuring: The gift of
220 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945

a surprise’; and the vitality of what happens now in the present moment during
a live situation is examined in Chapter 5, ‘Illuminating: Live mark making through
projected light’.
In aiming to gather artworks from different disciplines, materials and
approaches, each chapter has developed ways in which performance drawing
has become part of contemporary practice. Initiated as practice-based research,
the focus has been on how diverse perspectives and understandings of the
term can challenge and destabilize preconceived ideas of what it means to draw
and what it means to perform. Each author/artist has approached performance
drawing as a fundamental occurrence that expands and qualifies the field of
drawing. The focus has been on process and the continual emergence of
new strategies for practice intended for other practitioners and researchers to
investigate, develop, extend, challenge, test, push up against and explore.

Notes
1 Jean Fisher, ‘On drawing’, in Catherine de Zegher, ed., The Stage of Drawing
Gesture and Act: Selected from the Tate Collection (London and New York: Tate
Publishing and The Drawing Centre, 2003), p. 224.
2 Maryclare Foá, ‘Sounding out: Performance drawing in response to the outside
environment’ (PhD diss., University of the Arts London, 2011), p. 124.
3 Jane Grisewood, ‘Marking time: Investigating drawing as a performative process for
recording temporal presence and recalling memory through the line, the fold and
repetition’ (PhD diss., University of the Arts London, 2010), p. 2.
4 Carali McCall, ‘A line is a brea(d)thless length: Introducing the physical act of running
as a form of drawing’ (PhD diss., University of the Arts London, 2014), p. 84.
5 Birgitta Hosea, ‘Substitutive bodies and constructed actors: A practice-based
investigation of animation as performance’ (PhD diss., University of the Arts London,
2012).
6 Grisewood, ‘Marking time’, p. 2.
7 Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam
(New York: Zone Books, 1988), p. 55.
8 Grisewood, ‘Marking time’, p. 29.
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INDEX

Abramović, Marina 57, 60, 64 expanded animation 144


and Ulay, Nightsea Crossing 64 experimental 200
Acres, Birt flip book 131, 177
Tom Merry Lightning Artist Drawing Mr frameless 189
Gladstone (1895) 174 live animation 8, 92, 94, 115, 129,
action drawing(s) 5, 23 145, 173, 180, 195–202, 203–5,
action painting(s) 5, 11, 12, 86, 115, 217 206, 220
activism 202 live scratching 190, 191, 195
Ader, Bas Jan origins 173, 174, 175, 176, 179
In Search of the Miraculous (1975) 53 performance 178, 192, 197, 205
AG Gallery (New York) 85, 88 playback 172, 221
Agar, Eileen 7 process 177, 178, 192, 196
Lady Bird (1936) 142 real time 199, 200
Algorists, the 111, 113 sand animation 180–81
allographic 114, 218 stop-camera technique 144, 171,
art 109, 110, 116 174, 175
definition 6, 109 temporality 206, 221
drawing 109, 110, 116 trick films 144, 174, 175
Goodman, Nelson 6, 109 visual music 203, 204
mechanical process 110, 190 Antoni, Janine 10
Almeida, Helena 5, 9, 10, 29 Ariamanesh, Ahmad
Alÿs, Francis 6, 10, 34, 35 Concert of the Line (2013) 185
Amoo, Shola 145 Artaud, Antoine 81
Anastasi, William 5, 10, 30, 31 artist as athlete 6, 46, 48, 60
Subway Drawings 31 artists’ interventions 32, 34, 100–101,
Anderson, Laurie 7, 129, 132–33, 136, 101–3, 140, 148, 157, 198, 203–5
218 Arya, Rahul 181
Heart of a Dog (2016) 132 audience
Andre, Carl 2 active 189, 194
animation 132, 145, 208 as witnesses 91, 115, 146, 172
abstract 201, 203, 204 collective memory 66
as record of performance 205 confronted 147, 189
boiling 200 contemplation 65
calligraphic or text 184, 193 co-presence 28, 126, 171, 172, 179,
CGI 130 191, 195
digital 195 decoding 80, 173
drawings for projection 131, 133, 144 desire 128
236 INDEX

different views 150 The Enchanted Drawing (1900) 176


direct address 14, 133, 147 Blavatsky, Madam 104
engagement 69 Bletchley Park 110
expectation 129 blogging 92
historic 130 body
in the centre of action 81, 117 as a muscle 49
interpretation 151 as a tool 5, 13, 46, 49, 59, 62, 72
listening 92 as material 6, 15, 48, 73
mind’s eye 132, 137, 145, 153, 154, as medium 52
155, 157 as site 45, 48
online 65 as something other 52
outside in public 91 as subject 47, 48, 60
participation 36, 94, 100, 194, 203–5 drawing device 73
passers-by 69, 91, 100, 101 endurance 6, 17, 20, 29, 45, 46, 51,
passive 189, 194, 195 52, 53, 54, 57, 52–59, 64, 109,
popularity 99, 174 198, 218, 221
reaction 172, 182 expenditure of energy 45, 60
reception 126 mind/body 46, 55, 68
scrutiny 52, 187 resistance 47, 48, 49
surprise 129, 148, 149 restraint 47, 48
the camera as audience 14, 49, 54, testing limits 48, 52, 53
55, 58, 59, 94, 126, 138, 146, the whole body 5, 11, 20, 26, 47, 51
148, 172, 203, 205, 219 trace of physical contact 13, 14, 17,
autographic 111, 112, 114, 218, 220 25, 28, 49, 60, 183
as evidence of ‘art’ 115 Booth, Walter R. 179
definition 109 Comedy Cartoons (1907) 175
hand-drawn mark 115 Hand of the Artist (1906) 175
automatic drawings 106 Upside Down 175
automatic writing 105, 106, 197 Political Favourites (1903) 175
avant-garde 81, 86, 111 Boswell, Phoebe 7
film 188, 189 Dear Mr. Shakespeare 145
performance 80 Boyce, Sonia 65
Ayres, Robert 149 Brecht, Bertolt 194
Brecht, George 6, 69, 83, 84, 99
Babbage, Charles 110 Event scores 84–85, 100
Bard, Joseph 142 Three Broom Events (1961) 85
Barney, Matthew 6, 45, 51 Three Lamp Events (1961) 84
Drawing Restraint 1–6 48–50 Three Window Events (1961) 85
Drawing Restraint 11 49–50 Word (1961) 84
Bauhaus theatre 113 Brimfield, Mel
Beck, Martha 2 On Board (2010) 68
Berger, John 128 Brisley, Stuart 53
Ways of Seeing 128 DRAWN 56
Besson, Madam 106 Brouwn, Stanley 6, 100–101
Black Mountain college 82 chance procedures 100
Blackburn, Hugh 112 Steps of Pedestrians on Paper (1960)
Blackton, J. Stuart 179 100
Humorous Phases of Funny Faces This Way Brouwn (1962) 101
(1906) 176 View of a City in 24 Hours (1963) 100
INDEX 237

Walk from point A to point B (1971) 100 Treatise (1963–7) 97


Brown, Brené 159 Carlos, Laurie 91
Brown, Earle Carr, Cynthia 147, 149
December 1952 96 Centre for Drawing (Wimbledon, UAL)
Brown, Katrina 62 197
Brown, Trisha 5, 9, 10, 18, 24, 25, 57, Cernovich, Nicholas 82
60, 61, 64 chance 81, 82, 84, 85, 92, 95, 96, 100,
Man Walking Down the Side of a 101, 102, 103, 109, 112, 116,
Building 46, 70–71 172, 191, 203, 204, 218, 220
Buber, Martin 103 Chatwin, Bruce 140
Burden, Chris 148 Chhibber, Ronnie 181
Shooting (1971) 53 Cholodenko, Alan 179, 180, 206
Burgoyne, Greig 65, 137, 151 Chorpening, Kelly
Butades 133, 134, 136 A History of Drawing (2018) 3
Buxton, Dudley 175 cinema of attractions 174
Clair, René
C4RD 2 Entr’acte (1924) 95
Cage, John 2, 5, 25, 67, 99, 100, 110 Clark, Lygia 10
4´33˝ (1952) 82–83 Caminhando (Walking) 36
49 Waltzes for the Five Boroughs Cociña, Joaquín
(1977) 101 Mi joven corazón idiota (2007/9) 184
and Alison Knowles, Notations (1969) code
96, 100 algorithm 80, 111, 201
chance procedures 31, 81, 96, 109 as score 7, 100, 109, 110, 111
Cornelius Cardew 99 code-breaking 110
et al, Untitled Black Mountain Piece coded messages 80, 109
(1952) 81–82 coding 79, 80, 172, 200
Experimental Composition at the New computing 110, 111
School for Social Research 83–84 database 172
graphic scores 96, 101 encoding 79, 80, 105, 110, 197
I Ching 96, 108 live coding 201
influence 11, 31, 80, 96, 218 Morse code 113
influence of Suzuki, Daisetsu Teitaro open source 197, 199, 202
83 Cohen, Harold 111
music 83 collaboration 97
musiques-concrète (1939) 83, 84 a many headed hydra 4
scores 6, 81 as feminist practice 4
Williams Mix (1952) 96 as rejection of traditional forms of
Zen Buddhism 82, 83, 96 authorship 108, 116
Cakó, Ferenc 180 collaborative drawing 79, 92, 103,
Calder, Alexander 96 203, 204
Cameron, James collaborative writing 4, 92
Avatar (2009) 130 combined intention 89, 94, 116
Terminator (1984) 130 dialogue 94
Cardew, Cornelius 6, 96–100, 116 ethics 99, 116
Scratch Orchestra 97 mediumship 107
Scratchbook 98 methodology 92, 99, 103
Stockhausen Serves Imperialism multi-disciplinary 81, 151, 183, 197,
(1974) 99 198, 199, 200
238 INDEX

multiple authorship 92 Craig-Martin, Michael 126


non-hierarchal 99 Drawing the Line: Reappraising
online 92, 187 Drawing Past and Present (1995) 2
participation 116 Craword, Cair 148
with machines 113 Creed, Martin 6, 46, 64
with objects 55 Work No. 850 (2008) 63
compArt database Digital Art (daDA) 111 Crosland, Camilla 106
Computer Technique Group 111, 116 crossing disciplinary boundaries 3, 72,
conceptual 86, 152, 151–54, 160, 171, 174,
art 22, 111 205
constructs 14 Cunningham, Merce 25, 82
conjuring 125, 158 Cybernetic Serendipity 1968 (ICA) 112
Berger, John 162
definition 127 Dada 84, 85, 113, 194, 198
drawing 126, 127, 128, 129, 133, 136 Dali, Salvador 114
from thin air 145, 189 dance 11, 18, 25, 26, 46, 61, 62, 68, 70,
guided projection 143 150, 198, 200, 206, 207
illusion 127, 141, 150, 174, 175, 178, Beauchamp–Feuillet notation 100
179, 180 choreographic score 70
magic tricks 126, 151, 174, 175, 176, Labanotation 100
179 notation 6, 25, 100
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 165 Darwent, Charles 141
methodologies 126 de Certeau, Michel 36, 138
misdirection 126, 127, 129, 130, 160, de Zegher, Catherine 11, 126, 127, 140
218 Drawing Papers 20: Performance
of images 7, 125, 128 Drawings (2001) 3, 17, 80, 91
pareidolia 134, 160 On Line: Drawing Through the
plays on perception 127, 137, 145, Twentieth Century (1910–2010) 2,
173, 179 17, 126
sleight of hand 127, 129, 131, 137, The Stage of Drawing: Gesture and
141, 151, 173, 175, 180, 218 Act (2003) 2
sonic 157, 160 De/Tours 102
surprise 7, 126, 127, 128, 129, 141, Debord, Guy 160
149, 160, 174, 218 Society of the Spectacle (1967) 130
the gift of a trace 7, 131–37 del Rivero, Elena 3, 10, 17
transformation 8, 129, 142, 143, 173, Delehanty, Suzanne
174, 175, 176, 177, 179, 180, Soundings (1981) 158
184, 194, 206 Deleuze and Guattari 24
trick films 144, 174, 175 Deleuze, Gilles 20, 35, 36, 37, 221
unexpected visualization 126, 127, dematerialization of the art object 5, 69,
218 218
ventriloquism 173 Derrida, Jacques 7, 18, 135, 136, 149,
visual trickery 130 160
wonderment 8, 220 Memoirs of the Blind (1993) 135
Connearn, David 23 directive 138, 218
Constructivism 110, 113 as form of collaboration 7, 97
Cook, Malcolm 173, 179 as proposal for drawing 92
Court, John 6, 45, 50, 55–57 Event scores 6, 84–85, 90, 92
Crafton, Donald 173, 176, 179, 205 graphic notation 80, 83, 97, 104
INDEX 239

graphic scores 6, 98, 96, 101, 203 mediated 186


instruction paintings (Ono) 86 origins 133
instructions 13, 16, 18, 80, 93, 109, participatory 101, 104, 194, 203–5
113, 197, 199, 204, 218 ready-made mark(s) 100, 190, 191
instructions for drawings 6, 7, 36, 80, sewing as 30, 190
87, 92, 93, 100, 110, 111 temporal 1, 6, 9, 14–22, 31, 33–37,
mechanical 7 179, 193, 194, 188–95, 195–202,
scores 80–103, 108, 198 206, 219
spirit guides 7, 106, 109 the act of 5, 9, 18, 48, 49, 89, 115,
text 83 180, 183, 190, 195, 219
visual directive 100, 102, 104 through Spirit guides 105–9
disciplinary boundaries 152 through technology 7, 8, 111, 115,
documentation 186 144, 172, 186, 190, 219
anticipates an audience. See trace(less) 46, 64, 67, 72, 205, 220
audience:the camera as audience with a pendulum 108
as evidence 5, 58 with light 8, 28, 59, 92, 93, 144, 145,
as trace 16, 34, 63, 136, 171, 172 171, 172, 198, 202, 203–5,
for an audience 1, 11, 58, 171 206
photographic 11, 57, 66, 126, 136, Drawing Center (New York) 2, 3, 28, 29,
140, 171, 205, 218 90, 154, 206
vs the work itself 34, 172, 182, 205 Drawing Lab Dessin 3
Doolittle, H.D Drawing Now (1976) 2
Helen in Egypt (1961) 149 Drawing Now (2007) (Downs, Marshall,
Doppler shift 141 Sawdon,Selby, Tormey) 125
Doyle, Mary 2 DRAWING NOW Art Fair (2019) 3
Draw Art Fair London (2019) 3 Drawing Projects UK 3
drawing Drawing Room (London) 2, 22
(contemporary) 1 Sounds Like Drawing (2005) 2
(traditional) 1, 127 Duchamp, Marcel 69, 84, 96, 110
as diagnostic tool 109 Dyer, Anson 175
as dialogue 19, 36, 103
as predictive research process 108 Eco, Umberto 31
as trace 6, 10, 11, 12, 17, 29–33, 34, The Poetics of the Open Work (1962)
35, 49, 131–37, 149, 157, 160, 80, 95, 116
205, 207, 219 Eisenstein, Sergei M. 206, 207
definition 125 Emanuele, Rossella 3
digital 80, 93, 111–12, 115, 116, Enigma machine 110
144–45, 195–202 everyday 17, 62, 67, 100, 103, 115, 130,
erasure 13, 21, 115, 128, 131, 191, 193 156
expanded field 1, 3, 9, 50, 59, 217 expanded cinema 8, 126, 161, 188–95,
in movement 62, 64 219
in space 22–28, 63, 67, 183, 203 experimental music
instructional 101 Cage, John 82–83
machines 112–15 Cardew, Cornelius 96–100
mark making 6, 9, 10, 12, 19, 20, 32, Satie,Erik 96
45, 46, 49, 50, 62, 65, 67, 91, 92, Young, La Monte 88–89
109, 154, 188–95, 203, 217, 219 EXPORT, VALIE 8, 189, 194
materiality of 32, 37, 65, 67, 115, 152, Auf+Ab+An+Zu (1968) 194
187 exquisite corpse 92
240 INDEX

Feldman, Morton Gombrich, E. H. 127


Projections (1950–1) 96 Goodman, Nelson 218
Feminism 4, 45, 46, 90 Languages of Art (1968) 109
Fetterman, William 81, 82 Gornick, Lisa 8, 181–82, 184
Finch, Elizabeth 153, 154 Grandma Ray Live Drawing Show
’The Drawing as Instrument’ 91 (2015) 181
Fisher, Jean 128, 133, 147, 217 What (the Fuck) Is Lesbian Film?
Fluxus 5, 69, 83, 84, 85–86, 90, 92, 100, (2017) 181
116, 192, 194 Graffiti Research Lab 8, 202, 203
Fluxus Internationale Festspiele Grisewood, Jane 3, 10, 187, 221
Neuester Musik (1962) 85, 89 Line Dialogues 19–20
origin of name 118 Mourning Lines 32–33
Foá, Grisewood, Hosea, McCall 4, 92 Marking Time: firstsite papers 43
ARC: I Draw For You (2010) 92–94, 197 Grzymala, Monika 5, 10, 26–27, 36
Sky vs SKYPE (2011) 186–87 Gunning, Tom 174
Foá, M. 3, 89 Guppy, Agnes 106
Driftsong Drawing 92 Gutai group 5, 9, 11–13, 115, 217
Line Down Manhattan (2003) 157 action painting(s) 11
Lost Borrowed and Found (2006) Kanayama, Akira 115
139–40 Shimamoto, Shoza 12
Sounding out: Performance drawing Shiraga, Kazuo 12
in response to the outside Takamatsu, Jiro 12
environment (2010) 218 Tanaka, Atsuko 12
The Drawing Field 151, 168 Yoshihara, Jiro 12
Ford, Charlie 48, 65, 67–68
Forsyth, William 24 haiku 84, 86
Forti, Simone 61 Hall, Stuart 147
Foster, Stephen 150 Encoding/Decoding 79
found objects 114 Hamlyn, Nicky 189
Foundation for Contemporary Hanor, Stephanie Jennings 113
Performance Arts 96 Happenings 82, 86, 117, 152, 194
fourth wall, the 133, 146 haptic engagement 18
Francis, Alÿs Harmonograph 112
The Green Line (2004) 36 Hatoum, Mona 115
Franklin Furnace, New York 14 Hawkins, Alys Scott 198
Freud Museum 159 Hayden, Mrs Maria 105
Freud, Sigmund 159 Haynes, Nicci 94
Beyond the Pleasure Principle 134 Her Words My Body (2012–13)
Fujino, Koji 112 94
Furniss, Harry 175 Heathfield, Adrian 16, 17, 18, 36, 55
Futurism 113 Hébert, Jean-Pierre 111
Hébert, Pierre 8, 195–97
Gardner, Angela 94 Hein, Birgit 189, 193
Gego 9, 10, 36, 228 Higgins, Dick 83, 85
Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas 28 Home, Daniel Dunglas 106
Ghosh, Piyali 10, 20–21 Horodner, Stuart 148
Gifford, Dennis 174 Hosea, Birgitta 3, 119
Gingrich, Oliver 8 ’Drawing Animation’ (2010) 183
Aura (2015) 201 dotdot dash (2018) 203–5
INDEX 241

live animation 94, 145, 203–5 On The Spiritual in Art (1911) 105
Medium (2012) 197 Kaprow, Allan 11, 83, 84, 85, 117
Substitutive bodies and constructed Karshan, Linda 3
actors (2012) 144 Kawona, Hiroshi 111
White Lines (2009–10) 144–45 Kentridge, William 7, 132, 141
Houghton, Georgiana 7, 105, 109, 220 Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City After
The Flower of Catherine Stringer Paris (1989) 133
(c.1870) 107 Triumph and Laments (2016) 131
Howitt, Anna Mary Kerr, Ian 194
Sisters in Art 106 Khajavi, Mohammad Javad 184
Hsieh, Tehching 5, 10, 29, 37, 53, 55, 69 kinetic art 112
One Year Performance (Outdoor Klee, Paul 2, 27, 35
Piece) 36 Klein, Yves 5, 10, 12, 13, 29, 141
Huberman, Anthony 154 Knowles, Alison 3, 6, 83, 84, 85, 89,
Hudson, Frederick 106 91–92, 155, 154–56
Hupfield, Maria 65 #11 Printing Piece (1964) 90
#5 Street Piece (1962) 80, 90, 119
I Ching 96, 108 #9 Color Music #2 (1963) 90
Ichiyanagi, Toshi 83 and John Cage, Notations (1969) 96,
Iimura, Takahito 8, 189, 192–93, 194 100
Calligraphy Re-Read (1967/2014) 193 Event score 90, 96
Circle and Square (1981) 193 Fluxus 90
Screen Play (1963) 193 Komura, Masao 112
Industrial Revolution 112 Kovats, Tania 7, 134
Ingold,Tim Breath (2001) 134
Lines: A Brief History (2007) 50 Cape Farewell Lovelock Art
InspiralLondon 7, 101–3, 116, 203, 204, 205 Commission 134
Counterproductions 101, 203 KrÄma, Ed 207
dotdot dash (2018) 203–5 Krasner, Lee 12
Fox, Charlie 101, 102, 203 Krauss, Rosalind 11, 18
intentional presence 125 Kreider + O’Leary 7, 151, 152
International Centre for Fine Art Research Immolation Triptych 151
155 Kunz, Emma 7, 108–9, 220
Islamic calligraphy 185 use of divining pendulum 108

Jackson, Tommy 82 Laban, Rudolf 6


Jacquard loom 110 Laing, Alec 176, 179, 180
Janine Antoni 10, 13 Lamont, Peter and Wiseman, Richard 126
Jiro, Takamatsu 193 Latham, John 5, 9, 10, 15
Jonas, Joan 7, 149 One Second Drawings 16
electronic sorceress 150 Le Grice, Malcom 189
Lines in the Sand 149 Le Va, Barry 6, 46, 70
sleight of hand 167 Velocity Piece / Impact Run – Energy
Judson Dance Theatre 62 Drain 60–61
Jun, Fei Leaf, Caroline
Gesture Cloud Gesture Wall (2017) 201 The Metamorphosis of Mr. Samsa
(1977) 180
Kandinsky, Wassily 112 The Owl Who Married a Goose (1974)
Composition series (1910–39) 104 180
242 INDEX

Leah, Frank 176 London Gay Men’s Chorus 159


LeBrun, Charles 173 Long, Richard 2, 9, 10, 27, 34
Leonardo da Vinci 2 A Line made by Walking 6, 33–34, 50,
Lethaby Gallery, University of the Arts 61, 100
London 20 Lovelace, Ada
Levin, Golan notes on Charles Babbage’s Analytical
Messa di Voce (2003) 201 Engine (1843) 109
Scribble (2000) 201 Lumière Brothers 174
Levinas, Emmanuel 149, 160 Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (1895) 130
The Gift of the Trace 7, 135 Luzar, Robert 48
Lewis, Tim 7, 114 Two-Legged Idleness, Untaped 65–68
Auto-Dali Prosthetic (2002) 114
Mule Make Mule (2012) 114 Macabra, Jose 197
LeWitt, Sol Maciunas, George 83, 85
wall drawings 110 magnetic tape 83, 96
light 28, 132, 134, 161, 190 Malva, Filipa 183–84
light graffiti 8, 202, 203 O meu país é o que o mar não quer
lightning doodles 161, 203 (2014) 183
lightning sketch 8, 129, 161, 173–80, Manchot, Melanie
180, 181, 188, 209, 219 Tracer (2013) 46, 59, 63, 71
Lin, River 115 Manzoni, Piero 2, 10, 15, 20
line Lineas (Lines) (1959) 15
as concept 6, 50, 65, 67, 72, 217 mapping 14, 24, 32, 36, 93, 101, 102
as record 5, 32–33, 57, 179, 221 Marioni, Tom 9, 10, 22–24, 57
in movement 27, 32, 38, 79, 182, Drawing a Line As Far As I Can Reach
189, 200, 203, 204, 207 5
in space 5, 22–28 One Second Sculpture (1969) 22, 27,
invisible 20, 34 53
time-based 19, 14–22, 184, 200, 207 Out of Body – Free Hand Circle 51
Liu, Ani Walking Drawing (2000) 24
Mind Controlled Spermatozoa (2017) Marranca, Bonnie 2
201, 202 Marseille–Provence European Capital City
live of Culture celebrations in 2013 102
bodily presence 59, 150 Marxist-Leninist position 99
co-present audience 1, 8, 20 Mathieu, Georges
description 7 painting performances 112
ephemerality 8, 17, 29, 34, 38, 62, 69, McCall, Anthony 189
93, 157, 172, 173, 182, 198, 203, Five-Minute Drawing (1974/2010) 16
205, 207 Line Describing a Cone (1973) 189
immediacy 17, 67, 172, 198 McCall, Carali 3, 10, 55, 186, 219
improvisation 8, 92, 97, 98, 99, 100, Line Dialogues 19
196, 197, 198, 199, 203, 205 Run Vertical (Running Up the Side of a
live calligraphy 185 Building) 71
liveness 172, 205 Work no.1 (Circle Drawing) 50–52
real time 8, 31, 37, 65, 126, 152, 156, McCay, Winsor 176–79, 180, 209
180, 182, 206 Gertie the Dinosaur (1914) 178
serendipity 91, 126 Little Nemo in Slumberland (1911) 177
spontaneity 126, 182 Seven Ages of Man (1906) 177
London Film-Makers’ Co-op 189, 192 McDonough, Tom 91, 155
INDEX 243

Macfarlane, Kate 2 Namuth Hans


McKenzie, Jordan 7 Jackson Pollock 51 (1951) 11
Shame Chorus 159, 160, 170 Nauman, Bruce 2, 10
McLaren, Norman 200 Performance Corridor (1969) 25
McLean, Bruce Walking in an Exaggerated Manner
Pose Work for Plinths 68 Around the Perimeter of a Square
McQueen, Steve 147 24
mechanical sculpture 112–15 Nekes, Werner 189
Méliès, Georges 174, 179 Newman, Avis 2, 4, 94, 127, 128
L’homme à la tête en caoutchouc Newman, Michael 133
(1901) 144 Nicholson, Annabel 8, 189, 194
Le livre magique (1900) 175 Reel Time (1973) 190
Mendieta, Ana 5, 9, 10 Nold, Christian 7
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 141 Bio Mapping 153
Merry, Tom 174 Emotional Mapping 152–53
Miers, John 183 Nyman, Michael 96
Moholy-Nagy, László
EM 1–3 (1922) 110 O’Dempsey, Kellie 8, 198–99
Mohr, Manfred 111 and Jennifer Wroblewski, Resistance
Molnar, Vera 111 Movement (2017) 198, 199
Morelli, Didier 65 and Mick Dick, Draw / Delay (2015) 198
Walking Through Walls 69 O’Hara, Morgan 5, 10
Morelli, François 3 Live Transmission drawings 31
Morgan, Echo 7, 142 October Gallery London 155
Morley College, London 97 Offenbach, Jacques
Morris, Robert 2, 9, 10, 18, 50, 61 The Tales of Hoffmann (1881) 157
Blind Time Drawings 30 Ohtake, Makato 112
movement 6, 18, 25, 26 Olson, Charles 82
action 22–28 Ono, Yoko 85
gesture 11, 17, 22, 31, 171, 201 instruction paintings 86–88
moving image 59, 172, 177, 193, 206, 219 Kitchen Piece (1960) 88, 89
Museum of Modern Art (New York) 2 Lighting Piece (1955) 86
music 22, 25, 67, 97, 99, 185, 208 Map Piece (1962) 87
ambient sound as music 84 Painting to be Stepped On (1960) 87
and calligraphy 185 ‘To the Wesleyan people’ (1966) 86
as sound 98 Oppenheim, Dennis 7, 33
musical score 80, 88, 91, 95, 109 Gallery (1969) 137
non-material art 105 Orbach, Susie 159
notation 6, 25, 80, 83, 88, 95, 96, 97, Orlan 53
104 Orrico, Tony 6, 45, 50
noteless graphic score 96 Penwald Drawings 57–58
reproduction 80 Ostertag, Bob 196
silent work 83 Out of Line: Drawings from the Arts Council
music hall 173, 174 Collection, Hayward Gallery (2001) 2
Muybridge, Eadweard 141, 165
P. R. Neves, Joana 3
Nake, Frieder 7, 111 Paik, Nam June 85
Hommage à Paul Klee, 13/9/65 Nr.2 Zen for Film (1962/4) 190
(1965) 111 Zen for Head (1961) 89, 91
244 INDEX

PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 2 ‘The ontology of performance:


Panahi, Bahman 8, 185 Representation without
Musicalligraphy. 185 reproduction’ (1996) 172
Papua New Guinea 159 Philipsz, Susan 7, 218
Parsons, Michael 97 The Lost Reflection (2007) 157, 158
Paterson, Katie Phillips, Andrea 99
Vatnajokull (2007) 156 Piaf, Edith 82
Patterson, James 200 Picasso, Pablo 171
Paul, Robert 175 PiKAPiKA 171, 203
Paxton, Steve 62 place and space 138, 140
Peerna, Jaanika 5, 10, 27–28, 36 Plackman, Carl 2, 125
Peirce, C.S. 133 Plato 7, 131, 160
Perec, Georges Allegory of the Cave 130
Species of Spaces and Other Pieces Pliny the Elder 133
(2008) 158 Birthplace of Drawing 7
performance Pollock, Jackson 5, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14,
bodily presence 10–14, 26, 59–64 57, 60, 84, 217
body in 59 Pollockian Performative 11
efficiency 46–50, 51–59, 116 satirized 112
execution of a task 24, 32, 36, 116, Pope L., William 7, 147
79–116 Fluxus guy 148, 149
in front of an audience 8, 13, 58, 63, Harriet Tubman Spinning the Universe
116, 173, 177, 179, 191, 192, 201 148, 218
live experience 71, 172, 178, 188, The Great White Way 22 miles, 9
197, 199, 206, 219 years one Street (2000–9) 157
ritual 98, 108–9 Pope, Greg 194
space 24, 22–28, 82, 184, 207 Cipher Screen (2010) 191
performance art 13, 15, 57, 58, 69, 205, Light Trap (2007) 191
217 privilege 4, 148, 204
performance drawing process-based 1, 4, 18, 24
as a field 37, 72, 217, 222 public art 102, 103, 198, 202, 204
operational definition 1, 3, 148
origin of the term 3, 17, 80, 90, 91 Queensland Poetry Festival (2013) 94
origins 9, 10–14, 61, 69, 150, 154,
173, 176 Raban, William 189
physicality 45–73 racism 147, 149
problematics of definition 1, 4, 5, 8, Radvan, Jeremy 8, 199–200
46, 59 and Marina Tsartsara Ever Lasting
temporality 18, 26, 67, 206 (2011) 200
unsettles 205 and Paul Sermon, (tele)consequences,
performativity 73 a collaboration (2018) 187
Austin, J. L 59 and Rajyashree Ramamurthi, Avatar
becoming drawing 15, 20, 29, 218 (2005–7) 199
drawing that performs 200 The Use of the Computer as a Tool for
gender 50 Observation 199
performative act 13, 17, 18, 45, 60, Rauschenberg, Robert 13, 25, 82, 96
73, 193 ready-made 84, 110
Pollockian Performative 11 Reason, Richard 98
Phelan, Peggy 205 Rees, A. L. 188
INDEX 245

relational aesthetics 99 Skempton, Howard 97


remediation 179 Smith, Phil
repetition 18, 20, 24, 31, 32, 49, 53, 55, Mythogeography 138, 164
56, 57, 61, 63, 70, 88, 95, 115, Smith, Vicky 8, 190, 191, 194
150, 156 33 Frames Per Foot (2013) 191–92
Research Centre for Drawing 3 Smykla, Harald 8
Rhode, Robin 2, 7, 145 Movie Protocols (2010–1) 182–83
Untitled (Landing) 140 social encounters 103
Rhodes, Lis 194 social engagement 100
and Ian Kerr BWLHAICTKE (1976) Sogetsu Art Centre 193
191 Solnit, Rebecca 100
Richards, Mary Caroline 81 sound 22, 60, 83, 169, 186
Robert Paul 174 harmonics 157
Rogers, Angela 7, 116 listening 60, 82, 83, 101, 154, 156,
Drawing Conversations (2016) 103–4 157, 158, 160, 161, 219
Rosenberg, Harold 11 map 101
Rosenberg, Robert 61 place 157
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 106 sonar 158
Rubin, Ben sonic connection 159, 160
We Believe We Are Invincible (2004) sonic discovery 157
52 sound drawing 22, 23, 28, 93, 153,
running 23, 59–64, 71 154–61, 201, 219
as a method 61 sounding 28, 159
sound of 61, 63 three-dimensional 158
sport and art 46, 62 vocal 132, 150, 151, 157, 158, 159,
the act of running 45, 60, 61, 62, 71 160, 181, 187, 201, 204, 209
Ruskin, John 106 waves 153, 156
space
Saatchi Gallery 3 altered dimensions 21, 22–28, 126,
Samocha, Ram 50 129, 137, 140, 141, 151, 154
Draw to Perform 3, 115, 123, 143, 165 body in 22, 25, 61 See
Sandler, Irving 85 performance:bodily presence
Satie, Erik 95, 96 decentred 102
Schneemann, Carolee 6, 45, 51 drawing in. See drawing:in space
Up to and Including Her Limits 47–48 extension 183
Scratch Orchestra (Cardew) 97 for action 102
Serra, Richard 2, 10 holographic 144
Splashing 14 of projection 150
Verb List 14 public 21, 33, 64, 69, 70, 71, 91, 100,
shadow play 132 103, 155, 198, 202, 204
shamanism 109, 150 screen 193–94
Sharits, Paul 8, 189–90, 194 spatial context 141, 156, 172
Sherwin, Guy 189, 194 stage 26, 178, 183, 184
Paper Landscape (1975) 193–94 three-dimensional 5, 10, 25, 26, 28,
Simonova, Kseniya 100, 144, 189, 200, 205
Don’t Be Too Late (2009) 181 two-dimensional 11
You are Always Nearby (2009) 181 virtual 201
Siobhan Davies Dance studio 62 Spear, John Murray 106
site of projection 193 Speed, Lancelot 175
246 INDEX

Spiritualism 105, 106 magic lantern 172, 176, 179, 180


ectoplasmic drawing 197 MaxMSP 197
Fox sisters 105 microscope 202
mediumistic drawing 105–9 motion sensor 114, 201
séances 105, 106, 108 multiscreen technology 136
spirit drawings 106, 108 Musion Eyeliner 144
spirit medium 7, 105, 106, 107, 197 Mutoscope 177
spirit photography 106, 197 navigational data 153
spirit world 7, 80, 104, 105, 109, 197 overhead projector 180, 182, 184,
table tipping 106 187
telekinesis 201 pen plotter 111, 112
telepathy 201, 202 profaned 196
stagecraft 174 projection 8, 172, 202
Stansbie, Lisa 54 satellites 186
Stockhausen, Karlheinz 97 Skype 8, 65, 92, 186, 187
Stout, Katharine 2, 32, 63 sound 156
A Recent History of Drawing 127 Tagtool 8, 93, 94, 119, 197, 198, 199
Contemporary Drawing: From the video 181, 183, 184
1960s to Now (2014) 2 virtual reality (VR) 200, 201
Structuralist film 189, 192, 194 VJ software 172
Studdy, George Ernest 175 tesseract 125, 127, 129
subjectivity 59, 62, 111, 158 theatre 8, 173, 177, 181, 184, 205, 206,
Surrealism 84, 105, 108 207
Theosophy 104
tableau vivant 197 Thomas, Ashley ‘Bashy’ 146
Tarkovsky, Andrei Thoreau, Henry David 140, 156
Nostalghia (1983) 151 time 221
Tate Modern and movement 11, 37, 179, 206
Live Culture: Performance and the and space 17, 30, 31, 35, 55, 126
Contemporary conference (2003) 149 as a material 6
With a Single Mark conference (2006) durational process 16, 14–22, 26, 45,
126 46, 64, 68, 82, 93, 143, 200, 206,
Taylor, Anita 3 217
technology 63, 160, 180, 196 live time. See live:real time
Arduino 197 passage of time 17
augmented reality (AR) 200 record of 18, 32, 58
brain–computer interface (BCI) 201, temporality 16, 20, 21, 33, 37, 38, 55,
202 62, 64, 217, 219
electroencephalogram (EEG) headset time-based 20, 217
201, 202 Tinguely, Jean 7
electromagnetic signals 153 Méta-matics (1950–60) 112
galvanic skin tissue 153 touch/haptic engagement 1, 154, 155,
GPS 59, 138, 153 191, 217, 219
holographic projection 144, 145 Townsend, Kevin 10, 20
hydrophone 156 TRACEY 3
iPad 197 transcultural expansion 147
Kinetoscope 174 Treplin, Agnes 197
lasers 8, 161, 172, 202, 203, 204 Tresset, Patrick 7, 113
live video feed 100, 149, 180, 184, controlled loss 114
186, 187, 198 Human Study #4 (2017) 113
INDEX 247

Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize 3 Wilkinson, Mrs 106


Tudor, David 82 Wolf, Christian 96
Turing, Alan 110 Wood, Catherine 12
Performance in Contemporary Art
van der Werve, Guido 6, 45 (2018) 2
Number series 53–54 Wood, John and Harrison, Paul
Vancouver Art Gallery 20 Board, 1993 68
Vanderbeek, Stan 188 works on paper 52, 55, 57
Expanded Cinema (1970) 188 Wurm, Erwin
vaudeville/variety theatre 173 One Minute Sculptures 68
Verostko, Roman 111
Viennese Actionism 194 Yentob, Alan 132
Villa-Lobos, Heiter 95 Young, La Monte 83, 84, 85, 88, 99
Composition 1960 #7 (1960) 88–89,
walking 17, 23, 24, 25, 30, 33, 54, 69, 91
71, 87, 100, 101, 204
as drawing 10, 33–37, 50 Zen Buddhism 31, 89
drawing as walking 15 ensō 23
the act of 70, 157 Koan 84, 86
trail 32–33, 101–3, 157, 203–5 Mindfulness of Listening 83
Warr, Tracy 150 non-involvement 96
Watson, Chris Zhang, Haun
Vatnajokull (2003) 156 Family Tree (2001) 144
Webern, Anton 83 Zhilyaeva, Anna 201
Weibel, Peter 189
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