Olga Chernysheva: Vague Accent

12 9

Olga Chernysheva Vague Accent

THE D R AWI N G CENTER

The Drawing Center October 7 – December 18, 2016 Drawing Room

Olga Chernysheva Vague Accent

Curated by Nova Benway

D R AW I N G PA P E R S 12 9

Texts by Nova Benway, Pierre Joris, Mรณnica de la Torre, and Murat Nemet-Nejat

PL . 1

PL . 2

PL . 3

Vague Accent: Olga Chernysheva in New York

Nova Benway

Last November, at the invitation of The Drawing Center, Olga Chernysheva arrived in New York from her home in Moscow for a month-long visit. During that time, she endeavored to respond visually to the most “ordinary” aspects of the city—things a local might deem insignificant. After returning home in December to make dozens of drawings of New York cafes, pedestrians, museum crowds, and street sights, she reported to me that one perfectly appropriate response to the images would be a shrug of the shoulders: So what? Escalators carry people in and out of a shop, some with arms empty, others weighted with purchases. So what?

A group of students attends a lecture. So what? A boy walks his bike up a hill. So what? A dog goes to the groomer …

The Drawing Center’s invitation was unprecedented for the artist; her previous work has always drawn from the familiar environs of her home city. Videos like Trashman (2011), in which an Uzbek guest worker collects garbage from a movie theater in Moscow, or Marmot (1999), in which a woman marching in a Communist parade pauses to gaze fondly at a photograph of Stalin, make evident Chernysheva’s

9

concern with the ongoing evolution of the Russian cultural landscape.

New York is relatively unfamiliar territory for her. That unfamiliarity—the “vague accent” of the exhibition’s title—is felt in the New York drawings through her desire to “show what is already very much visible,” to insist on the enigmatic nature of the commonplace.1 Chernysheva’s search for the mundane might have transformed her into a foreign emissary, who would gather the most typical examples of “New York-ism” with an eye to anthropological detail. In fact, the drawings seem to offer no such overarching thesis; instead, the artist has created a set of loose, almost incidental affiliations between images. Each is accompanied by a strip of text collaged over the image, which often does more to impede interpretation than to facilitate it. A few drawings seem to coalesce into a kind of narrative: the art museum audience [PLS. 26–29], for example, echoes the audience at the anthropologist’s and philosopher's talks [PLS. 38–39], and these two scenes seem to converge in the drawing of the artist lecturing on his work [PL. 40]. But it must be acknowledged that the remaining images seem mostly unrelated, and frustrate any easy interpretation of the artist’s point of view. The series of scenes depicting visitors to a Picasso exhibition ends with an image of a man gazing down through a museum window at the world below, the accompanying text reading, “If you look at something long enough you'll begin to understand something.” The statement is grandiose and opaque in equal parts, and suggests the futility of searching the drawings for an underlying theme. Chernysheva has argued in the past that coherence cannot be composed, only discovered; as she puts it, “Unity comes through as a result of uncoordinated phenomena.”2 One commonly expects unity to emerge from the viewer’s sense of an artist’s perspective, but Chernysheva’s drawings hinder our conceptual depth perception. Each drawing is imbued with both tender intimacy and arm’s-length distance; they seem simultaneously personal and impersonal. In place of a dutifully attentive study of the city, we are repeatedly confronted with images of attentiveness itself: the woman engrossed in her self-help book on the crowded subway 1

2

10

Unless noted otherwise, all quotes from Chernysheva are taken from conversations between the author and the artist in the spring of 2016.

Quoted in Viktor Misiano, “Motion Studies,” Artforum International 48.7 (2010): 231.

PL . 4

PL . 5

[PL. 4],

the young man waiting patiently to cross the street [PL. 14], even the couple on the escalator standing side by side and staring straight ahead [PL. 5]. Attention is given earnestly by the students at the anthropologist’s lecture, and with bored indifference by the woman at the nail salon, fixated on her cell phone screen [PL. 23].

This type of attention is unremarkable, mundane; its practitioners are engaged in the humble ministrations of daily life. The art Chernysheva makes of these engagements matches their modesty.

She has described her approach as akin to spontaneous harmonizing: each of her subjects, occupied with their own activities, is singing a metaphorical song. In drawing them, she sings along— neither interrupting nor leading, but simply listening carefully and adding her own voice to the tune.

Chernysheva’s attraction to attentiveness is longstanding. Each photograph in her 2007 series On Duty, for example, depicts a guard in the Moscow subway system. The somber figures are presented in large-format black and white, recalling classical portrait busts. But while they appear almost to be allegories of their profession—The Attendant, The Guardian—they escape that designation, too, with their dreamy, fidgety, and preoccupied expressions. Chernysheva says she hoped to capture their professional demeanor: unfocused and yet attentive, “simultaneously on and off,” as she puts it—much like an artist observing a potential subject.3 (“I feel I have to be relaxed or I won’t be able to respond,” she says of her own artistic activity.)4 Chernysheva’s work explores the particular type of attentiveness she shares with her chosen subjects—rigorous, outwardly responsive, yet elastic enough for distraction or private contemplation. It is a vision of the world in which, in her words, “There is no divide between the background and the foreground.”

Each of Chernysheva’s drawings presents a complex vision of public and private life as interwoven layers of the social fabric. “Introspection is a way of sharing the mind as a communal space,” she once argued.5 3

4 5

13

Quoted in Heike Eipeldauer, “Olga Chernysheva: Inner Dialogue,” Inner Dialogue (Nürnberg: Verlag für moderne Kunst, 2009), 49.

Ibid.

Quoted in “Robert Storr in Conversation with Olga Chernysheva,” Acquaintances (London: Anya Stonelake/White Space Gallery Ltd, 2008), 54.

One imagines the mind as a crowded neighborhood: wherever else we may be, we are all also loitering there. She’s fond of a quote attributed (perhaps speciously) to various American legal theorists: “My freedom ends where the other man’s nose begins.” Our inner lives, which shape so much of our reality, are confined by the intractable borders of the outside world. The humor in Chernysheva’s work, vital but often under-recognized, results from the fact that membership in society entails living out your private life within a multitude, something put in brutally literal terms by the drawing of the man sitting on a curb surrounded by bags of his possessions, his foot stubbornly protruding into the street. “A small hitch in the growth of the material world,” the accompanying text wryly comments, “Brake.” [PL. 6] The individual and the collective jostle together in Chernysheva’s work, obscuring each other as they overlap, sharpening in contrast as they separate. Chernysheva titled a 2010 series of watercolors Citizens. This dense term, with its intimations of private and public selfhood, pertains to the present drawings as well. In the Soviet era, the functioning of everyday life under official ideology confounded many Americans who, then as now, cloaked their nationalism in a vaguely defined but deeply revered individualism. Chernysheva has described the woman marching in the parade in Marmot, mentioned above, as exercising “a possibility that until recently had been a duty.”6 In the drawings of Vague Accent, Chernysheva carefully scrutinizes each subject’s unadorned presence, the modest attention they give their surroundings; she views them appreciatively as “representing themselves.” The doorman asleep at his post is both on the clock and withdrawn into the privacy of his dreams [PL. 33]. Neither state supersedes the other, and Chernysheva declines to isolate them, preferring to depict their continual collusion.

6

14

Quoted in Robert Bird, “Mundane Virtuosity,” Afterall (Spring 2014), 108.

PL . 6

PL . 7

Lines for Olga

Pierre Joris

—— line of sight liens of night I’m entangled in lines draw the view from where I am to what is visible of the city on paper a building suspended lines of flight no spiderweb here no mesh architecture (no gnomish arch texture) nowhere to be caught no spider at center no center just the rush of lines mis-typed mis-drew the word as liens = links in French while in English a lien is an encumbrance I thought rudely interrupting my own lines I wrote of lines drawn tight top right toward bottom left I thought it was New York and no it is not the legend tells me it is the place called home it is elsewhere as home is always elsewhere a building is city I am sitting in a café in a city looking at the drawing of a café looks back at me in another city is any city really different or just different skins over systemic constructs more similar than not or is it only the lines we draw from our heads & eyes to the buildings & windows buildings are cities windows are eyes to see is to differentiate this is not this to draw a line is to create a universe a link from the city I’m in now to the one you drew this in then a line links times that café in N.Y. is not my café in Paris where I write these lines linking to this drawing a café here or there neither here nor there now laptop open finds her drawing again & its cosmopolitan lines so similar this could be here but I now go

17

à la ligne as the French say when dictating to pupils and they mean start a new line or paragraph but it sounds like the order to go to the line stand by it watch over it be with it la ligne the line which is only a beginning not all is there yet though already a universe looking for a multiverse & I wrote one of those sentences in Europe the other in America as Europeans call these United States now I have never been to Moscow but I recognize the pencil line we have never met but we were in the same room for a few hours unbeknownst to ourselves heard the same talk by a French philosopher with whom I spoke briefly about a Russian poet while you were drawing him in New York “an image is always part of itself in the sense that it belongs to the world that creates it” but it always escapes that world because it creates another one it can only belong to itself by escaping itself by making sure it does not become the broken off symbolon that could become whole if only the broken world could be found whose ragged breakline would fit it exactly no recognition except flight lines hold up the house back home (all houses are “back home”) no this is not nomadic errancy this is transhumance leave be somewhere else return but there is nomadicity in the two convex self-portraits mirror and chrome chrome and mirror in tiled places of passage bathroom hallway the pencil skids

18

PL . 8

PL . 9

Better to See Once Than Hear a Hundred Times

Mónica de la Torre

[PL. 1]

The airport is not close and your time is already not your own …

Owning your own time involves familiarity, and the alignment of your bodily functions and sensory perception with your “inner clock.”

When time is not your own, disorientation occurs. A mountain range might look like a body under the sheets in the very slow process of getting out of bed.

[PL. 9]

Drawing with insignificant subject During a leisurely walk you’re prone to let your attention be drawn down, to the ground, by the objects on your path. Here you might encounter creatures distinctive for eagerly demanding your attention.

They interrupt your movement forward. If only briefly, their liveliness suspends time, as if a leash had gotten caught around it. This is no minor feat.

21

PL . 10

[PL. 24]

Empty and full subjects Parallel escalators going up and down suggest that their direction corresponds to sense of fullness and emptiness of their riders.

Empty subjects might ascend the escalator to acquire stuff to fill themselves up. Full subjects might descend the escalator to start consuming the stuff they have just acquired. Yet all of them appear complete and vacant regardless. The shopping mall is not beyond the realm of metaphysics.

[PL. 14]

Three figures and one body Three figurations of the male body. A detached bike rider stops before a nondescript wall. Incongruously affixed to a period street lamp, a Walk/Don’t Walk signal depicts a generic man whose gender definition is almost passé. In the distance, a statue of Lenin salutes oblivious passersby from the roof of Manhattan’s Red Square, another period piece. An askew clock also atop the building celebrates the city’s disregard for temporal conventions. Everything changes, nothing disappears.

[PL. 10]

Forbidden subject For a subject to be forbidden, a restriction needs to make itself manifest. It’s a simple question of geometry. Surround an area with a chain-link fence and what remains inside it will be off-limits. A drawing produces a comparable optical illusion. It simultaneously reveals what it encloses, and no matter how close you come to it, it will always seem to be out of reach.

23

PL . 11

A Dialogue with Olga “A writing of the eyes’ movement disappearing, its calligraphy.”1

Murat Nemet-Nejat

Looking at Olga's drawings, I'm struck by the modesty of the image, forcing the body to bend and look. Freeze! freeze [PL. 37]

freeze

the eye melts into democratic blur distant [PL. 12] for near [PL. 11]

1

25

Murat Nemet-Nejat, The Spiritual Life of Replicants (Greenfield, MA: Talisman House Publishers, 2011).

the camera lens fixed frees the body's movement,

air spaces in the mind. [PLS. 26, 28]

Cubism's death liberates abstraction. * Torso Infinity collapses into a fragment, starting a journey

diagonal [PL. 1] * Love: a truncated body, a dog, a fragment of a wall—always focused on the powerless, the yearning inside an empty shoe, the democratic blur of the daily, its starry light. * Charcoal and white tracings—smudged—echoing the noir and white chiaroscuro of 19th-century photos—their damaged, double exposed light—its principle of uncertainty. [PL. 4] *

self-portrait, curve n.y. subway often changes course imperceptibly. plan b, despite this strict order [PL. 19] *

26

PL . 12

PL . 13

Winter branches, antennae—like tentacles—snare the vanishing act of time. [PLS. 43, 45] * Blue collar crowd of pigeons digging up a fire hydrant—what you call the proletariat.

Your focus insists on the image, gradually revealing to me what's not there—water—a shut off fire hydrant. The invisible. [PL. 13] * The shadow of the air hydrant—our soul—(hidden in air spout of the dryer)—surviving mind control, yet two silhouettes, suspiciously in the periphery, still observing. [PL. 2]

*

Olga's Weak Art iPhone6 destroyed photography, giving the photographer absolute power over its subject. At the click of a finger, every milli-inch of one's solipsistic reality is mastered, replicating or giving it an intensity of codified, algorithmic hue—of a violet panoptical twilight zone. The weak power of black and white images— rebelling. * Multi-media as dialectics—rather than synthesis.

In sketches, one is searching for the perfect moment, freezing.

Free zone, Plan B: shooting multiple moments of the same subject, one is reordering the passage of time—the voyage.

In these images, Olga the photographer's fighting the pencil she's holding.

29

* The journey ends in a fragment, as it begins. [PL. 45] * Beggars see mainly shadows of passersby—legs. [PLS. 30, 11, 12] * If you look at something long enough, you'll understand that what you look at is stretching along the direction of your thought [PL. 29] diagonal Death is a winter whistle to the beauty of an earless forest. (The Spiritual Life of Replicants) [PL. 43] Diagonals which strengthen the impression of perspective by breaking its rules. [PL. 3] * Freeze, comrade! [PL. 6] Garbage is the manna of the poor. Trickle down warmth in the New World. *

Fata Morgana If you look at an object long enough, things change. A cascade of birds descending in the thickening exhaust haze. prr object ivities in a glass rising as continuum. the birth of abstraction. [PL. 29]

30

* violence is the foreign tongue of my body, fragmentary improvisations, of yearning [PL. 26] oh, left, left your divine body like a broken sculpture in your hands! (souljam, küçük İskender)2 * The loneliness of the long distance hiker. [PL. 31] *

Manhattan Transcendent The cyclist, the body, Lenin's sculpture, the father, the traffic sign, the holy ghost. wall Plop. Frog in the pond beyond circles disappearing, in fini te [PL. 14] * Drawing the insignificant object. NOTHING is significant [PL. 9] *

Modesty of Art

Beauty of the sketches—avoidance of clear portraits—everything distilled to objects' gestures, spirit's essence, hidden behind the image, under the birds crowding the hydrant,

2

küçük İskender, “souljam,” in Murat Nemet-Nejat ed., Eda: An Anthology of Contemporary Turkish Poetry (Jersey City, NJ: Talisman House Publishers, 2004), 291–312.

PL . 14

self-portraits hidden in the toilets' shiny objects, the humble object becoming a mirror. * Truncated, time is reversed, the soul vanishing into objects.

In photographs time is infinite, flowing backwards, into peripheral space. [PL. 1] * The imperceptible image is always hidden in the perceptible.

[PL. 15, 16, 17]

*

Radiating Leash/Dog/Leg

In Olga's drawing frame doesn't exist. Everything emanates from an untruncated space.

Fragment of perception is its focus. Only its center. [PL. 9] * The sketch of the sound is the idea. [PL. 38] *

The Death of Perspective

Winter branches, subway tracks and airplane aisles meet at Plan B, returning home. [PL. 44] "Death is a winter whistle to the beauty of an earless forest." (The Spiritual Life of Replicants) *

33

To name something a fragment is tracing a door, to enter and leave it. checking out the house the windows the wind is like the first stirrings of pain on the roof first lost foreskins of living yet unfulfilled. weep. weep. [PL. 45] * Abstraction Walls always bend from the insufficiency of floors. [PL. 29]

—July 10, 2016

34

PL . 15

PL . 16

PL . 17

PL . 18

PL . 19

PL . 20

PL . 21

PL . 22

PL . 23

PL . 24

PL . 25

PL . 26

PL . 27

PL . 28

PL . 29

PL . 30

PL . 31

PL . 32

PL . 33

PL . 34

PL . 35

PL . 36

PL . 37

PL . 38

PL . 39

PL . 40

PL . 41

PL . 42

PL . 43

PL . 44

PL . 45

LIST OF WORKS

PL . 8

Untitled [Cafe…]

All works:

17 1/8 x 16 1/2 (43.5 x 42 cm)

2016 Charcoal and collage on paper

PL . 9

Courtesy Gallery DIEHL, Berlin; Foxy

Untitled [Drawing…]

Production, New York; and Pace London.

23 1/2 x 25 1/2 inches (60.5 x 64.5 cm)

Images © Olga Chernysheva PL . 10 PL . 1

Untitled [Forbidden…]

Untitled [The Journey…]

23 1/2 x 33 inches (60.5 x 84 cm)

16 1/2 x 23 3/4 inches (42 x 60.5 cm) PL . 11 PL . 2

Untitled [Distant…]

Untitled [First…]

23 13/16 x 16 1/2 (60.5 x 42 cm)

33 x 23 3/4 inches (84 x 60.5 cm) PL . 12 PL . 3

Untitled [Distant…]

Untitled [Hills…]

23 13/16 x 16 1/2 (60.5 x 42 cm)

16 3/8 x 23 3/8 (41.5 x 59.3 cm) PL . 13 PL . 4

Untitled [White…]

Untitled [Uncertain…]

23 3/4 x 23 3/4 inches (60.5 x 60.5 cm)

16 7/8 x 30 1/8 (43 x 76.5 cm) PL . 14 PL . 5

Untitled [Three…]

Untitled [Long…]

33 1/8 x 20 1/8 (84 x 51cm)

14 1/8 x 23 5/8 (36 x 60 cm) PL . 15 PL . 6

Untitled [In NY…]

Untitled [A Small…]

23 3/8 x 16 3/8 (59.3 x 41.5 cm)

16 1/2 x 23 7/8 (42 x 60.5 cm) PL . 16 PL . 7

Untitled [In NY…]

Untitled [Cafe…]

16 1/2 x 23 7/8 (42 x 60.5 cm)

23 7/8 x 11 3/8 (60.5 x 29 cm)

70

PL . 17

PL . 26

Untitled [In NY…]

Untitled [The Birth…]

28 1/2 x 15 3/4 (72.5 x 40 cm)

23 5/8 x 16 1/2 (60 x 42 cm)

PL . 18

PL . 27

Untitled [A Play…]

Untitled [The Birth…]

21 1/4 x 33 inches (54 x 84 cm)

32 3/4 x 19 1/2 (83.3 x 49.5 cm)

PL . 19

PL . 28

Untitled [Third…]

Untitled [The Birth…]

33 1/8 x 23 7/8 (84 x 60.5 cm)

23 7/8 x 16 1/2 (60.5 x 42 cm)

PL . 20

PL . 29

Untitled [A reference…]

Untitled [If you…]

33 1/8 x 23 (84 x 58.5 cm)

23 7/8 x 16 1/2 (60.5 x 42 cm)

PL . 21

PL . 30

Untitled [In search…]

Untitled [Street…]

21 1/8 x 28 (53.6 x 71 cm)

16 1/2 x 23 7/8 (42 x 60.5 cm)

PL . 22

PL . 31

Untitled [From…]

Untitled [I…]

30 1/4 x 21 5/8 (77 x 55 cm)

23 7/8 x 47 1/4 (60.5 x 120 cm)

PL . 23

PL . 32

Untitled [From…]

Untitled [Variation…]

13 x 16 1/2 (33 x 42 cm)

23 7/8 x 33 1/8 (60.5 x 84 cm)

PL . 24

PL . 33

Untitled [Empty…]

Untitled [An Image…]

33 x 20 1/2 inches (84 x 52 cm)

34 3/8 x 22 5/8 (87.4 x 57.4 cm)

PL . 25

PL . 34

Untitled [Born…]

Untitled [Upper…]

29 7/8 x 19 1/2 (76 x 49.5 cm)

33 1/8 x 23 5/8 (84 x 60 cm)

71

PL . 35

PL . 44

Untitled [Study…]

Untitled [Before…]

33 1/8 x 16 1/2 (84 x 42 cm)

15 1/8 x 33 1/8 (38.5 x 84 cm)

PL . 36

PL . 45

Untitled [Still…]

Untitled [Home…]

29 x 20 1/8 (73.5 x 51 cm)

21 3/8 x 16 7/8 (54.3 x 43 cm)

PL . 37

Untitled [Drawing…]

23 3/4 x 16 1/2 inches (60.5 x 42 cm) PL . 38

Untitled [Acoustic…]

13 3/8 x 23 13/16 (34 x 60.5 cm) PL . 39

Untitled [A Lecture…]

23 7/8 x 33 1/8 (60.5 x 84 cm) PL . 40

Untitled [Discussion…]

22 x 33 1/8 (56 x 84 cm) PL . 41

Untitled [Monday…]

33 1/8 x 23 7/8 (84 x 60.5 cm) PL . 42

Untitled [Study for the drawing Untitled (I…)] 16 1/2 x 23 5/8 (42 x 60 cm) PL . 43

Untitled [Roads…]

23 3/4 x 33 inches (60.5 x 84 cm)

72

T ranscriptions of C ollaged T e x ts PL . 1

The journey from Moscow always starts early, often at dawn. The airport is not close and your time is already not your own. It becomes mechanical and starts to count backward to takeoff. All theories about the infinity of time and space disappear. And you too are disappearing somewhere.

PL . 13

White square with image of street attractions.

PL . 14

Three figures and one body.

PL . 15

First self-portrait after passport control.

In NY everything moves north, south, west or east. Despite this strict order, NY trains often change routes unpredictably. But the conductors know the new plan.

PL . 3

PL . 16

PL . 2

Hills which strengthen the impression of perspective by breaking its rules.

PL . 4

Uncertain drawing.

In NY everything moves north, south, west or east. Despite this strict order, NY trains often change routes unpredictably. But the conductors know the new plan.

PL . 17

PL . 6

In NY everything moves north, south, west or east. Despite this strict order, NY trains often change routes unpredictably. But the conductors know the new plan.

A small hitch in the growth of the material world. Brake.

PL . 18

PL . 5

Long escalator.

A play not seen to the end. 34th Street.

PL . 7

Café attributes. No. 2

PL . 19

Third foreign self-portrait.

PL . 8

Café attributes. No. 1

PL . 20

A reference to Chinese painting.

PL . 9

Drawing with insignificant subject.

PL . 10

Forbidden subject.

PL . 11

Distant and near motives. No. 1 PL . 12

Distant and near motives. No. 1

PL . 21

In search of material for the drawing “A reference to Chinese painting.”

PL . 22

From the series “Service.” No. 1 PL . 23

From the series “Service.” No. 2 PL . 24

Empty and full subjects.

73

PL . 25

PL . 37

Born out of tourism.

PL . 26

Drawing technique: When you’ve made contact with the subject there’s no need to move or start analyzing. Just freeze.

The birth of abstraction at the Picasso exhibition. No. 1

PL . 38

Acoustic recording of philosopher’s lecture.

PL . 27

The birth of abstraction at the Picasso exhibition. No. 4

PL . 39

PL . 28

PL . 40

The birth of abstraction at the Picasso exhibition. No. 2

Discussion about art. No. 2

A lecture about anthropology.

PL . 41 PL . 29

Monday afternoon.

If you look at something long enough you’ll begin to understand something.

PL . 42

For the drawing “I often visited…”

PL . 30

Street coincidences.

PL . 31

I often visited a shop where, in one department, there were homeless animals on display. After these visits, all the products I saw in other shops seemed also in need of attention and a home.

PL . 43

Roads have a beginning and an end, but mental tracks often narrow, disappearing into nowhere like winter trees, whose branches become thinner and thinner. (From the series “Excursions.”)

PL . 44

PL . 32

Before the start.

Variation on preparations for the holiday.

PL . 45 PL . 33

An image is always part of itself. In the sense that it belongs to the world which creates it.

PL . 34

Upper East Side-style decorations aren’t for everyone.

PL . 35

Study for the monument “Considering the Menu.” No. 1 PL . 36

Still life of bread found in a bin in Soho.

(Reconstruction)

74

Home. View from the window. (Fragment)

CONTRIBUTORS

Nova Benway is Assistant Curator and Open Sessions Curator at The Drawing Center.

Pierre Joris is the author of The Agony of I.B. (a play commissioned and produced in June 2016 by the Théatre National du Luxembourg; Editions PHI); An American Suite (Inpatient Press, 2016); Barzakh: Poems 2000–2012 (Black Widow Press, 2014); and Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry of Paul Celan (FSG, 2014). When not on the road, he lives in Sorrentinostan, a.k.a. Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, with his wife, multimedia performance artist and writer Nicole Peyrafitte.

Mónica de la Torre's new poetry book, The Happy End/All Welcome, is forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse (2016). She teaches poetry at Brown University.

Murat Nemet-Nejat is presently working on his poem Camels & Weasels. His recent publications include his translation of the Turkish poet Ece Ayhan's A Blind Cat Black and Orthodoxies (Green Integer Press, 2015), and the essays "Holiness and Jewish Rebellion: 'Questions of Accent' Twenty Years Afterward" in Languages of Modern Cultures: Comparative Perspectives (University of Michigan Press, 2016) and "Dear Charles, Letters from a Turk: Mayan Letters, Herman Melville and Eda" in Letters for Olson (Spuyten Duyvil, 2016). Nemet-Nejat's poem Animals of Dawn will be published

by Talisman House in the fall of 2016.

BOARD OF DIRECTORS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Co-Chairs

Olga Chernysheva: Vague Accent is made possible

Rhiannon Kubicka

by the support of Josef and Margot Lakonishok;

Jane Dresner Sadaka

GRAD: Gallery for Russian Arts and Design, London; Dita Amory; Suzanne Dubois; Erika

Frances Beatty Adler

Hoffmann; Meryl Rose; Anna L. Zelenova; Lori

Dita Amory

Spector and Max Lang; and Jan ter Haar.

Brad Cloepfil Anita F. Contini

Special thanks to Pace London; Gallery DIEHL,

Andrea Crane

Berlin; Foxy Production, New York; Matthew

Bruce W. Ferguson

Stephenson; and Yulia Dultsina.

Stacey Goergen Steven Holl Iris Z. Marden Nancy Poses Eric Rudin David Salle Joyce Siegel Galia Meiri-Stawski Barbara Toll Waqas Wajahat Isabel Stainow Wilcox Candace Worth Emeritus Michael Lynne George Negroponte Elizabeth Rohatyn Jeanne C. Thayer Executive Director Brett Littman

E D WA R D H A L L A M T U C K P U B L I C AT I O N P R O G R A M

This is number 129 of the Drawing Papers, a series of publications documenting The Drawing Center’s exhibitions and public programs and providing a forum for the study of drawing.

Noah Chasin Executive Editor Joanna Ahlberg Managing Editor Designed by AHL&CO / Peter J. Ahlberg, Kyle Chaille This book is set in Adobe Garamond Pro and Berthold Akzidenz Grotesk.

It was printed by BookMobile in Minneapolis, MN.

I S B N 9 7 8 - 0 - 9 4 2 3 24 - 9 8 - 3 Š 2 016 T he D rawing C enter

THE D R AWI N G CENTER

3 5 W O O S T E R S T R E E T | N E W YO R K , N Y 10 013 T 212 219 216 6 | F 8 8 8 . 3 8 0 . 3 3 6 2 | D R AW I N G C E N T E R . O R G

Texts by Nova Benway Pierre Joris Mรณnica de la Torre and Murat Nemet-Nejat

D R AW I N G PA P E R S 1 2 9

$20.00 US

I S B N 9 78 0 9 42 3 24 9 8 3 52000

9

780942

32498 3