Drawing Conclusions - the Rise of Drawing in the Contemporary Art Scene Pt 1
Not so long ago, drawing became the new
painting
. From small-scale and intimate to wall-sized, highly-worked or resolutely low-fi; whatever its format, the rapid re-appearance of a side-lined medium marked a dramatic shift in its fortunes and indeed, assumptions about art in general.
But why the change? Was it that, in an
art scene
increasingly driven by fads, drawing became du jour simply because it hadn't been for a very long time? Or were other, less obvious factors at work?
In fact, the re-emergence of drawing was far from market-driven, and its increase in profile a far slower process than any newly voguish status might suggest.
To understand something of its current impact, it's necessary to look back at the closing years of the 20th century. A time when, to the eyes of many, the art scene looked very different indeed.
Throughout much of the 1990s visual austerity and a certain restraint governed the work of a new wave of artists; many of them British, many
high=profile
.
Figures such as Darren Almond, Damien Hirst, Martin Creed, Rachel Whiteread and a re-discovered Allan McCollum typified an art scene driven by hands-off, conceptual practice and stringent theoretical undertow.
Even artists whose work, by contrast, seemed more ludic and theatrical - Maurizio Catellan, the Chapman brothers, an ever-enduring Jeff Koons - shared a taste for slick, expensive, mechanized output. And in fact, looking back, there's a certain synchronistic poetry to the fact that Marc Quinn's 'Self' portrait, a principal icon of the era, quite literally froze the blood.
Further tendencies underpinned the general sense of pristine, chilly surface.
Graphic design
in the late '90s exulted in the hard edges of its newly perfect digital genesis, while on a popular level, serious flirtation with 'minimalism' induced homeowners to replace comfort with pristine surface and spacious void.
Clearly, any attempt to rapidly define a moment in art history is doomed to over-simplification. A vast array of artists stand in lush counterpoint to Hirst's surgically steely cabinets or Whiteread's pale, negative spaces. The work of Peter Doig, Marlene Dumas, Daniel Richter and Jarg Immendorf - to name just a few - all manifest an obvious delight in exuberant mark-making or absorbed, painterly gesture.
Yet it's certainly true that what generally made the headlines - the dissected sheep, the on/off lights, the unmade beds - were essentially
'conceptual'
works that side-lined direct artistic intervention. And it's also true that, with the internet truly coming of age in the '90s, such highly publicized aesthetics became instantly and widely accessible for the first time in any history. In the mass public eye, art had gained a hard, new edge.
Yet elsewhere, a wildly contrasting vision was being far less well documented. On America 's West Coast, in particular, the long-gestating seeds of a brimming alternative scene were beginning to bear considerable fruit. Its influences were multiple and diverse, yet shared the fact that all lay well outside the contemporary mainstream.
In LA, for example, the
'underground' drawings
of Ray Pettibon - linked initially to the rock scene then distributed through short-run zines - had garnered fervent admirers throughout the late '70s & '80s. A major exhibition in 1992 succeeded in raising his profile both throughout the States and abroad.
Yet Pettibon's work was merely the best-known facet of a burgeoning
counter-culture
. One which, since 1986, had found a major advocate in the now legendary La Luz De Jesus gallery in downtown LA.
This space, located incongruously above an offbeat gift store, focused entirely on artists whose backgrounds and influences sprang from an array of popular cultures such as illustration,
folk art
, comics and tattooing. And this output, crucially, tended towards an intricate figurative craftsmanship more closely associated at the time with illustration than so-called 'fine' art.
The gallery and its stable of artists proved a speedy and influential local success, and in 1994, Juxtapoz, a magazine founded by Robert Williams (himself an artist and friend of famed underground artist Robert Crumb) also began to showcase this growing wave of
alternative art
.
Utterly at odds with the rarefied, theory-led aesthetic dominating contemporary practice at the time, this new sensibility came to be regarded as a movement. Its roots and position were defined by not just one label, but two: Low-Brow, or Pop Surrealism.
Resolutely populist - bordering, even, on
kitsch
- its appropriation of popular style and content within a fine art context questioned long-held assumptions regarding the parameters of art itself. Revisiting the earliest tenets of Pop Art, it nevertheless totally dismissed that movement's later associations with Warholian mass production.
And in San Francisco , too, similar trends were at work.
In the 1990s a group of artists including Chris Johansen, Clare E Rojas and Barry McGee emerged to form a distinctive new scene. Their work, though sharing much with the Low-Brow phenomenon, differed in several important respects and became known as the 'Mission School' in recognition of its essentially San Franciscan flavor.
Local influences contributed to a more whimsical, looser approach to
image-making
than LA tendencies at the time. Street art such as graffiti formed an intrinsic part of the scene, but was generally refined into a figurative rather than textual medium. The legacy of underground comics pioneered by the likes of Robert Crumb was also evident in cartoon-like characterization and a witty, humorous edge.
More importantly still, while painting lay at the heart of the Low-Brow movement, drawing was much more widely adopted by the Mission School artists.
In a nod to the hand-drawn agitprop and pyschedelia of '60s Haight-Ashbury , they revived techniques such as detailed patterning, hand-lettering and decoupage. Materials, too, were frequently unconventional; ball-point pens, markers, recycled paper, wood or metal all found a part in the Mission School look.
This 'regional' distinction was clearly underlined in publicity for a 2000 show at LA's New Image Gallery:
SAN FRANCISCO DRAWING SHOW curated by: Alicia McCarthy and Chris Johanson. May 19 - June 17, 2000.
Straight out of San Francisco , drawings of over 15 artists will be exhibited .... Currently there are important artistic trends developing out of San Francisco . Drawing is at the root of this development.
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