STUDIO AS STUDY A Selection of Drawings by American Video Artists Edited, with an Introduction, by Melinda Barlow rawing, that intimate act of the hand often perceived as the most basic skill an artist must possess, was once described as “the bearing mother of all arts D and sciences.”1 Ingres insisted that drawing was “three quarters of painting,” while Cézanne refused to distinguish between the two media. “When one paints,” he wrote, “one draws.” Sculpture has had its share of master draftsmen, like Rodin, and yet sculptor’s drawings, like those by architects, are frequently seen to be purely utilitarian, because they lead to a three-dimensional final product, and reveal a process of conceptual trial and error. “A means of finding your way about things,” as Henry Moore put it, drawings are a way of envisioning possibilities. In the mid-twentieth century, drawing was radically reinvented by artists as different as Jackson Pollock and Sol LeWitt. Pollock uniquely fused drawing with painting, his energetic lines of paint literally flying off the canvas, while LeWitt redefined the idea of the commission, and moved the act of drawing from the page to the wall. Through written instructions or “scores” describing precise arrangements of lines ultimately executed by others, LeWitt forged a sensual partnership between drawing and architecture, and helped transform the traditional notion of the studio. Often a place where a work is crafted by hand in paint or clay, in the mid-1960s the studio developed a paper counterpart, the studio on the page, or in a notebook, where a work is crafted conceptually, as an idea. When art critic Lucy Lippard noted in 1968 that “the studio is again becoming a study,” it was this phenomenon that she was trying to describe.2 As art gradually “dematerialized,” drawings of happen- ings, performances, environments, and video installations became fascinating documents of works ultimately, if temporarily, realized in physical form. With a title evoking Lippard’s insight, “Studio as Study: A Selection of Drawings by American Video Artists,” explores the various roles drawing has played during the last 35 years of video history. It brings together drawings by 15 artists of different ages and orientations, from pioneers of the medium to members of the latest generation, from makers of single-channel tapes to multi-channel installations, from those with backgrounds in anthropology and photography to those trained in sculpture and painting. The resulting portfolio, extraordinary in its range of styles © 2002 Performing Arts Journal, Inc. PAJ 71 (2002), pp. 1–33. ᭿ 1 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152028102760049292 by guest on 25 September 2021 and moods, contains drawings that are personal and expressive as well as technical and utilitarian—drawings which reveal the agility of the moving hand and the ingenuity of the thinking mind. To contribute to this collection, each artist was asked to submit a drawing from any period of his or her work, past or present, along with a statement describing that particular work, or explaining how and why he or she has used drawings. The pages which follow contain these things and more, including excerpts from the audio text used in an installation resembling a computer play-station (Julia Scher), a phonetic cue card serving as both drawing and statement (Gary Hill), and images which expand the definition of drawing, dissociating it from an activity performed by the human hand and locating it in the waveform possibilities programmed in a machine (Woody Vasulka). For some of these artists, drawing has been a fundamental and continuous part of the creative process. Joan Jonas describes drawing as a basic graphic element, one she often incorporates into live action performances. Chip Lord carries a pocket sketchbook whenever he travels, and Sadie Benning doodles, sometimes while editing. Mary Lucier and Bill Viola produce volumes of hand-drawn material, creating extensive paper trails for virtually every work. Some artists, however, feel that drawing should not be limited to an arrangement of lines on a page. Jonas distances drawing’s intimacy by showing the process live, on closed-circuit monitors; and Tony Oursler calls the whole series of “primary hand-made images, props, sets, installations and videotapes” presented in a recently published catalogue drawings, perhaps because they are preliminary ways of trying out ideas.3 Many drawings included in this portfolio reflect important moments in video history, reveal basic aspects of working with the technology, or take the medium itself as their explicit subject. Ann Woodward’s whimsical illustrations for The Spaghetti City Video Manual and for a fable about a pirate cable TV station, for example, are reminders of the interest in community access pioneered by collectives like Videofreex, of which she was a member, while Beryl Korot’s delicate picto- graphic notations, elegant in their precision, were used to create a score for multiple channel editing. Especially rich with historical significance is the invocation by Peter Campus of Douglas Davis’s famous claim, in a “Manifesto” from 1974, that “the camera is a pencil”—an essential hand-held tool for communication.4 To make the drawing included here, Campus used a stylus and digitizing tablet, basic input devices for the computer which recall the oldest of writing implements, the stylus and wax tablet. And in Poetic (Coda) # 13 (1997) by Tony Oursler and Untitled (1998) by Sadie Benning, both reproduced in this introduction, the video medium itself is the subject of composition. Oursler’s ironic still life gives us a product: the familiar plastic box used to hold videotapes, hovering behind a snaking line reminiscent of videotape as it unwinds, while Benning’s sketch of a phantom silhouette both inside and outside the lens of a camcorder suggests an interface between reality and image, of humanity and the machine. 2 ᭿ PAJ 71 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152028102760049292 by guest on 25 September 2021 Tony Oursler, Poetic (Coda) # 13 (1997). Photo: Courtesy of the artist. Sadie Benning, Untitled (1998). Photo: Courtesy of the artist. BARLOW et al. / Studio as Study ᭿ 3 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152028102760049292 by guest on 25 September 2021 Other drawings in this portfolio reveal different aspects of the changing relationship between humanity and technology, redefine the idea of the commission, and expose the continuing legacy of conceptual art. Rita Myers likens the advent of the computer to that of the Sony Portapak, pointing out that software now enables one to generate many slightly different versions of the same drawing, and that this radically changes the meaning of making a preliminary “study.”5 (It also changes, once again, the meaning of the studio, giving it a new incarnation in cyberspace.) Myers’s elevation and axonometric drawings for Correspondences: Day into Night into Day (1992), like Julia Scher’s lighting plot for Wonderland (1998) and Diana Thater’s perspective drawing for Delphine (2000), were commissioned by architects and designers. Thater’s drawing, however, includes hand-collaged elements on its borders: dynamic shapes indicating the placement of projections in space, and pantone strips providing a patchwork of the installation’s color scheme. Chip Lord’s sketches for Picture Windows (1990), and Doug Hall’s installation Terminal Landscape (1995) reveal the legacy of conceptual art. As Lord explains in his statement, one of the drawings included here contains an idea he ultimately did not use. As LeWitt noted in his 12th sentence on conceptual art, “For each work of art that becomes physical, there are many variations that do not.” Hall asked his students to make drawings in response to a written description of a photograph. He then took a group of these drawings and used them in a larger mixed-media installation of his own conception that explored the role of mass media in contemporary society. While many books have focused on drawings by painters, architects, and sculptors, and while drawings by individual video artists have been included in a number of recent collections and catalogues, drawings by a range of video artists have rarely, if ever, been considered as a subject unto themselves.6 This portfolio therefore provides a rare opportunity at a key moment, for drawing is currently experiencing a resurgence, as witnessed by a show at the Barbara Gladstone Gallery in New York in the summer of 2000 featuring more than 100 drawings by artists working in different media.7 The selection of drawings assembled here aims at similar breadth on a smaller scale, and likewise celebrates drawing’s continued intimate pleasures. From Mary Lucier’s atmospheric pastel sketch of a lithe female figure flipping through the air, used to pre-visualize a video-dance performance; to Bill Viola’s hand-written notations for the creation of a primitive “scale”; to Gary Hill’s phonetic cue card that transforms language into a mysterious code (used by actors in a tape exploring Gregory Bateson’s concept of the metalogue)—the drawings included here demonstrate tremendous range, versatility, and vitality. Unique conduits to the creative process, they also implicitly issue a call to experience each work live, or in object form—as tape, installation, projection, or performance—and then to ponder further the fascinating relationship between each drawing and the work it prefigured. 4 ᭿ PAJ 71 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152028102760049292 by guest on 25 September 2021 NOTES 1. Gerhard of Brugge, An introduction to the general art of drawing (1674), quoted in Susan Lambert, Reading Drawings (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 9. 2. Lucy Lippard, “The Dematerialization of Art,” in Changing: Essays in Art Criticism (New York: E.P.