Performance Drawing New Practices Since 1945 9781788313841 9781350113022 9781350113015 - Compress
Performance Drawing New Practices Since 1945 9781788313841 9781350113022 9781350113015 - Compress
Performance Drawing New Practices Since 1945 9781788313841 9781350113022 9781350113015 - Compress
DRAWING
DRAWING IN
Series editors:
Published titles:
Forthcoming:
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
© 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.
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.
Series: Drawing In
Series editors: Marsha Meskimmon, Phil Sawdon and Russell Marshall
List of figures vi
Foreword viii
Foreword: Drawing life x
Acknowledgements xii
Introduction 1
Conclusion 215
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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:
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:
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.
produces large-scale ephemeral works that leverage the power and possibility
of drawing to give form to our evolving relationship to time-space.’63
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
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
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:
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:
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
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:
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:
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
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
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
Conclusion
Tehching Hsieh stated:
‘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
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
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
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
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
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
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:
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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
Projector:
Begin at 16 min.
Play freely until 23 min.
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
on. off.
lamp
off. on.
[1961]28
COMMUNICATING 85
broom
sweeping
broom sweepings
[1961]29
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
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:
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
Painting to be Stepped On
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:
Kitchen Piece
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:
[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
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
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.
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
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
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
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:
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
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
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
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
COMMUNICATING 101
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
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:
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.
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
could always leave off when I pleased; so he admitted his error, and promised
never to call me a machine again.128
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
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
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
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
COMMUNICATING 113
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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.
CONJURING 133
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:
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
CONJURING 137
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.
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
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.
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
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:
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
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
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
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.’
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.’
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
[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
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.
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
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.
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:
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.
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
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
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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
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:
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.
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
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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
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
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
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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
ILLUMINATING 189
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:
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:
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
194 PERFORMANCE DRAWING: NEW PRACTICES SINCE 1945
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,
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
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
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:
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
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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
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.
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.
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:
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.
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
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
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
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
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:
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
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