Drawing has a genealogy.

Drawing has a genealogy, indicates MOMA guest curator Laura Hoptman: Variously appreciated and dismissed in different periods, the medium has played a changing part for artists and audiences to go on foot along with the changing words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] followings of art production. For example, she asserts that Florentine connoisseurs prized the Renaissance masters' primi pensieri, while "presentation drawings" were highly valued in the eighteenth hundred years Fast-forwarding a couple centuries, she run overs us we've witnessed another significant shift in just the past not many decades. When Conceptualism and Minimalism came to the fore, drawing became valued for its relative ephemerality, almost always associated with the artist's gesture--with "making" or, to use a loaded expression with "process," regardless of whether the artist's action scarred the land or strok the paper. Then in the '90 a recent breed of draftsman appeared onward the scene: Artists conceived and execut drawings that stood alone as finished, autonomous works of art. While "drawing" was forward ce called a verb by way of Richard Serra, Hoptman notes--using the artist's celebrated 1977 remark as a straw man in united essay accompanying the show--today it is better contemplation of as a noun. And to illustrate her case, in "Drawing Now: Eight Propositions," she has arrangeed good-looking work by twenty-six contemporary artists in subordination to eight rubrics, declaring a kind of taxonomy for our moment

Scholars may find these historical generalizations somewhat uneven but even more curious was the exhibition's historicism. For all their announced empirical relationship to today, the various propositions appeared to take their catchwords from art history, even charting an unspoken chapter-by-chapter chronological course between the walls of the galleries. The show expanded with massive, mottled renderings of Alpine timbers by Ugo Rondinone; in a low-lying vitrine were Russell Crotty's equally immense landscapes. The proposition here, "Science and Art, Nature and Artifice," evok more [i]or[/i] less of the earliest significant instances of scientific drawing--done from nature by way of say, Leonardo da Vinci. In the nearest room, the rococo patterns of Laura Owens and Chris Ofili appeared beneath "Ornament." (Think Watteau as the match for their decorative forays.) Viewers then passed between the walls of sections titled "Architectural Drafting" and "Visionary Architecture," where Julie Mehretu and Paul Noble appeared (shades of Piranesi?). undivided could discover the fantas ies of William Blake reborn in Matthew Ritchie's lengthy horizontal sheets in the "Cosmogenies" section. Fast sketches at Elizabeth Peyton and Graham Little's brilliantly boreal drawings made after advertisements in "Fashion and Likeness" bring to mind a nineteenth-century artist like Baudelaire's favorite, Constantin stays A final room included Shahzia Sikander and Kara Walker in "Vernacular Illustration," and Barry McGee and Takashi Murakami in "Comics and Animation," with this duo's interests breaking the high-low barrier--punctuating the indicate in effect, with postmodernist pastiche.

"Drawing Now," in other words, was adjusted in the heavy cloak of "Then." Individual pieces, however execut were placed in subordination to a thematic lock, made the exclusive right of single ideas. And to this time nothing put so much stres upon Hoptman's taxonomy as the pieces forward view. Ritchie, for example, appeared strangely neutered when considered without concern to comic-book culture. The decorative quality of Chris Ofili's work was equaled by means of that of Sikander's, yet the same was categorized as ornament and the other as vernacular tillage eliminating any chance for poetic correspondence that might have arisen from one side their juxtaposition. Only on a answer visit to the gallery, in fact, did I realize that the pieces in "Vernacular Illustration" and "Comics and Animation" were in subordination to separate categories, so strong was the nearly claustrophobic intimacy among works (the best of which may have been a stunning grid of watercolors by way of Kai Althoff). Conversely, the beautifully dement libido of John Currin's takes forward the old masters seemed at o dd with the otherwise chic display of work below the wide-ranging theme of "Fashion and Likeness" (a title that would have Baudelaire rolling across in his grave). The categories were not mutually exclusive and did not articulate a clear rationale for their being. The fact that category names differ from catalogue to wall verse only adds to the confusion, suggesting that Hoptman herself is still coming to denominations with her terms.

Which leads to another troubling aspect of "Drawing Now": in what way much of this work is uniquely drawing? The question is annoying (it ought to be beside the point at this juncture) if it be not that in light of Hoptman's opening gambit for drawing as a medium as oppos to a technique, it must be asked. with equal reason many works were collages, paintings onward paper, or photographs that "drawing" have the appearanceed dispersed among media, continually veering into metaphor and begging for the kind of curatorial interrogation that painting has received lately in displays around the world. In her essay, Hoptman actually alludes, finally, to this expansive dynamic in painting and other media, saying that drawing similarly should nor "be characterized by dint of old criteria having to do with form, finish, and manner of execution." even now given the premise of drawing as a noun (and its suppos "finished" quality that arose during the '90s) and in the absence of any specific recently made known criteria, the assertion seems part fig leaf, part haze machine.