Author: Rachel Nackman

Caitlin McKenna on Annabel Daou

Posted on by Rachel Nackman

The language divorced of any meaning becomes an object, both threatening and useless…
— Annabel Daou1

Annabel Daou, Constitution, 2004, graphite, gesso and tape on paper, 50 x 38 inches (127 x 96.5 cm). © Annabel Daou / Photo: Ellen McDermott
Annabel Daou, Constitution, 2004, graphite, gesso and tape on paper, 50 x 38 inches (127 x 96.5 cm). © Annabel Daou / Photo: Ellen McDermott

In Constitution (2004), Annabel Daou transcribes the text of the Constitution of the United States phonetically into Arabic characters. The result is not a translation of the Founding Fathers’ document, nor even a careful and systematic transliteration of the English words using the Arabic alphabet. Daou made this work as she read the Constitution, her eye following the famous text as her hand refashioned it in Arabic characters. Due to the immediacy of this process, the drawing exhibits a directness not typically found in translation or transliteration. The resulting work is not a readable text from which one might derive a linear narrative like that of the original text. Instead, it is a drawing filled with spelling inconsistencies and Arabic consonants imprecisely substituted for English consonant sounds not present in the Arabic language. Given the circumstances of its creation, the text may even be missing words. Daou herself thinks of the resulting text as the U.S. Constitution being read in an Arabic accent, the words having lost their meaning when taken outside of their American context. The literal implications of the Constitution as a document rather than simply a group of words placed together can only be understood fully in English, and even though Constitution is not a complete iteration of the text in the original document, this drawing requires knowledge of both English and Arabic for any sort of linguistic comprehension.

Divorced from its original meaning, language becomes an object.2 As the drawing progresses along with Daou’s reading of the Constitution, the artist’s mental process of interpreting language becomes increasingly detached from her physical process of writing. With the fundamental essence of the text so unglued, the original meaning disintegrates and the potential for misunderstanding abounds. To use the artist’s own words, in her attempt to create “presence with a lack of presence,” language becomes a sort of “paint.”3 This paint fills the top portion of the frame and acts as a deliberately elusive foil to the void of the hollow cutout in the bottom portion. Although written in pencil, the transcribed letters were treated as permanent—Daou did not make any erasures or revisions, juxtaposing the ephemerality of graphite on paper with the immovability of the marks she had made.

Constitution, one of Daou’s first text-based pieces, marks a fundamental point in her artistic development. As a bilingual, fluent in Arabic and English, who has spent significant portions of her life in Lebanon and the United States, Daou was able in making Constitution to consider both her own linguistic hybridity and the process of translation that takes place in the minds of individuals belonging to more than one culture. With this piece, the artist explains, “…[I am] aiming at the non-culture of people like me. Cultural, not linguistic, translation [occurs] in my head. Translation is constant; some part of you [always] has to be translated.”4 Yet Constitution remains of paramount importance to Daou precisely because its creation allowed her to leave these questions behind, to experience the liberation of making art that does not engage with “identity politics.” The text itself directs both Daou’s hand and the form of the work, thus liberating her from the potential burden of cultural decision-making.

Annabel Daou, The Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms, 2006, graphite on paper, 7 ½ x 5 ½ inches (19.1 x 14 cm). © Annabel Daou / Photo: Laura Mitchell
Annabel Daou, The Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms, 2006, graphite on paper, 7 ½ x 5 ½ inches (19.1 x 14 cm). © Annabel Daou / Photo: Laura Mitchell

The Declaration of the Cause and the Necessity of Taking Up Arms (2006), made two years after Constitution, similarly detaches the language of a landmark historical document from its original context in order to examine the network of language, culture, and the written word. In this smaller work, however, Daou does not use the Arabic alphabet, instead filling the sheet with a minuscule English version of a document prepared by the Second Continental Congress in 1775. The drawing was originally shown in an exhibition of Daou’s work entitled “America,” in which the artist transcribed twenty documents relating to American history and culture. This series of works attempted to portray the country’s complex and often contradictory history from its founding until the present. As one part of this larger project, Declaration is remarkable in its ability to encourage the viewer to reconsider the original text through the lens of Daou’s handwriting, addressing both personal connections and contemporary relativity. By intentionally disorienting the viewer in this way, the artist locates her work in the space between meaning and non-meaning, maintaining a continuously shifting perspective. Misunderstanding always inversely suggests the possibility for understanding, and in the case of language, it is precisely this possibility that interests Daou.5

Annabel Daou, Book of Hours – one, 2006, artist’s book: graphite on paper with hand binding, 5 x 3 ½ x ½ inches (12.7 x 8.9 x 1.3 cm), closed. © Annabel Daou / Photo: Ellen McDermott

In Book of Hours – one, Daou carefully fills the pages of a blank book with times recorded from the face of a clock. Drawn arrows and numbers visually bridge the gaps between semi-transparent pages, creating sets of timestamps that sometimes fall into seemingly orderly intervals—one hour, one hour plus one minute, etc. Yet this system, while intriguing, resists being decoded fully by viewers. For Daou, this literal “book of hours” documents the passing of time as she experienced it while creating the work. After a collaborator supplied her with 120 individual words that were particularly meaningful to Daou at the time, she habitually spent concentrated blocks of time writing each of those words on paper, one after another. Book of Hours – one maps the times shown on the clock at the start and finish of each 120-word writing cycle. Daou admits that the 120 words were simply “an excuse,” meaning that here she explores the physical process of writing “time” with primary interest in the progression of real time rather than in the content of the words.6 While the contextual information contained in these pages is highly personal to Daou, the artwork also functions universally. For those with no prior knowledge of Daou’s process, the book’s depiction of time can seem innately to relate to the daily life of every human. Viewers may even find themselves contemplating their own activities or rituals associated with these points throughout the day.

With the title Book of Hours, Daou alludes to the late medieval European tradition of books of hours, or prayer books meant for private daily use. These devotional manuscripts guided users through days and seasons with appropriate prayers. Books of hours developed into a genre of sumptuously illustrated and highly personalized luxury objects, but on the most basic level they functioned as calendars. Daou’s artistic process similarly incorporates time-based ritual, but her choice of unadorned materials contrasts with the preciousness of this book’s medieval counterparts. Daou’s reference to the medieval tradition is perhaps similar to her use of historical documents in Constitution and The Declaration of the Cause and the Necessity of Taking Up Arms. In each case she removes the reference from its original context, fundamentally altering its meaning and opening a self-conscious conversation within her work. In Book of Hours – one, this conversation centers on the juxtapositions between the precious and the ordinary, art and anti-art, and the personal and the universal.

Book of Hours – one belongs to a larger body of work that was shown in the artist’s solo exhibition Book of Hours (2007) at Gallery Joe in Philadelphia, even though this particular piece was not part of the show. In addition to another book titled Book of Hours, the exhibition included drawings in which Daou represented one hour by writing the times seen on the face of a clock throughout each of its 60 minutes. A sound piece added to the multi-sensory experience of the installation, with Daou reading each of the 120 words, punctuated by her recitation of the time on the clock. Two confessional gates, as well as the concave ceiling above Book of Hours, which was shown on a pedestal in the position of an altar, reinforced Daou’s attempt to draw a parallel between the ritualistic aspects of her artistic process and those of worship.

Daou has described her artistic process as “trying to find a thread and pull it.”7 In her mind it is this process that is most important: “There is no beginning or end; it will repeat…[It] is not about getting anywhere but finishing the work, and then it can vibrate forever.”8 The notion of time is implicit in both this statement and her artistic practice as a whole. Tempo is always present in Daou’s work, whether represented through the inclusion of timestamps from the face of a clock or borne out in the artist’s conscious progression through the act of transcription. Each work has a different tempo, from the cyclical rhythm of Book of Hours – one to the deliberate forward movement of Daou’s hand in Constitution, at first perhaps staccato and then increasingly fluid. Book of Hours – one marks part of the artist’s larger interest in making objects that are imbued with presence–a presence seated in the tempo of their making and carried out as each work is approached, read, and used independently by viewers.

1. Annabel Daou, unpublished artist’s statement, 2004.
2. Ibid.
3. Annabel Daou, in conversation with the author, June 2011.
4. Ibid.
5. This sentence and the previous one reflect comments made by Daou in Messaouda Bouras, “Interview with Annabel Daou”, www.arteeast.org, 1 October 2006, http://www.arteeast.org/pages/artists/article/71/?artist_id=2.
6. Annabel Daou, in conversation with the author, June 2012.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.

Annabel Daou Biography

Annabel Daou (b. 1967, Beirut, Lebanon) was born and raised in Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War. She attended Barnard College of Columbia University, New York (1989). Daou held a residency at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Studio Program, New York (2002-2007), and was a Brown Foundation Fellow in Residence at the Dora Maar House, Ménerbes, France (2008). Daou won the Biennial Award at the 2010 Cairo Biennale. She was in residence at CentralTrak, Dallas (2011) and was a visiting professor at the Meadows Art School, Southern Methodist University, Dallas (2011). Recent solo exhibitions have been held at the David Winton Bell Gallery, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island (2009); Conduit Gallery, Dallas (2010, 2014); Josée Bienvenu Gallery, New York (2011, 2012); Galerie Tanja Wagner, Berlin (2012, 2014); and the Global Art Forum, Dubai, United Arab Emirates (2014). Select group exhibitions took place at Osart Gallery, Milan (2011); the Drawing Room, London (2013); and The Arts and Humanities Institute Gallery, Boise, Idaho (2014). Daou performed her work Fortune at MoMA PS1, New York (2013): more information about this work may be found at http://annabeldaoufortune.com/. She is a co-founder of S2A, a subterranean platform for art projects in New York City, and is a founder of dbfoundation in New York, a small collaborative effort to organize alternative exhibitions and projects. Daou has participated in a number of projects organized by dBfoundation, including Home Base IV, New York (2009); CAFÉ, the Phillips Collection, Washington, DC (2009); and We Are Not an Arab Artist, New York Chronicles, Virginia Commonwealth University, Doha, Qatar (2010). Daou lives and works in New York City.
Caitlin McKenna Biography
Caitlin McKenna (b. 1985, PA) currently serves as Research Associate at the Brooklyn Museum, where she is leading the reinstallation of the Museum’s Arts of the Islamic World gallery. Caitlin previously has worked for: Grey Art Gallery, New York University; the BMW Guggenheim Lab, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Goff & Rosenthal Gallery, New York. She holds a BA with Honors from Colgate University, Hamilton, New York, and an MA from New York University. McKenna lives and works in Brooklyn.

Lauren Marinaro on Buster Cleveland

Posted on by Rachel Nackman

Buster Cleveland, ART FOR UM, 1993-1998, mixed media on foam core, 62 pieces, each 5 ¼ x 5 ¼ x 1/8 inches (13.3 x 13.3 x 0.3 cm). © Estate of Buster Cleveland / Photo: Laura Mitchell

Buster Cleveland began producing his ART FOR UM mail art series in the late 1980s, mounting collaged images of celebrities alongside visual references to pop culture and art history on five-inch-by-five-inch squares of foam core. In a series totaling roughly sixty postcards, Cleveland presented his recipients with physically and conceptually layered works based loosely on the covers of contemporary Artforum magazines. He combined images of the original covers with his own magazine clippings, photographs, and other ephemera, before scaling each one down to postcard size using a laser printer. The final printed images were attached to foam core backings and adorned with the recipient’s address, rubber stamp markings, texts printed on paper, and handmade postage stamps—which Cleveland adhered alongside regulation United States Postal Service stamps.

Anyone was able to sign up to receive Cleveland’s ART FOR UM collages through the mail, for a fee of $100 for a yearlong monthly subscription or $1000 for a lifetime subscription. This democratic system provided those interested with relatively inexpensive access to an original body of work. The nature of this means of distribution reduced the sense of preciousness typically associated with fine art works; Cleveland’s collages were handled by multiple people and passed through postal service bins, boxes, and sorting stations.

In addition to producing the ART FOR UM series from collaged images of Artforum magazines, Cleveland turned the magazine covers themselves into art works. Often more minimal in style than the smaller squares meant for distribution, the original Artforum covers served as canvases for collage works. Ultimately encased in resin, the hardened objects could be hung on the wall or displayed on a plinth, acting both as image and object.

Buster Cleveland, Ray Johnson, 1993, collage in plastic resin, 11 x 10 ¾ inches (27.9 x 27.3 cm). © Estate of Buster Cleveland / Photo: Ellen McDermott
Buster Cleveland, Ray Johnson, 1993, collage in plastic resin, 11 x 10 ¾ inches (27.9 x 27.3 cm). © Estate of Buster Cleveland / Photo: Ellen McDermott

In many ways, the resin-coated Artforum covers can be viewed as maquettes for the ART FOR UM foam core works—they are simpler versions of the mailed pieces. Yet Cleveland seemed to regard the resin magazines as art works in their own right. They were presented in exhibitions, and there are many resin magazines that do not have a counterpart in a foam core version that was eventually mailed. The October 1967 Artforum cover, made in 1993 and included here in the Art=Text=Art exhibition, falls under this category—it is a stand-alone object that was never turned into an ART FOR UM piece. Titled Ray Johnson, the work pays tribute to the renowned mail artist, one of Cleveland’s major influences. The original Artforum cover features a painting by Ad Reinhardt, with whom Johnson served as an assistant in the 1950s. Cleveland then collaged a one-eyed figure on top of the image, perhaps alluding to Johnson’s own art, and printed “Buster Cleveland” on top of the Artforum logo before coating the entire work in resin, entombing this monument to his mentor.

Cleveland died in 1998 at the age of 55. He is remembered for his associations with the renewed Dada movements of the 1970s and for his later mail art. He was born James Trenholm in Chicago and studied at the Chicago Art Institute and the San Francisco Art Institute after serving in the US Coast Guard. While in California, he became associated with the Mendocino Area and Bay Area Dada movements, California organizations of artists whose intentions were to recreate the ephemeral works of early European Dadaists like Kurt Schwitters and Marcel Duchamp. Influenced by Ray Johnson, Cleveland began working with mail art in the 1970s and moved to New York during this time, living bi-coastally throughout the 1980s.

During Cleveland’s artistic career he achieved minor notoriety. In the early 1980s he showed with Gracie Mansion out of a rented limousine before she had a gallery space. He continued to show with Mansion once she opened her downtown gallery, and he had his final solo show there in 1993, five years before his death. In Cleveland’s ART FOR UM works, one of the most pervasive themes examined is death–often premature death—and the concept of the memorial. Specific memorial issues are dedicated to the artists Ray Johnson and Al Hansen, both mentors of Cleveland who died while the younger artist was still working. Throughout the foam core issues, images or text acknowledge the passing of pop culture figures including Andy Warhol, Princess Diana, James Dean, Allen Ginsberg, Leigh Bowery, and others. Cleveland’s legacy is closely aligned with the California Dadaists and parallels the scenario described by John Held in his recent article on the group: “Despite the number of publications they produced, and the underground effect they had on the culture, the contribution of the Bay Area Dada Group has been virtually ignored by the mainstream. Their works were community based, spontaneous and ephemeral. Never seeking or receiving the recognition they deserved, the record left in their wake is more than adequate to stake a claim.”1

1. John Held, Jr., “Before Punk and Zines: Bay Area Dada,” Stendhal Gallery, 21 March 2010, http://www.stendhalgallery.com/?p=3504.

Buster Cleveland Biography

Buster Cleveland (b. 1943, Chicago, IL, d. 1998, Queens, NY) studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the San Francisco Art Institute. Cleveland’s ART FOR UM mail art subscription series (1980s) is considered by many to be his most notable work. Cleveland had his first major solo exhibitions at the Gracie Mansion Gallery, New York (1987, 1990, 1993). Cleveland’s most recent solo exhibition was held at Pavel Zoubok Gallery, New York (2012). Cleveland work can be found in the public collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City; and the International Collage Center, Milton, Pennsylvania.
Lauren Marinaro Biography
Lauren Marinaro is the Director at the Zach Feuer Gallery, New York, where she works with young, emerging, and mid-career artists. The gallery works with art across all genres and mediums including video, painting, photography, performance, installation, sculpture, and conceptual works; as well as historical exhibitions including Signed, Sealed, Delivered, which Marinaro curated. Marinaro is an adjunct professor at New York University, where she most recently taught Understanding Contemporary Art: The Essential Guide to New Art and New Media. She completed her BA in Art History at the University of Richmond, Virginia, and received her MA in Contemporary Art from Sotheby’s Institute of Art, London.

Olivia Kohler-Maga on Trisha Brown

Posted on by Rachel Nackman
Trisha Brown, Untitled, 1975, ink on graph paper, 8 ½ x 11 inches (21.6 x 27.9 cm). © Trisha Brown / Photo: Laura Mitchell
Trisha Brown, Untitled, 1975, ink on graph paper, 8 ½ x 11 inches (21.6 x 27.9 cm). © Trisha Brown / Photo: Laura Mitchell

Trisha Brown’s works on paper Untitled and Drawing for Pyramid, both from 1975, are fluid while still systematic, seemingly spontaneous and yet also deliberate. Although drawn on graph paper, Brown’s lines do not follow the grid: they run through boxes, up and down columns, using the blue lattice as a guide, not a directive. Brown’s career as a visual artist has spanned decades, and she has amassed a diverse portfolio. Her drawings are intriguing on their own–some resemble hieroglyphics, primitive writing, or Abstract Expressionist canvases–but they begin to emote more deeply when considered alongside her choreography.

Yes, the artist is that Trisha Brown, of the Judson Dance Theater in the 1960s; of Walking on the Wall in 1971 at the Whitney Museum of Art; of Glacial Decoy in 1979, with sets designed by Robert Rauschenberg; and of You Can See Us, a duet danced with Mikhail Baryshnikov in 1996. Drawing, for Brown, is a form of mental exercise, a way of attaining the intense focus necessary to create or perform her works. These works on paper were meant to convey to her dancers a sense of the rise and fall of the dance, not to instruct them where to stand or how to hold their hands.

Trisha Brown, Drawing for Pyramid, 1975, ink on graph paper, 6 ¾ x 7 ½ inches (17.2 x 19.1 cm). © Trisha Brown / Photo: Ellen McDermott
Trisha Brown, Drawing for Pyramid, 1975, ink on graph paper, 6 ¾ x 7 ½ inches (17.2 x 19.1 cm). © Trisha Brown / Photo: Ellen McDermott

Just as her choreography runs in cycles, Brown also explores a certain characteristic for a time in her drawings, before moving organically to another idea. Her works on paper have evolved over the years paralleling her career as a dancer and choreographer. Once one knows about the other half of her creative accomplishments, drawings like these begin more apparently to define motion through time or to trace the position of a rotating dancer’s feet. The works on graph paper, however, are unique within Brown’s output, made during a phase that roughly corresponds with the development of her “Mathematic” choreography series from the early 1970s, which explores the accumulation, deaccumulation, and reaccumulation of gestures. Drawing for Pyramid refers specifically to the dance Pyramid, one of the pieces in the “Mathematic” series. It is tempting to try to identify exactly what this work could diagram. Similar works have been explained as picturing movement between groups of bodies.

It may seem confusing that an artist esteemed for her breakthrough choreography and for distinctive and unexpected dances would confine herself to a grid. Yet when one considers how Brown has described herself as an “art machine”1 and how she has seen her body as a “piece of machinery that was looking for a driver, a pilot,”2 the logic behind her choices may become clearer. One recalls Andy Warhol’s desire to become a machine as well, to create one piece repetitively, without change or augmentation.

When watching a performance of one of Brown’s “Accumulations,” in which gestures and movements build one at a time and then decrease again in sequence, one might expect to see a body striving to control its human failings, the mind concentrating on completing each step exactly as it had been completed one cycle, two cycles, five cycles before. But the movement is fluid, and the performer is indifferent to maintaining uniformity among the motions. This is as it should be, and the drawings correlate to the spirit in which Brown choreographed. It seems easy to find in these lines the cycle of the dance—each square delineating one step or one turn performed by a dancer—but it is important to try not to equate the two media. Instead one should follow the gentle roll of the drawing as it turns back on itself, creating the gentle wave one can also observe in the current of her dance.

1. Annette Grant, “Misha and Trisha, Talking Dance,” New York Times 8 August 1999.
2. Joyce Morgenroth, Speaking of Dance: twelve contemporary choreographers on their craft (New York: Routledge, 2004), 60.

Trisha Brown Biography

Trisha Brown (b. 1936, Aberdeen, WA) is a well known innovative choreographer and her work on paper is informed by her experiences with movement and dance. She earned her BA at Mills College, Oakland, California (1958) and received a DFA from Bates College, Lewiston, Maine (2000). Brown founded the Trisha Brown Dance Company, New York (1970) and has since received numerous honors and recognitions for her choreography and dance performances. A major retrospective of Brown’s dance pieces and drawings was held at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2008). Solo exhibitions of Brown’s works on paper were held at documenta 12, Kassel, Germany (2007) and Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York (2009, 2012). Brown lives and works in New York City. More information about her contributions to modern dance and choreography can be found at www.trishabrowncompany.org.
Olivia Kohler-Maga Biography
Olivia Kohler-Maga (b. 1981, Chicago, IL) is the Assistant Director of the Luther W. Brady Art Gallery at George Washington University, Washington, DC. She received her BA in Art History from the University of Richmond, Virginia, and her MA in American Art History from American University, Washington, DC. Olivia lives in Washington, DC.

William Corbett on Stephanie Brody-Lederman

Posted on by Rachel Nackman

Stephanie Brody-Lederman, Mothers—Thorny Subjects, 1978, artist’s book: string, thread, twigs and ink on museum board, 4 1/2 x 6 1/4 inches (11.4 x 15.9 cm), closed. © Stephanie Brody-Lederman / Photo: Laura Mitchell

Stephanie Brody-Lederman’s one-of-a-kind book, Mothers—Thorny Subjects (1978), is a primer on motherhood. Like all primers we are meant to learn a thing or two, for example our A-B-Cs, while absorbing a lesson that might serve us well in later life. Brody-Lederman’s book is dedicated to her children, but after years of motherhood she now thinks her book has as much to say to and about her.

Brody-Lederman writes small stories in stick figures. This is not where the moral of this primer is, if there is one. Thorny twigs have been sewn to the pages. Mothers build nests and come to know that they are not all down and comfort. Mothers are adept with needle and thread, to mend what needs mending. And if thread binds in a restrictive way…well, that’s one of the ways Mom can be a thorny subject.

Stephanie Brody-Lederman Biography

Stephanie Brody-Lederman (b. 1939, New York, NY) earned her BS in Design at Finch College, New York (1961), and received her MA in Painting from Long Island University, Greenvale, New York (1975). She was presented with the Jessica Cosgrave Award (2010) for distinguished alumna of Finch College. Recent solo exhibitions have been held at the Islip Art Museum, East Islip, New York (2007); OK Harris Gallery, New York (2009, 2012); the lobby of 1133 Sixth Avenue, New York (2010); the Hudson Opera House, Hudson, New York (2010); and The Forge Gallery, Milford, Pennsylvania (2012). Recent group exhibitions have been held at Guild Hall, East Hampton, New York (2009); Central Booking, Brooklyn (2010); Projective City, Paris (2012); and the Southampton Cultural Center, Southampton, New York (2012). Brody-Lederman’s work has been reviewed in Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail, ARTnews and Artforum, and has been featured as the cover of The Paris Review #160 and L’OEIL. A chapbook of her work, featuring an essay by Edward M. Gomez, was produced (2011). Two of her poems were published in the St. Petersburg Review 4/5 (2012). Brody-Lederman lives and works in New York City and Paris. More information about her work can be found at www.stephaniebrodylederman.com.
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).

Jeff Friedman: Drawing=Choreography=Drawing

Posted on by Rachel Nackman

Trisha Brown is a renowned post-modern dancer and choreographer with a long and distinguished national and international career. Brown is well-known for her nuanced collaborations with many visual artists, including Robert Rauschenberg and many others. Brown has also created visual art in her own right, including two works in the Art=Text=Art exhibition.

Trisha Brown, Drawing for Pyramid, 1975, ink on graph paper, 6 ¾ x 7 ½ inches (17.2 x 19.1 cm). © Trisha Brown / Photo: Ellen McDermott
Trisha Brown, Drawing for Pyramid, 1975, ink on graph paper, 6 ¾ x 7 ½ inches (17.2 x 19.1 cm). © Trisha Brown / Photo: Ellen McDermott
This online conversation gives us an opportunity to discuss the role of visual arts and choreography, as they interact artistically on-stage, as visual arts documents choreography as an archive, and as an interdisciplinary field of inquiry.

Jeff Friedman is Associate Professor of Dance Studies, Mason Gross School of the Arts, at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. He received his PhD in Dance History and Theory at the University of California-Riverside, where he was a Jacob K. Javits Fellow. As a professional dancer and choreographer, Jeff has toured nationally and internationally with the Oberlin Dance Collective and LOCUS Solo Dance. His solo work Muscle Memory has been seen in throughout the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, Poland and Germany. Friedman was a Senior Research and Teaching Fulbright Fellow in Frankfurt, Germany, in 2010. His publications are available in the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain and New Zealand. He was also a visiting Senior Lecturer in the Dance Studies Programme at Auckland University, New Zealand.

Annabel Daou: Language as Lure

Posted on by Rachel Nackman

I’d like to begin this discussion by questioning the deviousness and seduction of language as used in art. Words are a lure and we are drawn to the writing on the wall, whether in a gallery or museum, a bathroom stall, or on a poster-lined street. Language captures the viewer and draws him or her closer in a different way than the image does, and I’m interested in opening up a discussion around that phenomenon.

In the same way that a title of a work can open up or even shift the way we see the work, language within the work can manipulate the way the viewer responds to and ultimately receives it. How might language be said to operate in ways that aren’t restricted to the contextualizing and annotative possibilities that language seems inherently to bring with it? Much discussion has taken place around the manipulative nature of the image; in what ways does the use of language become implicated in similarly manipulative strategies?

Annabel Daou (b. 1967, Beirut, Lebanon) was born and raised in Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War. She attended Barnard College of Columbia University, New York (1989). Daou held a residency at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Studio Program, New York (2002-2007), and was a Brown Foundation Fellow in Residence at the Dora Maar House, Ménerbes, France (2008). Daou won the Biennial Award at the 2010 Cairo Biennale. She was in residence at CentralTrak, Dallas (2011) and was a visiting professor at the Meadows Art School, Southern Methodist University, Dallas (2011). Recent solo exhibitions have been held at the David Winton Bell Gallery, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island (2009); Conduit Gallery, Dallas (2010, 2014); Josée Bienvenu Gallery, New York (2011, 2012); Galerie Tanja Wagner, Berlin (2012, 2014); and the Global Art Forum, Dubai, United Arab Emirates (2014). Select group exhibitions took place at Osart Gallery, Milan (2011); the Drawing Room, London (2013); and The Arts and Humanities Institute Gallery, Boise, Idaho (2014). Daou performed her work Fortune at MoMA PS1, New York (2013): more information about this work may be found at http://annabeldaoufortune.com/. She is a co-founder of S2A, a subterranean platform for art projects in New York City, and is a founder of dbfoundation in New York, a small collaborative effort to organize alternative exhibitions and projects. Daou has participated in a number of projects organized by dBfoundation, including Home Base IV, New York (2009); CAFÉ, the Phillips Collection, Washington, DC (2009); and We Are Not an Arab Artist, New York Chronicles, Virginia Commonwealth University, Doha, Qatar (2010). Daou lives and works in New York City.

Marilyn Symmes: The Creative Potential of a Blank Sheet

Posted on by Rachel Nackman
Ed Ruscha, Suspended Sheet Stained with Ivy, 1973, gunpowder and ivy on paper, 14 x 22 ½ inches (35.6 x 57.2 cm). © Ed Ruscha. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery / Photo: Ellen McDermott
Ed Ruscha, Suspended Sheet Stained with Ivy, 1973, gunpowder and ivy on paper, 14 x 22 ½ inches (35.6 x 57.2 cm). © Ed Ruscha. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery / Photo: Ellen McDermott

Before an artist draws or a writer writes, s/he confronts a blank sheet of paper, which awaits the marks that transform it into a work conveying creative thought. In Art=Text=Art, several artists have created intriguing works that deliberately exploit the paper’s expanse of white, unmarked space as a meaningful element of the overall composition. Artists leave areas blank to mediate between “absence” and “presence.” Determining what to draw, or where to place a line or other mark, is as important as deciding which areas to leave pristine. Blank areas in drawings are not empty.

Consider works by Ed Ruscha, Robert Barry, John Fraser, Bronlyn Jones, or Jill O’Bryan.

How does each artist use the white of the paper? And to what purpose? What does each artist’s use of the white of the paper suggest to you? How are the white, unmarked areas of these works significant? Please share your thoughts about these drawings or about other drawings in the exhibition that use the blank space of the paper in interesting ways. In Bronlyn Jones’s Erasure List (2009), she offers for pondering: What is left out, What is unnecessary, and What is left unsaid.

To launch the Art=Text=Art discussion section, we offer the concept of tabula rasa [blank slate] and the “blank” parts of drawings as a catalyst for your ideas.

Marilyn Symmes is the Morse Research Center for Graphic Arts Director & Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. In addition to overseeing the Zimmerli’s installation of the Art=Text=Art exhibition in 2012, she organized the 2011-12 traveling exhibition Dancing with the Dark: Joan Snyder Prints 1963-2010. Other Zimmerli exhibitions she realized include: with the help of Rutgers University Art History graduate students, Pop Art and After: Prints and Popular Culture (2008); Jolán Gross-Bettelheim: An American Printmaker in an Age of Progress (2011); Aspects of Architecture: The Prints of John Taylor Arms (2012); Lynd Ward Draws Stories (2012); and Stars: Contemporary Prints by Derrière L’Étoile Studio, New York (2013). From the 1970s to 2002, Symmes held graphic arts curatorial posts at the Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts; Detroit Institute of Arts; the Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio; and the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, New York, where she organized many Old Master to contemporary graphic arts exhibitions. In addition to the monograph Dancing with the Dark: Joan Snyder Prints 1963-2010 (2011), her publications include Impressions of New York, Prints from the New-York Historical Society (2005) and Fountains: Splash and Spectacle, Water and Design from the Renaissance to the Present (1998). Symmes has also published numerous catalogues and articles on prints, drawings, and artist illustrated books. Currently serving on the advisory board of the Lower East Side Printshop, New York, and the National Endowment for the Arts International Advisory Panel, Washington, DC, Symmes has previously served on the boards of the Print Council of America and the International Confederation of Architectural Museums. She has a BA in Art History from Stanford University, Stanford, California; and an MA in Art History and Museum Practice from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Nathan Langston: Dancing About Architecture

Posted on by Rachel Nackman
Ann Ledy, Untitled, 1980, ink and Wite-Out on paper, 8 ½ x 11 inches (21.6 x 27.9 cm). © Ann Ledy / Photo: Ellen McDermott
Ann Ledy, Untitled, 1980, ink and Wite-Out on paper, 8 ½ x 11 inches (21.6 x 27.9 cm). © Ann Ledy / Photo: Ellen McDermott

Ekphrasis was an ancient Greek teaching method in which a student of rhetoric was placed before a painting, a sculpture, or a particularly fine krater and asked to describe the object so perfectly that a person who had never seen the work would feel as though they were standing in its presence. In this way, ekphrasis was basis for the first formal analysis and was also one of the earliest forms of art history.

In a certain respect, different types of ekphrasis run throughout the entirety of Art=Text=Art, as the very premise of the show concerns the relationship (or sometimes disconnect) between information communicated as text and information communicated visually. There are both differences and similarities between the ways these two forms convey information, such as the idea of “red” in Carl Andre’s typewriter work red red. Mel Bochner shows 12 inches both visually and in written numbers in 2 (12” x 12”). All of Jasper Johns’s works in this exhibition play with both text and numbers, engaging in a back and forth dialogue with the visual.

Furthermore, ekphrasis can be other forms of translation besides simply the visual/textual exchange. Fittingly, this catalogue is not just a textual/visual catalogue! Check out the musical interpretations of Jón Laxdal, Mary McDonnell and Allyson Strafella‘s work. Frank Badur interprets his own work, Untitled, with a musical piece entitled Different Lines – Different Colours. Lawrence Weiner’s works are turned into poems!

Nathan Langston is composer, writer, and dramaturg for Satellite Ballet & Collective (New York) and writes for the blog Psychopomp Kaleidoscope.