Ways of Seeing: Writings on Drawings from the Jack Shear Collection by The Drawing Center

146

Jennifer Krasinski Nick Mauss Ben Marcus Charlie Porter

George Saunders Clare Sestanovich Brenda Shaughnessy Tracy K. Smith

Craig Morgan Teicher — Introduction by Hilton Als

Volume 1

Ways of Seeing Writings on Drawings from the Jack Shear Collection

Ways of Seeing: Writings on Drawings from the Jack Shear Collection Jennifer Krasinski Nick Mauss Ben Marcus Charlie Porter George Saunders Clare Sestanovich Brenda Shaughnessy Tracy K. Smith Craig Morgan Teicher Introduction by Hilton Als

Drawing Papers 146

Volume 1

The Drawing Center

Ways of Seeing: Writings on Drawings from the Jack Shear Collection

Commissioning Editors

Hilton Als and Claire Gilman

Contents

Foreword Claire Gilman 15

Introduction Hilton Als 21

Jennifer Krasinski on Odilon Redon, George Grosz, and Gladys Nilsson 30

Ben Marcus on Gordon Matta-Clark, Christian Schad, and Jorinde Voigt 36

Nick Mauss on Jean Cocteau, Andy Warhol, and Ray Johnson 45

Charlie Porter on Edward Burne-Jones, Paul Thek, and Agnes Martin

George Saunders on Agnes Martin, Julie Mehretu, and Henry Darger 61

Clare Sestanovich on Joaquín Torres-García, Rashid Johnson, and Edward Ruscha 71

Brenda Shaughnessy on Berlinde De Bruyckere, Ursula von Rydingsvard, and Torkwase Dyson 82

Tracy K. Smith on Chris Ofili 87

Craig Morgan Teicher on Willem de Kooning, Antony Gormley, and Bruce Nauman

Clockwise from top left Vija Celmins, Galaxy (Hydra), 1974; Jan Toorop, Meditatie (Meditation), 1921; Adolph Friedrich Erdmannvon Menzel, Studie einer sitzenden Dame mit Hut, Schirm und Geldbörse (Study of a Seated Woman with a Hat, Umbrella and Coin Purse), 1880; Stanley Whitney, Untitled, 2020; Lee Bontecou, Untitled, 1968; Elaine de Kooning, Portrait of Bill, 1950; Alice Neel, Requiem, 1928.

Foreword Claire Gilman

In Ways of Seeing, John Berger’s timeless reflection on the power of images, the British art critic, painter, and author succinctly explains the complex relationship between seeing and understanding: “The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.”1 According to Berger, this is in part because looking is an active choice that is dependent on the changing world around us. “We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves. Our vision is continually active, continually moving, continually holding things in a circle around itself, constituting what is present to us as we are.”2 As a result, images themselves change, their “story” fluctuating according to the circumstances surrounding their reception. “The meaning of an image is changed according to what one sees immediately beside it or what comes immediately after it. Such authority as it retains, is distributed over the whole context in which it appears.”3 Taking this one step further in Bento’s Sketchbook, an exquisite rumination on drawing interspersed with aphorisms by “Bento” Spinoza, Berger quotes the philosopher: “The more an image is joined with many other things, the more often it flourishes.”4 This is particularly true, it would seem, when the images in question are drawings, drawing being an art form that, according to Berger, is fundamentally open and extensive rather than closed and contained. It is “a manner of searching”; “a form of probing”; and, generally, impelled by an

John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: British Broadcasting Company and Penguin Books, 1972), 1. 2 Berger, Ways of Seeing, 3. 3 Berger, Ways of Seeing, 29. 4 John Berger, Bento’s Sketchbook (New York: Pantheon Books, 2011), 65. 1

“imaginative movement” both on the part of the author and the viewer who perceives it.5 Berger’s reflections are the inspiration for Ways of Seeing: Three Takes on the Jack Shear Drawing Collection, a three-part exhibition focusing on the rich collection of drawings that artist, curator, and collector Jack Shear has built over the past half-decade. Shear’s interest in the artist as collector is longstanding. In 1999, he co-organized Drawn from Artists’ Collections at The Drawing Center, an exhibition that highlighted the personal, often idiosyncratic way in which artists collect the work of their peers and forebearers. To date, Shear’s collection consists of nearly seven hundred drawings dating from the sixteenth century to the present, and includes contributions by a diverse group of figures such as Edgar Degas, Kazimir Malevich, Adolph Friedrich Erdmann von Menzel, Stanley Whitney, Francis Picabia, Eugène Delacroix, Alice Neel, Pablo Picasso, Vija Celmins, Lee Bontecou, David Hockney, Tom of Finland, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Robert Gober, Jan Toorop, Elaine de Kooning, and Walter Price, among many others. In his studio in upstate New York, Shear has adopted an eccentric approach to hanging his collection, placing works alongside, directly on top of, and abutting other works on the basis of intuited visual affinities regardless of context or historical accuracy. Describing his hanging method, Shear has likened the installation process to working with the alphabet, in that, in putting drawings together, you see things that you wouldn’t see otherwise. He has also likened collecting to approaching artists as though seeing their work for the first time.6 Ways of Seeing: Three Takes on the Jack Shear Drawing Collection foregrounds Shear’s intuitive approach by staging three distinct curatorial interpretations of the collection. Over the course of the exhibition’s fifteen-week run, Shear himself, the artist Arlene Shechet, and the critic and curator Jarrett Earnest will each present an exhibition chosen from Shear’s holdings. In each case, the curators have free rein in choosing the works that will be presented and in deciding how these works are displayed and amplified through supporting materials. In this way, the exhibition aims to bring Berger’s words to life, revealing in real time the role of personal vision in the presentation and reception of art. It reinforces the fundamental truth that interpretations of art are always, at 5 Berger, Bento’s Sketchbook, 149–51. 6 Jack Shear, Zoom conversation with the Blanton Museum of Art, April 7, 2021.

their core, impacted by our own sensibilities and experiences. The three curatorial iterations will be considered in depth in the second volume of this publication. The subject of this volume, however, is a bit different; indeed, it is a kind of parallel project. Building on the themes of the exhibition as a whole, commissioning editor Hilton Als has selected nine writers to discuss two to three works from the collection of their choosing: fashion writer Charlie Porter; artist Nick Mauss; art historian Jennifer Krasinski; poets Brenda Shaughnessy, Tracy K. Smith, and Craig Morgan Teicher; and authors Ben Marcus, George Saunders, and Clare Sestanovich. Contributing poems and traditional art historical analyses of discreet drawings, as well as stories and personal ruminations that encompass several works, the authors’ texts are inflected with a spirit of personal investigation and discovery. While in some cases the writers have chosen to do extensive research on their selected objects, others approach their drawings uninitiated, taking the assignment as an exercise in close looking. Several texts reflect on the slippage between drawing and writing, and the misunderstandings each entails. Others contemplate the necessity and inevitability of storytelling, the way in which we read narratives into even the most recalcitrant objects. Still others ponder the question of ownership: who controls meaning, the artist or the receiver? In all cases, the writers consider what it means for images to escape our control as they continue to grow and change and make meaning both because and in spite of us. In Brenda Shaughnessy’s words: “The idea becomes art, the moment of conception. The eventual object may only be a pinprick at that moment, and it may never develop. Or it might.”7 The result is a snapshot of Shear’s collection that, far from being comprehensive or cross-sectional, is personal, subjective, and incomplete. In a sense, one could say that this volume stands as a curatorial iteration in its own right; a kind of fourth “hang,” albeit one not only composed of a group of eclectic objects from across countries and centuries, but also delivered by a variety of voices from a range of disciplines. It is an “imaginative movement,” in Berger’s words, offered to the viewing and reading public as a microcosm of Shear’s intuitive approach to collecting and a testament to the uncontainable power of art to make meaning over and over and over again.

See page 76 of this volume.

Ever since my first trip to Jack Shear’s studio in January 2019, I knew we needed to show his extraordinary collection at The Drawing Center. I also knew that Jack’s unique way of installing the work, grounded in intuition and the pure joy of looking, needed to be front and center. I would like to extend my heartfelt gratitude to Jack for his generosity throughout this process, and for enthusiastically embracing every idea we presented to him. Thank you Jack for allowing us to show your work, and for permitting us to invite others to offer their takes on the astounding, eclectic, wide-ranging collection you have put together with deep attention and love. My gratitude extends in equal measure to those individuals who so gamely accepted our invitation to bring their own perspectives to bear on Jack’s collection: Hilton Als, Jarrett Earnest, and Arlene Shechet. Jarrett and Arlene, thank you for greeting our invitation to participate in this somewhat unorthodox project with gumption and creative energy. I am eager to see what you both come up with. And Hilton, thank you for lending your wisdom, enthusiasm, and uniquely deep knowledge of both writers and artists to this publication. You have assembled a truly stellar team of contributors and I am immensely grateful. Finally, my sincere thanks to those contributors whose stories, poems, and reflections prove the myriad ways that art touches and inspires us. Thank you: Jennifer Krasinski, Ben Marcus, Nick Mauss, Charlie Porter, George Saunders, Clare Sestanovich, Brenda Shaughnessy, Tracy K. Smith, and Craig Morgan Teicher. My gratitude also extends to a number of individuals who supported this exhibition in various ways. Thanks to Frank Appio, Adam Boese, and above all, Mary Anne Lee, from the Ellsworth Kelly Studio, for ensuring that putting together this exhibition was a smooth and enjoyable experience. Thanks also to Cassandra Smith, Head of Collections and Exhibitions, and Carter Foster, Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs, at the Blanton Museum of Art; and to Prithi Gowda, Emily Brownawell, and Cara Kuball from Arlene Shechet’s studio. Finally, a huge thanks to Frances Beatty Adler for encouraging us to travel to Spencertown in January and to Alex Adler for being our very knowledgeable chauffeur. At The Drawing Center, the entire staff deserves my appreciation. Special thanks go to Isabella Kapur, Curatorial Associate, for once again displaying her extraordinary research

and organizational skills, and to Joanna Ahlberg for navigating this complex publication with enthusiasm, insight, and grace. Finally, I would like to extend my gratitude to The Drawing Center’s Board of Directors as well as the funders whose support was fundamental to the creation of this exhibition and the accompanying publications: Kathy and Richard Fuld, Agnes Gund, the Low Road Foundation, Matthew Marks, Christie’s, Emily Rauh Pulitzer, Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder, and Pace Gallery.

Introduction Hilton Als

I loved him. And because I loved him, I wanted to amuse him, and provide him with big jolts of pleasure that would shoot through and light up his otherwise gloomily romantic, hurt soul. Sometimes, when I looked at his insides—I could see in through his eyes— I found Whistler-like grays and blacks with little dabs of white. And whenever I see that Whistler white in any number of paintings and drawings now, I think of his teeth, and the white of his handkerchief, which he offered to me as we walked along strange and familiar streets on those New York summer days when the heat shut the rest of the world out and there were no cabs, or no cabs for the likes of us. On those summer days, when walking from one part of town to the other felt like being caught in an evil dream, he not only offered me his handkerchief, he’d also carry whatever bag I needed help with. Sometimes, on those long-forgotten errands, he wore white shoes. Like Whistler, he was a glamorous purveyor of style, and dressed to tell the world who he was from the inside out. He was his own art, and I admired him as much as I admired his photography, and his drawings. I wonder now if he misses me as much as I have missed him; we were friends for over twenty years. I wonder if he’s ever tried to draw our years together and what that illustration might look like. Something gray with a horizon line? And beyond that, a little hope? I was a boy when we met in the late 1980s; he was about five or six years older. He was an artist to his core. Our friendship started to unravel—what does it matter? The specifics of it? That’s the kind of information that adds nothing to our story. Let’s just

say our friendship stopped because of grief and need, all those desires and feelings once shared and shared no more. I can’t make a drawing of it, but maybe he could, or can. Looking at that friendship—the days and years, the months of laughter—is like looking at a drawing that gets a little erased during its run across the page, but the line is still there, you can make it out despite the faintness of time, or the artist changing their mind about what kind of drawing they want to make. He changed his mind about the kind of drawing we would make together. Don’t mind the metaphors. It’s not unusual for me to substitute the reality of one thing with another; that is, I often talk about things being “like” other things. I live in a world of associations, or maybe I use metaphors to protect me from life, the pain as much as the joy. I don’t know why I live through associations, but I do. So, when I think of him, I sometimes think of what he was “like,” and in being like a number of things I love, why wouldn’t certain drawings come to mind? Like Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953). The history behind the making of this particular drawing says as much about our relationship as anything. In 1953, a highly imaginative, restless, and experimentdriven young artist named Robert Rauschenberg—he was not yet thirty—spent a fair amount of time thinking about what art could be or mean. Entranced and no doubt emboldened by Duchamp’s trailblazing ideas—was a urinal just a urinal or art once the artist signed it?—Rauschenberg brought a similar questioning spirit to his own work, specifically his drawings. If he erased one of his images, would it still be a drawing? Or would it be a memory of a drawing, something that lived on in the mind’s eye? The experiment didn’t work when Rauschenberg erased his own art. He wasn’t well-known then, and it didn’t take him long to realize that in order to make his point, or a point about authorship, he would have to erase a piece by someone more powerful, a creator whose drawings had much more market value and had generated wide critical attention. After a time, the brash Rauschenberg approached the great Willem de Kooning to help him out. Might I erase you? De Kooning was not only one of the architects of Abstract Expressionism; he also helped make its bricks and planted beautiful flowers in between the bricks. Legend has it that de Kooning heard the younger artist out and, being no stranger to youthful bravado and the will to make, eventually handed over a drawing.

I don’t know what the original drawing looked like, and perhaps that’s one of the points of the exercise. Was it a masterpiece that was erased? A doodle? In any case, Rauschenberg erased the drawing and called it what it was: Erased de Kooning Drawing. It lives on in our minds today for a number of reasons, one being its sexiness. The sexiness of absence. Eraser frottage. Rub, rub, rub. The taking over of one man by another man, the erasing of that old patriarchal stuff in favor of a gay artist’s dream: a murky almost white space where the father used to live and now haunts in name only, but that the younger gay artist dominates with his own thoughts, his own actions. The piece is about power as much as anything else, and the visual liquidation of one generation in the playing field of another. Time teaches us that youth will trump older generations because they always do, the better to show their strength, and how they must vanquish the established to establish themselves. Kudos to de Kooning, then, for understanding that being destroyed meant he was thought about by his younger colleagues, and that Rauschenberg’s gesture was right and good and part of the natural order of things. The trick was to be self-assured enough in one’s own work to stand back and watch it disappear. I think Erased de Kooning is a masterpiece and like many of the great midcentury masterpieces it is a break with the past while creating a kind of silence infused with electric thinking about the future and the imagination, and that’s how it lives on in our minds today—as a piece that’s still filled with possibility. Drawings, the best of them, pulsate in my mind; they are always nearly incandescent with opportunity: Look at what the eye and the hand and the imagination can do together! Let’s take it up a notch! Let’s go further! We are fortunate that we live in a time when the parameters of what makes or constitutes a drawing have expanded, just as Rauschenberg helped expand our ideas around what makes art. During the Renaissance, drawings were mainly seen as a rehearsal for another, larger work of art, but today you can have a thought and call it a drawing and why not since drawings begin with a thought, or the hope of unearthing one from the subconscious? Most people would not call Jessica Rankin’s Field of Mars (2016) a drawing, but there is so much to draw from it, including the artist’s obvious love of drawing or what drawings can do, which is to make suggestions in space. If you paint it, it stays fixed. But by embroidering on organdy, which is what Rankin did for

Field of Mars, you can create abstractions about land and sea and air that are suggestive of your internal world, and the world of stars that surround you. Rankin’s crisscross imagery, the widening of the image out toward the picture frame, is like a drawing spreading out in my mind, in sleep, and it’s a piece that reminds me as much as Erased de Kooning does of my friend, and our complicated backand-forth filled with stars. When I say my friendship with him became like or was like Erased de Kooning, I don’t mean to suggest I tried to erase one of his photographs or drawings the better to see myself. What I mean is that in order to have any kind of life as an artist and a man, I had to rub my friend out a little bit, the better to see what I loved in my own work. I had spent years championing his pictures, and it can be lonely giving up that kind of role, and even lonelier looking at yourself as you try to erase the impulses that lead you to that kind of role in the first place. And yet my friend is in every line that I write here, as is the memory of his drawings, and how I wish I knew him to look at Rankin’s Field of Mars, to find ourselves in its controlled lostness, its explosion of earth and sky that promotes dreams. I remember a big charcoal drawing he made in the mid-1990s; it was a portrait of a woman on Whistler-gray paper. I loved watching his hand move across the paper’s surface, and then suddenly there was a drawing. Where did that talented hand come from? I don’t want to erase him, even though time has erased our time together. These words commemorate who we were and what our meaning was or remains to one another, just as drawings commemorate what those moments were for the artist. It all begins with a line. The line says: Look at me! This is an occasion. Then the line says: OK, let’s go out a little bit further, in space. Maybe we’ll be a house, maybe a person, or maybe we’ll just stay a line that stretches across this bit of white expanse or Whistler-gray paper, as conclusive or inconclusive as you like. The point is the viewer’s eye will finish us off, make of us what it will just as the artist began by making of the line what he, she, or they would. And did. Drawings have an aura of fragility as well, don’t they? Maybe because they can be…erased. But never forgotten. Erased de Kooning becomes larger and more specific the longer you think about it. Its erasure grows questions in the mind, including: What kind of mind would think about erasing a de Kooning? Collectors, the best of them, are at

heart collagists, and their work is to show how juxtaposing this piece with that makes the collection different every time you add or take an object away: Nothing is fixed in a collection except the collector’s love of surprise. Jack Shear collects memories—memories of who the artist was at that time according to the drawing. And when they go out in the world, these memories become the viewers’ memories too, flowers that take root in the soil of time and grow and grow and grow, the better to show us what drawings are and what they can be. That’s what we see in this book. And another thing: The artists assembled here have a powerful relationship to words, as powerful as the writers who are describing the work under review. Warhol manipulated language to create a kind of “dumb” persona, but you can’t do that without knowing what words mean, and how they can change an atmosphere, let alone the world. Cocteau drew all his life, but he also wrote novels and made films—each was an element in his grand design, which was to create a kind of monumental poetry. The German-born artist George Grosz had a romantic notion about America because of his love of reading, particularly the novels of James Fenimore Cooper and Bret Harte. I wonder if drawing for Warhol, Cocteau, and the others was their preferred language, a way to “write” outside the limitations of speech, and with a free hand. One thing’s for sure: Drawing is a solitary act. So is writing. And as a result my friend and I knew how to be alone together. As a visual artist, you can have a model to keep you company, or a bowl of fruit, some sky, even, but in the end you are alone with that paper and pencil or whatever, tracing your feelings and thoughts that move as swiftly and slowly as a cloud, or a heartbeat, or time, or friendships that bloom in the mind, not unlike an erased drawing.

Jennifer Krasinski on Odilon Redon, George Grosz, and Gladys Nilsson

“The dilettante looks to art only for his pleasure,” Odilon Redon wrote in his journal in 1870, believing pain to be an essential mark and feeling of the true artist.1 The otherwise mild-mannered Symbolist was lauded for his disquieting, fantastical figures: phantoms and gnomes, polyps and spiders, bodiless heads, and creatures with long-lashed eyes where they shouldn’t be. It was the writer J.-K. Huysmans who brought Redon to wider attention in his novel Against Nature (1884), filling the vestibule of his protagonist Duc Jean Des Esseintes’s curious home with the artist’s drawings of “the horrific realms of bad dreams and fevered visions.”2 The author later enumerates how Des Esseintes, when overcome by the unease of these works, would stand before Redon’s rendering of Melancholy, and “a sweet sadness, an almost languorous sorrow would gently take possession of this thoughts.”3 La Terrible (The Terrible One) is a drawing in charcoal and black chalk from 1871, made by Redon the same year he returned home from his service in the Franco-Prussian war. The female subject is a feral, harrowing sight, her black eyes set so deeply inside their sockets as to almost disappear into her skull. Her gaze is intense, but her face expressionless save the slight downturn of her mouth. It is unclear whether the wide metal shackle tightly bound around her torso is the cause, or the effect, of her terrible state, but the Odilon Redon, To Myself: Notes on Life, Art, and Artists, trans. Mira Jacob and Jeanne L. Wasserman (New York: George Braziller Inc., 1986), 34. Tranlated from the 1979 French edition titled A soi-même. 2 J.-K. Huysmans, Against Nature, trans. Robert Baldick (New York: Penguin Books, 1959), 73. Originally published in 1884 as À rebours. 3 Huysmans, 74. 1

Odilon Redon La Terrible (The Terrible One), c. 1871. Charcoal and black chalk, with stumping and erasing, on cream laid paper altered to a golden tone, 16 3/4 x 13 1/4 inches (42.5 x 34 cm).

equanimous scale hovering in the shadows behind her head suggests that her fate—or perhaps the fates of those who stand before her— hangs in its balance. In the second volume of the artist’s catalogue raisonné published by the Wildenstein Institute in 1994, La Terrible is included in the section titled “Le Fantôme” (The Ghost), her image appearing alongside those of a haunted mirror, the resurrection of Lazarus, a slain man, scenes starring skeletons, even a pencil drawing of Hamlet holding the skull of poor Yorick, as well as other unsettling, and unsettled, characters.4 Taken together, these works are meditations of one kind or another on mortality, and on the sad, inevitable fate of the flesh. “Perhaps she is the Camarde [a figure of death] of who came to seek the lost on earth,” the catalogue’s caption conjectures, but La Terrible appears closer in spirit, and certainly in physique, to another charcoal drawing by Redon of that same year: L’Ange perdu, also referred to as L’Ange déchu (The Lost Angel or The Fallen Angel), depicting a miserable, hollow-eyed male with thick black wings on his back, held down as La Terrible by a shackle around his middle.5 To be kicked out of heaven implies some sin has been committed, yet the nobility of Redon is his refusal to reduce his visions to parable or lesson. One instead encounters his images as one does the productions of dreams, nightmares, and the subconscious: without the comfort or compass of moral certainty. Instead, we are faced with the human condition in all its creep and glory. Whatever La Terrible has done to stand or pass judgment might not be the true subject for reflection. In the words of Redon: “Sadness, when it is without cause, is perhaps a secret fervor, a sort of oration, something vaguely like worship, in the unknown.”6

4 Alec Wildenstein, Odilon Redon: Catalogue Raisonné de l’Oeuvre Peint et Dessiné, Volume II: Mythes et Légendes (New York/Paris: Wildenstein Institute and La Bibliothèque des Arts, 1994), 214–225, https://view.publitas.com/wildensteinplattner-institute-ol46yv9z6qv6/c-r_odilon_redon_volume_ii_wildenstein_ institute/page/234–35. 5 Wildenstein, 95. 6 Redon, 103.

Er will nicht stehen (1929) is a loose-handed, graphite drawing by the German artist George Grosz (1893–1959) that presents a naughty threesome between a man and two women. The bottles and glassware on the table in the foreground suggest that spirits have loosened the trio’s mood, enough so that the women flanking Grosz’s gentleman (such as he is) are nude save for their thigh-high stockings and kitten-heel shoes. Crouching over his crotch, the two tie ribbons in bows on either end of his penis. She on the left, a few pearls of a necklace sketched in around her neck, bites her lower lip in concentration; she on the right bends her head down over her work, her hands notably dainty next to her luscious thighs. The man wraps his arms around both of them to steady himself. Although he grasps and gropes his playmates, he doesn’t look at them, and instead keeps his eyes on his cock. In the upper right corner of the drawing, Grosz has penciled a partial narrative: “Er will nicht stehen / nach der Erzählung / von / Mica / Wahre Begebenheit mit,” which can be translated, “He [referring to his penis] does not want to stand / after a story / from / Mica / a true incident with”—but the sentence ends there, without naming a name.1 This caption transforms the scene from one that appears to be of pleasure, play, and kink, to one of impotence, possibly of cuckoldry. His penis, wrapped in ribbons and rendered useless by a story for which we are not given the details, seems at first little more than decoration. To understand this as a scene of a man’s humiliation at the hands of women would not be out of order. In Grosz’s most politically potent work from the 1920s—satirical drawings that skewered the bloated bourgeoisie who in turn floated the Weimar Republic— his women were often depicted as at once lusty and lusted after, voluptuous and grotesque. Their presence and power erupts from a feral sexuality, which is punished, one suspects, on the occasions when their encounters with the artist’s buffoonish, monstrous male figures turn violent, even fatal. In his poem “The Muses of George Grosz,” Robert Lowell offers a crude assessment of the artist’s women, useful as a measure of generational attitude if not as proof of the poet’s aptitude for perceiving nuance.2 “Grosz men are one man,

1 Allison Wucher, Silverpoint Fine Art, email message to the author, June 10, 2021. 2 Robert Lowell, “The Muses of George Grosz,” in Notebook (Toronto: Doubleday Canada Ltd., 1967).

George Grosz Er will nicht stehen (He Doesn’t Want to Stand), 1929. Graphite on paper, 18 1/8 x 23 5/8 inches (46 x 60 cm).

Marshal von Hindenburg,” he writes of the every-Nazis that populate the artist’s depictions of Berlin: . . . paying gold for Venus; none ever strip—Grosz women always shed: girls one might meet at Modern Language Annuals, pushing retirement, weighing more than men; and once the least were good for the all-night game—

He continues by deriding them as “old sows” with “nettled cunts,” and yet as the title concedes, they are the muses who move Grosz’s hand and mind. But these women are softer than those women, more playful, and the erotics of the scene in fact may be fanned by another story too. That ribbon so precisely tied around the man’s shaft: It recalls a moment in the artist’s autobiography when, as a boy, he ran to a friend’s house to play, only to find himself standing on a wooden box outside a window, spying on his friend’s aunt as she dressed.3 Grosz describes the scene in vivid detail, including “a roll of blue silk ribbon which she threaded through small holes in the embroidery [of her underwear] and tied into bows.”4 The sight of this naked woman was transformative to the young artist: “I felt the man awakening within me. How I would have loved to be in there with her, senseless, crazy, to caress her and kiss her—all those curves, those folds, the fur of the dark heart with the split in the middle. My knees went weak. I could not tear myself away.”5 Indeed the man in the drawing—perhaps a portrait of Grosz himself?—seems perfectly at ease with his captivators, in this moment surrendering to whatever unknown pleasures will follow.

3 George Grosz, George Grosz: An Authobiography, trans. Nora Hodges (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 21–29. Translated from the original 1946 edition titled Ein kleins Ja und ein grosses Nein. 4 Grosz, 23. 5 Grosz, 29.

Gladys Nilsson’s Physically Outfyted (first titled Physically Phyt) made its public debut in May of 1968 at the San Francisco Art Institute, hanging in an exhibition alongside works by Art Green, Jim Falconer, Suellen Rocca, Karl Wirsum, and Nilsson’s husband, Jim Nutt—the band of Chicago artists otherwise known as the Hairy Who. The group had made its collective reputation with paintings, drawings, objects, and ephemera that looked as though the artists had mainlined mass culture until hyper-giddy, more than a little horny, and deep into wild hallucinations of an absurd, chaotic America. Yet no two Hairy Who members made art alike. Working in watercolor, which then (as now) was considered a comparatively minor medium, Nilsson produced extroverted images in dazzling palettes that revel in the hum of everyday life without ever succumbing to the ordinary. Physically Outfyted—the misspelled title invoking the spirit of the goof—is populated end-to-end with oddball characters who seem to organize themselves around a giant figure wearing bright pink tights, white go-go boots, and where its head should be—what to call those watered-down brown eely platypus-ish long-snouted slack-jawed beasties? The distorted mugs and half-bodies and loosed limbs of Nilsson’s mytho-illogical world can be downright dizzying, her picture plane so dynamic and brimming with life that it feels more choreographed than composed. “I start out with the big figures, and then I boil it down to smaller and smaller figures—tiny people who are doing silly stuff,” Nilsson told The Paris Review in 2014. “It’s about getting the larger figures in place so that I can unleash these tiny people who are risqué and haughty.”1 Note how Nilsson neatly divides Physically Outfyted into four levels, stacking her throngs one on top of the other; the watercolor’s overall architecture might bring to mind the ascending chaos around the Tower of Babel. At the very bottom of the picture, a motley crew of eccentrics arrive on the scene, some driving into frame in fantastic-looking vehicles, while others stand around in high-heeled shoes. One particularly perplexing creature is little more than tan culottes, a blue body with a matching puff of hair—and breasts where her eyes would otherwise be. Above them all, a cluster of muscular figures in gym gear and what look to be helmets pulled down over 1

Nicole Rudick, “Eye Contact: An Interview with Gladys Nilsson,” The Paris Review, November 24, 2014, https://www.theparisreview.org/ blog/2014/11/24/eye-contact-an-interview-with-gladys-nilsson/.

Gladys Nilsson Physically Outfyted, 1968. Watercolor on paper, 30 1/4 x 22 1/2 inches (76.8 x 57.2 cm).

their eyes and noses stand with their arms up—ready to work, or workout. Higher still are a bunch of hippy beardos with bulging eyes and groovy shoes, just hanging around, looking heavy. “I still have a horror of the vacui,” Nilsson recently joked, which may explain in part why her paintings prioritize formal fizz over narrative clarity.2 Yet one detail in Physically Outfyted hints that there might be more to its story: Beneath the big white go-go boots, the artist has painted a mirror image of a black pair, as though the giant were balancing on its own shadow—or on another pair of shoes. (The blue-bodied figure with breasts for eyes likewise stands on the shoe bottoms of an upside-down figure.) Like Lewis Carroll’s Alice and her looking glass, Nilsson’s world here seems founded upon, or at least buoyed by, a topsy turvy version of itself—or vice versa. Hers is a welcome reminder that amid life’s pandemonium and confusion, there is always something extraordinary to see.

2 Gladys Nilsson, interviewed by Alison M. Gingeras, Gladys Nilsson: Honk! Fifty Years of Painting (New York: Garth Greenan Gallery and Matthew Marks Gallery, 2020), 98.

Ben Marcus on Gordon Matta-Clark, Christian Schad, and Jorinde Voigt

The teeth from the male bloodline of a FAMILY are collected over several generations. The men are not always dead when the teeth are collected. Time, well, it does not pass, does it? It never has. Mostly it breaks open and spills on the ground and the children splash in it. PUDDLE OF BLOOD is the English term for time, though no one likes to say so. The children grow despondent, leaking air, complaining that the day is too long now, it will not end. The day is so terrible and why is it going and going and going and never stopping? Meanwhile the TEETH OF THE MEN are stashed in a mail bag that hangs from a house, banging in the wind, limp and wet in the still season that people call TOMORROW. The house is fixed on rails so it can slide from town to town. You’ve felt it, this night sliding, but who would ever dare to admit it. It seems insane. In the evening, when the house rolls over the knife-strewn landscape, the bag of teeth rattles against the clapboards, producing a sound mistaken for animals crying in the distance. One town over, two towns, three towns—no one actually knows, let alone me, here in the cellar operating only on rumor—the noise is taken as a terrible omen. A young woman with a Burmester four-aught decimator records the sound onto a homemade linen filament that stretches nearly sixty meters long. Maybe longer. I’m not sure; there are competing reports. And so, before this woman, recording audio in the field, grows old and dies, she stitches an outfit from this linen filament for her little one. The costume slips over the little one’s body. A suit, a cape, a caul. This is how we enter our finest skin. And are we not so very dressed up today, and are we not looking so terribly smart, and are we not the sharpest bodies this world has ever known?

Gordon Matta-Clark Untitled (Arrows), 1973–74. Pencil, black ink, and marker on paper, 18 7/8 x 24 inches (47.9 x 61 cm).

Christian Schad Das Geld (Pecunia non olet sed homo (Geld stinkt nicht, aber der Mensch)) (The Money [Pecunia non olet sed homo (Money doesn’t stink, but man)]), c. 1973. Gouache and graphite on paper, 39 3/4 x 36 1/4 inches (101 x 92.1 cm).

A shadow called MONEY is painted next to the body. The shadow activates without a light source, a process referred to as BIRTH. Like most shadows painted after the war, it can be manually converted to a cream or a potion. The process, as with any celebration, contains nine escapes, including a sunset, a betrayal, and a sudden mortality. A bird usually loses its power of flight. A grassland animal gains human form and wanders into the moist, hair-lined fruit of a house. For the process to reach fulfillment, the American math must be broadcast in daylight: by children, outdoors, with an ENGLISH LANGUAGE vocal program. In the morning, children flood the holding pens of the residential grid, standing in attitudes of musical expulsion: rigid in posture, their mouths blocking the light from their inner caverns, little fists at their sides. From afar it appears that they are WALKING TO SCHOOL. The TRAIL OF CREAM deposited in their wake is collected with a spoon, spread on the curb, or stored inside the wet hell of a man’s mouth. These cream-filled mouths, seen in most human cities, filter the interior wind of men, turning their airborne sorrow into little apologies called WORDS. No one needs to listen, but they do anyway, tilting their heads in the evening, towards the hills, towards the water, waiting, as ever, to learn the news of what is coming, and when.

A garden is paved over with stone. Stone is covered with a cluster of children who smell like yesterday’s bones. Given the day, Tuesday, and the time, noon, the children are blanketed in linen, a soundless procedure that works a German formula on the local population. The linen, since it scalds in the sun, and since it is mountainous now with bodies squirming below, is a target of those laser-fine vectors of disfigurement called birds. Birds with tiny wet beaks, softer than a baby’s shadow. Birds who break into pieces if they fly above the wall. They come at a certain precise afternoon minute to assault the linen, to execute a pattern of illegible dismay in its surface, producing a picnic on the linen called WRITING. Like most writing it is not read from above, nor below, nor ever, at least correctly. Like most writing, it is lovingly misunderstood with the face, which rubs it and rubs it and rubs it, over and over again. What the birds have to say, then, is known only to the smothered children under the linen, who are usually considered to be first-graders and forgotten soon after evening lands, even as their hidden faces swell with a message. One thing maps never show: how many people have wept and where. How many people have moved through zones of grief and produced small atmospheres of sorrow that form a light wind for others to navigate, thinking the day sure is nice, the weather is quite fine, my mood has been banished to someone else—I took my turn with sadness, I played my part. That is no breeze on your face. Shame on you. Maps don’t show the likelihood of sorrow in a coordinate or the relative muteness, fear, and paralysis one is likely to feel here rather than there, upwind, downwind, in the goddamn lee. Maps rarely make a sound, but not for lack of trying. They act too much like a blanket. They smother what is under them, supposedly, but it’s a sick joke. We know better at this point, even if we choose not to speak on it. We can zoom in on them, put our ears against their slick, neutral skins, and hear the young struggle underneath — the little limbs muscling around, filled with the very newest bird writing, trying and failing to break from the costume known as the landscape and distribute their message into the air.

Jorinde Voigt Nexus-Studie (III), 2011. Color pencil, graphite, and ink on paper, 24 x 18 1/8 inches (61 x 46 cm).

Nick Mauss on Jean Cocteau, Andy Warhol, and Ray Johnson

The unknown subject of Jean Cocteau’s 1933 “souvenir portrait” is pictured in pensive near-profile, like most of the poet’s drawings. But whether this is a portrait in the conventional sense of a living likeness remains uncertain; Cocteau drew “from life” as much as from fantasy, memory, and myth. What is the nature of this souvenir? Is it Cocteau who is remembering (by drawing) the pictured subject, or is it the recipient of this drawing who is to remember Cocteau? A striking intimacy and remove characterizes Cocteau’s mode of drawing, similar to a cartographer’s self-assurance in transcribing an internalized terrain onto paper. The pen, it appears, hardly leaves the page as it describes what it has committed to memory: a haphazard shirt collar, long-lashed eyes that can only be hazel, but then, an unexpected invention: the sensual transfiguration of an ear into cursive. The ear never ends, and the name “Jean” never begins—the autograph and the drawing are made of the same material, like an ingeniously bent wire. Cocteau himself would describe this singular fluency between drawing and writing in the dedication of his first published book of drawings (addressed to Picasso): “Poets don’t draw, they unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but otherwise.”1 In his appreciation of that book in a 1925 issue of Harper’s Bazaar, e.e. cummings admitted that Cocteau “the poet, the satirist, the Parisian, the literary idol,” had now also proven himself to be a “draughtsman of first-rate sensitiveness.” Along with Klee, Kandinsky, Picasso, Grosz, and Calder, Cocteau ranks among the early twentieth century’s most inventive analysts 1

Jean Cocteau, Dessins (Paris: Librairie Stock, 1924).

Jean Cocteau The Souvenir, 1933. Ink and wash on paper, 8 x 5 1/2 inches (20.3 x 14 cm).

of the line, which he deemed an expression of “the soul’s style.” He is rivaled only by Matisse in bringing the arabesque of handwriting into confusion with the non-linguistic register of drawing. “Writing is drawing in different apparel, and drawing is another way of writing,” Cocteau wrote, “And when I draw, I write. Perhaps when I write, I draw.”2 His insistence on the inextricability of drawing from writing is a programmatic revolt against rationalization, that “constriction of thought” identified by paleoanthropologist André Leroi-Gourhan as the disappearance of “the dualism between graphic and verbal”3 in the phase of human development that separated their functional coexistence. Nobody can say how many thousands of drawings Cocteau produced “on blotters, tablecloths, and backs of envelopes”4 during the course of his life (not to mention the walls of churches and the Mediterranean villa he “tattooed” with drawn murals) but the souvenir portrait emerges as one of the most prominent, recursive formats, very consciously refined into a trademark, or even a type of currency that both reflected and amplified his celebrity status. Cocteau’s drawn profiles of the 1930s morph over time, into Marianne (the symbolic personification of the French Republic, donning a Phrygian cap) or the poet-hero Orpheus, a double for Cocteau himself. The question presents itself whether we are looking at a signed drawing or an embellished autograph. This souvenir portrait was presumably given away as a gift, much like the many elaborately inscribed drawings Cocteau made to illuminate the title pages of his own books, dedicating them to friends and patrons. But Cocteau’s inscriptions in books were usually more personal, and therefore signed, simply: Jean. This drawing bears no addressee, and is followed by the full autograph: Jean Cocteau, indicating a level of remove from the recipient, and a certain formality. The formulation “Souvenir de…” was commonly used by celebrities in France, such as Josephine Baker, when signing photographs to admiring fans. This drawing, then, is an innovation by Cocteau, substituting the celebrity photograph with a drawing that may be a version of himself, an object of desire, a figure from one of his books or films, one of their sources in “real life,” or a short-hand synthesis of them all.

2 Jean Cocteau, 60 Dessins (Paris: Galerie Bert, 2013). 3 André Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), 210. 4 Cocteau, Dessins.

Much has been made of Warhol’s indebtedness to Cocteau’s line and homoerotic subject matter, given the clear affinity between Cocteau’s drawings from the 1930s and Warhol’s from the 1950s. But every artist knows that the most powerful influence is indirect and enmeshed with others. As Nathan Gluck, one of Warhol’s early studio assistants explained in an interview: “…rather than saying that Andy had looked at Cocteau and had been influenced because I’m not sure that at the time that Andy mentioned this about the Cocteau book, he had been, you know, drawing like this for quite a while. It’s just like when people tie it into Ben Shahn and think that Shahn was an influence. And I don’t think it was. I think that it’s just that if you’re going to look for an influence, you might go back to Picasso’s Blue Period and Picasso’s Classic Period when he was drawing in a fine line which, then, you could say was an influence on Shahn and an influence on Andy. And, of course, Picasso wasn’t the first person to invent drawing in line. You can go back to Ingres.”1 Compared to his early “fourth generation Picasso by way of Cocteau”2 drawings, Warhol’s deadpan 1964 drawing of the back of a dollar bill appears un-stylized and asexual, verging on the indifference of a sign (though its imputation of handmade money feels taboo). But like even his earliest drawings it is marked by contractions and elisions, graphic decisions that seem to bring the drawing to its essence. Warhol’s abbreviations allow us to see, as if for the first time, the strange graphic layout of this “paper promise,” riddled with radiating symbols and derivative ornaments. A painting of money approaches trompe l’oeil and the counterfeit, a drawing of money tries to understand it. What makes this drawing hurt is the way it evades the inherent romanticism of drawing as the artist’s direct registration of an intense moment of encounter. It seems to counter the question it poses “What is drawing?” with the self-evident fact that money is drawing. “When you see a big store and see so many of each kind of anything that is in it, and on the counters, it is hard to believe that one more or less makes any difference to anyone,” Gertrude Stein wrote in her meditations on money in the Saturday Evening Post. “When you see a cashier in a bank with drawers filled with money, Nathan Gluck, in Patrick S. Smith, Warhol’s Art and Films (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1986), 328. 2 Henry Geldzahler, in Smith, 307. 1

it is hard to realize that one more or less makes any difference. But it does, if you buy it, or if you take it away, or if you sell it, or if you make a mistake in giving it out....”3 As a subject in Warhol’s work, money is linked to the advent of his use of silkscreen in paintings in 1962. Since his silkscreener initially refused to make screens of money, Warhol had to draw the money that he wanted to reproduce on canvas. As a concept and material, money had already appeared a decade earlier in the Cocteau-like drawings, where extravagantly crumpled-up dollar bills surround an elegant naked calf and foot. Flagrantly coupling desire with stupid excess, Warhol renders money absurd, the way an alien visitor might not be able to naturalize its use value or symbolic function. In his Philosophy Warhol declared, “The best way I like to carry money, actually, is messily. Crumpled wads. A paper bag is good.”4

3 Gertrude Stein, “All About Money,” Saturday Evening Post, August 22, 1936. 4 Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich), 136.

It may sound blasphemous, but I’ve never been interested in the concept of mail art in relationship to Ray Johnson, in the sense of a relay of postal exchanges between Johnson and other parties. All that matters is the insistent, audacious gesture of initiating the possibility of an exchange (generally unsolicited, and often unrequited), radiating out from Johnson and projecting a world of new relations. It’s hard to say how Johnson’s work will change as the circulation of pieces of paper invested with meaning and emotion is superseded by digital gestures of reciprocation that produce entirely different archives, social networks, and chemical reactions in the bodies of sender and receiver. To dispel the notion of mail art as “fathered” by Johnson (“father of nothing”), William S. Wilson, his early supporter and most sensitive interpreter wrote, “During the Civil War, envelopes became vehicles carrying political slogans. At the same time, in France, many painters were already sketching on envelopes, sometimes watercoloring images. If these activities are deemed mail-art, then that title is retroactive, and helps to make a point about the way the history of art works. A movement in art is not founded on a ready-made foundation: a structure builds and rebuilds its foundations as it develops.”1 Johnson so successfully created his own context through his work that I associate him with the real and insinuated network of his making more than with any of his actual contemporaries. The net he cast—in redefining the public sphere, and projecting a counter-world—is so wide that centuries of future scholarship and even algorithmic study will be unable to pin it down. I was surprised to learn of his interest in the philosopher Jacques Derrida, though in Johnson’s hands, of course, the desire to be in dialogue with Derrida is camp. Scholar Clive Phillpot recalls that Johnson liked Derrida’s book The Post Card, in which the philosopher innovates new forms of correspondence such as this: “The emission of sense or of seed can be rejected (postmark, stamp, and return to sender). Imagine the day, as I have already, that we will be able to send sperm by post card, without going through a check drawn on some sperm bank, and that it remains living enough for the artificial insemination to yield fecundation, and even desire.”2

William S. Wilson, “Retrospections on West 23rd Street” (New York: Printed Matter, 2006). 2 Jacques Derrida, The Post Card (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 24. 1

Ray Johnson Untitled (Dear Jacques Derrida), 1981–92. Ink, graphite, and collage on board, 13 1/2 x 11 inches (34.3 x 27.9 cm).

The collage addressed to Derrida is full of graphic and verbal cues that cannot be united, but sit side by side in compartmentalized friction. In the upper right hand corner, the words “THIS IS NOT A JAMES” accompany what looks like a silhouetted armless doll sitting on a cartoon stage, a form that is repeated once more, though slightly more eroded, beside a yellow and a black splotch and the name of the director of the 1924 film Greed, Erich von Stroheim. An organic shape with a little heart throbs over the word “NUSCH,” perhaps alluding to Nusch Éluard, the surrealist artist and muse. If I were to resort to conventional terms such as figure and ground, the ground of this work is a photographic self-portrait by Johnson, oft-reproduced, manipulated, Xeroxed, and mailed, which has been caressed with sandpaper to create a haze of fine white looping lines over its surface. An upside down silhouette of a hand, and a gamelike arrangement of tesserae adorn and obscure the face, like a mask. The words “DEAR JACQUES DERRIDA” are turned 200 degrees from what I (falsely) assume to be the standard orientation of the collage, since this is a work to be held in the hand, to be looked at from multiple points of view.

Charlie Porter on Edward Burne-Jones, Paul Thek, and Agnes Martin

Why draw? Edward Burne-Jones was born into misery. His mother, Elizabeth Coley, died six days after his birth. No portraits exist of his mother. There was one ivory miniature of her likeness, given to her young son to hold. He destroyed it. On birth, he was just Edward Jones, “Burne” a middle name upgraded and hyphenated much later in adulthood. His father, Edward Richard Jones, never remarried and was mostly absent from their home in Birmingham, a city in the very middle of England. Burne-Jones was raised by Ann Sampson, an “uneducated”1 housekeeper with “strange friends.”2 Burne-Jones once told a fellow artist about his childhood. “Unmothered, with a sad papa, without sister or brother, always alone, I was never unhappy, because I was always drawing.”3 How Victorian, how English. “I was never unhappy” reads as “I was always unhappy.” He began a lifetime of compulsive drawing. The work flowed out of him and overflowed him. In 1880, he wrote a letter to his friend Charles Elliot Norton. “And my rooms are so full of work—too full—and I have begun so much that if I live to be as old as the oldest inhabitant of Fulham I shall never complete it.”4 From an early age, he was drawing hair. Before he was six years old, he would stay with an aunt in the country, who had remarried a farmer. He drew his cousins-in-law. “The curls which the young ladies wore were unmistakeable…,” wrote his widow, Georgina Georgina Burne-Jones, Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1906), 1:4. 2 Burne-Jones, 1:5. 3 Burne-Jones, 1:8. 4 Burne-Jones, 2:107. 1

Edward Burne-Jones A Head of a Knight from “The Briar Wood,” 1874. White and black chalk on buff paper laid down on canvas, 12 5/8 x 13 inches (32 x 33 cm).

Burne-Jones, in her Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones.5 In his adult paintings, he gave his figures great helmets of hair as a tool in depicting their frozen three-dimensionality: what was visible of the hair, how it hung, defined the pose of the human. To get a feel for these hair helmets, he made drawings. In the painting The Briar Wood, Burne-Jones depicts five sleeping/dead knights caught in the briar rose surrounding Sleeping Beauty’s castle (correct: this “never unhappy” human found lifelong escape in fairy tales). One young knight is lying asleep/dead on the thigh of another asleep/dead knight. My queer gaze wants to find something going on between these men in slumber, particularly with the camp of its subject matter (i.e., Sleeping Beauty). Maybe translate this as, my queer gaze is desperate to find some life in this painting. The knight’s head is bowed, with no face flesh visible to us: all we see is the hair helmet, radiating from a crown. In the painting, this one head of hair hardly registers. It’s dead hair. And yet its preparatory drawing is rudely alive. It’s like a drawing from another world. Hair shoves itself out from the crown; the dome of the head becomes a taut land mass. It looks like a nipple. It looks like an anus. It is a drawing about the force of life. Let hair do what it wants, let artists do what they want. In 1969, Paul Thek sketched himself. We understand much from his hair. There’s not much on top; at the sides it’s long, unkempt. This unkemptness he expresses with a couple of abrupt zigzag scribbles, his pencil barely leaving the page. To the right of his head, strands wisp down. An otherness, a queerness, a radicalism expressed even before it is noticed he’s drawn his pupils as hearts. When he drew that self-portrait, Thek had already dislocated himself from the New York art scene. Thek’s experience in the ’60s shows the emptiness of presumed success markers. He appeared in Warhol’s Screen Tests. He exhibited with Pace Gallery. Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation is dedicated to Thek. So what? Thek could find no free path for himself in Manhattan’s tight commodification. He moved to Europe in 1967 on a Fulbright fellowship, where his work was liberated through impermanence: installations that were site-specific, sculptures made from everyday objects, discarded once the shows were over. And yet he sought permanence on the page. In 1969 he started keeping a journal, using it for drawings, doodles, thoughts, 5 Burne-Jones, 1:8.

Paul Thek Self-Portrait, c. 1969. Graphite on paper, 10 5/8 x 7 3/4 inches (27 x 19.7 cm).

jokes, transcriptions of spiritual texts. Like the 1969 self-portrait, he chose lined paper, like that of a kid’s schoolbook—maybe the paper for the self-portrait was torn out of one. Thek filled these notebooks until the end of his life, in 1988 from AIDS-related illness. After his death, nearly 100 notebooks were found among his possessions. The lined paper punctures any preciousness, no matter how profound the work. C’mon, they say, it’s just a sketch, don’t be so serious. I first discovered Thek at the Whitney Museum retrospective in 2010. I’d visited the museum on a whim, no idea what they were showing. It was like a parallel universe that turned out to be this universe. I could not believe this artist had existed. Few remnants of his installations had survived. Much had to be imagined, pieced together from photography of shows from which next to nothing is left. And yet, there in the show were the notebooks. There were his drawings. There was this constant practice, this reckoning with his own mind. There was no need to try and recreate the installations. It was all here. Another artist quit Manhattan in 1967. Agnes Martin had lived for a decade on Coenties Slip, in a loft neighbored by other queer artists: Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly. It was in that loft, in her late forties and early fifties, that Martin arrived at the grid. In ’67, she gave up her experiment of existing in the city. Martin cut off her long and plaited hair, bought an Airstream trailer, and disappeared. So strange, the hierarchical slight often given to this “drawing.” The grids on her canvases are drawn in pencil. Drawing was at the absolute core of her work. With these drawn lines, she created mesmeric fields, too much to take in. The experience of the canvases can be overwhelming and it can be euphoric. It is an experience created with drawn pencil lines. In 1972, Ann Wilson transcribed a conversation with Martin, titled “The Untroubled Mind”: When I draw horizontals you see this big plane and you have certain feelings like you’re expanding over the plane6 6 Agnes Martin and Anne Wilson, “The Untroubled Mind” (1972), in Arne Glimcher, Agnes Martin: Paintings, Writings, Remembrances (London/New York: Phaidon, 2012), 217.

And then later in the same conversation: I didn’t paint the plane I just drew this horizontal line7 The very last line: The wiggle of a worm is as important as the assassination of a president8

Drawing is everything. An untitled, undated work by Martin is created by drawn lines. The first line, directly centered, is short. The next line is a smidgen longer. And the next line. And the next line. A kind-of-oval is formed, though one of ends that finish as if going towards a point. Around midway, the lines stay roughly the same length for a while, creating a trunk. The edge of this oval wavers slightly—there’s no militancy in the exact length of the line, just a need for the line to be what it is. Then the lines begin to shorten, and then the form is whole. There is perfect imperfection. Ten lines down, there is a stutter in the line. Forty-nine lines down, there is a slight gap. Sometimes there is a slight widening of the gap between the lines. Other times, a lessening. As far as I can see, the lines never, ever touch. Writing these words makes me realize the pleasure that could be had writing about the nature of every single line. How to reach that state of commitment, curiosity, clarity, playfulness, purpose. That is this drawing. Caring, but also letting things be. Intense, concentrated work that may boggle the minds of many. And yet free with it. You get the feeling that if she’d screwed up, she’d just screw it up. No matter. It was worth doing, whatever the result. I love periods of coalescence, when artists find their way to what they are going to do. This is what happened to Martin on Coenties Slip. She brought herself to the place where she could finally face the grid. But art is life. Her drawings from the New York years are also like notes on trying to work life out. The line. The length of a line. The spacing. The tension. The balance. The imbalance. Is there resolution. If there is resolution, is it of a magnitude that we could ever even face. This is why draw.

7 Glimcher, 218. 8 Glimcher, 224.

Agnes Martin Untitled, c. 1960s. Ink and graphite on paper, 8 1/16 x 8 15/16 inches (20.5 x 22.7 cm).

George Saunders on Agnes Martin, Julie Mehretu, and Henry Darger

When we look at a work of art, something happens to us. In response to an image (a barn and a young man walking toward it, say) the mind starts making stories. (He is going in there to milk a cow, or hang himself, or meet a lover.) Take away the barn and the young man, leave only the line of the horizon. As long as we can identify it as a horizon, the stories keep coming (the work is “about” distance, or loneliness, and so on). But make that line as straight as possible, eliminate all daisies and anything that might be taken for topology, add many additional parallel lines—what does the mind do with that? Looking at The Great Rose of Evening, I find myself looking for a story in the slight variations in the parallel lines and in the patterns that, once the eye settles in, begin to play across the drawing. My mind is seeking some sort of intentional, imposed meaning. But Martin’s technique seems to disallow this. She didn’t “mean” anything. She was just “doing” something. So, the variations are accidental or, let’s say, procedural: they just occurred, naturally. (Anyone attempting to draw this many parallel lines will enact some pattern of variation.) So, the drawing is a record of Agnes Martin, on a certain day or days, ostensibly drawing straight lines contained by the shape of a triangle with its top truncated. Groups of the lines appear to work together to make bands of darkness that occur almost but not quite, periodically. (I find myself seeking meaning first in the fact of the periodicity, then in the failure of it.) The lines are darker or lighter as we move across them. The eye finds definite smeary patterns of light and dark. I imagine Martin about to draw a line. Then she draws it. And another, and another. Each line is its own line; no two are identical.

Agnes Martin The Great Rose of Evening, 1962. Ink on paper, 8 3/4 x 8 3/4 inches (22.2 x 22.2 cm).

She didn’t will these variations but allowed them. What does it mean, that every line, made by the same hand, is different? We might say that it means: time is real. Each combination of hand/arm/drawing implement/paper/breath/mind yielded a slightly different line. My mind, quieter now from the looking but still seeking meaning, feels the patterns of my own life here, somehow: day after day I have risen, approximately the same person, with the same approximate energy and intention, and gone out into approximately the same world, but look behind me, at the pattern of small variations that makes up “my past.” The drawing might be seen, then, as a sort of retrospective, God’s eye view, of a life—each line representing a year, say. But there I go again, still telling stories. As I continue to look, a phase comes during which my mind begins working at telling smaller stories. Here a dark section “encroaches” on a light section. Towards the bottom of the drawing, the dark and light swaths seem to have reached some sort of “accommodation.” They are, you know, “taking turns.” But this approach doesn’t cohere. These effects are too small and random to have been “intentional” and, for that matter, might be found in any old thing lying around. The mind, like a dog that has gotten no attention for its antics, now sits, goes quiet(er). Soon the drawing just is and there isn’t much I want or need to say about it. All that’s left, is me, perceiving. There I am, perceiving, and there I am, noticing that I am perceiving. The work is serving as a mirror, showing me how my mind works—how it works, always, at extracting stories from what it is seeing (even if no story is there). For me, the highest meaning of The Great Rose of Evening lies in exactly that: the way that one part of my mind looks over at another part of my mind as I am looking at the drawing and notices what that observed part of the mind is doing. And that process might be called “meditation.”

The mind, attempting to make narrative out of an image like this and being thwarted, reveals itself. That is what the mind is always doing: making a story out of what we perceive. (It does this— we learned to do this long ago—so that we might, as a species, go on living.) The power of this drawing for me—the power of all of Mehretu’s work that I have seen—lies in the way that I can feel my mind trying to make stories out of the image. The work seems to want me to do this. Are those or are those not tusks, possibly burning tusks, there on the upper right-hand side? Is that a trail of smoke coming up from that field, which has possibly just been bombed, in which some people are standing? Well, yes and no. The suggestion of topography makes me feel that I am viewing something from above. The general lay of several flag- or hair-like structures, which are blowing to the left, makes me feel that motion is involved. I see an opening to a cave, a few different sets of hoofprints, a single red silk tracer blowing upwards. Or not. These things are what we might call narrative suggestions— they suggest a story but resolutely refuse to make themselves into one, or into one that can be neatly articulated. They make a mood, but even that would be hard to put into words. “Flying over a victory we made with ravage, hooray,” occurs to me, as does “Look how our violence makes an energetic blend with all that nature.” I suspect Mehretu would not approve of either of these summaries. There is more going on here than those one-liners would suggest, and also less—less, in a good way. Who needs an image that tells us exactly what’s happening? What we need are images that make us wonder about just how it is that we might claim to know, in any instance, what’s happening. The power of this image, for me, lies is the way that it exposes our latent meaning-making tendencies. (The eye takes in an image and the mind tries to assign a story to what is seen.) Why might this tendency need exposing? Well, in real life we apply it thoughtlessly, mistaking the meanings we infer for reality itself. This is the essence of violence: I make something small or negligible of you, here in my mind (something less than you are), and then I may do anything to you. But the you I have made in my mind is not as rich or real as the real you.

Julie Mehretu Untitled, 2000. Ink and color pencil on vellum laid on paper, 19 x 24 inches (48.3 x 61 cm).

This drawing causes me to say, to my own mind, “Look, there, you’re doing it again, being so needful of a story, a reductive story, that you are falsifying reality.” Also, selfishly, I find Mehretu’s work useful to my own, in that I feel—well, I see—the sense of play in it, the way that the drawing of one shape seems to lead naturally to the drawing of the next. There’s a wisdom in this, a wisdom that I try to access when I am writing a story. In this drawing, I see the subconscious at work, responding playfully to what it has just done (not attempting to depict, but, rather, exploring), and feel this mode of play to be more truthful and nuanced and ambiguous and abundant than the usual, normative, way of seeing. This drawing is both a form of alertness and a call to be more alert. The fact that we can suddenly, briefly, see how hard we are trying to impose meaning leads us to the great truth that we are always making meaning (are constructing it, not receiving it). That is: meaning is not premade, it does not already exist in the things we see and experience, but, rather, we put it there, we are continually and energetically putting it there. And the response to this knowledge is, or should be, humility, whenever we go to act; that is, kindness. So, this drawing is, to me, a call for kindness.

Certain moments in a narrative are rife with potential (a man in slippery shoes, angry and distracted, approaches a polished ballroom floor, for example). In this drawing, the potential energy is created by the placement of seven innocent-looking young girls, dressed to the nines in Victorian style, into what looks like a raging Civil War battle. It is a sort of cartoonish Guernica, set just before the carnage instead of after it. A little research reveals that this is not, or not only, a commentary on what happens to the innocent of this world in wartime, it is part of a 15,145-page (single-spaced) novel called In the Realms of the Unreal, created over a forty-three year period by the so-called “outsider artist,” Henry Darger, only discovered (by his landlord) shortly before his death in 1973. The girls are “the Vivian girls,” the heroes of this saga. I haven’t read In the Realms of the Unreal, and don’t know the significance of this scene (and don’t believe that the intimated violence comes to pass here) but the image, taken alone, is a beautiful representation of what violence really is: something terribly forceful about to happen to someone not at all prepared for it. Those little girls should be lined up in front of an ice cream shop. They seem to have been teleported over from some different drawing. They are not angry or afraid. The two on the far right seem to be lightly gossiping. The one on the far left might be calling over a waiter. It is as if, because they are facing away from war, there is and could be no war. Like so many people in the twentieth century, they are in for a big surprise. They seem unaware that a cannon is about to be pulled over them. They are from a different time and place; from the town to which the war is moving next; from some distant ideal suburbia where war has no footing. And yet here war comes, sneaking up on them: they appear to be safely behind the lines but, based on the activity on the right-hand side of the drawing, they and their protectors are in the process of being flanked. What I love about this image is the manic, unlikely life in it, the casual insanity of the whole production: that tree in the center, under which someone should be picnicking; the huge explosion in the center of the frame; the ambiguous whitish puffs to the left, which seem to be explosions but also visually double as huge shrubs; the fact that there seem to be only two people (one standing, one shooting from horseback) who have recognized the flanking; that

Henry Darger At Cedernine. Vivian girls ... battle, but refuse to leave the field (recto) At Anna Miria. One of the Vivian girls Violet takes up afternoon sentry duty and frustrates a number of Glandelinian sharp shooters be her own swift and good accuracy of shooting (verso), c. 1940–60. Watercolor, carbon tracing, and graphite on three joined sheets of paper, 23 x 42 1/4 inches (58.4 by 107.3 cm).

tarp-looking structure in the foreground that seems to morph into the lower part of a horse. It is a moment that couldn’t exist in physical reality but the image is a perfect and true poem of a deeper reality, in which the violence of the universe takes no account of the innocence of whoever or whatever might be in its path.

Clare Sestanovich on Joaquín Torres-García, Rashid Johnson, and Edward Ruscha

The Archive When I was a child, there were certain things that I was told to keep to myself. I learned to recognize the look on adults’ faces— a combination of disappointment and discomfort—and then I didn’t even need telling. I kept the things in boxes, and when I was alone, I lifted the lid and considered my sins. • I ate snot. • I imagined that my older brother was dead. He was often called a good kid. When he died, I would be consoled. • I had not forgotten what my parents looked like naked. My mother had enormous nipples. My father had a red penis with black hair around it. • There were messages in the stars, which I was still learning to decode. I stayed awake watching them through my window. • My mother asked me why I was always tired, but I kept the stars in a box. Selfishly, I wanted the messages for myself. • There was a strong, foul smell in my navel. My mother gave me a book that explained the many unpleasant ways I could expect my body to change. When? No one said. The point was to read about it instead of talking about it. The book contained many illustrations of the body, which I thought looked like everything but the body. The uterus and the ovaries together formed an insect’s face. The vulva resembled a poorly drawn map. A brief chapter warned me against old men. Uncles, neighbors, teachers. Especially strangers. This was frightening, and also exciting. I closed the book and turned on my stomach, hands

Joaquín Torres-García Composición, 1930. Ink on paper, 5 1/4 x 3 1/2 inches (13.3 x 8.9 cm).

clasped penitently behind my back, waiting for the staticky feeling in my private parts to diffuse. I would have put this feeling in a box, but it was fast and hard to catch. • I didn’t always eat the snot right away. I saved it, for when I truly craved the taste. • After school, I went through the drawers of the teacher’s desk. I stole one unsharpened pencil and one paper-wrapped tube, which I later identified as a tampon. • I collected the hair from my hairbrush and kept it in a ball under my bed. It seemed like a waste to throw it away. • I was afraid of the clock on the kitchen wall. It had its eye on me. You couldn’t see the eye, but you could feel it. If the long hand was on the three or the six or the nine, the clock’s eye was kind and unjudging. When it pointed at any of the other numbers, the eye became a mean slit. The twelve meant good luck, though not necessarily right away. You might have to wait a long time for your fortune to be revealed. One day, I walked into the kitchen at exactly noon. This made me light-headed: the two hands had become one hand. I looked down at the glass of milk in my hands to avoid looking at the clock— to avoid meeting its gaze. I pictured the third hand, the thinnest one, racing impatiently around the circle, like a horse biting down on the metal in its mouth: faster. There was a split second in which I became aware that I was about to do something terrible. It was as if a match had been struck inside me and I could see, for the first time, the blood-red walls of my body. Then the match went out—a stick figure with a charred head—and the milk and the glass had been thrown to the ground. The glass broke into three large pieces, sharp and dangerous. The bright white milk splashed on the bright white tile and my bright white socks. It was a watery creature, with tentacles that reached across the room, getting longer and longer, indifferent to the obstacles—chair leg, table leg, human leg—that stood in its way. When at last I looked up at the clock, one hand had become two, and the third was still racing. Faster, faster, faster.

My brother did die. By then, he was twenty-nine-years old, which gave everyone the impression that he had been on the cusp of something. In fact, he had simply been on a precipice: he fell off the balcony at someone else’s cocktail party. He died in London, half a day’s drive from the town where we were born. I was far away, in another country, so no one consoled me. I had been on the move: to New York City; to Jupiter, Florida; to a leafy suburb of Atlanta, where an old man had paid me to clean his house and be something pretty to look at. (I wasn’t actually pretty. I had bad skin and bony limbs. But I was young.) I was in North Carolina when the news of the death reached me, on the first day of July. The heat was overpowering and the cicadas were everywhere, a steady drone that could disappear into the background of life until you remembered to hear it—the ominous, collective hum—and then couldn’t believe you’d ever been able to unhear it. I bought a ticket to London, and that night my brother’s corpse appeared in a dream. A taxidermist in a fur coat was draining fluid from the body through a long, winding tube. I thought it would be blood but it was just water, clear and drinkable. When I woke up, I cancelled the flight. I made vague assurances to my mother; I’d be home as soon as I could. I lived in the basement of a house that belonged to a married couple. There was a screened-in porch and a row of hydrangea in the yard. The woman buried rusty nails in the soil to turn the flowers from pink to blue. Her daughter was three years old, fat and high-spirited. The man was not fatherly, so I thought of the daughter as belonging to the woman alone. One night, drunk on the porch, he had told me to avoid marriage at all costs; he’d only agreed to it because his wife had said her clock was ticking. He kissed me with clumsy lips. He didn’t avoid me after that, but he didn’t get drunk on the porch again, and I found myself wishing that he would. In the yard one afternoon, I showed the little girl how to put her thumb over the hose. She shrieked with delight. The water seeped through my shoes and I thought I could feel the man’s gaze on my back. I imagined him standing in the window, the scene perfectly framed: laughter, youth, water catching the light. My shirt was stuck to my skin. The girl and I sprayed the flowers, half pink and half blue, and when I turned around, no one was watching. I made myself buy another plane ticket—non-refundable. The day before I left, the couple planned a barbeque for the fourth of July.

Rashid Johnson Untitled Anxious Red Drawing, 2020. Oil on cotton rag, 30 x 22 inches (76.2 x 55.9 cm).

They invited me, and seemed surprised when I accepted. (I hadn’t mentioned my brother while he was alive, and I didn’t mention him once he was dead.) The woman was making anxious preparations, so I went with the man to pick up ice and charcoal. In the parking lot of the grocery store, in the sudden silence of the turned-off engine and the turned-off radio, I sat there waiting for him to kiss me again. He opened the door and had one leg out of the car before he turned to look at me. “What?” When he realized what I had been expecting, it was not embarrassment but cruel pity that appeared on his face. He smiled in spite of himself. Then he stood up and slammed the door. Inside the store, my whole body burned. The skin on my neck and above my breasts turned mottled red. Each pimple and each pimple scar seared. On the drive home, I cradled a plastic bag of ice against my chest and held another between my legs. How long would it take to go numb? The party was big enough to break into groups, but all the conversations seemed the same. Kids, gardens, sports. The men finished their beers before they had time to go warm in the sun. The women hovered around the bowls of snacks, stealing one potato chip at a time. I didn’t join any of the groups, and I could see that this made everyone uncomfortable. They couldn’t help but glance in my direction. Everyone except the man, who seemed absorbed in the conversation’s dutiful loops. In the kitchen, I found the little girl standing on a chair, surveying an enormous platter of watermelon. Pink juice was dripping off her chin and smeared on her hands. We smiled at each other. I went to the bathroom and changed a tampon that I’d left in for too long. A dark red clot slid out of me, slipping down the side of the toilet like a seal off a rock. It settled near the drain, its crimson tail curled around itself. I flushed, and it vanished. The party I returned to had become a single mass, all the little groups pressed together, alive with some shared urgency. Getting closer, I saw that they were gathered around the girl, whose small body heaved with the effort of vomiting. The vomit was a red splatter all over the ground. “Blood,” someone said. “Blood,” someone repeated. “What does it mean?” the girl’s mother said, crying. The spray of vomit reminded me of the spray of the hose. Bright and hot in the sun. It seemed, just then, like a simple message—

a proof of abundance. There was enough. There was too much. The body laughed and puked, yielding to both joy and pain. I smiled at the clarity of this. The man beside me, a stranger, saw the smile and recoiled. “Don’t just stand there,” he said, breathing beer and heat onto my face. “Aren’t you the babysitter?” “It’s not blood,” I said calmly. The little girl looked up when I spoke. Her mouth was dripping again—that same vivid red. Her eyes were vacant for a moment, but I knew better than to be afraid of this: she had been full, and now was empty, and soon would be full again. The eyes flickered and she was back. She was there. “It’s not blood, it’s fruit.” 67

Edward Ruscha Two Sheets with Whisky Stains, 1973. Gunpowder and Scotch whisky on paper, 14 9/16 x 22 13/16 inches (37 x 57.8 cm).

My brother’s death made my parents rich. The balcony had not been up to code, and the owners were forced to paid a large settlement. When my father offered me a big chunk of the money, I had recently sold several photos of my bare, arched feet to strangers on the Internet. My need was too stark to look at directly, so I declined, and told my parents to buy a bigger house. They went to the suburbs, where the houses were close together, each one a mirror image of the next. (At their old house, the neighbors had been tiny, glowing windows in the distance.) I visited every few years around the holidays, when the days were gray and short. The place wasn’t extravagant, but even so, there were more rooms than two people could fill. One contained nothing but cardboard boxes, which my father referred to as the archive. The labeling system was haphazard, giving little clue as to what was inside. Black marker on one box said Me. On another, You. I had no attachment to the house, and maybe that was why I eventually returned to it. I was forty years old, at the end of a string of unlikely, ill-suited jobs. I had fallen in love with someone online, which meant that when it was over, it was impossible to truly escape it. I spent hours deleting the records of its existence, and more always remained. I considered getting rid of my phone, but I couldn’t summon the courage. My parents were old enough that my return might have been interpreted as generosity. They were smaller than I had remembered. Their lives were organized around meals and afternoon walks and the cleaning woman’s weekly appearance. I tried to remember them in their youth, but all my memories were of me, not them. Over dinner, I asked my parents to reminisce. There were certain stories that could turn into memories; if you heard them often enough, you started to forget that they weren’t actually yours. My mother brightened at the prompt. My father went to the archive to retrieve a photo album. They showed me black and white snapshots of their wedding and honeymoon, lingering over a photo of my mother, hair blown across her face on a beach in Yugoslavia, a country that no longer existed. The last picture in the album had no people in it—just a litter of kittens curled up in a fruit crate— so they ignored it. My mother leaned back in her chair. “When I was your age,” she began. But I was mesmerized by the photo and only half-listening. The kittens were tiny and blind. A pair of hands was visible in the frame,

blurry, as if they were about to lift one of the animals out of the box. I wanted to know what had happened to the cats, but something—fear?—told me not to ask. When I finally looked away, it took me a second to realize that my mother was telling a story about the early years of her marriage. She and my father exchanged a vague, affectionate look. “But you were barely twenty back then,” I said. She turned, giving me the same abstracted smile. “I’m already forty.” “Yes,” she said, the smile flickering momentarily into a frown. “That’s right.” I couldn’t fall asleep that night, or the next one. The third time I found myself awake, I got up and pressed my forehead against the cold, dark window. There was too much light pollution to see the stars. On the fourth night, I stayed under the blankets and masturbated with the same distracted guilt that I remembered from my youth, the same smell that I tried and failed to rub off my fingers. After a week of sleeplessness, I considered being productive. When I had exhausted my short list of tasks, I found myself standing in the archive after midnight. The boxes were stacked as high as my chin and they were too heavy to move. I squeezed between them, finding my way to the ones closest to the window. In the light from a streetlamp, I could see my name and my brother’s, written in my father’s barely legible scrawl. It had been years since I had seen our names together like that, linked by an ampersand’s excessive twists and turns. I was suddenly very hot. I opened the window. The quiet in the neighborhood was total. It wasn’t peaceful. A dark, nimble shape ran across the top of the neighbor’s fence. When I turned back to the room, I saw one box that looked much newer than the others, its cardboard stiff and unwarped— unlabeled. I tore the tape off in long, satisfying strips. Inside were eight bricks of paper, neatly packed and still in their plastic. Unyellowed, untouched. I ripped one open and a few pages fluttered in the draft from the window, as if considering taking flight, then thinking better of it. I slid down onto the floor, the stack of paper held tightly against my chest. All the boxes, all the me’s and you’s, loomed above me. I imagined them filled to the brim with blank pages. I leaned against a heavy box, dense with nothing. I must have fallen asleep like that. It wasn’t quite morning— the starless sky was somehow both black and orange—when I woke up. There was paper fanned out in my lap, clean and blank and bright, brighter than anything I’d seen in a long time.

Brenda Shaughnessy on Berlinde De Bruyckere, Ursula von Rydingsvard, and Torkwase Dyson

One of a years-long, multi-media, genre-crossing series, aren’t we all? This one, 2-dimensional, a study, a page, barely an object, barely more than speech in the air, a blur, script on paper, existing fragile low and shallow with its corners, yet grasping for the space I occupy. The other “Romeu My Deers” stick out of the wall, grabbing into the room from the other side of the Deer-mirror, death-lamped. The others have their own bodies to inhabit. Don’t they all? Yet they search mine out. Yours too. His. Others are hungry, others need territory too. This page-bound body is tampered-with with hands, hands withdrawn, body left half-turned, tuned-in, half stood, misunderstood hardwood, with no hands, good regenerative genitals as if to say: We meet again. We: meat, again? And again, we come. We return. Buttressing an arch through which we are welcomed. We. By “we” I mean “me.” In this way the self lives forever.

Berlinde de Bruyckere Romeu ‘my deer,’ 2010. Graphite and opaque and transparent watercolor on paper, 12 5/8 x 17 7/8 inches (32.1 x 45.4 cm).

Me at work Meatwork. A done deal. Cooked. Flesh meat hard with flexion, opening to the murderous air, inside the body air must not flood itself, or death, again, seated for every meal. Torso pointing up as if Prometheus awaiting carrion birds to begin uploading him, aching to be hung from the sky. There’s so little freedom in the circulatory system, there is no flying, only the hunger to offer oneself up to whatever is hungry. To whatever smells death for its living. Amazing angles, peaceful pieces, gestural suggested musculature as speculative architecture: a portrait of a torso pinned in place by limbs. The body is a pot brimming over a fire—foot and knee on fire, head in the air, arched back in offering penile wood vaginal water bending back body—this viscous process. Prominent, frontal, in deepest hue, is penis, it’s true the dark pink taint splits in two, splotched vulvar with vagina viewed wholly as X-ray. I am surprised by the body restarting itself, the mind relieved of the total burden and signaling, through the body, that audible relief. Relief also visible in the body’s planes and hills, geography as much as any occupied territory. And in the background, presupposed but unseen, your hand moving swiftly to strike me, scoop me affectionately, show me where to go, or supposing, superimposing, shaking, waving goodbye. But I keep looking at you, so close to opening.

The hand had a soft surface with firm, padded hills on one side and hard longish seawalls on the other. Opening this hand meant pouring out all the moves that made so many pictures and paintings —those portraits and portals—and looking at the spout, the route. Where, on its way, did an idea become a physical object? At what point in the creative process? When thought became action, was it in the first moment of action that thought gained a materiality of sorts, a seedliness?

Or does an idea retain the essence of thinker-spirit as long as it’s being thought, thought through, and throughout the making process, and when the making is finally over, only THEN does the idea, now something more than just the idea, dump the product itself plus the making process, into the product itself. The made thing then becoming itself the moment it’s finished. No that can’t be right. It has to be the first, right? Thing becomes thing as soon as it begins to become itself. No government criminalizes abandoned art projects, even though the promise or even spark of independent life might be there. The artist’s hand is always open, even if it’s holding something. Especially so. It has to be. The artist’s hand guides the horizon of seeing to the very edge, overlapping, even layering the way you must to cover something completely. Feathers cover tightly to keep the line of liquid out, wicking it away. Birds can’t get their skin wet or something? It’s a tight weave— waterproof like skin is, not like hair, which is about warmth. Warm skin, cold feathers. Cold weather, warm clothes. New form, old function. Decades ago, the much older woman, an artist, took my arm and said “Look at this strong little arm” and marveled, her hand stroking me

Ursula von Rydingsvard Loss of Feathers, 1995. Ink and burn marks on paper, 10 1/2 x 7 inches (26.7 x 17.8 cm).

fingertip to elbow. I was embarrassed. I thought she was envying my young body. Many years later, now that I envy my own young body, I realize she wasn’t coveting mine but finally claiming her own. We held hands, looked at each other’s. Turned them over and around. Feathery age spots, neater freckles, blue ridges and knuckle dimples, wrist wrinkles that go across. Blood traversing its own known way and never crossing another’s.

She said you couldn’t be an artist and a mother back then. It was impossible, then suddenly unsure, she said well impossible for her. Being a mother, she never wanted to. Lucky she didn’t have to. Her arms were for art. Her hands, her fingers in mine, which would make art too into a future that was done being hers. That had transferred to me. The idea becomes art, alive, the moment of conception. The eventual object may only be a pinprick at that moment, and it may never develop. Or it might. The process of making—dissolving idea into body, body into thing, where thing emerges, made. That one feather, lost, to the bird, on its many-minded journey, is never missed. Another feather finds its place. But the art was the only one of its kind. And I continue on into a future which won’t be mine the way her hand in mine was mine.

Who Sings Whose Songs? —after Torkwase Dyson’s Sing Who will decide once and for all: half empty or half full? Will it be left to the artist—(is it right for an artist? Is it the right of an artist?) to weigh and lay to rest the question of half, of division, of border, of definition, of edge? Is that the artist’s realm? That power, that naming force: semi is a half-curl, hemi is a cup, demi a reduction. But half of an infinite form is more than can ever be drained drunk diminished or determined. Must we trust the artist to give us perspective, to give us proper proportions? Ask an artist at the dinner party and put everybody on edge. It doesn’t go over well. Doesn’t go down easy. Leave the table to its surface dimensions, service, salt. Turn your face, an eclipse in cups, a rim aswim in a stemless wineglass. I’m glass. See through me. Drink the moon, your reflection, your bottomless river. A swarm aswirl as well. Where else does gravity lead if not to the grave? Why does water bead up on not wet what can’t be bathed? Who can tell me if this is:

An architect’s drawing of spherical ice on whiskey.

A cross section of a skipped stone mid-skip?

A dream of taking a bath.

Torkwase Dyson Sing, 2020. Gouache and ink on paper, 16 x 12 inches (40.6 x 30.5 cm).

Whale approach.

You, Just Barely Touching My Arm.

Noted: Tiny triangle of intensity in the corner is actually the aperture, and we, the observer, will be in this picture. Noted: Tiny corner triangle pointing away (uppish) from large circle half-submerged.

This thing a bit too beat to sing from its Cubist face.

With eye that closes from the bottom.

How are you holding up? It makes me feel free, to look at this. Questions of construct, boundaries, gradations, levels, areas, shapes, tones, dimensions… are all worked out for me, who looks freely at the artist’s work.

Who decides what displaces who? When you came in the cup was full so who sloshed out when you came in and when did you decide to come and push who down? How are you holding up?

Precise angles exist already everywhere in this wet air, each new cup and shelf and ridge/edge/wedge/selvage is salvaged from an eternal original mined for usable dimensions.

Lines and curves recognize each other, like long lost. Populations displace people—once places held space for people, now only for a populace who can afford popular places— replacing people with populace & allowing populations to use places to replace people & make places impossible to afford so the people can’t possibly return, long lost.

Fingerprints on a glass look inked in blood, the iron rusting on its own home fluid: nothing can be kept out for good. Glass looks slick but its made of: many small staggered fissures, each little dagger cuts its bit of air— bit your tip like a mosquito, leaving a tiny blue pool under the skin. How rare is something just entirely itself. Not even water is. How rare is something just entirely itself. Not even water is. A fingerprint is unique, yes, but now it’s used for ID and not its ridges & whorls, for which there is no standard of beauty. Everything’s used is different than everything is of use. Who makes the call—what is in/what is out— whoever has the most objective sight line?

The artist’s eye sees past vision, past even the notion of vision or the glimmer of the notion— but gives voice to motion. Who is on edge, in the drink, sink or swim, waving, draining, drowning, drawing, setting, settling, sunk? Who is singing, who sung?

Tracy K. Smith on Chris Ofili

Something in Me Hurries to Sing Praises Like God, he appears. Hair and beard enshroud him like fog atop a mountain. I ask his eyes to graze mine— Debt of seeking, being seen, of bleat, breathe, pulse ache, born as we are into every age. He doesn’t stir. Faces future. Still, something in me hurries to sing praises: shudder of benediction, cough of awe. And that dip of the chin known simply as the nod.

Water, Color Here she is again before me as if through the haze of time, she in hers, I in mine. Late-day light eddies and sways as if through the haze of time. Why is it history I seek to see? Late-day light eddies and sways around her, not me. From a distance I see it is history I seek. What else would rise up to crest and break on her, on me? From this distance her shoulders transmit laughter. Will it rise, crest, break into the pain I’ve been taught all of them shouldered? Laughter rings her eyes. No trace of the pain I’ve been taught to fear. Liquid color ripples off, wends back to ring her eyes. No trace of burden, but might. Liquid color ripples off, wends back as something lucent, black, a message unburdened by its own might: One sun sets on all of time. It is the lucent message Blackness brings. Here she is again before me while the one sun sets on all of time, she in hers, I in mine.

Chris Ofili Afromuses (Couple), 2005. Watercolor and pencil on paper, 19 x 12 1/2 inches (48.3 x 31.8 cm) each.

Craig Morgan Teicher on Willem de Kooning, Antony Gormley, and Bruce Nauman

ABSTRACTIONS I just didn’t want to think about anything in particular. Are those cave drawings flashing across the page behind the elegant mayhem? Someone who once wanted to hurt me—he was jealous, didn’t think I belonged there, and drunk—said I’d need a PhD to understand him. I just want to feel the lines, their sweep and cornered inward curl. Not my father, not my son, just a lively blackish box hidden within which is nothing, just the space on the paper awaiting a mark. We have enough money, finally, for once. It’s not that. There’s a pair of fuzzy eyes, a dog’s fat, wet lips, there toward the upper left, savagely angry. Someone strange has come to the door; our good girl is just trying to protect us. She is a good dog—I believe that. On the bottom right, look at that tiny seal man walking laboredly over a woman’s heel, having just traversed the rest of her leg. Or is he some kind of sentient plant? No. I have been her kind. There’s a cardinal, or a woodpecker at the middle left edge. And an undersea beast in the upper right. I failed to close my cartooning eyes and open my inner windows. I don’t even like my father. But who can help liking his father? I want to be held like a child again. I’m sure I always will, old, longing to be swaddled. I wish to live amongst directions and gestures. In heaven, we’ll call one another by where we’ve been, where we seem to be going. Art is meant to suspend the story, or some art is. My dad’s name is Art. Short for Arthur. One old friend, and only that one, calls him Artie. Drunk, she began yelling loneliness at my stepbrother’s

Willem de Kooning Abstractions, c. 1950s. Sapolin enamel on diagram paper, 18 1/8 x 24 inches (46 x 61 cm).

wedding. Art is meant to unpin us from our context, let the wind take us away. I want away. I’d be sad not to come back. I’d miss everyone so much. But I’d be busy, I think, with my directions and gestures, and all the names would have fallen off of everything by then anyway. This isn’t a suicide note, nor even a wish list. I want to be alive—more than anything. I want to be here if this is all I get, alone or not. There’s the bent woman, the cardinal cocked and ready, the foaming dog, the wet whirligig, the crossbow and the horse, seal man, those ink-soaked cotton ball eyes, the ever-diminishing glow of the paper sunset.

SPACES

1 Your new Breathing Room 1 comes fully stocked with oxygen-rich air stationed in various configurations and on a series of intersecting planes in order to accommodate almost any orientation in which the breather may be found. Luxury antique wardrobe, set of two painted Moroccan shelves. Recently treated for termites. Spacious intersecting and concentric rectangles welcome Eastern light each morning. Dinner is served promptly at six. Duck boots optional. Breathers will find plenty of opportunities for tombstone rubbing as evening falls. Here lies a man of tender hart [sic] unto the poor. Act now and we’ll include the Football Phone for the same low price. Constructed by hand using original thin lines in gray and greenish sourced from Antony Gormley, your Breathing Room 1 comes fully assembled, in as much as that term is applicable. Beyond here lies nothing. Call for more information and to learn about new features slated for release with Breathing Room 2. 2 I was in search of something not-boring but also soothing, like the sun-dappled tide bowls cresting atop the surface of a large lake, like the sound of crickets, which seems to go on forever but must stop eventually, most likely when I am sleeping. Finally, I found myself criss-crossing a room, etching shapes into the air like a figure skater, except the blade was my head. I found myself shaping the space into smaller, eye-level rooms, which hovered and intersected, staining my gaze. I was both confined and freed by this exercise. I was able to shake loose some of the sadness clinging to my ribs. Of course it settled back into place each time I stood still. So I kept moving. Eventually, like a rug upon which someone has paced for a generation, the very air developed tracks corresponding to my routes. This all began a long time ago. I’m almost certain it’s Wednesday now. 3 “The piano would fit nicely over there. And the wagon wheel table could go in the middle. You could put your desk there on the left.” “I’d like to put my desk by the window.” “But that’s where we’re putting the piano. Put your desk near the other wall, a few feet out, facing the window.”

Antony Gormley Breathing Room I, 2005. Carbon and casein on paper, 20 1/2 x 30 3/4 inches (52 x 78 cm).

“Then it will take up the whole room. This isn’t meant to be an office.” “Maybe we don’t need the piano, or the desk. Just the table, and maybe a hearty plant to place atop it.” “Where are we going to put the TV?” “Not in here!” “No, I guess not. I don’t have much of an imagination for spaces. I’d prefer to move things around once we get there.” “I know, you always say that, but we don’t know what we have until we know where it will go. Maybe we need more furniture. Or maybe we have too much.” “I’m going to make a sandwich and then go back to working on the hole out back.” “Don’t you think it’s deep enough?” “Not yet. You’d still have to kneel to fit comfortably.” “What about the water cooler? Could we fit that in if we take out your desk?” “You know how I feel about that water cooler.” “I do. It’s just that I’m trying to think of everyone’s needs. I could use a little more help in that department from you.” “I know. I’m not Superman.” “And I am?” “I didn’t say that.” “Good. Thank you. I’m going to lie down.” “Don’t forget about 8:15.” “I won’t. I never do. Do I?” “No, you don’t.”

STUDY This study for one of Bruce Nauman’s “Variable Lights” installations depicts two, perhaps three rooms seen from the near end of one, at a slightly raised perspective. Diagonal lines slanting toward the upper left describe this near wall, which terminates sharply at the left edge of the piece of paper. This is an example of how the medium itself can determine the form of the art. By which I mean that if the piece of paper had been wider, perhaps another room entirely would have been described in the drawing — Untitled (Study for “Untitled (Variable Lights)”…) is a drawing by Bruce Nauman, a study for one of his large scale installations pieces, which utilize various forms of lighting to illuminate large spaces. The study depicts two rooms, maybe three, and there’s all sorts of scribbling and cross hatching at the back and I have no idea what it means. — Bruce Nauman’s Untitled (Study for “Untitled (Variable Lights)”…) is a drawing in graphite done in 1972 in preparation for one of the sculptor’s installations. The drawing depicts two rooms. There are absolutely no dinosaurs depicted in either of them, which is a real bummer. — There are absolutely no dinosaurs in them, which is a real bummer Untitled (Study for “Untitled (Variable Lights)”…) — I don’t know for which specific project this study was done in preparation, or even whether any project for which this study formed some part of the basis was ever realized. It almost looks like there’s a third room way in the back there, but that’s an illusion. I think it has to do with the way the wall we as the viewers are facing—shit, I think I forgot to mention that all the walls are transparent, which they are … though you’re probably looking at the drawing right now, so you don’t need me to describe it. — In Untitled (Study for “Untitled (Variable Lights)”…), Bruce Nauman scales new aesthetic heights—horizontal ones…

Bruce Nauman Untitled (Study for “Untitled (Variable Lights)” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art), 1972. Graphite on paper, 23 1/4 x 29 1/8 inches (59 x 74 cm).

— This is the house of Bedlam. This is the man that lies in the house of Bedlam. This is the text to go in the book that includes Untitled (Study for “Untitled (Variable Lights)”…) by Bruce Nauman. — The problem, the real problem, is that I can’t focus. — This study for one of Bruce Nauman’s “Variable Lights” installations depicts two, perhaps three rooms seen from the near end of one, at a slightly raised perspective. Diagonal lines slanting toward the upper left describe this near wall, which terminates sharply at the left edge of the piece of paper. This is an example of how the medium itself can determine the form of the art. Nauman’s large scale installation works utilize various forms of lighting to illuminate large interior spaces. The drawing depicts two rooms and includes the sculptor’s annotations of various aspects of the drawing.

Contributors

Hilton Als began contributing to The New Yorker in 1989, writing pieces for “Talk of the Town.” He became a staff writer in 1994, a theater critic in 2002, and chief theater critic in 2013. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing, a George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism, the American Academy’s Berlin Prize, and the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism for his work at The New Yorker in 2017. He is the author of the critically acclaimed anthology of essays White Girls, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the winner of the Lambda Literary Award in 2014, and is a Professor at Columbia University’s Writing Program. Jennifer Krasinski is a writer, critic, and the editorial director of Artforum digital. She is a frequent contributor to Bookforum, and formerly the art columnist for the Village Voice. She has contributed essays to catalogs on artists Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys, critic Jill Johnston, and the theater artist Reza Abdoh, as well as others. She was a recipient of a 2013 Creative Capital / Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. Ben Marcus is the author of several books, including The Flame Alphabet, The Age of Wire and String, and Notes from the Fog. His work has appeared in The Paris Review, Granta, The New Yorker, and Conjunctions. Among his honors are a Whiting Writers Award, a Creative Capital Award, a Cullman fellowship from the New York Public Library, and a Guggenheim fellowship. Since 2000 he has taught in the School of the Arts at Columbia University.

Nick Mauss is an artist based in New York. He has presented exhibitions at Kunsthalle Basel (2020); the Whitney Museum of American Art (2018); Triennale di Milano (2018); and Museo Serralves, Porto (2017), among others, and has participated in group exhibitions at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; S.M.A.K., Gent; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; and the Museum Ludwig, Cologne. Mauss’s writing has appeared in artists’ monographs as well as in journals including October, Octopus Notes, Texte zur Kunst, and Artforum. Charlie Porter is a writer whose book What Artists Wear was published in the U.K. by Penguin in 2021, and will be published in the US by W.W. Norton in 2022. He has written for publications such as Financial Times, New York Times, British Vogue, The Guardian, i-D, and Luncheon. George Saunders is the author of Lincoln in the Bardo, winner of the 2017 Man Booker Prize. His most recent book is A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, a series of essays on the Russian short story. He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Syracuse University. Clare Sestanovich is an editor at The New Yorker and the author of the short-story collection Objects of Desire, pubished by Knopf. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Harper’s, and Electric Literature.

Brenda Shaughnessy is the author of five poetry collections, most recently The Octopus Museum (Knopf), a New York Times 2019 Notable Book. Our Andromeda (2012) was a finalist for the Griffin International Prize, the PEN/Open Book Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Prize. She received a 2018 Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a 2013 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. Her second book, Human Dark with Sugar, won the James Laughlin Award. She is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Rutgers University-Newark and lives with her family in New Jersey. Tracy K. Smith is a Pulitzer Prizewinning poet, memoirist, editor, translator, and librettist. She served as the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States from 2017–19, during which time she spearheaded American Conversations: Celebrating Poetry in Rural Communities with the Library of Congress, launched the American Public Media podcast The Slowdown, and edited the anthology American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time. Smith is the author, most recently, of the poetry collection Such Color: New and Selected Poems, and co-translator (with Changtai Bi) of My Name Will Grow Wide like a Tree: Selected Poems of Yi Lei. Craig Morgan Teicher is the author of several books, most recently the poetry collection Welcome to Sonnetville, New Jersey. He was awarded a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation in 2021.

Board of Directors

Staff

Co-Chairs Andrea Crane Amy Gold

Laura Hoptman Executive Director

Treasurer Stacey Goergen Secretary Dita Amory Frances Beatty Adler Valentina Castellani Brad Cloepfil Harry Tappan Heher Priscila Hudgins Rhiannon Kubicka Iris Z. Marden Adam Pendleton David M. Pohl Nancy Poses Eric Rudin Almine Ruiz-Picasso Jane Dresner Sadaka David Salle Curtis Talwst Santiago Joyce Siegel Amy Sillman Galia Meiri Stawski Rirkrit Tiravanija Barbara Toll Jean-Edouard van Praet d’Amerloo Waqas Wajahat Isabel Stainow Wilcox Linda Yablonsky Emeritus Eric Rudin

Olga Valle Tetkowski Deputy Director Rebecca Brickman Director of Development Aimee Good Director of Education and Community Programs Allison Underwood Director of Communications Claire Gilman Chief Curator Rosario Güiraldes Associate Curator Isabella Kapur Curatorial Associate Kate Robinson Registrar Dan Gillespie Operations Manager Tiffany Shi Development Manager Kara Nandin Digital Content Coordinator Rebecca DiGiovanna Assitant to the Office of the Executive Director Nadia Parfait Visitor Services Associate Lucia Zezza Bookstore Manager Mark Zubrovich Visitor Services Associate

All artworks pictured in this volume are from the Jack Shear Collection and have been reproduced by permission of the individual artists and/or their representatives. Additional image caption and copyright information is as follows: Cover Francis Picabia, Transparence (Transparency), c. 1930–33. Pencil, color pencil, and ink on paper, 14 1/4 x 12 1/4 inches (36.2 x 31.1 cm). © 2021 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. Page 8 (clockwise from top left) Vija Celmins, Galaxy (Hydra), 1974. Graphite on acrylic ground on paper, 12 x 14 7/8 inches (30.5 x 37.8 cm). © Vija Celmins, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery; Jan Toorop, Meditatie (Meditation), 1921. Black crayon on paper, 11 3/8 x 9 inches (28.9 x 22.9 cm); Adolph Friedrich Erdmannvon Menzel, Studie einer sitzenden Dame mit Hut, Schirm und Geldbörse (Study of a Seated Woman with a Hat, Umbrella and Coin Purse), 1880. Graphite on paper, 8 x 5 inches (20.3 x 12.7 cm); Stanley Whitney, Untitled, 2020. Crayon and graphite on Japanese paper, 12 1/2 x 17 inches (31.8 x 43.2 cm); Lee Bontecou, Untitled, 1968. Soot, graphite with opaque watercolor, and white chalk? on paper, 28 1/2 x 22 1/2 inches (72.4 x 57.2 cm); Elaine de Kooning, Portrait of Bill, 1950. Brown ink on paper, 8 1/2 x 11 inches (21.6 x 27.9 cm). © Elaine de Kooning Trust; Alice Neel, Requiem, 1928. Watercolor on paper, 9 x 12 inches (22.9 x 30.5 cm). © The Estate of Alice Neel, Courtesy The Estate of Alice Neel and David Zwirner.

Page 25 © 2021 Estate of George Grosz / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY Page 31 © 2021 Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Page 32 © Christian Schad Stiftung Aschaffenburg / ARS, New York, 2021 Page 35 © 2021 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn Page 37 © ARS / Comité Cocteau, Paris / ADAGP, Paris 2021 Page 43 © Ray Johnson Estate Page 48 © Estate of George Paul Thek Pages 51 and 53 © Agnes Martin Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Page 68 © Ed Ruscha Page 88 © 2021 The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Page 91 © Antony Gormley Page 94 © 2021 Bruce Nauman/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Ways of Seeing: Three Takes on the Jack Shear Drawing Collection Organized by Claire Gilman, The Drawing Center’s Chief Curator, with curators Jack Shear, Arlene Shechet, and Jarrett Earnest, with the assistance of Isabella Kapur, Curatorial Associate The Drawing Center October 2, 2021–February 20, 2022 Generous funding for Ways of Seeing: Three Takes on the Jack Shear Drawing Collection is provided by Kathy and Richard Fuld, Agnes Gund, the Low Road Foundation, Matthew Marks, Christie’s, Emily Rauh Pulitzer, Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder, and Pace Gallery.

This is number 146 of the Drawing Papers, a series of publications documenting The Drawing Center’s exhibitions and programs and providing a forum for the study of drawing. Editor Joanna Ahlberg Design Dandelion / Peter Ahlberg Printing & Binding Shapco Printing, Minneapolis About the Type This book is set in Publico Text (Roman, Italic, and Bold). It is part of the Publico Collection, designed by Ross Milne, Christian Schwartz, Paul Barnes, Kai Bernau, and Greg Gazdowicz, and released incrementally by Commercial Type in 2009, 2013, and 2014. This book also uses Plain (Regular and Italic), which was designed by François Rappo and released by Optimo Type Foundry in 2014. ISBN 978-0-942324-42-6 © 2021 The Drawing Center All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without written permission from The Drawing Center.

Ways of Seeing: Writings on Drawings from the Jack Shear Collection Published on the occasion of the exhibition Ways of Seeing: Three Takes on the Jack Shear Drawing Collection, this anthology takes as its subject what contributor Nick Mauss calls the “singular fluency between drawing and writing.” Building on the exhibition’s themes of perception and personal vision, nine renowned writers were asked to reflect on drawings of their choosing from Shear’s eclectic collection. The group of authors, comprising a fashion writer, an artist, an art historian, as well as poets and fiction writers, offer us poignant and insightful stories, poems, personal ruminations, and visual analyses of objects from across countries and centuries. The result is a unique marriage of visual art and literature that testifies to the uncontainable power of art to make meaning over and over and over again.

Contributions by Jennifer Krasinski Nick Mauss Ben Marcus Charlie Porter George Saunders Clare Sestanovich Brenda Shaughnessy Tracy K. Smith Craig Morgan Teicher Introduction by Hilton Als

ISBN 978-0942324426

780942

324426