Leseprobe | Vitamin D2

V I TA M I N D 2 NEW PERSPECTIVES IN DRAWING

CONTENTS

0 07 P R E FA C E

0 0 8 ‘ D R A W I N G T O D A Y ’ B Y C H R I S T I A N R A T T E M E Y E R

016 N J I D EK A A KU N Y I L I

0 74

NIK CHRISTENSEN

132 A N N A L E A H U C H T

184 WARD ELL MIL AN

238 C AMERON ROBBINS

294 D O N A L D U RQ U H A RT

0 1 8 D I A N A A L- H A D I D

0 76

TO N Y C R UZ PA B Ó N

134 AL AIN HUCK

188 DAN MILLER

24 0 N I C O L Á S R O B B I O

298 A N D R A U R S U TA

020 D OVE ALLOUCHE

078 A DA M DA N T

138 DONNA HUDDLESTON

19 0 A L E K S A N D R A M I R

24 2 P I E T R O R O C C A S A LV A

30 0 J. PA R K E R VA L E N T I N E

0 24 U R I A R A N

082 LO U ISE D ESP O NT

14 0 C O LT E R J A C O B S E N

194

ADRIANA MOLDER

24 4 Y E H U D I T S A S P O R TA S

302 I R I S VA N D O N G EN

028 ED G A R A RC EN E AUX

0 8 4 A N J U D O D I YA

142 C A M E R O N J A M I E

196

M AT T H E W M O N A H A N

24 8 J O R G E S ATO R R E

306 M A RC EL VA N EED EN

032 S H U V I N A I A S H O O N A

088 ANTONIS DONEF

14 6 J I A A I L I

20 0 M A R C E LO M O S C H E TA

250 ELISA B E TH SCH ER FFI G

310 E R I K VA N L I E S H O U T

034 C H A R L E S AV ERY

0 92 M AT Í A S D U V I L L E

150 D O R OTA J U R C Z A K

2 0 4 C I P R I A N M U R E Ş A N

252 AU R E L S C H M I DT

312 R I N U S VA N D E V E L D E

038 FIRELEI BÁEZ

096 R I CH A R D FO RS TER

152 EL I A S K A F O U RO S

206 MANISH NAI

254 M ITH U SEN

314

040 JUDIE BAMBER

100 N E A L FOX

154 M A R I A KO NTIS

208 EKO N U G RO H O

256 SEH ER SH A H

316 J O R I N D E V O I G T

042 M A RC B AU ER

10 4 V I DYA G A S TA L D O N

156 I R EN E KO PELM A N

212 N I C O L Á S PA R I S

26 0 W I L S O N S H I EH

320 C H A R L I N E V O N H E Y L

044 ABDELKADER BENCHAMMA

106 E WA N G I B B S

158 V L A D KU LKOV

214 A M A L I A P I C A

262 PAU L S I E T S E M A

324 K E M A N G WA L E H U L E R E

048 DAN BEUDEAN

110 A L A S D A I R G R AY

16 0 F R I E D R I C H K U N AT H

216 D I O G O P I M E N TÃO

26 6 M A RT I N S K AU EN

326 C L AU D I A W I E S E R

052 A N N A B O G H I G U I A N

1 1 2 N I L B A R G Ü R E Ş

164 C A RY K WO K

218 O LIVIA PLEND ER

26 8 D EB S O KO LO W

330 HUGO WILSON

05 4 PA B LO B R O N S T E I N

114 G O N K A R G YAT S O

168 M OSHEK WA L A N GA

220 R I TA P O N C E D E L EÓ N

270 C H R I S T I A N A S O U LO U

332 G O S I A W LO DA R C Z A K

058 ELIJAH BURGHER

116 K A R L H A END EL

170

222 J. A R I A D H I T YA P R A M U H E N D R A

272 M I R C E A S U C I U

334 BA LI NT ZSA KO

0 6 0 K ATA R I N A B U R I N

120 DAV I D H A I N E S

172 J O S E L EG A S PI

224 J O R G E Q U E I R OZ

2 76

064 JOHANNA CALLE

1 2 2 K I R A LY N N H A R R I S

1 76

226 I M R A N Q U R E S H I

280 G ERT A N D U W E TO B I A S

066 BONNIE CAMPLIN

1 24 S T E V E N C . H A R V E Y

178 R I C H A R D L E W ER

23 0 J E N R AY

28 4 SUZ A N N E T R EI S T ER

0 6 8 PAU L C H A N

126 A DA M H EL M S

180 M AT EO LÓ P E Z

234 AL AN REID

28 8 TAT I A N A T R O U V É

337 A RT I S T B I O G R A P H I E S

070 N I K H I L C H O PR A

130 CHRISTINE HIEBERT

182 B R I T TA LU M E R

236 MARY REID KELLE Y

292 IGNACIO URIARTE

351 I N D E X

EL AD L ASSRY

ELLEN LESPERANCE

ADRIÁN VILLAR ROJAS

SUN XUN

010-011

history after a triumphant generation of post-war abstraction and conceptualism. In 1983, the formerly Minimalist painter Jo Baer commented on this shift in her infamous essay ‘I Am No Longer an Abstract Artist’, which earned her censure and almost ended her career.4 Baer lamented the fallacy of rejecting illusion and meaning, and although levelled against the Minimalist painters and sculptors of her day, her remarks could easily be extended to drawing practice: A nonillusionistic art, where not impossible, is a nearly meaningless art. Rejecting metaphor, symbolism, and ‘hierarchical’ relations leaves only an organizing principle plus combinative rules to work from. To put sixty-four bricks in a line on the floor or arrange four light tubes into a square is to attack significance and the world it inhabits.5 But in her decision to dissociate herself from her former Minimalist colleagues, Baer equally seeks to distance herself from the figurative models that emerge at the beginning of the 1980s, ‘the Schnabels, Clementes, Baselitzs, et al., transacting the swing of history’s pendulum – over-scaled, indulgent, loose, fast, gaudy and shallow, they are also traditionally baroque.’6 Instead, she proposes a complicated new concept of ‘radical figuration’ that is simultaneously unencumbered by the non-meaning of Minimalism and the reflexive reversal of its illustrative counterpart. Radical figuration, she posits, ‘requires a subject that is akin to myth but not the mythological … Where the subject is a retelling or illustration of a mythology, the unit of meaning is closed and therefore inconsistent to discourse. To enhance discourse is to paint and draw in fragment, which is an open adventure.’7 Baer’s at times caustic manifesto amounts to attempting to rescue the discursive aspects of previous artistic practices – its roots in intellectual debate and doubt – from the selfimposed material and conceptual reflexivity that closed art off from contingency and myth, surprise Around the same time, another and urgency. return to figuration and narration took the form of artists rediscovering the traditions cast aside by the official and dominant histories, or excised from the list of avant-garde methods, incorporating academic traditions that extended as far back as the early nineteenth century as well as popular vernaculars that ranged from commercial illustrations to underground comics. The last generation of artistic practice has, since the 1980s, seen a return to live figure drawing, a staple of several hundred years of academic training; to the formal preparatory sketches and studies that were standard practice roughly until Impressionism; to caricature and comic-book illustration; to the detailed illustrative tradition of botanical, anatomical, and zoological prints and drawings that go back to the nineteenth century; to fashion illustration, and any number of other figurative, commercial and academic drawing traditions. William Blake and

Robert Crumb, Ludwig Richter and Gary Panter, caricature from Hogarth to the New Yorker cartoons of the 1950s seem to serve as progenitors for drawing practices as diverse as those of Mike Kelley and Raymond Pettibon, Martin Kippenberger and Kai Althoff, John Currin and Elizabeth Peyton in the 1980s and into the 1990s and beyond. During the 1960s, only Pop Art was able to connect to some of these popular forms of drawing, but besides an exaggerated focus on the early drawings of Warhol, a full evaluation of the range and importance of drawing in Pop Art practice has yet to be undertaken.

Another exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York aimed to take stock of recent developments in drawing. By titling her 2002 exhibition ‘Drawing Now: Eight Propositions’, Laura Hoptman made a conscious reference to Rose’s achievement and its lineage, and clearly positioned the exhibition among the surveys that aimed to assess the status quo of contemporary practices.

Just as Rose had responded to a major change in the role of drawing as a material and intellectual practice between the 1950s and 1970s, so Hoptman aimed to give coherence to her observation of changes in the contemporary art world in the 1990s, changes that gave drawing a newly prominent role after what might be perceived as a decline in importance over the preceding fifteen years.

But as much as it is a homage to, and continuation of, Rose’s undertaking, Hoptman’s show is also an antidote, drawing very different conclusions and responding to very different creative impulses from Hoptman’s the artists whom she introduces. exhibition features a generation of artists, among them painters such as John Currin and Elizabeth Peyton, Julie Mehretu and Neo Rauch, Kara Walker and Shazia Sikander, Laura Owens and Jockum Nordstrom, who embrace figuration, narrative and a return to drawing as an ‘ideational’ practice. In the introduction to the catalogue for her exhibition, Hoptman describes these representational (and largely planned and sketched-out) drawings as ‘projective’ (borrowing a term from Yves-Alain Bois) – that is, ‘they depict something that has been imagined before it is drawn, as opposed to being found through the process of making.’8 The similarities to what Rose had described as ‘ideational’ are striking, but Hoptman reverses Rose’s focus on the processual and material conditions of drawing. Instead she places the artistic approaches in her exhibition in a lineage of drawing practices that had largely fallen out of favour, as she claims: Since arguably the mid-nineteenth century …

The kind of autonomous drawing that is attached less to process than to finished product, that describes a specific object or state of mind, that maps a specific experience, that tells a particular story.’9 These practices were tied to academic traditions, to the popular and narrative projects of the graphic novel and book illustration, as well as to ‘the techniques and formal vocabularies of varieties

Elizabeth Peyton, Chloe (Gold), 2001. Coloured pencil on paper, 22 × 15 cm

of precision drawing elsewhere considered industrial or commercial. Such close relationships to popular cultural forms, architectural plans, scientific drawing, ornamental embellishment, and vernacular fashion illustration further distance these drawings from process-oriented work, which exists entirely in the realm of “art”.’10 Featuring twenty-six artists,11 the exhibition was structured around the titular eight propositions – thematic groupings that provide a basic narrative order along such broad genres as ‘science’, ‘nature’, ‘architecture’, ‘ornamentation and decoration’, ‘fashion’ and ‘popular culture’, but also more rhetorical terms such as ‘allegory’ and What Hoptman observed ‘interior imagination’. and responded to with her exhibition was a shift not only in contemporary drawing practice but also, by extension, in the art world at large: a focus on finished works, a return to figuration, an embrace of idiosyncrasies and personal narrative, and a rediscovery of a much broader range of sources for both style and content – increasingly from non-Western sources and traditions – all marked the second half of the 1990s. And although Hoptman has claimed that ‘Drawing Now’ was conceived in response to her observations in New York in the 1990s,12 the art world had become significantly more international, even global, in the two and a half decades since Rose’s exhibition.

By the beginning of the 2000s, drawing had become an immensely productive and varied, complex and confusing, prolific and exciting field of artistic practice. Fifty years of experimentation had bequeathed to the discipline the tools and

vocabulary for endless manipulation and reinvention of its basic methods, and instilled a sense of self-reflexivity into the medium with which it emerged into the new millennium. And the counter currents of two decades of intense reversals and an embrace of previously forgotten or ignored histories in turn provided a vast new (or rediscovered) range of subject matter, narratives, and a renewed interest in realism and surrealism, in dreams and descriptions. Two prominent attempts to document this resurgence of drawing in the first decade of the new millennium established a comprehensive and immensely insightful record of the range and depth of works on paper at that time. The first is the initial volume of this series focusing on emerging artists working in drawing today, Phaidon’s publication Vitamin D: New Perspectives in Drawing (2005). The second was intended as a physical record, and constitutes one of the most ambitious attempts to establish a panorama of contemporary drawing at that time: the Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection of roughly 2,500 works amassed between 2003 and 2005 and donated to the Both share Museum of Modern Art in 2007. overlaps in selection and emphasis, and illustrate how much the discipline has taken from the experiments – formal and material, narrative and historical – of the past fifty years. But they also document the degree to which the world of drawing had grown more diverse and international in

the span of a decade. Artists from Japan and Latin America share billing with those from North America and Western and Eastern Europe, although most of the artists with more exotic origins are still largely based in Western centres. Artists such as Julie Mehretu, Huang Yong Ping, Toba Khedoori, Vik Muniz, Yoshitomo Nara, Shazia Sikander, and Fernando Bryce all live and work in first-world cities: Paris and Berlin, New York and Los Angeles.

The Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection even structured much of its collection rationale around the understanding that four centres – Berlin and London in Europe, Los Angeles and New York in North America – would offer a representative sample of the most important trends in drawing today (or rather, then).

It is not only this limited (if at least attempted and acknowledged) internationalism of just a few years ago that strikes us today as outdated: another, more material-related change has also become apparent with hindsight. In the first few years of the 2000s, collage and assemblage techniques assumed a major role in the production of artists across all disciplines. Appropriation and citation, collage and montage, introduce material experiments and thematic concerns that can range from re-assigning value and meaning to commonplace found objects by transferring them into a new art context (a process that has been resolutely part of the avant-garde vocabulary since Marcel Duchamp’s readymades of the 1910s) to more

Julie Mehretu, Untitled, 2000. Ink, coloured pencil and cut paper on mylar, 45.5 × 61 cm

Njideka Akunyili, Umezebi Street, New Haven, Enugu, 2012.

Acrylic, charcoal, pastel, coloured pencil and Xerox transfers on paper, 213 × 267 cm

selective imports of found material. And although sculpture and installation as well as the digital realm are obvious and popular arenas for these new methods, a surprising number of artists make works on paper. These works represent not so much a reversal or rejection of the previous approaches and concerns of drawing, as a new application of previous techniques and subjects. They are not anti-representational or against narrative, but neither are they against the material and processoriented approaches of the 1960s and 1970s. They cull from popular sources and widely distributed materials such as fashion magazines and press images, but also reference avant-garde practices Collage like those of Duchamp and El Lissitzky. and mixed-media works radically expand the notion of drawing from a medium of mark-making (as in the material experiments or process drawings) or a medium of ideation capable of expressing fantastical worlds (as in polished and highly worked-through drawings as finished works) or a medium subordinate to another more finished product (as in the sketch and study) to a more inclusive concept of a ‘work on paper’.13 Assemblage in this expanded form exists as a parallel practice to other forms of production, often serving as an experimental arena for communicating with an outside world that is increasingly received and processed through the highly mediated images of mass media and modern telecommunications. Technological reproduction and free circulation have become basic conditions of contemporary images, and for many artists, to engage with the flows of information and the streams of images in the surrounding world means to enter into a dialogue with them. Clipping images from magazines, downloading images from the internet, or simply using the archive of one’s own digital images, is no longer an act that denotes a critical relationship to the means of technological reproduction and the autonomy of images, but simply points to the realities in which images are produced and consumed today.

The French critic and curator Nicolas Bourriaud

Uri Aran’s allusive, fragmentary drawings resemble the doodles of a desk clerk approaching mental collapse: each image centres on an insistent, spiky or looped linear sketch and a scattering of appropriated images whose significance initially seems cryptic. But his art is in fact a very deliberate analysis of what he calls ‘bureaucratic formalism’. His videos, installations and drawings often explore the entwined routines of leisure and work in contemporary life. There is something here of what cultural theorist Herbert Marcuse discovered in the proximal suppression of creativity in work-a-day life and the quashing of sexual desire in supposedly civilized cultures. A more recent predecessor is Aran’s former tutor at Columbia University, Liam Gillick, himself an artist known for excavating the In the drawing subjectivities of a corporatized life.

Untitled (A) (2010) four identical blue and yellow striped beach balls share their pictorial space with a fluid, linear drawing of a shark. The image has been assembled on a computer, but it is anything but slick. Rather than fully exploiting the powerful photographic software of which most computers are now capable, Aran’s drawing relies on more immediate tools (he draws the lines by hand, using a mouse). The result is deliberately less precise than a drawing executed in more conventional media such as pen or pencil, but it perfectly captures the idea of the office-worker’s mind in the process of digression from the daily grind. It is also significant that the image here is one of a vacation in crisis, for while the beach balls offer the advertiser’s promise of escape, the sharks appear Aran as manifestations of the subject’s darker fears. has no specific medium. Instead, he employs an almost random choice of media, including computer drawings, inkjet prints, spray paint, marker pen, graphite and oil pastel. It is as if these were the materials most easily retrievable from the office store cupboard – the clerk’s resources. In an untitled drawing from 2012 we see a clipping from a stationery catalogue – an advert for packaging materials described as the ‘One Bedroom Package’.

The image certainly fits into Aran’s aesthetic, but it also captures another arena of squeezed and psychologically fragile contemporary existence. This advert might be read as suggesting the contemporary instability of the housing market in much of the US, since the products are clearly intended for packaging one’s life away (perhaps in haste).

Similarly, in another untitled drawing the words ‘thanks to you we shall have a home’ appear floating above an image of birds appropriated from an ornithology volume.

Aran often uses the motif of animals in his videos, installations and drawings (sharks, birds, the word ‘dog’ floating in a tenebrous grey haze). They are at times metaphors for human fears and desires and at times merely animals – suggesting that our dreams are, after all, only human.

Tactically informal though rigorously conceived, these images are a curiously poignant exploration of the semantics and Colin Perry affects of contemporary life.

1. Untitled (Jacques, Drawing F), 2011. Pen and inkjet on newsprint, 28 × 21.5 cm 2. Untitled, 2012. Marker and inkjet print on construction paper, 42 × 56 cm 3. Untitled, 2012. Computer drawing, pencil, pen, acrylic and plastic on paper, 29.5 × 20.5 cm

URI ARAN 3.

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024- 025

EDGAR ARCENEAUX

5.

5. Blind Pig #3, 2010. Acrylic and graphite on paper, 183 × 427 cm

026- 027

Elias Kafouros spins kaleidoscope images of hammering intensity that explore the spectacle of a fragmented, postmodern condition. Planes of dense and demented reality are allied with areas of diced perspective, both of which amplify his geometric mash-up of the psychical disjointedness of contemporary human experience. These drawings are deliberately overtaxed cinematic gestures, intending to herald a world addicted to hollow and media-thrown images. Yet Kafouros’s depictions paradoxically avoid being just that; the viewer intuitively recognizes that these are not images of depthless surface but ones that have a meaningful and intellectual substance.

Despite his hyper-graphic and palpitating drawings, Kafouros is clearly a contemplative artist. Having completed a degree in painting at the Athens School of Fine Art, between 1998 and 2004 he travelled to Poona, India, to undertake a degree in Painting and Meditation Techniques at Osho Multiversity, studying the variegated religious and mystic traditions associated with meditation and incorporating these into his daily life. Subsequently, he lived in an ecological commune based in a Costa Rican rainforest and explored the pedagogical efficacy of the natural world upon the human mind. In Costa Rica, Kafouros continued to practice the meditation that he had learned in India, while also being initiated into the traditional discipline of plant medicines. In 2006, he was conscripted into the Greek army for a year, at which time he pulled his intellectual and artistic experiences together to harness his current style.

How Did I Get Here? (2011) is a particularly moving example of Kafouros’s idiosyncratic graphic format and conceptual project. In the central vortex of the composition a woman kayaks toward a paradisiacal ocean. This central scene at first seems like a blissful narrative of choice and departure; however, it is wreathed by a sinister gateway constructed of disorientating twists of rope, piping and other constraining industrial materials. The artist further layers hallucinatory mechanical devices, references to 18–30 package holidays, and curious organic matter: dangling skulls, semi-deconstructed ostrich heads and bizarre hanging pineapples. Behind the condemned kayaker, an imperious rope ensnares a done-for teddy bear and angels dance above her head – not guardians who frolic in a heavenly manner, but self-interested ravers crowned with fake halos and synthetic wings. The insertion of words into the drawing, which is common in Kafouros’s work, ratifies his message: the rhetorical question ‘How Did I Get Here?’ arcs above the woman’s head, suggesting not a conscious and positive decision to explore and change but rather confusion and desperation regarding her mental whereabouts. To either side of the protagonist, the word ‘Horizon’ protrudes – baseless simulacra ultimately suggesting that this woman is not moving towards a catalytic horizon.

A wrought-iron fence in fact surrounds her, signalling capitulation. This is not an image of romantic departure, but a visual memorandum of the insatiable contemporary longing for escape from a contorted and iconoclastic society. Kafouros’s protagonist, symbolic of humanity’s own potential fate, is paralysed within the picture depths and will only ever gaze towards a mirage of harmonious existence, rather than ontologically inhabit it.

Freya Smaill

ELIAS KAFOUROS

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1. It’s Not a Game Anymore!, 2011. Technical pen and ink on archival paper, 122 × 152 cm 2. Hierarchy of the Stolen Image, 2011. Technical pen and ink on archival paper, 120 × 120 cm 3. How Did I Get Here?, 2011. Technical pen and ink on archival paper, 120 × 120 cm

152- 153

Amalia Pica explores language, communication and different forms – and inefficiencies – of information exchange.

Her drawing practice, or what she calls ‘an expanded definition of drawing’, acts as an organic extension of her larger conceptual and sculptural practice, in which she works with a wide scope of media, including sculpture, photography, film, installation, watercolour and performance.

After graduating from the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes P. Pueyrredon in Buenos Aires, where she received a classical art training with particular emphasis on traditional drawing, Pica made work that was bent towards the immaterial – primarily conceptual works that investigated how history has been taught in Argentina since the 1970s.

However in 2004, when she attended the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, her work not only returned to material form, but her focus shifted from her home country to thinking about a common language across cultures, exploring how particular aspects of visual and body-oriented languages – from colour to physical gestures – serve as a universal code Deeply influenced through which to communicate.

by Latin-American Conceptualists of the 1960s and 1970s, Pica describes her practice as ‘a free approach to drawing’, often allowing herself to be led by an idea or found material and then emphasizing the form in equal measure to the idea. For example, in her Venn Diagram drawings she is interested in a particular moment in Argentine history during the 1970s when Venn diagrams were banned from primary-school curricula because they were considered to promote subversive thought as they encourage thinking about groups. But the delicate and balanced nature of the vibrantly coloured ‘blobs’ (as she calls them), which overlap one another in a very precise and controlled manner, are by and large abstract forms until they are contextualized by the corresponding captions explaining their significance Pica’s exploration of the fuzzy boundaries to the viewer. between fact, myth and memory, both universally and as she experienced them in her own schooling, is reflected in the materials she chooses for some of her drawings, such as pencil, string and even pages from childhood notebooks. ‘I want the drawings to have this “school” feel to them,’ she says, ‘using materials that were readily available in my childhood.’ Her works often push the very definition of drawing, comprising found images and objects such as a comb that ‘draws’ rays of string on the wall. Entitled Catachresis #8 (2011), the work refers to a literary term that defines the metaphorical application of a word or expression to name something, such as the ‘teeth’ of a comb or the ‘eye’ of a needle. In another work from 2011, Some of that Colour #4, she bleeds the vibrant colours of found bunting onto paper, hanging the resulting drawing on a wall with the flags festooned in front.

In recent years, she has gone from making a single piece at one time to working on several autonomous pieces simultaneously that are then brought together in converThough Pica’s works are realized through sation. a thoughtful choice of materials and a wide range of techniques, they nevertheless have a quiet aesthetic and casual appearance. This delicate touch, coupled with her investigation of socio-political themes, can be placed within the wider context of conceptual approaches to drawing that are currently so prevalent.

Marina Cashdan

AMALIA PICA

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1. Venn Diagram #6, 2009. Liquid watercolour on paper, 45.5 × 61 cm 2. Venn Diagram #7, 2009. Liquid watercolour on paper, 45.5 × 61 cm 3. Venn Diagram #8, 2009. Liquid watercolour on paper, 45.5 × 61 cm 3.

4. Some of that Colour #4, 2011. Paper flags, drained paper flag dye on watercolour paper, chair. Paper size: 120.5 × 241.5 cm, overall: 198 × 394 × 154 cm

154-155

Jorge Satorre’s ventures in the world of visual creation began as a text illustrator. He departs from this experience to analyze and redefine the relationships inherent to the publishing field. Through this procedure his role as an illustrator has been gradually blurred over the years, as he becomes a blend of author, reader, researcher and editor.

From this multifaceted position, Satorre picks up some conceptual art practices and uses drawing as a graphic document in order to articulate sociological, historical and geological research, among other fields of knowledge.

In spite of the apparent systematic and objective quality that usually distinguishes his drawings, they unfold as narratives based on actual situations that are nevertheless imaginary. As his practice interweaves site-specific interventions with illustration, and scientific methodologies with the literary, the relationship between image and text becomes ambiguous, since the interpretative context of the drawings as documents is credible but also speculative.

In this sense, his scientific-minded work is charged with artistic and symbolic intention, a deliberate ‘manipulation’ This play between to intervene in and affect the real. scientific illustration, research and narrative is the common denominator in Satorre’s graphic research work.

Such is the case with The Erratic. Measuring Compensation (2009-10), created as part of the curatorial project ‘Portscapes’, in the context of the widening of Maasvlakte, the port of Rotterdam, started in 2008. Five million tons of rock were bought and moved from Scandinavia for this ambitious construction, to be used on the dikes or retaining walls. Coincidentally, almost the totality of the few stones, known as ‘erratic’, that can be found in Dutch terrain came from that region thousands of years ago by way of glacial displacement. Around the same time that the construction of the Maasvlakte began, Satorre organized the search for an ‘erratic’ boulder as a symbolic gesture and critical questioning of the efficacy and meaning of the ecological compensation projects that were being implemented in parallel. Once the boulder of about three and a half tons was found in a farm in the north of the country, the artist identified, with a geologist’s assistance, the stone’s exact original location and moved it to that spot: a forest in the south of Sweden, on 8 January 2010. Prior to this action Satorre made three speculative drawings that caricatured the transfer process and its symbolic impact on the communities linked to the port. The drawings are therefore imaginary illustrations of the possible collective reaction to the gesture of symbolic compensation. These procedures summarize a site-specific practice in which the illustrator becomes a sui generis editor. Satorre shifts scientific drawing to new fields in such a way that the latter become the main source of access to knowledge in the Willy Kautz transverse research he’s engaged in.

JORGE S ATORRE

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1. The Erratic. Measuring Compensation, 2009-10. Pencil on paper, 29.5 × 21 cm 2. The Erratic. Measuring Compensation, 2009-10. Pencil on paper, 29.5 × 42 cm 3. The Erratic. Measuring Compensation, 2009-10. Pencil on paper, 21 × 29.5 cm

157-157

BALINT ZSAKO

The American novelist William Faulkner once said that he wanted to get the whole world into one sentence. The Brooklyn-based, Canadian artist Balint Zsako has a similar ambition for his medium. ‘I want to put everything about contemporary art into a small watercolour,’ he says. With the exception of the occasional work such as Appetite (2012), an ambitious 1.7 × 2.3 metre drawing, virtually all his watercolours are made on modest-sized paper. Although there is a kind of alchemy in his work, his method is one of connecting rather than transforming. ‘I look at a lot of photographs and paintings … to get ideas about how to connect things. A lot of it is structural,’ he says.

The connections are ingenious in detail and often fragile in construction. There is a provisional, jerry-rigged look to his built world and the associations he makes.

Like a house of cards, everything could come tumbling down, or disappear. In one drawing, Untitled (Yellow) (2011) (all his works are untitled, followed by a descriptive title in parentheses), a comely, vengeful nude with preposterously long black hair, causes another body to The drawings always feature a naked turn into mist. figure, but Zsako does flirt with abstraction. In Rorschach (2011), the central figure is flanked by a doubled painting that could be by Joan Mitchell; in Geometric Abstraction in Thread (2011), a finely woven abstraction unravels when it falls into the figurative world. Zsako is fascinated by the contrast between order and disorder and how little it takes to go from one to the other. Among the unravelling figures is a possessed-looking male who balances a woman on his back; he may come from the dark side (he is taken from one of Goya’s witch etchings), but he is a welcome visitor. ‘People in my works are complicated and there is no clear battle between good and evil,’ says Zsako; ‘it’s more like the real world, where people do all manner of things to one another. So my narratives don’t make In Shit & Gold judgments – I want them open-ended.’

(2011) a man and a woman sit with interlinked arms on a mountain of excrement, to which the woman is a contributor. Her mouth is ringed with blood and, inexplicably, she holds in her hand a severed arm. She and her partner lean against a skull figure whose body is composed of twigs and flowers. All three are held in precarious balance.

At the foot of the mountain is a man gilding excrement with gold leaf. He leaves a trail of bright urine echoing the brilliance of the sun above. Shit & Gold is one of those ‘want everything in’ watercolours. It contains something from all of Zsako’s major informing structures; art history, sexuality, nature, scatology and eschatology. As a result, our reading is confounded and we are pulled every which way. It is a confusion he intends because it truthfully represents his take on the human condition. His binaries are only a framing device. What happens inside the frame is what interests him and what he wants his art to embody. ‘I am constantly going in one direction and then circling back,’ he says, ‘so there are all those Robert Enright contradictions.’

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1. Untitled (Shit & Gold), 2011. Watercolour, gold leaf and ink on paper, 51 × 35.5 cm 2. Untitled (Rorschach), 2011. Watercolour and ink on paper, 35.5 × 51 cm 3. Untitled (The Cell), 2011. Watercolour and ink on paper, 40 × 30.5 cm 4. Untitled (Yellow), 2011. Watercolour and ink on paper, 40 × 30.5 cm 2.

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5. Untitled (Folk Dance), 2011. Watercolour and ink on paper, 51 × 35.5 cm

Marcel van Eeden’s life is drawing to the extent that he is obsessed with drawing his life. More precisely, he’s drawing his life through people, objects and events that existed before November 22, 1965, the day he was born. The only unchanging rule in this project, which began in 1993, is that whatever he draws has to have its point of origin prior to his birth date. Initially, van Eeden set himself the task of doing a drawing a day (while he doesn’t know the exact number, he estimates that he produced approximately 8000 drawings, over 2500 of which appeared on his weblog) but by 2008 the daily rhythm was no longer practical. His practice had also changed and he was doing larger, more complicated drawings (which could take months to finish), and he was gravitating towards installations which exploited the narrative dimensions of Van Eeden’s first artistic aspirathe ongoing project. tion was to be a poet and writer and he has realized that ambition in another form. In a recent drawing, Oswald Sollmann appears, a character who combines Lee Harvey Oswald and a little-known German pharmacologist, named Oswald Sollmann. Below a close-up of a roulette table is the phrase, ‘The Art of the Story-Teller’. It is a case where the invented character reflects the inventive artist.

Van Eeden has assigned an improbably rich life to Sollmann and he can add whatever biographical details he wants. He decided to fill a two year-long gap in Sollmann’s Van Eeden’s sense life by making him a photographer. of story is rhizomatic; its tendrils can start anywhere and the narrative has no centre. He interweaves the equally fictitious biographies of his other characters, including K.M Wiegand, an American botanist who becomes a boxer, an heroic Admiral in the U.S. Navy and who even marries Elizabeth Taylor; and Celia Coplestone, a former nurse who is crucified by pestilence-ridden villagers in Kinkanja who van Eeden borrows from T. S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party.

Eliot joins Robert Walser, W.G. Sebald and pulp fiction writers – the high and the low – in having their stories cannibalized. Van Eeden’s appropriations are unapologetically limitless. ‘I can do anything’, he says. ‘I can use text that doesn’t really match because people are willing to tolerate a lot of discontinuity. It’s just like in a dream, you accept not being able to understand the narrative.’

Van Eeden operates like a collagist, not in a material way, but as a way of cobbling together disparate images. The newest works are dense amalgamations of still life, advertising logos, landscape fragments, cartoon figures, numbers, silhouettes from the animations of Lotte Reiniger, and colourful meat cutlets and mustard covered hotdogs.

They are meta-drawings and the potential for the process to be endlessly self-generating is apparent. ‘I’m aware that what I want to do, draw everything that exists prior to my day of birth, is absurd and impossible, but now it’s difficult for me to make an empty drawing.

I like to fill them up; it works against my horror vacui.’

Robert Enright

JOHANNA CALLE

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V I TA M I N D 2 I S A N I N T E R N AT I O N A L , U P - TO - T H E - M I N U T E SU RV E Y O F C O N T E M P O R A RY D R AW I N G. T H E SEQ U E L T O P H A I D O N ’ S ‘ V I T A M I N D ’, I T F E A T U R E S 1 1 5 A R T I S T S N O M I N AT E D B Y H I G H LY R E S P E C T E D C R I T I C S A N D C U R ATO R S F R O M A R O U N D T H E W O R L D. N OW M O R E T H A N E V E R, T H E D R AW N L I N E IS A C RU C I A L ELEMENT IN ARTISTIC PR ACTICE, AND THE ARTISTS F E AT U R E D I N T H I S V O L U M E A R E A L L E N G A G I N G W I T H AND PUSHING THE BOUNDARIES OF THE MEDIUM. THEIR WORK IS SHOWCASED HERE IN OVER 500 IMAGES A N D E X A M I N E D I N I N C I S I V E T E X T S BY I N T E R N AT I O N A L C R I T I C S , A RT H I STO R I A N S , C U R ATO R S A N D W R I T E R S .

A N I N S I G H T F U L I N T R O D U C T O RY E S S AY BY C H R I S T I A N R AT T E M E Y E R , A S S O C I AT E C U R ATO R O F D R AW I N G S AT T H E M U S E U M O F M O D E R N A RT, N E W Y O R K , P R O V I D E S A BROAD OVERVIEW OF RECENT DEVELOPMENTS I N D R AW I N G.

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1. Índice (Index), 2011, Aluminum and copper on cardboard, 73 x 81 cm 2. Submergente (Submergent) , 2011, China ink, letraset and lacquered wire mesh on cardboard, 41 x 51 cm 3. Perímetros (Perimeters) , 2012, Typed text on ledger (old notarial) paper, 166 x 208 cm

SUZANNE TREISTER

Marcel van Eeden’s life is drawing to the extent that he is obsessed with drawing his life. More precisely, he’s drawing his life through people, objects and events that existed before November 22, 1965, the day he was born. The only unchanging rule in this project, which began in 1993, is that whatever he draws has to have its point of origin prior to his birth date. Initially, van Eeden set himself the task of doing a drawing a day (while he doesn’t know the exact number, he estimates that he produced approximately 8000 drawings, over 2500 of which appeared on his weblog) but by 2008 the daily rhythm was no longer practical. His practice had also changed and he was doing larger, more complicated drawings (which could take months to finish), and he was gravitating towards installations which exploited the narrative dimensions of Van Eeden’s first artistic aspirathe ongoing project. tion was to be a poet and writer and he has realized that ambition in another form. In a recent drawing, Oswald Sollmann appears, a character who combines Lee Harvey Oswald and a little-known German pharmacologist, named Oswald Sollmann. Below a close-up of a roulette table is the phrase, ‘The Art of the Story-Teller’. It is a case where the invented character reflects the inventive artist.

Van Eeden has assigned an improbably rich life to Sollmann and he can add whatever biographical details he wants. He decided to fill a two year-long gap in Sollmann’s Van Eeden’s sense life by making him a photographer. of story is rhizomatic; its tendrils can start anywhere and the narrative has no centre. He interweaves the equally fictitious biographies of his other characters, including K.M Wiegand, an American botanist who becomes a boxer, an heroic Admiral in the U.S. Navy and who even marries Elizabeth Taylor; and Celia Coplestone, a former nurse who is crucified by pestilence-ridden villagers in Kinkanja who van Eeden borrows from T. S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party.

Eliot joins Robert Walser, W.G. Sebald and pulp fiction writers – the high and the low – in having their stories cannibalized. Van Eeden’s appropriations are unapologetically limitless. ‘I can do anything’, he says. ‘I can use text that doesn’t really match because people are willing to tolerate a lot of discontinuity. It’s just like in a dream, you accept not being able to understand the narrative.’

Van Eeden operates like a collagist, not in a material way, but as a way of cobbling together disparate images. The newest works are dense amalgamations of still life, advertising logos, landscape fragments, cartoon figures, numbers, silhouettes from the animations of Lotte Reiniger, and colourful meat cutlets and mustard covered hotdogs.

They are meta-drawings and the potential for the process to be endlessly self-generating is apparent. ‘I’m aware that what I want to do, draw everything that exists prior to my day of birth, is absurd and impossible, but now it’s difficult for me to make an empty drawing. I like to fill them up; it Robert Enright works against my horror vacui.’

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B I N D I N G : PA P E R B A C K F O R M A T : 2 9 0 × 2 5 0 M M / 1 1 1 / 2 × 9 1 / 2 I N EXTENT: 352 PP NUMBER OF IMAGES: 115 COLOUR & 10 B&W WORD COUNT: C.60,000 WORDS I S B N : 978 0 7 1 4 8 76 4 4 3 PHAIDON PRESS LIMITED REGENT’S WHARF ALL SAINTS STREET L O N D O N N 1 9 PA PHAIDON PRESS INC. 6 5 B L E E C K E R S T R E E T, 8 T H F L NEW YORK, NY 10012 © 2017 PHAIDON PRESS LIMITED PHAIDON.COM

B OTH A REFERENCE B O OK FOR THE ART WORLD AND AN ACCESSIBLE INTRODUCTION FOR NEWCOMERS TO T H E S C E N E , ‘ V I TA M I N D 2 ’ P R O V I D E S A N I N D I S P E N S A B L E GUIDE TO THE MEDIUM AND ITS FUTURE.

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1.–3. HEXEN 2.0/Tarot/0 The Fool – Aldous Huxley, 2009–11, Archival giclée print (from original Rotring ink drawing) with watercolour on Hahnemuhle Bamboo paper, 21 x 29.7 cm

MIRCEA SUCIU

5. It all ends with a laugh, 2012, Charcoal on paper, 101 x 150 cm

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