Drawing Time, Reading Time brings together an international group of artists whose work dates from the 1960s to today. Each artist is engaged in exploring the relationship between drawing and linguistic communication as distinct yet interrelated phenomenological gestures. Now commonplace, visual art’s preoccupation with language had its roots in an unexpected linguistic turn circa 1960, when artists sought to recover a direct, sensory experience of the world. Paradoxically, language became a favored tool in this effort, as artists such as Mel Bochner, Hanne Darboven, and Lawrence Weiner submitted the written word to verbal and visual manipulation in order to evacuate conventional meaning and uncover the materiality of language. As Laura Hoptman points out in her catalogue essay for the recent Museum of Modern Art exhibition Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language, artists mining words in the late 1950s and 1960s tended to “use language as a medium like paint, dissecting and rearranging letters, words, and phrases to create works of art whose form and content were meant to be one and the same.”1 In this endeavor, they joined abstract painters and sculptors of the same period, updating modernism’s century-old effort to expurgate literary reference and cultivate the work of art complete unto itself. Drawing Time, Reading Time considers a different path, one that emerged simultaneously with conceptual art but that embraced language as a means of questioning the written word’s communicative transparency on the one hand and visual art’s material opacity on the other. In considering drawing specifically—rather than the visual arts more generally—Drawing Time, Reading Time participates in a field of inquiry that has intrigued art and literary critics for decades, namely what defines mark-making as such. Such analyses have tended to examine the graphic relationship between writing and
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Laura Hoptman, “This Language is Ecstatic Because,” in Dexter Sinister (David Reinfurt, Stuart Bailey), edited with Angie Keefer, Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language, Issue n. 3 of Bulletins of the Serving Library (Berlin: Sternberg Press), 181.