When speaking publicly, I rarely connect the unwieldy variety of forms in my work to “drawing,” even if I do just that among friends. I gave it a stab once, with an unsatisfying text that moved too swiftly from Mantegna to the rise of the capacitive touch screen. I think there was a reflexivity issue: If the essay is the exemplary, enlightenment device for persuasion, perhaps it incidentally emphasizes a humanist conception of drawing, which is really only one story among many. Virtual assembly spaces, on the other hand, readily hold many stories. While forums ostensibly built for speech now have stringent disciplinary practices, those devoted to buying and selling retain a cacophonous—or, depending on your POV, polyphonic—hum. Perhaps it’s because the language there is always in service of something else. After a good is sold, how often do the words remain? I’ve adopted this unruly form for another take, where the essay stalled out. For those unfamiliar: LTS (“looking to sell”), OBO (“or best offer”), ISO (“in search of”).
David Muenzer. Sconce (Shared Screen), 2015. Sand, resin, lighting hardware, 6½ x 9 in. Installation view, “Scalar-Daemon,” Reserve Ames. Courtesy of the artist and Dracula’s Revenge, New York. Photo: Veli-Matti Hoikka.
This one goes a few years back. Some of you may have heard about it, but I think the time has come to put it out there and see.
I thought I’d make a drawing by eating spicy ramen. At the chosen shop, if you finished the deepest red bowl, you’d get your picture taken and pinned to the wall. I planned to exhibit the photo. At the time, I felt that any action which generated a sense of passage (clearly loosely construed) might function as an inscription.
Well, despite a lifelong love of heat, I failed to finish the outlandishly large portion. (Hint for would-be-challengers: don’t drink water, you’re wasting space.) But, for those interested, this “drawing” (not mine, or really a drawing, except through nomination) is still out there.
Gauging interest at this stage—
If drawing is subterranean “Termite Art” (a characterization that both jives with my experiences and is offered up by well-known draw-er/writer about draw-ers Amy Sillman), why is it that portability is often its most salient quality? Manny Farber’s oft-cited insect “goes always forward eating its own boundaries” and Sillman doubles down on the earthy metaphors, offering up the image of a beaver against the soaring eagle of the painter. While the industrious rodent seems more of a rejoinder to elevated claims about paintings’ elsewhere-powers than a fully-fledged metaphor, drawing’s groundedness is clearly a throughline.
For my part, I’ve happily organized a show around a pair of drawings made on an airplane and on vacation. Earlier, I made drawings while on the clock. They did get gussied up in frames, adding a touch of gravitas, but all the thinking/acting happened in transit.
David Muenzer. Partner Drawings (detail), 2010-2012. Highlighter, Wite-Out, firm stationery, firm time, 30 parts, each 8½ x 11 in. (unframed). Courtesy of the artist and Dracula’s Revenge, New York. Photo: David Muenzer.
Looking for a way of traveling light through the present.
I often misremember part of this late-aughts Boris Groys essay, where he makes an early stab at characterizing the contemporary. In my mind: the artist needs to travel light in our continuous present. On the page, it’s actually an Ernst Jünger quote, and those ease-of-hauling ideas were meant to characterize modernity (oops). Groys goes on to define the contemporary as the time in which one’s ambitions might be stymied, as plans for the future may run up against the practical limitations of the present: you wanted to write that manifesto, but you had to cook dinner, pay the bills, ice your back, etc.
I think my poor recall isn’t completely off, as we continue to live in a world that is as much modern (or never modern) as it has ever been, in a non-totalizing kind of way. Drawing can be made on-the-go, and with minimal means. Roland Barthes calls Cy Twomby’s drawn gestures loitering, a state of being that lacks the clagginess of Groys’s vision of contemporaneity, but nonetheless shrugs off imagined futures.
Left: Jay DeFeo, Untitled (Tripod series), 1977. Acrylic, graphite and charcoal on paper, 40 x 30¼ in. Museum of Modern Art, New York. © 2023 The Jay DeFeo Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Right: Jay DeFeo, Figure III (Tripod series), 1976. Graphite on paper with spiral wire, 14¾ x 10 in. © 2023 The Jay DeFeo Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Ben Blackwell.
🔥🔥🔥This post is now an auction.🔥🔥🔥
Please read through ALL of the information before placing a bid:
Courtroom illustration’s power as drawing is founded on the absence of cameras, no? Nearly every other part of life is up for snaps. During legal discovery these days, there is a presumption that any act may well have been incidentally recorded. Equally relevant is the drive to self-image. Diaristic impulses, written and visual, are the bread and butter of internet 2.0 (“Instagram: look how perfect my life is. Facebook: look how medium my life is. Twitter: look how messy my life is. Reddit: I killed someone twenty years ago and have told no one until now.”) Even if security cameras aren’t mounted in bathrooms, that doesn’t stop us from bringing our own always-on imagers to scroll from the toilet.
One could parse the descriptive force of courtroom drawings in a matrix, with a row related to the draw-er’s faculty with pastel, pencil, etc., another corresponding to the strength of the interdiction on photography (which varies by case), and a final row counting preexisting demand for images of the subjects depicted.
David Muenzer, Partner Meeting (Buddakan, NY), 2011. Inkjet print mounted on aluminum, illustrations by Elizabeth Williams and Aggie Kenny, 21½ x 48 in. Courtesy of the artist and Dracula’s Revenge, New York. Photo: David Muenzer.
J. R. Schellenberg, A Man Drawing the Silhouette of a Seated Woman on Translucent Paper Suspended in a Frame and Lit by a Candle, 1783. Etching. 9½ x 7¾ in. Wellcome Images. Public domain.
Motion is a big deal in modernist conceptions of drawing.
This could take the form of vitalistic projection—tracing the line of thought of the practitioner—or a teleological progression (towards the future or an imagined past). Eisenstein drew on all of those, with the temporality rushing towards primitivism: “In English, Disney’s moving drawing is called… an animated cartoon. And in this name, both concepts are interwoven […] ‘animateness’ (anima-soul) and ‘mobility’ (animation-liveness, mobility)!”
David Muenzer. Rome Window (after Tischbein), 2019. Colored pencil on paper, 16 x 12 in. unframed, 18¼ x 14½ in. framed. Courtesy of the artist and Dracula’s Revenge, New York. Photo: Paul Salveson.
How about drawing-as-case-study? Ralph Lemon, a movement practitioner par excellence, also sees his drawn figures as anthropological studies, which might say something about my affinity for that strain of his practice. It’s not a question of whimsy or style or color in them—it’s the who and how they come together.
While drawn figures are not exactly embodied, I do focus on the movement and headspace of the characters I choreograph. Can drawing sustain gesture like a dance? Sillman notes that, “Drawing is always a performance for the drawer herself,” but do performance analogies break down for later viewers?
I use an existing and well-articulated language of depiction, cartooning, to put my most unruly energy into the characters, rather than their mode of representation. It’s a craft thing: continuity over avant-gardist rupture. (Craft communities, even if laterally connected, still have nodes with exceptional density of connections. I’ll offer up a few: Bechdel, Steinberg, Daumier, Hogarth.)
Ralph Lemon, selection from an untitled series (detail), 2015-2022. Photo: David Muenzer.
Any reasonable offer ➡️ Get this off my desk
The Eshkol-Wachman Movement Notation (EWMN) is a system for precisely scoring motion, which distinguishes itself from other dance notation systems, at least in part, through its broader non-dance applications. It has been used to compare the movements of animals and to diagnose cognitive differences. In the axioms that define EWMN, Eshkol is clear right off the bat: “EWMN is written, not drawn.”
These days, EWMN’s number-filled grids don’t seem so distant from conceptual drawing’s forms—Charles Gaines comes to mind—but if we take Eshkol at her word, what is it about writing that is contra-distinguished? It’s not the alphabet (Guston and Sillman have shown that), nor it’s quality as an utterance. (Sillman again: “Drawing is like a speech act, except that it is literally a gesture act.”)
Perhaps it is the universalizing quality that EWMN attributes to writing, which, while not IMHO accurate, seems to speak to the other tenets of Eshkol’s axioms: “To establish one general form that will stand conceptually for all bodies, an abstract body, similar to a ‘stick figure’ image is proposed: a ‘man without qualities.’”
Mirale Sharon, John G. Harries, and Naomi Polani. Movement score notebook, 1952–1954. 12½ x 81½ in. “EWMN is written, not drawn. Movements are written on a horizontally ruled notation page (resembling a spreadsheet) which represents the body. Vertical lines divide the page into columns, denoting units of time. The symbols for movements are written in order, from left to right.” See: https://noaeshkol.org/about-eshkol-wachman-movement-notation/basic-principals-of-ewmn.
Silke Otto-Knapp. Early Shaker Spirituals (after W.G.), 2018. Watercolor on canvas, 51⅛ x 59 in. © Silke Otto-Knapp, Courtesy of Regen Projects, Los Angeles. Photo: Evan Bedford.
123456789
The blankness of the page is the secret power of drawing, according to John Berger. But, whether the blackness of the silhouette, the middle tone of the courtroom artist, or Saul Steinberg’s glossy print-page white, there’s more to tell about keeping it empty.
In Lemon’s reflections on Bruce Nauman, specifically Wall-Floor Positions (performed 1965), he notes that valedictory readings of this work are predicated on context receding. Big one-word takes: chance, freedom, score vs. the specifics of Nauman’s healthy (“sexy”) white male body and the privacy of his school studio, removed from civil rights upheaval.
I am taken by Lemon’s observation that “a body is never abstract” and how this relates (and fails to apply) to drawn performers.
Left: David Muenzer. Sconce (Snowden Avatar), 2013. Porous nylon, lighting hardware, 4 x 9 in. Photo: Gideon Barnett. Right: David Muenzer. Sconce (Snowden Selfie), 2014. Porous nylon, lighting hardware, 8¾ x 5 ¼ in. Installation view, “Scalar-Daemon,” Reserve Ames. Courtesy of the artist and Dracula’s Revenge, New York. Photo: Veli-Matti Hoikka.
Anyone have a bead on where that whole thing went? Every gesture that can be read as inscription depends on the maker’s passage being sufficiently differentiated from the water it cuts through or the skin it scratches or the fibers it blots or even the noisy hot loud spicy Ramen joint where the photo fails to snap.
Still not sure it’s for me, but I’ve got some questions.
Thx all!!
David Muenzer. Duet VIII, 2022. Colored pencil on paper, 24 x 18 in. Courtesy of the artist and Dracula’s Revenge, New York. Photo: Rumpelstiltskin.
David Muenzer is an artist and writer. He formerly co-directed the space Full Haus.
Citations
Roland Barthes, The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation, 1991.
Leo Bersani, Psychoanalysis and the Aesthetic Subject, 2006.
Sergei Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney, 1988.
Manny Farber, Negative Space: Manny Farber on the Movies, 1998.
Boris Groys, “Comrades of Time,” e-flux journal 11, 2009.
Catriona MacLeod, “Schattenriss (Silhouette),” Goethe-Lexicon of Philosophical Concepts vol. 1, no. 1, Jan. 2021, pp. 74-82, doi:10.5195/glpc.2021.20.
The New Yorker, April 17, 2023.
Ralph Lemon, quoted in Alex Greenberger, “Legendary Choreographer and Artist Ralph Lemon Wins Whitney Biennial’s $100,000 Bucksbaum Award,” ARTnews, September 22, 2022; https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/ralph-lemon-whitney-biennial-bucksbaum-award-1234640355.
Amy Sillman, Faux Pas: Selected Writings and Drawings, 2020.
Isabella Stengers, “Reclaiming Animism,” Animismus: Moderne hinter den Spiegeln, 2011, 183.