Drawing Time, Reading Time at The Drawing Center

Drawing Time, Reading Time  (15 November, 2013–12 January, 2014) has been organized simultaneously with Marking Language at Drawing Room, (10 October–14 December, 2013) 

This exhibition brings together an international group of artists spanning the 1960s to today, all of whom are engaged in exploring the relationship between drawing and writing as distinct yet interrelated gestures. Artists include Carl Andre, Pavel Büchler, Guy de Cointet, Mirtha Dermisache, Sean Landers, Allen Ruppersberg, Nina Papaconstantinou, Deb Sokolow, and Molly Springfield.

Now commonplace, visual art’s preoccupation with language had its roots in an unexpected linguistic turn circa 1960, when artists sought to recover a direct, sensory experience of the world. Paradoxically, language became a favored tool in this effort, as artists such as Mel Bochner, Hanne Darboven, and Lawrence Weiner submitted the written word to verbal and visual manipulation in order to evacuate conventional meaning and uncover the materiality of language.

Drawing Time, Reading Time considers a different path, one that emerged simultaneously with Conceptual Art but that embraced language as a means of questioning the written word’s communicative transparency on the one hand and visual art’s material opacity on the other. The nine artists in Drawing Time, Reading Time do not challenge writing and drawing’s integrity as distinct disciplines, each with its own parameters. Instead, they investigate ways in which each discipline has a dual character and how, when considered together, they reflect upon and complicate each other.

A joint publication is available here.