This drawing was made at the MacDowell Colony, where I was doing a residency in January of 2007. My studio was in the woods, surrounded by snow, which dampened any sounds that might be heard, and I felt the presence of silence all around me. I started focusing on the sounds that were audible: the ambient sounds of the studio, like a mechanical hum. The sounds I created by moving in the space. The wind and an occasional birdcall. I had been planning to work on painting, but the materials I brought weren’t working out, and I was frustrated. One morning after sitting still a while, with no preconceived thoughts, I got up and walked to my drawing table and started drawing. I drew horizontal red lines by simply moving my hand from the left side of the page to the right. I used an old pen that was in my box and mixed some red ink with gouache that I happened to have with me. At the beginning, in the first few drawings, all the lines were fairly perfect. But one morning the pen hit a fiber and caused the ink to bleed out from the line. I remember pausing, holding my breath for a brief moment, and then letting go, thinking, “Just keep going.” And so I continued on with the line, working with whatever came up, and letting the accidents be. As I did more and more drawings, I became aware of what caused the ink to erupt, which disturbed the evenness of the lines and created a blob, or an incident on the page. Sometimes it was a raised fiber in the paper that the pen nib would come in contact with. Sometimes it was the mix of the gouache and ink, that it wasn’t the right consistency. Or the incidents happened when I broke my concentration, had a lapse of mindfulness, or my thoughts drifted away from the page. It became interesting to me how and when the incidents arose, and how these clusters or centers located a scar, an accident, a stray thought. I laughed out loud, seeing my veering thoughts, my inattentiveness recorded. I started each day of the residency this way, and made fifty or so of these drawings altogether. The experience or act of making a drawing is what became important to me, more so than any one individual drawing.
Translation across media is notoriously ineffective, and when I sat down to write about Mary McDonnell’s Untitled (2007), my frustration and poor results exemplified that difficulty. The idioms lost between image and text are no different from untranslatable figures of speech. Some art begs to be explained, written about, and encased in academic language (conceptual art comes to mind), but McDonnell’s work demands to be experienced.
Both McDonnell’s paintings and drawings preserve and present their creation, acting simultaneously as objects and archival records. Yet the particular invitation of the works on paper in the “Red Line Drawings” series is situated in their mechanical familiarity. (Who has not drawn a line in pen on paper?) Acquaintance with this action increases our appreciation of McDonnell’s skill—forty-four lines, remarkably straight—as well as our understanding of what she calls “incidents” in the process: the inevitable blotches and bleeds of ink. Thus, during sustained viewing the character of Untitled vacillates between approachable and aloof: the intimate scale draws us in, but the fine art context places it just beyond reach; the familiar action recalls a commonplace experience, but the artist’s dexterity repositions it on the authoritative gallery wall. It is in this vacillating, this trembling—echoing the human trembling of the lines—that the complexity of this deceptively simple work is revealed.
McDonnell started these works when she was experiencing artistic frustration while on a residency at The MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire. In an attempt to still her mind and enter a meditative place she started drawing lines on a piece of paper whose handmade quality had captivated her. One page a day, for several days, the lines proceeded without disturbance. When the first blotch arrived, McDonnell paused before accepting it as a necessity of the process, and then, as she described to me, “that was that.”1 The final number of drawings in the series is around fifty (she is unsure of the exact quantity), and they record McDonnell overcoming a passage of unproductivity through dedication, practice, and repetition. As physical documentation of her mental discipline they connote a schoolchild’s written lines or a monk’s manuscripts. Additionally, the solution to McDonnell’s struggle was also a beginning: besides representing a completed task the artwork resembles the grid of blank sheet music facing a composer, pregnant with possibility.2 The inherent potential of these lines effectively soothed the artist’s frustration, impelling her to bring that mentality back to her studio and subsequent work.
While the artist is undoubtedly skilled, her work proceeds from subjective intuition more than from premeditated technical consideration. “[From] the gut,” she explains, while embedding her fingers in her abdomen. Everything about this series of works could be construed as accidental: the number and placement of the lines, the irregular incidents, even the color of the ink (red was the color McDonnell happened to have the first day she began). Yet these characteristics are only “accidental” in the sense of being unplanned. They arise from the intuition of an artist who has spent her career considering color and form, who stripped these works down to reveal the fundamental tenets behind her more visually complex works: expressive line, lyrical movement, evocative color, careful positioning. In this sense the intuition that McDonnell heeds is both an inexplicable prompting and the automatic response of learned mastery.
The generative practices that led to Untitled reflect McDonnell’s broader creative habits. Beyond facilitating the visceral composition of each piece, the artist has situated herself in and towards life in a posture of attentiveness. In her upstate New York studio she paints amid the “silence” of nature, which she has discovered contains a polyphony of birds and running water. She lives with paintings for months, until she perceives the stirring that reveals how finally to fulfill them. Simone Weil wrote that true prayer is an attitude of attentiveness,3 but McDonnell is more of a midwife than a worshipper. The monolithic “act of creation” really comprises a series of acts, continual preparation for the awaited delivery.
1. All facts about the genesis of this piece, details about the habits of McDonnell’s practice, and record of her words are from an interview she graciously granted the author (23 June 2011).
2. McDonnell has a musical background, and her work’s affinities with music are not tangential. Multiple composers, including Meredith Monk, Linda Dusman, and Fred Hersch, have responded to her art in their own medium, continuing the cross-disciplinary trend.
3. Simone Weil, “Waiting for God” in Waiting for God (New York: Harper Perennial, 2002), 57-58.
Mary McDonnell Biography
Mary McDonnell (b. 1959, Saginaw, MI) received her BFA from Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo (1981), and her MFA from Syracuse University, New York (1984). She was granted the Western Michigan University Arts Centennial Distinguished Artist Award (2003) and the Delaware Valley Arts Alliance Fellowship Award (2004). McDonnell completed numerous artist residencies, including at the Oberpfälzer Künstlerhaus, Schwandorf, Germany (2007); The MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, New Hampshire (2007); and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Amherst (2002, 2009, 2010). Recent solo exhibitions have been held at Miller Block Gallery, Boston (2005), and James Graham Gallery, New York (2005, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2014). McDonnell’s work has also been included in group exhibitions at various venues, most recently including the Delaware Center for Creative Arts, Wilmington (2005); Kunst-und Gewerbeverein Regensburg, Germany (2008); the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Esteban Vicente, Segovia, Spain (2009); James Graham Gallery, New York (2006, 2009, 2010); the Visual Arts Gallery at the School of Visual Arts, New York (2010); the Christine Price Gallery at Castleton State College, Vermont (2011); the Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah, New York (2011); the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey (2012); and The Hafnarjordur Centre of Culture and Fine Arts, Hafnarfjör∂ur, Iceland (2013). McDonnell lives and works in Brooklyn and upstate New York. More information about her work can be found at www.marymcdonnellart.com.
Kristen Gaylord Biography
Kristen Gaylord earned her MA from and is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She is interested in modern and contemporary art with an emphasis on postwar America, and also specializes in Latin American modernism and the history of photography. She lives and works in New York City.
References
All facts about the genesis of this piece, details about the habits of McDonnell’s practice, and record of her words are from an interview she graciously granted the author (23 June 2011).
McDonnell has a musical background, and her work’s affinities with music are not tangential. Multiple composers, including Meredith Monk, Linda Dusman, and Fred Hersch, have responded to her art in their own medium, continuing the cross-disciplinary trend.
Simone Weil, “Waiting for God” in Waiting for God (New York: Harper Perennial, 2002), 57-58.
Stefana McClure is concerned with the confluence of forms as extrapolated from language and its expression. In her practice as a visual artist, she takes written text and makes it manifest in aesthetic form, allowing for a curious palimpsest to occur—as the minimalist bands of color or hyper-detailed designs engage the viewer, the realization that the abstraction is a tangible manifestation of poem, prose, or dialogue is striking. The viewer is liberated from the trappings of particular meaning or message, left instead with a sublime layout of language, the capture of the unseen composition of letters and words as stretched across temporal and spatial enunciation.
In her Films on Paper series, McClure utilizes colored transfer paper as a surface upon which to relentlessly accumulate the subtitles of a film, faithfully tracing each letter in its original typeface and screen placement onto a single intimately scaled page or series of pages. Often copies of Japanese subtitles for English-language films, the characters stack upon themselves, solidifying into shimmering bands of near-formless markings at the paper’s edge. These have been described as “light bands,” and rightfully so—they glow from the page, exuding a permanence not typically associated with the fleeting language of film, a time-based medium. An Inn in Tokyo: Intertitles to a silent film by Yasujiro Ozu (2003) is transferred from a 1935 film known for its subtle acting and powerful visuals invoking the struggle with depression and poverty in a small, honorable family. The condensed nature of the image here indirectly alludes to the relative simplicity of the silent film era, when language was an interruption and not the focus of the largely visual narrative. Intertitles, rather than simply filling in characters’ words, pause the visual action to provide a subjective narrative description; similarly, McClure offers a removed, condensed image as a source from which to intuit the film, aesthetically.
In works that capture the running subtitles of a film—such as Blue Velvet: Japanese subtitles to a film by David Lynch (2001)—the bands of form appear denser, as subtitles simultaneously capture the spoken arc of action and narration. In a way, subtitles provide a more objective translation of the world of the film, though mistakes can occur as a character’s particular words become lost in translation. In The Postman Always Rings Twice, a series of drawings based on the Japanese translation of a novel by James M. Cain (2005), five sheets of paper are entirely consumed by McClure’s faithful, painstaking tracing of the entire novel. While a Western viewer might sense an adaptation into Japanese from the faint vertical thrust of the markings, the dual monoliths of each page spread also share an uncanny formal affinity with the original English volume, capturing even the pagination and titling in the block header. The intrigue of the novel is muted, scrubbed away by McClure’s hand, its meaning buried within a literal run-down of form across the page.
Together, these transcendent, luminescent drawings represent three hours and twenty minutes of film, and an additional hundred or so pages of text—all in deceptively simple, seductive form. In her Films on Paper, McClure has effectively neutralized stories of poverty and imprisonment, sadism and murder, and sexuality and violence, respectively. Set against lushly colored grounds, the act of tracing transfer takes away color, continually removing color saturation until the register of language appears to glow. Each utterance, narration, or word is thus endlessly translated into a single form, abstracted from the specificity of geography and dialect into a universal, minimal form. These collected works speak of the universality of language—the blurred un-reading of each word affirming the dictum of accumulation over diction.
Whereas the structural rigor of filmic subtitling creates, through McClure’s hand, an even, measured body of work, the same principles applied to poetry engender something radically different: formless forms, patterns and explosions of cadence. Digging (from Death of a Naturalist): a poem by Seamus Heaney (2006) is neither a transcription nor an abstraction of that text; it is rather something of a visual translation of a synesthetic memory of the poem—its words and letters and spaces. McClure has taken away from “Digging” its immediate readability, instead emphasizing the poem’s visual structure through a systematized process acted upon an especially impressionable material.
Between my finger and my thumb/The squat pen rests; as snug as a gun—Seamus Heaney’s 1966 poem “Digging” begins with the assertion and reminder of the author’s chosen implement, the pen. While authors and artists alike regularly originate their drawings and writings with the pen, McClure instead utilized 88-character typeballs, organized spheres of letters and symbols from old electric typewriters, to make the marks of this drawing. McClure fastened the typewriter elements to the tips of professional typists’ gloved fingers, directing them in an exact iteration of the poem, word by word, pantomiming a keyboard upon the Teflon surface of the drawing. In selecting Teflon, an unusual support for a work of art, McClure capitalizes on the medium’s malleability: a nearly frictionless material, the synthetic captures and records the vestiges of touch and marking. Thus the drawing is made not with ink but with the memory of each stroke.
As impressions accumulate, marks are blackened by the fading and eventual erosion of the Teflon surface. Frequency of keystroke—letter, punctuation, or, perhaps, the space bar—is manifest in the darkening clouds of the drawing. The actual poem—its meaning, its word choice, its weight—is replaced by the poem’s visual structure, its accretions reminiscent of poised hands. Formal subtlety can also be traced in the Films on Paper, yet the stroke-by-stroke accrual therein allows for the unveiling of a distinct line. In pointed contrast, through Digging McClure has replaced the calculation and obsessive mimesis of the Films with a looser, chance-based translation of the rhythms of poetry. There is a tactile rhythm here that is absent in the Films; where Heaney describes the titular act of digging as a “squelch and slap,” so McClure captures the clack and clutter of the act of typewriting. Abstract yet accurate, the mysterious ebb and flow of letters and numbers coalesces into the poem’s transference, at times ethereal, at times dense.
Digging is one in a series of transposed poems and texts, each a discrete and easily distinguishable image, its layers both reconstructing and clouding the text that is literally at hand. Marks that initially seem the results of chance are thus revealed as indexes of the text—of its duration and of any repetition found within it. “Digging” becomes Digging, transferred and condensed in its entirety to one image, one reading, one moment. In each of her works on view here, McClure obliterates any semblance of the passage of time, all while transforming words of various context into shimmering, ghostly recollections—their function passing fluidly into form.
Stefana McClure Biography
Stefana McClure (b. 1959, Lisburn, Northern Ireland) completed her BA in Sculpture at Hornsey College of Art, London (1980-1984). She continued her studies in papermaking, with a Monbusho Scholarship, at Kyoto Seika University in Japan (1993-1995). McClure was a visiting artist at the Awagami Paper Mill, Awayamakawa, Tokushima, Japan (1998). She has since been resident at the University of Central Arkansas, Conway (2008), and the Field Institute Hombroich, Neuss, Germany (2008, 2010, 2011). McClure is the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant. Recent solo exhibitions have been held at ArtON, Bonn, Germany (2010); Josée Bienvenu Gallery, New York (2008, 2011); Dublin Contemporary, Ireland (2011); and Bartha Contemporary, London (2009, 2013). McClure has been included in numerous museum exhibitions, most recently at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, Wisconsin (2009); the Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany (2010); the Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah, New York (2011); the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery at Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut (2012); Kloster Wedinghausen, Arnsberg, Germany (2012); the Cornell Fine Arts Museum at Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida (2013); Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston (2013); Das Kleine Museum, Weissenstadt, Germany (2013); The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2013-2014); and the Columbus Museum, Columbus, Georgia (2014). McClure lives and works in New York.
Carmen Hermo Biography
Carmen del Valle Hermo (b. 1985, Summit, NJ) is the curatorial assistant for collections at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. She graduated in 2007 from the University of Richmond with honors in Art History and English. Following graduation she held a one-year internship in the Department of Drawings at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. She then worked with the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, to catalogue the collection of drawings and prints as part of the Collection and Documentation Initiative. Carmen lives in Jersey City, New Jersey, and works in New York City.
Mark Lombardi called himself a storyteller. In Casino Resort Development in the Bahamas c. 1955-89 (Fourth Version), from 1995, Lombardi draws the connections between such diverse players as Meyer Lansky, Air America, Howard Hughes, Richard Nixon, and a myriad of dubious banks. These connections could be dismissed as conjecture or, worse, as misinformation. However, this chart describes the flow of capital between entities, which serves as a verifiable indictment of association and occasional corruption.
In dying on March 22, 2000, Mark Lombardi missed his decade. He missed the confusion and manipulation of that year’s presidential election, the panic and distortion of the September 11th attacks and the ensuing wars, and the incomprehensible web of the subprime mortgage crisis. Any one of these events could have kept Lombardi busy for the rest of his career. Perhaps most relevant to Lombardi would have been the ruling of the 2010 Supreme Court case, Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission, which found that corporations, like people, are able to make anonymous political campaign contributions because money qualifies as a form of free speech. This decision is the conceptual inversion of a Lombardi drawing; not only is the flow of money unseen, but contributors–be they people or corporate entities–are legally indistinguishable.
I initially began making a chart of the Post-Lombardi Era for my own edification. I had to keep revising and reorganizing the chart to incorporate more events as they were remembered. Some events even occurred during the making of the chart (the News Corp phone-hacking scandal was particularly apropos). Unsurprisingly, my chart began to resemble Lombardi’s own work. I even had to ignore the instinctive impulse to connect the events with the people and organizations that were relevant. But the appeal was clear: the clean lines and text provide a cogent way to quickly grasp these dizzying narratives.
Lombardi’s work allows us to observe a confusing and unseen world. His drawings depict a genealogy of influence, in which the connections denote not bloodlines, but rather the movement of capital. Each allegiance is not familial, but rather is a mutually beneficial partnership, the aim of which is to acquire and retain power. Lombardi depicts these networks as enclosed and self-reflexive, giving both artist and viewer the impression of being an independent observer. We appear to be on the outside looking in, belatedly trying to sort out this complicated network. But by viewing the drawing, we, as well as Lombardi, become entangled. Our desire for knowledge burdens us with liability. We are now embedded in the network; we have become accomplices after the fact.
Mark Lombardi Biography
Mark Lombardi (b. 1951, Syracuse, NY; d. 2000, Brooklyn, NY) earned his BA in Art History from Syracuse University, New York (1974). As an undergraduate, Lombardi served as Chief Researcher for the exhibition Teapot Dome to Watergate (1973), which prefigured his later drawings inspired by United States government scandals and abuses of power. Lombardi served as Assistant Curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, Texas (1975) before opening a gallery called Square One, Houston, Texas. He then worked as a General Reference Librarian for the Fine Arts Department of the Houston Public Library, where he began a regional artist archive. Recent solo exhibitions featuring his work have been held at Galerie Thomas Schulte, Berlin (2007); Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, England (2007); De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill on Sea, England (2007); Hatton Gallery, Newcastle University, England (2007); the Museum of Contemporary Art Leipzig, Germany (2008); and Pierogi, Brooklyn (2011). Recent group exhibitions have been held at James Cohan Gallery, New York (2007); the Queens Museum of Art, New York (2007); the House of World Cultures, Berlin (2007); The Kitchen, New York (2008); Daniel Weinberg Gallery, Los Angeles (2008); the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, Wisconsin (2009); the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2009); The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2011); the Sharjah Biennial, United Arab Emirates (2011); the Mercosul Biennial, Porto Alegre, Brazil (2011); and dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, Germany (2012). Director Mareike Wegener produced a documentary on Lombardi entitled Mark Lombardi: Death-Defying Acts of Art and Conspiracy (2012) that premiered in Germany, at the Brooklyn Film Festival, and at The Museum of Modern, New York.
Billy Jacobs Biography
Billy Jacobs (b. 1985, Boston, MA) is a painter who lives and works in New York City. He earned his BFA from Parsons, The New School of Design, New York (2008). More information about his work can be found at www.thebillyjacobs.com.
K. McGill Loftus. Sounds like a made-up name. The Collector’s database reports that he bought 20 Questions Series on November 18, 1959. He does not remember the purchase or the artist.
K. McGill Loftus could be an answer to a game of 20 Questions.
The computer turns up many a Loftus but no K. McGill. Absent the artist, we do have the art.
20 Questions is a parlor game—does anyone still use the word parlor?—also employed to amuse children on long car rides. Wikipedia says it was invented in the 1940s, which makes sense, because there were a lot more cars after World War II and thus a lot more bored and annoying children in their back seats. The game had to be current when K. McGill made this series for the joke to work. It is a mild, non sequitur joke, meant, I suppose, to animate the art and vice versa. A few of the questions call to mind the art of Glen Baxter but lack his punch.
The series is a meeting of art and idea, often an uneasy relationship. Number 12 is my favorite. As a baseball fan, I love paper doll uniforms and can easily imagine myself in all of them.
In every large collection there must be a Loftus, a forgotten artist. What did the Collector see in this work?
A guess: he has always loved a series.
K. McGill Loftus Biography
K. McGill Loftus was active during the mid-twentieth century. If you have any further information on this artist, please contact us.
William Corbett Biography
William Corbett (b. 1942, Norfolk, VA) is a poet and memoirist who lives in Brooklyn. He teaches writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts. He has published books on the painters Philip Guston and Albert York, and has edited the letters of the poet James Schuyler. Corbett directs the small press, Pressed Wafer. Hanging Loose Press published his book of poems entitled The Whalen Poem (2011).
The two drawings included in this exhibition relate to the two fundamental forms LeWitt’s art has taken: modular cubic structures and wall drawings. In the earlier drawing, 6 Variations/ 1, 2, 3 (1967), LeWitt has plotted several permutations of the subject that preoccupied him for nearly a decade: the open cube. The artist explained, “The most interesting characteristic of the cube is that it is relatively uninteresting…the cube lacks any aggressive force, implies no motion, and is least emotive.”2 In the 1960s, by which time the art world had abandoned nearly all rules, the demand that a work be “interesting” seemed to be the only parameter left. LeWitt flirted with defying this tenet when he described the cube as uninteresting; however, he employed the inexpressive shape so as not to distract from the interesting idea at the core of his work. LeWitt explored the open cube in linear diagrams, axonometric drawings and three-dimensional constructions ranging from diminutive models to large-scale structures. These varied representations are often exhibited alongside one another as a means to address the different ways a singular subject may be rendered. The drawing 6 Variations relates to this large body of work, juxtaposing textual description, diagrammatic representation and the implied yet absent three-dimensional manifestation of these ideas. In 6 Variations, while the language is rudimentary and the overall concept simple (these are types of cubes), the viewer confronts the much more obtuse project of making sense of his system of Xs and imagining all variations possible in addition to those offered on the page.
The relationship between simplicity and complexity is further explored in the later drawing, The Location of Geometric Figures: A Blue Square, Red Circle, Yellow Triangle, and Black Parallelogram (1976). While the free-floating shapes are precise and clear, in the vein of mechanical drawing or children’s educational tools, the text bound within them is circuitous and prolix. The handwritten sentence nestled into each shape describes the location of that shape and its relationship to the neighboring forms. LeWitt employed just such language as instructions for his wall drawings, geometric systems carried out by others according to his directions. The text is sometimes, but not always, written adjacent to the wall drawing; when the text appears, it underscores the original idea and the process utilized to carry it out. In The Location of Geometric Figures, written and drawn articulations of LeWitt’s idea are intimately mapped onto one another. They become redundant in this shared space on the page, provoking us to question the difference between textual and visual representations and their validity as artistic tools.
The period spanning these two drawings was a remarkably rich phase of LeWitt’s career, both in the quantity of works he produced and the quality of innovations he devised. LeWitt interrogated the relationship between the idea and its realization, between what is present and absent, between complexity and simplicity, and between different modes of representation. Language, as its own closed system riddled with these very tensions, operates at many levels of LeWitt’s work. As viewers, we are prompted to reconsider the role of language—both the words we see on the page and the ones we use to discuss art.
1. While LeWitt emphasized that his conceptual art is “made to engage the mind of the viewer rather than his eye,” many maintain that one cannot disregard aesthetics entirely. After all, it is nearly impossible to ignore the elegance of LeWitt’s softly stenciled geometric wall drawings. Sol LeWitt, “Paragraphs of Conceptual Art,” Artforum 5, no. 10 (June 1967), 79-83.
2. Sol LeWitt, quoted in Sol LeWitt (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1978), 172.
Sol LeWitt Biography
Sol LeWitt (b. 1928, Hartford, CT; d. 2007, New York, NY) earned his BFA at Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York (1949). LeWitt’s work was first publicly exhibited in a group show at the Kaymar Gallery, New York (1964), and has since been the subject of hundreds of solo exhibitions. The most recent retrospective of the artist’s wall drawings was installed in 2008 at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), North Adams, in partnership with the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, and with the Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts, and will be on view for 25 years. His work is represented in museum collections worldwide, including: The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Dia:Beacon, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Tate Modern, London; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Australian National Gallery, Canberra, Australia; and the National Museum of Serbia, Belgrade. LeWitt lived and worked in New York City, where an installation of his three-dimensional structures, organized by the Public Art Fund, was on view in City Hall Park through 2011. Pace Gallery has represented the estate of LeWitt since 2007.
Delia Solomons Biography
Delia Solomons (b. 1984, Savannah, GA) is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, specializing in twentieth-century art from Latin America, the United States, and Europe. Her dissertation examines the 1960s boom of Latin American art in the United States as sparked by the Cuban Revolution. She has worked as an Adjunct Instructor at New York University, Writer/Researcher/Editor for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and Curatorial Assistant at the Grey Art Gallery, New York University. She lives in New York City.
References
While LeWitt emphasized that his conceptual art is “made to engage the mind of the viewer rather than his eye,” many maintain that one cannot disregard aesthetics entirely. After all, it is nearly impossible to ignore the elegance of LeWitt’s softly stenciled geometric wall drawings. Sol LeWitt, “Paragraphs of Conceptual Art,” Artforum 5, no. 10 (June 1967), 79-83.
Sol LeWitt, quoted in Sol LeWitt (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1978), 172.
Plato describes the universe by constructing it and making it grow.1
The purpose of art, according to Shklovsky, is to force us to notice. Since perception is usually too automatic, art develops a variety of techniques to impede perception or, at least, to call attention to themselves.2
“defamiliarization”; Shklovsky
the habitual way of thinking is to make the unfamiliar as easily digestible as possible. Normally our perceptions are “automatic,” which is another way of saying that they are minimal, i.e., learning is largely a matter of learning to ignore. Ex. “We have not really learned to drive an automobile until we are able to react to the relevant stoplights, pedestrians, other motorists, road conditions, and so on with a minimum of conscious effort–without actually noticing what we are reacting to–“3
A plane figure bounded by a single curved line every point of which is equally distant from the center.4
What can be done with the English language? Use it as material. Material of five kinds: letters, syllables, words, phrases, sentences. A text for a song can be a vocalise: just letters. Can be just syllables, just words; just a string of phrases; sentences. Or combinations of letters and syllables (for example), letters and words, et cetera.5
Croce = Philosophy of language and philosophy of art are the same thing. P 142. ie: the science of art and that of language, AESTHETIC and LINGUISTIC, conceived as true sciences, are not two distinct things, but only one. –general Linguistic, in so far as what it contains is reducible to philsophy. –same 6
1. The source for this note is not included in Ledy’s drawing, but it is possibly from Francis MacDonald Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology: The Timaeus of Plato Translated with a Running Commentary (originally published London: Kegan Paul, Trubner & Co., Ltd., 1937), 31. (http://tinyurl.com/3bedbtc)
2. Ivor Armstrong Richards, Science and Poetry (originally published London: Kegan Paul, Trubner & Co., Ltd., 1926). Viktor Shklovsky was a Russian theorist from the twentieth century.
3. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis, Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays (University of Nebraska Press, 1965), 4. (http://tinyurl.com/443rbsg)
4. The specific source for this definition of a circle is not included in the drawing.
5. John Cage, from an essay in the journal Semiotext(e) 3.2 (1978).
6. Benedetto Croce, Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic (originally published in Italian in 1902). (http://tinyurl.com/3j62j57)
Ann Ledy Biography
Ann Ledy (b. 1952, St. Paul, MN) earned her BFA in painting at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis (1974), and received her MFA in painting at the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York (1979). She has taught drawing at Pratt and at Parsons, The New School of Design, New York, where she also chaired the BFA Foundation Department. Solo exhibitions featuring her work have been held at Andrea Bergmann Gallery, Drensteinfurt, Germany (1996); Gallery Nine, Seoul (1996); C.A.I.S. Gallery, Seoul (1998); A.D.D. Gallery, Hudson, New York (1999, 2001); Stark Gallery, New York (2001); and OK Harris Gallery, New York (2004). Her work has been included in numerous group shows, most recently at the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut (2007); The San Diego Museum of Art, California (2008, 2009); the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Esteban Vicente, Segovia, Spain (2009); and the Nash Gallery, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis (2014). Ledy lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, where she served as President and Chief Academic Officer at the College of Visual Arts. More information about her work can be found at http://www.annledy.com/.
N. Elizabeth Schlatter Biography
N. Elizabeth Schlatter is the Deputy Director and Curator of Exhibitions at the University of Richmond Museums, Virginia, where she has organized exhibitions of modern and contemporary art since 2000. Previously she worked at the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, Washington, DC, and the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston. Elizabeth also organizes exhibitions independently and writes about art for various publications and websites. She has a BA in Art History from Southwestern University, Georgetown, Texas, and an MA in Art History from George Washington University, Washington, DC. Elizabeth lives and works in Richmond, Virginia.
Ivor Armstrong Richards, Science and Poetry (originally published London: Kegan Paul, Trubner & Co., Ltd., 1926). Viktor Shklovsky was a Russian theorist from the twentieth century.
Jón Laxdal (b. 1950, Akureyri, Iceland) studied philosophy at the University of Iceland, Reykjavik (1971-1975) and was an Honorary Artist in Akureyri (1993). A recent solo exhibition of Laxdal’s work was held at Hamish Morrison Galerie, Berlin, in 2007. Recent group exhibitions have been held at Kunsthaus Graz, Switzerland (2008); the Akureyri Art Museum, Iceland (2010); Kuckei + Kuckei, Berlin (2011); Hamish Morrison Galerie, Berlin (2010, 2012); and the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey (2012). Laxdal lives and works in Freyjulundur, Iceland. More information about his work can be found at www.freyjulundur.is.
Nathan Altice Biography
Nathan Altice (b. 1979, Roanoke, VA) received a PhD in Media, Art + Text from Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond. Nathan has been writing and recording music for over fifteen years. He plays guitar and sings in The Silent Type and records electronic music as Circuit Lions. Nathan lives and works in Richmond, Virginia, and writes at www.metopal.com.
A tension between absence and presence hovers over Bronlyn Jones’s quiet works Untitled #3 and Erasure List, both from 2009. In their spare intimacy, both sheets invoke things unseen just as they inspire painstaking examination of their subtly worked surfaces. While her depiction of everyday materials and use of text appeal to the spirit of conceptual art, Jones operates in a register of meticulous craft and aesthetic restraint that summons comparisons with minimalist precedents such as Agnes Martin and contemporary artist Wes Mills.
Beginning with specially selected butcher paper, Jones carefully delineates the sheets with graphite and red pencil until they resemble neatly lined, though gently aged, notebook pages. For the series “Drafts of an Empty Page,” these lines complete the exercise. While Untitled #3 is an early, anonymous example, more recent works in the series depict the grids and proportions specific to varied typologies of the notebook: Moleskin, Reporter’s, Ledger Page, Writing Tablet. They are essentially portraits of writing’s basic substrate, almost reverent in their precision and ostensible blankness. Yet it seems important to emphasize that, due to Jones’s manual process, we are far from the territory of the readymade. In Jones’s own words, it is the “subtle nuances, texture, evidence of the hand,”1 which constitute the works’ essential features.
Erasure List bears typewritten traces of the artist’s thoughts and touch, though the negative imagery speaks more to that which is omitted than to what is included. The empty line between each fragmentary phrase visually conjures the erasures to which the title refers. This structural gesture recalls the ‘intermedia’ strategies especially favored by Fluxus artists of the 1960s and 70s, which blurred the distinction between visual arts and poetry. The repeated words What is anchor each line and form a vertical chain down which the eye easily slips.
But this poetic offering is not an abstract image. The statements flicker between questions and dictums, constructed either around the deficiency or the banishment of words, images, or processes. We, the viewers, are faced with the inevitable desire to fill in the blanks, but we are not necessarily equipped with the tools to do so. Faced with this incompleteness, or staring down an empty page, we approach a state that the poet John Keats called negative capability: “when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason…”2 Jones volunteers no answers. The list feels both deeply personal and universally germane.
Bronlyn Jones (b. 1954, Iowa) received her BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts (1983). She completed her MFA at Tyler School of Art and Temple University, Philadelphia (1985). Jones was the recipient of a fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the New England Foundation for the Arts in 1995. Jones’s work has been included in group exhibitions at such venues as the Reed Fine Art Gallery, University of Maine, Presque Isle (2009); the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Esteban Vicente, Segovia, Spain (2009); the Barbara Krakow Gallery, Boston (2009, 2012); the Joel and Lila Harnett Museum of Art, University of Richmond, Virginia (2011); the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey (2012); RISDI Museum, Providence, RI (2013); and Barbara Krakow Gallery, Boston, MA (2014). Jones lives and works in Little Compton, Rhode Island.
Ingrid Langston Biography
Ingrid Langston (b. 1983, Seattle, WA) received her MA from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. She is currently a curatorial assistant in the Department of Drawings and Prints at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
It seems like everyone has a story about Ray Johnson. I also have a story about Ray. It’s not a story in the traditional sense–not a “One time, Ray and I…” sort of story–because he was long dead when I met him.
The context of my Ray Johnson story is that I was asked to write a fictional response to Ray Johnson. I had never heard of Ray before. But suddenly I was inundated with images of his work. And then something unexpected happened, which was that I got sick, and while I was sick, I had a dream about him. That’s my Ray Johnson story.
The dream, as dreams tend to be, was a collage. This one had five parts.
The Part with the School:
The dance class at the Correspondance School was called “Steps to Christ,” and the twelve steps were clearly diagramed on the chalkboard. I sat by the window because I wanted a view of the grass, and beyond the grass, a river with a bridge, and beyond the river, two peaks. (Later, I would see an envelope in an art gallery, elaborated by Ray with two bunny heads labeled “Himalaya” and “Heralaya.”) On every desk there was a nametag. I pinned my nametag to my chest, and my name was Art Baud. Ray arrived late. I knew his cue ball head from his picture, and his face–cheerful and sly as if he were wearing some kind of mask. He was twice the size of everyone. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. It looked like he’d gone swimming in all of his clothes. The teacher was waiting patiently with her hands folded on her desk; she wasn’t going to start her lesson until everyone was seated. The problem was that Ray was too big for any of the chairs. He was standing, trying to think of what to do. The tension in the room pulled the air taut. Finally, Ray lay across the whole back row of desks, and everyone cheered.
The Part with the River:
Instead of going on with the lesson, the whole classroom stood up (still cheering) and carried Ray out onto the campus quad, where the sun was shining and the birds were flitting over the grass. The grass gave way to the riverbank. Something about the quality of the day assured us a dip was going to be the perfect thing. We set Ray down next to the bridge, where lots of curious objects had washed onto the sand. Ray reached down and picked up a nutcracker in his huge hands and smiled, and then everyone stripped. I was soon surrounded by hundreds of naked celebrity artists, and I felt very self-conscious. Ray was already splashing around in the shadow of the bridge, huge and smiling. The artists began running single-mindedly towards the water, but before they could reach it whatever was holding their bodies together was disappearing, and they were scattering across the beach. Where they fell there were now more objects: ropes and combs and potato mashers and bicycle seats. I picked up a box and tried to collect all the pieces, but it felt futile: there was too much to pick up. When I saw that Ray was beckoning to me from the water, I jumped in.
The Part with the Telephone:
The water was so cold I thought my heart would freeze. Was I still holding the box? I suppose I was. I sunk down into the black water, clutching the box to myself for warmth, and when I opened my eyes everything was red, like a darkroom with a red lamp. In fact, that’s exactly where I was: in a darkroom, where a string of red photographs was suspended above red plastic chemical tubs. All the photographs were of mandrake roots. With their insinuations of legs or trunks or ears, some of them looked liked elephants while others looked like fetuses or rabbits. I took the photographs off the line and put them into the box. I realized a telephone was ringing somewhere. I reached over and picked up the handset. It was Ray’s voice. He wanted to know why something wasn’t in “the show.” I was confused. “Bring the beach box you’re holding!” said Ray. I said I would, even though I didn’t understand. He hung up. I was incredibly confused. There was the sharp noise of cracking celery, and I turned around.
The Part with the Auction:
The face of a horse-sized rabbit hovered in space, crunching down on a carrot and thumping the floor with its six-foot-long feet. It was the biggest rabbit I’d ever seen, and Ray sat on its back, holding on by its ears. He was inside some kind of ring, the kind you might find at a horse show. This was an indoor stadium and there were hundreds of people milling around the stands. Ray reached over the fence, took the beach box from my hands, and rode the rabbit into the middle of the ring. The audience took their seats. The lights went down and a spotlight came up on Ray. We were waiting to see what would happen next; it was so silent. Then, a man next to me raised a white paddle. Instead of Ray speaking, it was the huge rabbit doing the talking in Ray’s voice. “I have two hundred,” it shouted. “Do I hear two-fifty?” A woman in a broad-brimmed white hat raised her paddle. “Two-fifty! Three hundred?” said the rabbit. The man next to her raised his paddle, and the numbers kept going up and up. It seemed everyone had a paddle and everyone was using it. Even I had a paddle. I raised it into the air. Ray pointed at me in the audience, and a sudden spotlight blinded me. There was a hush in the stadium. “He’s bought it now, ladies and gentlemen!” Bought what? My stomach dropped. What did it cost?
The Part with the Letter:
I ran to a place that was simultaneously all the places I’d ever lived. The living room, for example, was a mix of childhood and adulthood, and the walls were striped in two shades of green, glacial and avocado. I sat down at the kitchen table. I was forcing open an envelope with a pen. Inside there was a Xeroxed profile of a man’s head; its jaw was missing. For upper teeth, someone had written in tiny architectural caps, “PLEASE DRAW SOMETHING IN THE SPACE PROVIDED.” I looked through the window and drew what I saw: a man swimming in the water in January.
Ray Johnson Biography
Ray Johnson (b. 1927, Detroit, MI; d. 1995, Long Island, NY) studied at Black Mountain College, North Carolina (1945-1948). The most recent retrospective of Johnson’s work opened at Raven Row, London (2009), and traveled to Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona. Recent solo exhibitions in 2014 have been held at Sidney Mishkin Gallery, Baruch College, New York; Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid; and The Museum of Modern Art Library, New York. Group exhibitions have been held at Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2009); Max Ernst Museum, Brühl, Germany (2011); the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C. (2011); Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, California (2012); the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2012); the Brooklyn Art Museum, New York (2012); the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, East Hampton, New York (2012); the Musée Denys-Puech, Rodez, France (2012); the Krannert Art Museum, Champaign, Illinois (2013); The Morgan Library & Museum, New York (2014); and Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York (2014). More information about his work can be found at www.rayjohnsonestate.com.
Axel Wilhite Biography
Axel Wilhite (b. 1985) is a Los Angeles-based artist and writer. He holds a BA in Mythology and Literature, New York University, and an MFA in Fiction Writing, New York University. His interest in the intersection of literature, culture, and visual art has led to numerous collaborations and experiments. He is an avid practitioner of kendo, or the art of Japanese swordsmanship. He has shown his paintings in the United States and abroad.
“Johns is consciously searching to discover every possible nuance of which a medium is capable.”
— Ruth E. Fine1
Jasper Johns is well known for his drawings and paintings of numbers. His works on paper 0-9 (1960) and Numbers (1996) provide two examples of Johns’s ability to make the medium part of the subject of his work. In 0-9, the two-by-five grid and sequential inclusion of numerals zero through nine emphasize the idea of a structured and closed set. The graphite wash employed in this work allowed Johns to create varying shades and to toy with the separation between figure and ground. Here, brushstrokes often play an integral part in defining the forms of the numerals and in directing one’s eye from one number to the next. Graphite dust is sprinkled noticeably on the paper surrounding the image. The visible juxtaposition in texture between the proper grid of numbers and these seemingly incidental, powdery smudges highlights the physical conversion of the dry graphite into a wet wash.
This conversion mimics both the shifting roles that numbers play in day-to-day life and the ways in which they function in Johns’s work. When written, numbers transform easily from abstract ideas to concrete symbols, thus relaying necessary information. Because Johns displays these numbers without any mathematic context or implied application, he demonstrates how numbers can further transition from symbols to graphic forms, designed for aesthetic contemplation.
In Numbers, Johns created an expanded closed system of numbers by sequentially repeating twelve times the numerals zero through nine in an eleven-by-eleven grid. By leaving the first square of this grid blank, Johns allows the viewer to read the numbers in numerical order both horizontally and vertically. If read diagonally from upper left to lower right, the numbers are ordered by even and odd integers: 0, 2, 4, 6, 8 or 1, 3, 5, 7, 9. If read from upper right to lower left, the diagonal rows consist of identical numbers: all 9s or 8s or 7s, and so on. Despite this well-planned layout, the collage technique that Johns uses, which involves cutout squares and stenciled numbers, graphite, and acrylic, encourages the viewer to lose him- or herself in a multi-layered field of physical pattern with no particular hierarchy. Perhaps one might first notice the network of lighter areas in the dark paint surrounding the numbers, or another viewer might observe the work’s undulating surface, created through the uneven application of the grid’s individual collage units. A different set of eyes may be most engaged with the lumpy patterns caused by the inconsistency of the paint. The metered repetition of numbers here allows each viewer to examine, compare, and appreciate fully the visual subtleties of each unit.
In 0-9 and Numbers, Johns works with his medium in a way that physically mimics the intellectual process of understanding numbers. In both the transformation of dry graphite into wash and the physical layering of collaged pattern units, these works float between abstraction, representation, and aesthetics in much the same way that numbers do.
“But numbers exist only in the imagination. We write them every day, we use them all the time, but they remain stubbornly abstract in a peculiar way.” — Michael Crichton2
Jasper Johns’s decision to feature numbers—“things the mind already knows”—in his work has allowed him to expose the complex relationship between form and the perception of numbers. In Numbers from 1960, Johns transforms the ten individual digits from theoretical notions to concrete works on paper. In front of this piece, the viewer spends time reveling in the artist’s adept handling of the pencil and eraser, two of the simplest of artistic tools. Each numeral, ranging from zero to nine, exhibits unique line work; no two numbers look alike. In some instances, a number barely emerges into the foreground through a dense frenzy of crosshatched lines. In other instances, Johns has applied layers of fine lines that mimic a delicate concealing mesh. The contours of the numbers, while not always completely continuous, are often defined by a singular line, perhaps referencing Johns’s frequent use of stencils.
Never missing an opportunity to deepen the complexity of his work, Johns leaves the viewer to wonder how to understand Numbers. Should one view this array of numbers as a counting instrument, like a modern abacus? Should one merely read the figures as one would if they were located in a written text? Why did Johns opt to depict these numerals with such an expressionistic hand, rather than to employ the smooth contours and solid lines of handwritten or typed numbers? Perhaps the subject herein lies more in the beauty and possibility of the graphite line than in the coherent forms of the numbers themselves.
Johns’s use of scribbled lines, inside, around, and across the numerals’ borders, supports this reading. Far from careless marks, these lines reveal the rhythmic motion of Johns’s hand; almost as an afterthought, they also reinforce the shape of a number. The occasional erasures, still visible, prove that Johns carefully considered the effects this line work would have on the overall reading of the piece. It is this expressive line that unifies these ten small drawings. The inclusion of each digit, and their appearance in sequential order, allows viewers to do more than read the numbers exclusively as symbols. Here, one can also marvel at the network of lines used to portray these common figures and observe the artist’s complication of his subject.
1. Ruth E. Fine, “Making Marks” in Drawings of Jasper Johns, Nan Rosenthal and Ruth E. Fine (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1990), 53.
2. Michael Crichton, Jasper Johns (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994), 32.
Jasper Johns Biography
Jasper Johns (b. 1930, Augusta, GA) was raised in Allendale, South Carolina. He briefly attended the University of South Carolina, Columbia (1947-48) before moving to New York in 1949, where he studied for a few months at Parsons School of Design. Johns’s first solo exhibition was at Leo Castelli Gallery, New York (1958), which brought him renown as well as several purchases by The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Johns was the subject of retrospectives in New York at the Whitney Museum of American Art (1977) and The Museum of Modern Art (1996), both of which traveled internationally. Most recently Johns’s work was shown in Jasper Johns/In Press: The Crosshatch Works and the Logic of Print, Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts (2012); Jasper Johns: Variations on a Theme, Phillips Collection, Washington, DC (2012); Jasper Johns: Seeing with the Mind’s Eye, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2012); and Jasper Johns: Regrets, The Museum of Modern Art (2014). Johns’s most recent award was the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2011), which he received from President Obama.
Jacqueline Clary Biography
Jacqueline Clary (b. 1989, Richmond, VA) received her BA in Art History from the University of Richmond, Virginia, in May 2012. She has conducted research for the University of Richmond Museums as the Joel and Lila Harnett 2011 Summer Fellow and for the Valentine Richmond History Center as a visitor services intern. Clary currently lives in Baltimore, where she works as an elementary school teacher.
References
Ruth E. Fine, “Making Marks” in Drawings of Jasper Johns, Nan Rosenthal and Ruth E. Fine (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1990), 53.
Michael Crichton, Jasper Johns (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994), 32.
