Drawing Time, Reading Time + Dickinson/Walser & Engelen Opens this Month at Drawing Center

The Drawing Center will present three new exhibitions in November - two concurrently, Drawing Time, Reading Time and Dickinson/Walser: Pencil Sketches and one week later, William Engelen: Falten opens in our Lab gallery.

The exhibition in the Main Gallery, Drawing Time, Reading Time, will bring together an international group of artists spanning the 1960s to today, all of whom are engaged in exploring the relationship between drawing and writing as distinct yet interrelated gestures. Artists include Carl Andre, Pavel Büchler, Guy de Cointet, Mirtha Dermisache, Sean Landers, Allen Ruppersberg, Nina Papaconstantinou, Deb Sokolow, and Molly Springfield. This exhibition is organized simultaneously with Marking Language at Drawing Room, London (October 10-December 14, 2013). Concurrently Dickinson/Walser: Pencil Sketches will be on view in our Drawing Room bringing together Emily Dickinson's original poem manuscripts and Robert Walser's microscripts for the first time. Opening one week later, William Engelen: Falten highlights the artist's latest works, Falten [Folds], in which Engelen builds musical scores from folded sheets of paper. Please see below for a detailed description.

This show features an international group of artists spanning the 1960s to today, all of whom are engaged in exploring the relationship between drawing and writing as distinct yet interrelated gestures. Although now commonplace, the current predominance of language in art had its roots in an unexpected linguistic turn around 1960 as artists sought to recover a direct, sensory experience of the world outside of symbol and representation. Paradoxically perhaps, language became a favored tool in this effort with artists like Dan Graham, Mel Bochner, and Hanne Darboven manipulating the written text in an effort to evacuate predictable meaning and uncover the materiality of language as a system of signs. This exhibition considers a different path, one that emerged simultaneously with Conceptual Art but that embraced language in art as a means of questioning the written word's communicative transparency on the one hand and visual art's material opacity on the other. Challenging modernism's longstanding effort to purge art of narrative association in favor of material and conceptual self-sufficiency, the artists in the exhibition pursue a hybrid aesthetic that privileges incompletion. Curated by Claire Gilman.

Artists include Carl Andre, Pavel Büchler, Guy de Cointet, Mirtha Dermisache, Sean Landers, Allen Ruppersberg, Nina Papaconstantinou, Deb Sokolow, and Molly Springfield.

Drawing Time, Reading Time is made possible by the very generous support of Sarah Peter, Agnes Gund, anonymous, HRH Princess Firyal of Jordan, Kathleen Irvin Loughlin, Frank Williams, Karen Zukowski and David Diamond, Irene Panagopoulos, Gil Shiva, The Felix & Elizabeth Rohatyn Foundation, Amanda Foreman and Jonathan Barton, and Morris A. Orden. The accompanying catalogue is made possible by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Colombia.

Dickinson/Walser: Pencil Sketches

This show brings together Emily Dickinson's original poem manuscripts and Robert Walser's microscripts for the first time. Although Walser, who was born shortly before Dickinson died, was most likely unaware of her work, both writers were obsessively private as well as peculiarly attentive to the visuality of their texts. Walser wrote in tiny, inscrutable script on narrow strips of paper using an antiquated German alphabet that was long considered indecipherable. Only recently have these scripts been shown to consist of early drafts of the author's published texts. Similarly, Dickinson fitted her multifarious poetic fragments to carefully torn pieces of envelope or stationery, which were discovered among her posthumous papers. (Walser once referred to himself as a "clairvoyant of the small," and this description might apply to Dickinson as well.) In both cases, the form of these texts affects the language itself as both writers crafted their words in response to the form at hand. Rarely in literature has the manner in which words are made been so integral to the way in which they might be read. The Dickinson/ Walser exhibition is a fitting corollary to Drawing Time, Reading Time, which appears concurrently in the Main Gallery. Curated by Claire Gilman.

Dickinson/Walser: Pencil Sketches is made possible by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia, Consulate General of Switzerland in New York, and New York Council for the Humanities.

Engelen: Falten

Engelen's latest works, Falten [Folds], build musical compositions from folded paper. At the start of each composition, Engelen draws a time line on a sheet of paper. Each centimeter of paper corresponds to one second in the score. The artist shapes the paper into three-dimensional forms-ovals, cones, or even knots. He then hand-draws a staff notation on the sections of the paper that are not hidden in the folds. Through this structure of creases and lines, Engelen organizes, through both intention and chance, the elements of sound and silence in each piece. The landscape of the paper determines the music that can be made from it. In performing Falten, musicians "walk" through this architectural landscape, using the paper's planes, heights, and structures as parameters for qualities in volume, pitch, rhythm, tension, character, and the spatiality of sound. The lines on the page and resultant folds manifest the score as an intricate drawing. Falten for Percussion consists of eight parts, and will be debuted by the celebrated percussion ensemble Talujon. Curated by Nova Benway.