exile—the novel is set in a college town much like Ithaca, New York, where the Russian native lived for a time after leaving the USSR—it is also important to recognize that those potential tales the narrator imagines for the fireflies and bats are of pain and exile: writing is not only about stories but is itself a vehicle of transference, a way to communicate in absentia. It is also hard not to think of the “blue ink” of writing marveled at in Nabokov when one sees Nina Papaconstantinou’s obsessive, indexical reworkings of major texts in Drawing Time, Reading Time, the exhibition, alongside Marking Language, under discussion here. Both shows dissect the use of text in contemporary visual artworks, drawing a line from conceptual art to the present. In her works comprised of lines and lines of blue ink, Papaconstantinou rewrites the text of E.H. Gombrich’s Shadows, for example, and with each penned sentence makes her own self more apparent and palpable: moving the book, as if pressed through her own body, into illegibility, and allegorizing her own ambition to understand and consume it fully. In the end, Gombrich’s analysis of shadows in painting becomes nothing other than marks on a page, a visual splash of ink (and a hint of Yves Klein). Drawing’s connection with the hand returns a sense of the self to language, which, even written, is mostly these days mediated by technology: by computer screens or smartphones, or by the false immateriality of emailed texts. The works on show here question what it is not only to have an “I” behind written language but also to understand the moments when mark-making becomes primary—and the moments when the system of language that organizes marks into meaning begins to dissipate. This spectrum that stretches between writing as a purveyor of linguistic information and writing as marks on a page hovers over many of the works in these two exhibitions. Of the two, The Drawing Center’s has the more historical focus, looking back to conceptual art to discover works that have a more emotional or personal content than is allowed by conventional
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