Why Draw? Richard Serra.

You might also like to know what William Kentridge, Jim Dine, and Mauricio Lasansky have had to say about drawing.

Why Draw? William Kentridge.

drawing from Felix in Exile, William Kentridge
charcoal, pastel, and gouache, 120 x 160 cm


Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev - You've often said that everything you do is drawing, and that you see drawing as a model for knowledge.

William Kentridge - What does it mean to say that something is a drawing - as opposed to a fundamentally different form, such as a photograph? First of all, arriving at the image is a process, not a frozen instant. Drawing for me is about fluidity. There may be a vague sense of what you're going to draw but things occur during the process that may modify, consolidate or shed doubts on what you know. So drawing is a testing of ideas; a slow-motion version of thought. It does not arrive instantly like a photograph. The uncertain and imprecise way of constructing a drawing is sometimes a model of how to construct meaning. What ends in clarity does not begin that way.




Christov-Bakargiev - So although you said at the beginning of this interview that for you drawing can become a self-centred process, drawing does not justify itself per se.

Kentridge - No, but I believe that in the indeterminacy of drawing, the contingent way that images arrive in the work, lies some kind of model of how we live our lives. The activity of drawing is a way of trying to understand who we are or how we operate in the world. It is in the strangeness of the activity itself that can be detected judgement, ethics and morality. Trains of thought that seem to be going somewhere but can't quite be brought to a conclusion. If there were to be a very clear, ethical or moral summing-up in my work, it would have a false authority.

from an interview in William Kentridge published by Phaidon

Shelf-Portrait

There are two things in my life that are slightly incompatible:

1. I love books, and certain books I like to keep in as fine a condition as possible, and
2. I have a two-year old daughter.

My daughter is absolutely amazing, the light of my life, but she's really hard on books. She loves 'em, but her love is often shown in more physically demanding ways than is good for the health of the book.

We have bookshelves all over the house, and none of them are safe from our energetic toddler. Except one. I have one very high shelf over my computer in my studio that is, at this point, toddler-proof. So, over time, the books that I most want to preserve have migrated to that shelf. This hasn't become a place for my favorite literature, as most of that is in paperback form, and I figure that paperbacks are built to self-destruct over time anyway, so there's no sense in being too protective of them. What has accumulated there is a few of the art catalogs in the house that I just couldn't stand to see lose their dust jackets or get dog-eared.

The thought struck me that, in grabbing things that I wanted to keep out of the baby's hands, over time I've created a self-portrait of sorts. Sort of accidentally answering one of those "if you could take such-and-such to a desert island, which would you take" type questions. So here, for what it's worth, is the list of those books, a window into those things that I like to look at and want to keep, a "shelf-portrait".

Light and Lens by Robert Hirsch. This one and the linocut exhibition catalog are sort of oddballs in that my own work is reproduced in them, and so they maybe aren't as much a portrait of my tastes as an example of my vanity.
William Kentridge
The Art of William Steig
Drawings of Jim Dine, an exhibition catalog from a show at the National Gallery of Art
Gregory Gillespie, an exhibition catalog from a show of his late work at the Forum Gallery
International Triennial of Graphic Arts Prague 2004, the aforementioned exhibition catalog containing a few of my linocuts.
In the Shadow of No Towers by Art Spiegleman. This is the first "artist's book" up there.
Brucke, a catalog of woodcuts, with some of the essays for individual prints written by an art-historian friend of mine, Tina Yarborough, who is a professor at the small college in Georgia where I used to teach.
Gregory Gillespie, an exhibition catalog from the Hirschorn from 1978
The Art of Richard Diebenkorn
Poetry Speaks
Drawings by David Hughes. You should visit his website.
The Book of Shrigley. You should visit his website, too.
The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo, of course, but illustrated beautifully by David Hughes.
The Essential Joseph Beuys
Anselm Kiefer, an exhibition catalog from the show at the Philadelphia Museum in 1988. Some day I should tell you about the women wearing white gloves who were turning the pages of his gigantic sand covered books, and how their gloves turned progressively browner and browner, and how amusing I thought that was, and how incredible I thought that exhibition was. Well, I guess I just did.
Anselm Kiefer, a catalog from Marian Goodman Gallery
Arnulf Rainer, from a great show I saw in Chicago
Kleinzueg, an artist's book by Arnulf Rainer, by far the coolest wedding present we received.
Walter Pichler
Artist's Books: A Critical Anthology and Sourcebook
John Virtue: London Paintings, a catalog from a beautiful show we saw at the British Museum in New Haven. Ironically, considering the reasoning behind why this book is on this shelf, this was the first show that my tiny daughter ever attended with us. She slept through the whole thing.
Extraordinary Exhibitions: Broadsides from the Collection of Ricky Jay
Jay's Journal of Anomalies, by Ricky Jay
Dieter Roth: Graphic Works
Roth Time, the catalog from a great Dieter Roth retrospective that MOMA put on when it was in its temporary exhibition spaces during the big recent renovation.
Dice: Deception, Fate & Rotten Luck, by Ricky Jay and photographer Rosamund Purcell
Art in its Time by Paul Mattick. I'm not quite sure how this one got up there - it's not in the "must not be dinged" category - more something that must have ridden the studio tides up to that shelf.
Imaginary Economics by Olav Velthuis
Black Box / Chambre Noire by William Kentridge
and finally, a big goofy notebook labeled Every Dumb Idea, which is just a receptacle for everything that crosses my mind that might become a print, drawing, artist's book or whatever. It's not a precious book, just something I need at hand when I'm working on the computer, and it makes a good bookend.

So there's my portrait in catalogs. What would be on your shelf?

Shadows, Strings, and the past 10 years

So, do you ever have one of those moments in the studio where you say "gee, so that's what I've been thinking about"? They're nice, aren't they. I just had one, courtesy of Judith Hoffman, an artist who does fantastic things with metal and artist's books, by way of a comment she left concerning Zero Sum #21. I had mentioned that I was enjoying working with my new box, as it reminded me of theaters, and puppets, and cameras, and she pointed me towards ShadowLight Productions, a shadow puppet theater company founded by Larry Reed. So I wandered over to YouTube. . .


and was blown away. Isn't that great stuff?! One of my favorite things about that is the flames used as the light source for the shadow puppets in the traditional production. So, after my video-watching-adrenaline rush subsided, I thought about some drawings I had made in the past.


That drawing was one of a bunch of pieces I made for a show I called the Existential Theater. I made those drawings back in 1996. At the time I was really interested in making images that had a mix of drawing from the model and drawing from casts, and I enjoyed how the viewer would bring figures to life even if they were made from disjointed parts. What I wasn't really thinking about at the time, but which I'm finding more and more intriguing these days, was the way these drawings were really a species of still-life, but a form of still-life that looked to the stage for inspiration, in the contained spaces and dramatic lighting and deployment of figures in the images. The theatrical aspect was obvious, but I wasn't as focused on the "still-life".

So in 2004, I go to this puppet show at Bard College,


a performance of "Nevsky Prospekt", by the Russian puppet theater company "Theatre Potudan". It blows me away. Just incredible. It was a miniature stage, with wonderfully beautiful and strange and delicate puppets. The imagery was frequently very surreal. And yet, as an audience member, you were fully involved with these puppets as living beings. One of the wonders was that, with such a tiny stage, the viewer was seated just a few feet from the performers, and the fact that these performers were made of paper and sticks and strings was celebrated, not hidden. Though you understood them to be puppets, the suspension of belief, the empathy you had for these objects, was just breathtaking.


The climactic moment of the production involves the suicide of the main character. This is shown by way of the puppeteer's hands entering the stage, gathering the puppet's strings, and cutting them. That cliched metaphor of the puppet's strings, so often used to symbolize being in someone else's control, here was turned around to show us the strings as the very life-force of the puppet. Which, of course, they are. After the puppet falls limp to the stage, the hands reach down and cradle the lifeless form. Gosh, it was beautiful.

I left that production just astonished. That was some seriously powerful stuff. I didn't have a place for it in my own studio practice at the time, but boy, I wished I did.

I recently became aware of a project that William Kentridge did in 2005, the "Black Box"



or "Chambre Noire". Kentridge's work has me all fired up as well, with his combination of drawing, animation, and puppetry. And in this particular project, his building of a mechanical miniature stage in which the lighting of scraps of drawings and wire, their movement through the space and the shadows they cast, the use of some images as "characters" and some as "setting", all resonates with me.

And, thinking about all of that, makes me realize how I'm digesting those influences in my own work. When I started the Zero Sum Art Project I didn't realize that I would start accumulating these strange objects in my studio, and I certainly hadn't planned on building a stage to place them in. I hadn't planned on incorporating photography, and I didn't realize that collage would play such a large role in the artwork. It's kind of delightful that these things have happened, but it's only now that I'm really seeing the relationship of those choices to a lot of things I've worked on and looked at and thought about in the past.


Zero Sum work in progress
So thanks for the heads-up, Judith, I really appreciate it!