Jackson Mac Low: Lines-Letters-Words

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Jackson Mac Low Lines–Letters–Words

THE D R AWI N G CENTER

The Drawing Center January 20 – March 19, 2017 Drawing Room

Jackson Mac Low Lines–Letters–Words

Curated by Brett Littman

D R AW I N G PA P E R S 131

Essays by Anne Tardos, Brett Littman, and Sylvia Mae Gorelick

My Work with Jackson Mac Low

Anne Tardos

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As an artist, as a poet, I have always appreciated Jackson’s devotion to the art of performance. Many, or most, of the drawings in this show were regarded as performance scores. Every Gatha (phrases or mantras on grid paper) is a score for any number of performers [PLS. 33–41]. The Vocabularies and Name Poems, where a page is filled with words from a “lexicon,” created by using the letters of the dedicatee’s name, or the occasion of a celebration, were viewed as performance scores as well as artworks [PLS. 47–57].

Perhaps his later works, the thirteen Vermont Drawings, where he wrote words such as “clouds” or “dogs” or “stone,” over and over on the page, were not considered performance scores, but simply drawings [PLS. 58–60]. These might have been an exception. In the mid-1990s, while visiting our mutual friend Simone Forti in Vermont, we often walked across the field down to the brook that, as Steve Paxton remarked, felt more like a temple. Jackson describes the scene in meticulous detail in his poem “Forties 77.” We would spend hours sitting on the rocks, in complete tranquility and felt inspired to create. Jackson used a very hard pencil for these drawings. For an artist, who used bold strokes and drew with India ink for much of his life, to choose such a delicate and faint instrument to make his mark was interesting to me. He was in his early seventies at the

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time, and felt himself aging. There is a gentleness to these drawings, perhaps the tenderness of old age, but the boldness of the concept, repeating words to form a visual pattern, had not faded.

Atypical drawings such as the Skew Lines, diagonally drawn straight lines, using color markers, made in the late 1970s, inevitably turned into performance scores [PLS. 42–46]. He performed them solo a few times, interpreting the lines as a musical score, vocalizing according to the lines’ directions. Still, I had the impression that the absence of words in these scores left him somewhat wanting. Jackson was a man of words and language.

When we first met in 1975, I was making film and video art. I made a series of tapes with Jackson improvising for my camera, using whatever object in my loft was available at the time. A piece of wood, a ladder, a rope. The work was utterly graceful, poetic, and sometimes hilarious. Later, after I began writing multilingual poetry, I also agreed to join him in his performances. We were sometimes accompanied by musicians, and we traveled the world as a duo. We wrote a number of performance works collaboratively, and performed them together. We were collaborators. There are canvases with words and images on them, bearing both our signatures. Like me, Jackson was a poet, visual artist, and composer.

Our performances were so-called guided improvisations, where we worked with the score, listened to each other intently, and only contributed to the whole when we felt we had something worthwhile to add. Jackson’s universal instruction to performers was to “listen and relate” with “no ego tripping.” It was clear that this direction was a political one, pointing to his vision of a utopian society in a pacifist anarchist world.

Jackson had worked with many other performers in his life, often groups, and in the 1960s he involved entire audiences by handing out copies of his scores. When I once asked him why he was mainly performing with me rather than larger groups as he used to, he said “this is what interests me now.”

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Many of the works in this exhibition were discovered after his death. One might say, they could only be discovered then. He had kept his drawings and collages safely, but he completely lost track of them, sometimes painfully suspecting the works as having been stolen. I had to go through the enormous accumulation of this artist’s life’s work, and in doing this, I discovered many long lost items, in particular the original, hand drawn Light Poems Chart [PL. 18]. In the decade following his death, I edited three large, posthumous volumes of his works: Thing of Beauty: New and Selected Works (University of California Press, 2008); 154 Forties (Counterpath, 2012); and The Complete Light Poems 1–60, with Michael O’Driscoll (Chax Press, 2015).

Jackson Mac Low’s work has been widely recognized as influential, and has been acknowledged by poets, artists, dancers, and musicians, as pivotal and groundbreaking. He is regarded as a major avantgardist visionary. This exhibition is a fitting tribute to Mac Low’s visual and conceptual work.

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Jackson Mac Low: Lines–Letters–Words

Brett Littman

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Jackson Mac Low: Lines–Letters–Words is the first solo museum exhibition of visual works spanning the multidisciplinary artist’s practice from the 1940s to his passing in 2004. Tracing the arc of his creative output, specifically through the lens of drawing and handwriting, this exhibition identifies drawing as a foundational medium for Mac Low—one that significantly informed his work and influenced his multidisciplinary output for more than sixty years.

Mac Low was born in Chicago in 1922. He is best known as a poet, but he was also a seminal and influential figure in the avantgarde visual arts, performance, theater, film, dance, and music worlds beginning in the 1950s. He influenced and was associated with a wide range of movements, including the New York Fluxus movement, and he collaborated with artists, poets, and institutions throughout his career, most notably The Living Theater (Judith Malina and Julian Beck), Judson Dance Theater (Trisha Brown and Merce Cunningham), David Antin, John Cage, Simone Forti, Allan Kaprow, Meredith Monk, Jerome Rothenberg, Tui St. George Tucker, Yoko Ono, Diane Wakoski, and La Monte Young.

I first met Jackson in 1990, when he was the Regents’ Lecturer at the University of California San Diego, where I was an undergraduate

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studying philosophy and poetry. At that time, I was part a group of poets and performers that had founded )39, a magazine that published chance-generated texts, concrete and Xerox poetry, groupwritten poems, and collaborations between writers, musicians, artists, and filmmakers. His “quasi-intentional” or “diastic” methods for composing poems—which almost always consisted of a transformational system for choosing word fragments or whole words from charts or source texts—called into question issues of authorship, control, and authenticity. At first glance, his poems are jarring and seemingly impossible to decipher, but upon closer reading of accompanying descriptive texts that painstakingly describe the conditions and processes of composition, a reader can begin to understand the deeper structures that hold these works together. For me, Jackson’s poems were courageous, extreme, difficult, and revolutionary, and they opened the door to work outside of the traditional subjective, expressive, and emotive confines of poetry.

Being able to hear Jackson, his wife and collaborator Anne Tardos, and musician Charlie Morrow read and perform live during his residency on campus was a profound experience. Jackson’s guest lectures in Jerome Rothenberg’s experimental poetry class provided a second important and lasting impression. Jackson first talked to us about how his own pacifist-anarchist-Buddhist philosophy influenced his work. This was the first time that I encountered an artist who self-identified as an anarchist, a position that allowed for “getting out of the way” in order to permit other people to make their own decisions while reading or performing within the framework of his texts. Jackson then conscripted us into learning how to read and perform some of his “Simultaneities,” which included DrawingAsymmetries, Gathas, and Vocabularies. We spent several hours with Jackson going over his very specific performance instructions for each type of work, and then we were given typewritten or handdrawn works to enact. Things progressed slowly. Jackson was not happy with our first attempts. Because we were not listening to one another, what resulted was a cacophony of spoken letters, phonemes, and words. He asked us to think about the spaces between the letters, the visual layout of the poem, to hear the ambient noise outside of our classroom, and finally to be present and aware of all other performers. Probably by the fourth or fifth time we tried to

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perform the works, we began to understand and develop strategies for group reading that both followed his rules and allowed us more agency to produce increasingly interesting and interactive results.

Since my early interactions with Jackson at UCSD he has remained a significant and influential cultural figure for me. About two years ago, I decided to reach out to Anne Tardos to see if I could visit her, look at Jackson’s archive, and discuss the possibility of organizing a show for The Drawing Center. I was specifically interested in his early drawings, collages, and hand-drawn performance scores like the Drawing-Asymmetries, Gathas, and Vocabularies, some of which had been documented by Steve Clay in the 2005 Granary Books publication Doings: Assorted Performance Pieces 1955–2002. I wanted to explore in more depth how drawing influenced his thinking.

Over the past fifteen years, I noticed some of Jackson’s works were included in visual art exhibitions, indicating a growing interest in his work beyond the confines of the poetry world.1 Anne graciously allowed me to see some of the drawings in the many archival boxes that Jackson left behind in the loft on North Moore Street in Tribeca after his death—what a treasure trove they turned out to be!

Jackson began drawing in his early teens and continued to create visual work throughout his life. The earliest abstract automatic drawings in this exhibition were created between 1947 and 1953 with gestural ink brushstrokes in sketchbooks or on single sheets of paper. Jackson’s indebtedness to artists like Jean Arp, André Breton, Salvador Dalí, André Masson, and Joan Miró, all of whom pioneered Surrealist automatic drawings in the 1920s, is clear. His early drawings, with their loopy lines and non-representational forms, were explorations into the use of chance and non-systematic compositional techniques; he had already been studying D. T. Suzuki’s writings on Zen and Kegon Buddhism in the early 1940s, and 1

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Several of Jackson works were in Jay Sanders and Charles Bernstein’s 2001 Poetry Plastique exhibition at Marianne Boesky Gallery. In 2012 Galerie 1900–2000 in Paris organized an exhibition titled Jackson Mac Low. 2013 saw several of Jackson’s Drawing-Asymmetries included in The Museum of Modern Art’s There Will Never Be Silence: Scoring John Cage’s 4’33”. Most recently, in 2016, a series of typed poems on index cards (Gitanjali for Iris I–VI) were included in Carte Blanche to Karma: Olympia at Galerie Patrick Seguin in Paris.

was familiar with practices and methods to release the mind from conscious influence. In 1948, Jackson attended a John Cage concert of Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano at Columbia University.

This composition was chance-derived and used Cage’s prepared pianos to further remove the creation and performance of the work from the systematic rules and tunings of Western music. Jackson was intrigued by Cage’s methods, and surely hearing his music inspired him to continue explorations with drawing into similar territory.

In 1953, Jackson shifted his focus from abstract drawings to drawings that contain fragments of letters and in some cases, full words.

Untitled (September 10, 1953), Pie (n.d.), Ape (n.d.), and Hi (n.d.) represent the first time that Jackson’s drawing concerns intersect with his radical ideas about poetry and performance [PLS. 14–17]. These are the earliest examples of Jackson’s drawn performance scores, and it is possible that George Brecht, Al Hansen, Dick Higgins, Toshi Ichiyanagi, or Allan Kaprow, who were enrolled with Jackson in Cage’s experimental composition classes at the New School between 1953 and 1958, helped to realize some of these. We do not have performance instructions for these works, but the rules published in 1961 for performing the Drawing-Asymmetries indicate that line thickness and font size are meant to guide duration, silence, intonation, and pitch.

These drawings made between 1947 and 1953 are critically important to understanding Jackson’s oeuvre. They illuminate Jackson’s early developments and were foundational for the deeper philosophical and political ideas that led to his now better-known radical writing methods. It was not until between 1954 and 1955, about seven years after Jackson began creating automatic drawing experiments and hand-drawn scores, that he wrote the 5 biblical poems, the first typed work composed using chance operations and the first of his “simultaneity” performance instructions.

In 1961, Jackson composed the script for Tree* Movie, although the film was not made until a decade later in 1971 [PL. 19]. I have included the film in this exhibition, because 1961 was another pivotal year for Jackson’s visual output. Tree* Movie is a prototype for the static and structural filmmaking, later popularized by Hollis Frampton, Paul Sharits, Michael Snow, and Andy Warhol. Tree* Movie brings together Fluxus’s preoccupation with imperative actions

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and Jackson’s tendency to merge language with more expansive visual thinking. In 1961, concurrent with the development of the Tree* Movie script, Jackson began to make the Drawing-Asymmetries, Gathas, and a drawing entitled Om in a Landscape [PL. 32]. For the Drawing-Asymmetries Jackson began by randomly choosing a “generator” word from an existing text and writing this word on a blank sheet of paper [PLS.20–26]. He would then write a series of words, each of which were acrostically connected to the generator word. These haphazardly placed, differently sized, and sometimes distinctly colored and hand-drawn words construct strong visual compositions, which are not representational, but performative.2 The equally visual Gathas, the Sanskrit word for “verse” or “hymn,” consist of individual letters, which are drawn omnidirectionally on graph paper [PLS. 33–41]. While Jackson’s earliest Gathas were derived from Sanskrit mantras, later Gathas include words sourced from modern texts, such as Kathy Acker’s 1978 novel The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula. These drawings are examples of what Jackson described as Buddhist performance scores that “encourage performers and hearers to give ‘bare attention’ to the letter-sounds, words, etc.”3 In 1973 Jackson started to make the Vocabularies by handwriting proper names in India ink on large sheets of white paper. Jackson would then write any word that came to mind that included one of the letters from the name. In the performance instructions for these works, he included specific rules for musicians and vocalists, adding to the phonetic connotations of each word by positioning them as tonal notations. In The Drawing Center’s exhibition, there are several

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“Each of the Drawing-Asymmetries may be performed alone, or with other DrawingAsymmetries, by a single performer or any number of performers. Each performer begins by reading any word on the drawing in any manner suggested by the way the word is drawn. All possible parameters of reading each word (loudness or softness, pitch changes, etc.) are to be inferred from the word’s appearance. Each performer should leave plenty of silence between the words, regulating the amount of silence by the amount of white space and the degree to which the words are crowded together or far apart.” Jackson Mac Low, “Drawing-Asymmetries,” in Doings: Assorted Performance Pieces 1955–2002, ed. Steve Clay (New York: Granary Books, 2005), 54.

Written in 1961, revised March 26, 1989, and February 23, 2002, New York.

Jackson Mac Low, “Introduction to Selected Gathas,” in Thing of Beauty: New and Selected Works, ed. Anne Tardos (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 192.

Written on May 7, 1985.

important Vocabularies including A Vocabulary for Peter Innisfree Moore (February 1974–July 1975) and Stephanie Vevers (August 1977) [PLS. 47–48]. From 1979 to 1980, Jackson created the Skew Lines, which act as scores for vocalized actions. Each of the Skew Lines consists of differently colored, slanted pen lines that span across a white page. According to Tardos, Jackson rarely performed these works, and so they have not been published or seen until now.

Starting in 1977 and continuing until 2004, Jackson also made a series of Name Poems. Jackson began each of these works on a specific occasion, such as the birthday of his daughter (Clarinda) or of his wife (Anne) or to celebrate Valentine’s Day or the New Year. These drawings, which take the words of the celebrated event as their basis—Happy Birthday Annie (December 1, 1994) or 1st Name Piece for Clarinda, Happy New Year 1978 (December 31, 1977)—closely resemble Jackson’s early works from the late 1940s and early 1950s [PL. 51–52]. They are definitely and purposefully illegible, due to the palimpsestic iterations of the original statement, which have been repeated and layered on the paper in pen, crayon, or acrylic. Finally, the series of thirteen Vermont Drawings (1995) echo the unsettled system of marks in Jackson’s early works, returning him to a visual form that is more purely grounded in drawing rather than in text or performance [PLS. 58–60]. It is fascinating to me that in the last decade of his life Jackson’s visual work circled back to his earlier prelinguistic explorations with drawing. It is obvious that he continued to feel this was territory that warranted further exploration.

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Gesture and the Politics of Communication in the Drawings of Jackson Mac Low

Sylvia Mae Gorelick

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Jackson Mac Low’s drawing practice moves through multiple layers of meaning, action, and performance. Mac Low’s early drawings, made in the late 1940s and early 1950s, are gestural, pulsional. They present a landscape that is largely prelinguistic, where the forms of letters are discernible as punctures in what one could call the substrata of sense. These primary gestures do not bind themselves to any particular linguistic regime. Indeed, many of the letter-like forms that seem to arise in the series of untitled drawings from 1953 resemble Japanese or Chinese characters as much as they evoke Roman ones. The limit between gesture and meaning remains obscure even when in Untitled (September 10, 1953) the word “if” seems to be so clearly traced [PL. 14]. These movements call to mind Roland Barthes’s notion of an “écriture sans alphabet,” posed in his work on Cy Twombly.1 Of this “writing beyond alphabet,” which follows the indexical logic of the ductus in paleography, Barthes writes: “it scratches out in idleness (désoeuvrement), as if it were a 1

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Roland Barthes, “Non Multa Sed Multum,” in Catalogue raisonné des oeuvres sur papier de Cy Twombly, Volume IV: 1973–1976, ed. Yvon Lambert (Milan: Multhipla Edizioni, 1979), 9. English version, Roland Barthes, “Cy Twombly: Works on Paper,” in Barthes, The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art and Representation, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: California University Press, 1985). See also “The Wisdom of Art” in the same volume.

question of making time visible, the trembling of time.”2 In Mac Low’s drawings, too, the temporal aspect is central. Before he wrote the 5 biblical poems (1954–55), his first work composed by chance operations and the first of his performance scores, Mac Low used the practice of drawing as a means of indexing the body on the page through time, opening a space of sensuous and sensible aesthetic possibility, prior to the rigidity of any regime of meaning.3 In 1960 and 1961, Mac Low made a series of 501 poetic works called the Asymmetries, generated using procedures which he referred to as “reading-through” methods, counted among his many “nonintentional” processes for writing poems—namely, procedures that remove the artist’s authority over the composition. For these works, Mac Low culled content from a source text, and, occasionally but significantly, from the spatiotemporal environment in which the poem was written. He would then select a separate text, called an “index” or “seed string,” which he spelled out within the frame of the poem “by selecting (by ‘chance’ or choice) certain types of linguistic units” from the source text and arranging them typographically in accordance with chance operations.4 In the case of the Asymmetries, as in many of Mac Low’s reading-through works, these methods are often acrostic.5 Essential to their poetic nature is the performative aspect of Mac Low’s nonintentional works; each Asymmetry is written as a score for its performance. Indeed, beginning with the 5 biblical poems,

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“Non Multa Sed Multum,” 9. My translation.

Mac Low composed this work in December 1954 and January 1955.

Jackson Mac Low, “My Ways of Writing and Composing and their Relation to ‘Found Poetry’” (unpublished paper), 2.

Jackson Mac Low, Thing of Beauty: New and Selected Works, ed. Anne Tardos (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), xix. In her preface, Tardos explains that though Mac Low considered reading-through and related methods to be chance operations while creating these works in the early 1960s, he later modified this view in the 1990s, considering them to be deterministic methods, since “if one applies a deterministic text-selection method multiple times to the same source text and seed text, making no mistakes, the method’s output will always be exactly the same.”

Yet, Mac Low also claimed that the element of chance could never be eliminated from these works entirely. The term “nonintentional” qualifies both chance and deterministic procedures for Mac Low.

all of Mac Low’s works composed using nonintentional methods are accompanied by lists of detailed instructions for reading and performance by one or by multiple participants, at times including the author himself. These reading methods are based primarily on typography and punctuation. As he expressed perhaps most explicitly in his “Statement on Anarchist Pacifist Poetics,” written in the early 1960s, Mac Low envisioned his performance scores as the embodiment, “in microcosm,” of a specific political agenda. He defines this agenda as anarchist pacifism, which entails a resistance to “frozen power structure[s],” an investment in personal freedom, and a categorical refusal of recourse to violence for the resolution of social problems.6 In Mac Low’s view, by creating, in performance works, a “general framework” with an open set of rules for enactment by multiple people, a “situation” is generated in which the “poet” acts as “a loyal co-initiator of action within the free society of equals which he hopes his work will help to bring about.”7 This aesthetic-political program is inseparable, for Mac Low, from a breakdown of the separation between “chance” and “cause,” which, for him, results in the dissolution of the social fabric of subjectivity. It is in this way that poet and performers become, in Mac Low’s words, “co-creators” of the work.8 Mac Low’s performance-based poetics, in a manner deeply related to John Cage’s methods for musical composition, is ideologically grounded in a Buddhist aspiration to transcend the hegemony of the ego.9 Indeed, Cage bore witness to Mac Low’s influence when he said, with respect to his own use of chance procedures, “It’s actually

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It is essential to note that Mac Low later modifies his political views in “My Ways of Writing and Composing and their Relation to ‘Found Poetry’” to say that his politics is an “uneasy—some might say, ‘Pyrrhonianly skeptical’—compromise between anarchist pacifism or pacifist anarchism, libertarian and democratic socialism, and left liberalism.” He then writes: “I don't understand clearly how the forms of my poems, music, and other artworks could affect the social, political, and economic arrangements of our society for the better, but I hope they can.” “My Ways of Writing and Composing and their Relation to ‘Found Poetry,’” 7.

Jackson Mac Low, “Statement on Anarchist Pacifist Poetics,” in The Poetics of the New American Poetry, ed. Donald Allen and Warren Tallman (New York: Grove Press, 1973), 384–5. Written in the early 1960s.

Ibid.

Both Cage and Mac Low were inspired by the philosophy of D. T. Suzuki.

through Jackson’s work that I was stimulated to do as I’m doing.”10 Working in this vein, Mac Low used nonintentional methods to eradicate any mediation of the work by his own ego, that is, by his authorial presence, and by the egos of the work’s performers. Of his approach to chance operations, Mac Low wrote: “I felt these ways of working allowed me to lessen dependence on the illusory ego and let ‘the rest of the world’ enter into the works.”11 He used these methods as a means of radically limiting agency, to allow the material of the external world to move through the poem and disrupt the socially codified movements of bodies through language.

In Mac Low’s drawing practice, the Gathas present the most complex manifestation of his Buddhist performance method.12 In these works, Mac Low used nonintentional procedures to read through principally Buddhist mantric texts, spelling them out on quadrille paper.

He calls the Gathas “Buddhist performance texts,” and writes that “chance operations were used in composing them in order to encourage performers and hearers to give ‘bare attention’ to letter-sounds, words, etc. Also a Buddhist de-emphasis of the composer’s ego underlies both using compositional chance operations and letting performers’ choices determine many parameters of their realization.”13 These diagrammatic works map out space directly, from page to performance, such that empty gaps in the quadrille paper are rendered as caesuras in the performers’ individual subjectivities.

In another manifestation, this “nonegoic” aesthetic program is accomplished in the script for Tree* Movie (January 1961) [PL. 19].

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John Cage, Musicage: John Cage in Conversation with Joan Retallack, ed. Joan Retallack (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1996), 71. Moreover, Cage cites Mac Low as the only visual artist aside from Marcel Duchamp to employ chance operations (154).

Thing of Beauty, xix. Quoted from Jackson Mac Low, “Person, Personae, Look on the Page, Orality and ‘Voice,’ or, Living as a Verbal Artist as a Person” (lecture presented at Naropa Institute, Boulder, Colorado, July 1994, revised).

The Sanskrit word gatha means “verse” or “hymn.”

Jackson Mac Low, “Introduction to Selected Gathas,” in Thing of Beauty, 192.

Written on May 7, 1985. Mac Low further specifies that while all of the Gathas executed from 1961 to 1973 are based on transliterated mantras, a number of Gathas composed after 1973 employ non-mantric words. Indeed, such works as Expectations Gatha, composed on April 24, 1978, are executed in bright colors using an English vocabulary.

This piece presents a plan for a static film; the text instructs the reader to select a tree or another object in nature and place a film camera in front of this object to record it and all surrounding occurrences for “any number of hours.”14 The author of the work is thereby removed from the generative process that “produces” the film; the film’s content is likewise void of mediation, opening instead onto the organic movements of a landscape over an indeterminate duration. In direct opposition to the Gathas, Tree* Movie does not seek to abolish subjectivity but rather to overcome the ego through a removal of personal intervention in the work. It’s as if we were watching the world perform itself within the frame of the film, uncontaminated by any human element.15 After his initial engagement with chance operations, Mac Low recognized the idealistic and theoretically flawed nature of his Buddhist investment in nonegoic procedures. In 2001, he wrote: “By the time I realized that the artmaking methods that I’d mistakenly thought were ‘nonegoic’ are not, I had come to value them for their own sake.”16 He writes in turn that, contrary to his original belief that the self could be transcended by means of nonintentional works, the self must first be studied and understood if it is to be surpassed: “An understanding of the self—even though the term is ultimately meaningless—is only attained by working through what each of us thinks of as ‘my self,’ not by attempting to evade or abolish it.”17 Indeed, as Anne Tardos writes of Mac Low in her preface to Thing of Beauty: “We often talked about the fact that even when he used a nonegoic system, he was still consciously choosing the verbal materials.[….]” Yet he continued to

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Jackson Mac Low, Representative Works: 1938–1985 (New York: Roof Books, 1986), 132.

Ibid., 132–3. Tree* Movie was realized on three occasions: on November 14, 1971, in a garden on the roof of the Chelsea Hotel; on March 26, 1972, on a farm in Binghamton, New York; and on August 12, 1972, on the northeast side of Central Park. During each screening of Tree* Movie, Mac Low repeated the word “tree” continuously throughout. In 2009, Anne Tardos combined the four-hour video of the Binghamton realization of Tree* Movie with her audio recording of Mac Low’s live performance during a screening of Tree* Movie at Bard College in 1985.

Thing of Beauty, xviii. Quoted from Jackson Mac Low, “A Talk about My Writingways” (lecture presented at University of Arizona, Tucson, January 24, 2001).

Written from early December 2000 to January 24, 2001 in New York.

Ibid.

employ chance operations and deterministic methods, motivated by the “illusion” that they were nonegoic.18 The Drawing-Asymmetries of 1960 and 1961, also composed according to reading-through methods, figure words “immediately lettered very freely and impulsively” on the page. Mac Low attested that “[i]n many cases the letters of the words are so placed that they are difficult or impossible to read—as words or even as letters.”19 In Drawing-Asymmetry #15 (1961) the phrase “Directions in a cool, dry place,” curving multidirectionally across the page, can be clearly read [PL. 23], and in Drawing-Asymmetry #2 (1961) the words “Clothes Internal Revenue Service” appear snaking through the white ground. Yet Drawing-Asymmetry #12 (1961) presents thick black gestures crossing through one another, such that it feels almost like an act of interpretation to call them letters [PL. 22]. Mac Low specifies that these works often cannot be traced back to their “index word”—the root of their acrostic progression—because, in many cases, this original word is spelled out across multiple drawings. The nonintentional operation itself is therefore doubly obscured by the physicality of the drawings. In contrast to the poetic Asymmetries, where the seed string moves clearly through the writing and performance of the piece, in the Drawing-Asymmetries, the threshold of legibility is continually breached and folded in on itself, casting meaning into question.

In an essay from 1986, Mac Low posed an active stance on reading as a form of performance: “Why did I begin at that time [in December 1954] to view performance as central and texts as primarily notations for performance (if only by a silent reader)?”20 Inseparable from the notion of reading as a productive activity, the scope of the concept of performance extends, for Mac Low, from the deepest point of subjective interiority to the most social level of exteriority. While this would seem to suggest that the performability of a piece depends

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Thing of Beauty, xix. Importantly, Mac Low emphasizes that he never renounced any of his early work as his poetics developed over the course of his life.

Jackson Mac Low, “A Note on the Drawing-Asymmetries,” in Thing of Beauty, 102.

Written on May 18, 1985 in Verona.

Representative Works, xvi.

on its legibility as text, there is evidence that Mac Low considered the purely gestural to be performable as well. The series Skew Lines (1979–80), a group of drawings presenting straight lines in different colors, slanting across the page at diagonals, was conceived as a set of performance scores [PLS. 42–46].21 By their corporeal nature, their status as points of inscription between body and meaning, the Drawing-Asymmetries seem to open onto a working through the self from within the aisthesis— the space of the perceptual and the conditions of meaning—where new experiential possibilities emerge.22 Indeed, Mac Low writes that the goal of his work is to bring about “new aesthetic (experiential) meanings.”23 In contrast to the idealism of pure nonintentionality, the Drawing-Asymmetries are positioned directly between artist and viewer, opening onto the process of the formation of meaning. What Mac Low had attempted to perform on a grand scale with the poetic Asymmetries and with the Gathas, absent the marks of any “self,” he shifts to the corporeal level with the Drawing-Asymmetries by directing the movement of text through the body. In parallel, his political directive shifts from the logic of social microcosm to the space between bodies—the most intimate and fragile space of communication.

A series called Vocabularies, spanning from the mid-1970s to the end of Mac Low’s life, presents messages dedicated to specific people; in each Vocabulary, Mac Low devised a lexicon from the letters that compose the dedicatee’s name, which he then traced across the page at various angles so that the linguistic identity of the person in question is at once deconstructed and multiplied. In a parallel series of Name Poems, composed using colored crayons, markers, and acrylics on paper, the alphabetical aspect is once again obscured by the thick layering of gestures. For example, in Dear Annie, Be My Valentine (1992), where the message itself is illegible by excess, it is

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“Statement on Anarchist Pacifist Poetics,” 384–5.

For an in-depth, historically situated analysis of this concept, see Jacques Rancière, Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art, trans. Zakir Paul (New York: Verso, 2013).

“Statement on Anarchist Pacifist Poetics,” 384–5.

communicated not discursively but physically [PL. 55]. The event of the Vocabularies’ performance is properly situated between the body of the artist and that of the recipient.

In a manner similar to, and in the lineage of, Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard, the poetic Asymmetries liberate language from syntax by means of typography. Yet while Un coup de dés presents a sphere of poetic purity in which linguistic objects relate to one another spatially rather than temporally, the Asymmetries fracture any possibility of purity; they filter the world into the poem, and immediately return the movement of sense out of it, back into the world through their performance, which, in turn, dislocates the bodies of performers from their sociolinguistic syntax.24 The Drawing-Asymmetries, as well as the Vocabularies, working beyond and against this logic, break outside the confines of typography and bring the dimension of gesture—of the body itself—directly into the work; between the seed string and the act of performance they bear the imprint of the body’s movements on the page. In the drawings, there is no text properly speaking, meaning there is nothing that offers itself up to syntactical systematization in discourse. Because these drawings necessarily disrupt the possibility of a total effacement of the artist’s self—because they, rather, redirect the confluence of chance and choice through the movement of his hand—the rupture they effect is one through the mechanisms of meaning. Rather than a destruction of the ego, the drawings’ force lies in their relationships to the body as an active center of signification. The corporeal aspect of Mac Low’s drawings—their mixing of line and word to the point of indistinguishability—is accompanied by a polyphony of performative possibilities. It is perhaps from the space of this convergence that a political praxis based in a working through of the self takes form.

24

26

This aspect of the work is prefigured by Mallarmé’s unfinished manuscript for Le Livre, which he envisioned as a script for its performance.

Early Drawings

28

PL . 1

Untitled, 1947

PL . 2

Untitled, 1951

PL . 3

Untitled, n.d.

PL . 4 / PL . 5

#4, December 1951 / #26, November 30, 1951

PL . 6

Untitled, n.d.

PL . 7

Untitled, 1951

PL . 8

Untitled, n.d.

PL . 9 / PL . 10

Untitled, September 10, 1953 / Untitled, September 10, 1953

PL . 11 / PL . 12

Untitled, n.d./ Untitled, n.d.

PL . 13 / PL . 14

H, 1953/ Untitled, September 10, 1953

PL . 15

Hi, n.d.

PL . 16

Ape, n.d.

PL . 17

Pie, n.d.

Light Poems Chart The Light Poems began in early June 1962 as a chart lighting 280 names of kinds of light (plus 8 ‘extras’). Lettered roughly on a Funk & Wagnalls Editorial Department Payroll Distribution form, this chart has 14 columns & 20 rows. Each column is headed by one of the 14 letters contained in my name & that of my wife (Iris Lezak), & beneath each letter is the symbol of a playing-card denomination (Ace to King, plus Jokers). The letters appear in the order ‘A, R, C, M, E, W, O, L, N, I, J, S, K, Z.’ Some were undoubtedly assigned to denominations because they were the latter’s symbols (‘A’ & ‘K’); I don’t know how the others were assigned. While each light name on the chart begins with one of these letters, only 7 columns are filled solely with names beginning with the letters heading them. The lower rows of the others are mostly filled with names beginning with other chart letters (usually ones similar in sound), since I was able to think of, or find in dictionaries, too few beginning with some letters (e.g., ‘Z’) & far more than 20 beginning with others (e.g., ‘S’). At first I listed extra light names as nearly above their initial letters as possible, but after shifting all but two extra ‘S’’s to the ‘Z’ column, I filled the empty spaces in other columns with extras & ended with only 8 extra names listed solely above (a ‘C,’ an ‘M,’ 4 ‘L’’s, & 2 ‘S’’s).1

1

Jackson Mac Low, “A Note on the Methods Used in Composing the 22 Light Poems,” in 22 Light Poems (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1968), n. pag.

PL . 18

Light Poems Chart, 1962

Tree* Movie Select a tree*. Set up and focus a movie camera so that the tree* fills most of the picture. Turn on the camera and leave it on without moving it for any number of hours. If the camera is about to run out of film, substitute a camera with fresh film. The two cameras may be alternated in this way any number of times. Sound recording equipment may be turned on simultaneously with the move cameras. Beginning at any point in the film, any length of it may be projected at a showing. *) For the word ‘tree,’ one may substitute ‘mountain,’ ‘sea,’ ‘flower,’ ‘ lake,’ etc.

Jackson Mac Low 965 Hoe Avenue New York 59, N.Y. January, 19612

2

Jackson Mac Low, “Tree* Movie,” in Representative Works: 1938–1985 (New York: Roof Books, 1986), 132. Written in January 1961, and originally published in ccV Tre, January 1964.

PL . 19

Still from Tree* Movie, January 1961 (video: second version, 1972, Binghamton, NY; audio: 1985, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY)

Drawing-Asymmetries

48

PL . 20

Drawing-Asymmetry #15, 1961

PL . 21

Drawing-Asymmetry #42, 1961

PL . 22 / PL . 23

Drawing-Asymmetry #12, 1961 / Drawing-Asymmetry #36, 1961

PL . 24

Drawing-Asymmetry #33, 1961

PL . 25

Drawing-Asymmetry #38, 1961

PL . 26

Drawing-Asymmetry #52, 1961

PL . 27

What is a nail, n.d.

PL . 28 / PL . 29

This is not going to fool anybody, February 1965 / There is still, 1965

PL . 30

Very Few Football Players, January 1965

PL . 31

Boxing, January 3, 1965 (1:55 AM)

PL . 32

Om in a Landscape, 1961

Gathas

66

PL . 33

74th Hare Krishna Gatha, February 1967

PL . 34

AUMMM Gatha, 1961

PL . 35

1st Milarepa Gatha, October 13, 1976

PL . 36

Kadish Gatha, April 27, 1975

PL . 37

Vajra Guru Gatha, October 9, 1975

PL . 38

Free Gatha 1, February 22–28, 1978

PL . 39

A Vocabulary Gatha for Anne Tardos, May 1980

PL . 40

A Postcard Vocabulary for Eve Rosenthal, April 28, 1978

PL . 41

Expectations Gatha, April 24, 1978

Skew Lines

81

PL . 42

Skew Lines, March 1979

PL . 43

Skew Lines, March 1979

PL . 44

Skew Lines, March 1979

PL . 45

Skew Lines, March 1979

PL . 46

Skew Lines, March 1979

Vocabularies and Name Poems

88

PL . 47

Stephanie Vevers, August 1977

PL . 48

A Vocabulary for Peter Innisfree Moore, February 1974–July 1975

PL . 49

Words from A Vocabulary for Annie Brigitte Gilles Tardos, 1981

PL . 50

Poem and Name: Happy Birthday, Anne, November 29–30, 1991

PL . 51

First Name Piece for Clarinda, Happy New Year 1978, December 31, 1977

PL . 52

Happy Birthday, Annie, December 1, 1994

PL . 53

For Anne with love for her birthday, December 1, 1987

PL . 54

Trope Market, 1989

PL . 55

Dear Annie, Be My Valentine, 1992

PL . 56

Happy Birthday 57th for Anne, 2000

PL . 57

Untitled, October 15, 2001

Vermont Drawings

102

PL . 58

Funguses, 1995

PL . 59

Sun, 1995

PL . 60

Moss, 1995

A c k n o wledg m ents

This exhibition would not have been possible without Anne Tardos, Executor of the Estate of Jackson Mac Low. Without Anne’s guidance, knowledge, friendship, and belief in The Drawing Center, this project would have never gotten off the ground. Her excellent preface provides an artistic and personal perspective on Jackson’s work and life that really makes this catalog indispensable. I am also very grateful to the composer Michael Byron, who has dedicated innumerable hours to the project. Thank you Anne and Michael, I truly am indebted to you. I would like to recognize poet and writer Sylvia Mae Gorelick, whose thoroughly researched analysis of Jackson’s poetry and drawings bring a new critical perspective to his work.

Funding a show like this is not easy; although Jackson was a denizen of the art world, he is still not a household name. I would like to thank Glenn Horowitz, Steve Clay and Julie Harrison, Susan Bee and Charles Bernstein, as well as several very important anonymous donors for their visionary and generous support to make this exhibition possible.

From The Drawing Center, I would like to recognize my staff whose hard work helped to realize this exhibition. First and foremost, I want to give a very special thank you to Amber Moyles, our Curatorial Assistant, for her invaluable help. Amber jumped into this project mid-stream and has been an incredible collaborator. She has done so many things that went above and beyond her normal curatorial duties that it would be impossible to list them all here. I would also like to recognize Olga Valle Tetkowski, Exhibition Manager; Noah Chasin, Executive Editor; Joanna Ahlberg, Managing Editor; Peter Ahlberg, AHL&CO; Délana Dameron-John, Development Director; as well as the curatorial interns who assisted with this project: Joana Valsassina Heitor and Isabella Kapur.

Lastly, I would like to thank The Drawing Center’s Board of Directors and our annual supporters who make all of our programs possible.

—Brett Littman

106

Michael Byron’s support and indefatigable efforts during the preparation of this exhibit are to be thanked with the deepest gratitude and appreciation. Brett Littman’s engagement in curating this show, and his devotion to Mac Low’s work, has been admirable, helpful, and effective. I thank Sylvia Mae Gorelick for her careful study of Mac Low’s work and for writing an essay for this publication.

Many thanks to Amber Moyles and Olga Tetkowski, and to the staff of The Drawing Center, for their care and precision in handling the artworks.

—Anne Tardos

107

L I S T O F P L AT E S

PL . 6

Untitled, n.d.

All works by Jackson Mac Low.

Ink on paper

All works from the collection of Anne Tardos.

6 1/2 x 7 1/2 inches

COVER

PL . 7

Detail of Dear Annie, Be My Valentine, 1992

Untitled, 1951

Crayon on paper

Ink on paper

8 3/4 x 12 1/2 inches

6 x 8 inches

PL . 1

PL . 8

Untitled, 1947

Untitled, n.d.

Pencil on paper

Ink and graphite on paper

8 1/2 x 11 inches

9 x 12 inches

PL . 2

PL . 9

Untitled, 1951

Untitled, September 10, 1953

Watercolor and ink on paper

Ink on paper

5 1/2 x 8 1/2 inches

8 1/2 x 11 inches

PL . 3

PL . 10

Untitled, n.d.

Untitled, September 10, 1953

Ink on paper

Ink on paper

9 1/2 x 13 inches

8 1/2 x 11 inches

PL . 4

PL . 11

#4, December 1951

Untitled, n.d.

Ink on paper in sketchbook

Ink on paper

9 x 12 inches

8 1/2 x 11 inches

PL . 5

PL . 12

#26, November 30, 1951

Untitled, n.d.

Ink on paper in sketchbook

Ink on paper

9 x 12 inches

9 x 12 inches PL . 13

H, 1953 Ink on paper 9 1/4 x 12 inches

108

PL . 14

PL . 21

Untitled, September 10, 1953

Drawing-Asymmetry #42, 1961

Ink on paper

India ink on paper

8 1/2 x 11 inches

8 1/2 x 12 inches

PL . 15

PL . 22

Hi, n.d.

Drawing-Asymmetry #12, 1961

Ink on paper

Ink on paper

9 1/4 x 12 inches

8 1/2 x 11 3/4 inches

PL . 16

PL . 23

Ape, n.d.

Drawing-Asymmetry #36, 1961

Ink on paper

Ink on paper

9 1/4 x 12 inches

8 1/2 x 12 inches

PL . 17

PL . 24

Pie, n.d.

Drawing-Asymmetry #33, 1961

Ink on paper

Ink on paper

9 1/4 x 12 inches

8 1/2 x 12 inches

PL . 18

PL . 25

Light Poems Chart, 1962

Drawing-Asymmetry #38, 1961

Graphite, typewriting, and ink on paper

India ink on paper

9 1/2 x 12 1/4 inches

8 1/2 x 12 inches

Not included in exhibition PL . 26 PL . 19

Drawing-Asymmetry #52, 1961

Tree* Movie, January 1961 (video:

Marker on paper

second version, 1972, Binghamton, NY;

8 1/2 x 11 3/4 inches

audio: 1985, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY)

PL . 27

DVD, black-and-white

What is a nail, n.d.

210 minutes

India ink on paper 11 x 8 1/2 inches

PL . 20

Drawing-Asymmetry #15, 1961

PL . 28

Ink on paper

This is not going to fool anybody, February 1965

8 1/2 x 12 inches

India ink on paper 8 1/2 x 11 inches

109

PL . 29

PL . 36

There is still, 1965

Kadish Gatha, April 27, 1975

India ink on paper

Pen on graph paper

8 1/2 x 11 inches

11 x 8 1/2 inches

PL . 30

PL . 37

Very Few Football Players, January 1965

Vajra Guru Gatha, October 9, 1975

India Ink on paper

Pen on graph paper

9 1/8 x 11 3/4 inches

8 1/2 x 11 inches

PL . 31

PL . 38

Boxing, January 3, 1965 (1:55 AM)

Free Gatha 1, February 22–28, 1978

India ink on paper

Pen on graph paper

11 x 13 inches

11 x 8 1/2 inches

PL . 32

PL . 39

Om in a Landscape, 1961

A Vocabulary Gatha for Anne Tardos, May 1980

Graphite on paper

Pen on graph paper

13 3/4 x 11 inches

11 x 8 1/2 inches

PL . 33

PL . 40

74th Hare Krishna Gatha, February 1967

A Postcard Vocabulary for Eve Rosenthal, April

Ink on graph paper in sketchbook

28, 1978

8 1/2 x 11 inches

Marker on gridded notecard 6 1/4 x 4 1/4 inches

PL . 34

AUMMM Gatha, 1961

PL . 41

Pen on graph paper

Expectations Gatha, April 24, 1978

11 x 8 1/2 inches

Marker on gridded notecard 6 1/4 x 4 inches

PL . 35

1st Milarepa Gatha, October 13, 1976

PL . 42

Pen on graph paper

Skew Lines, March 1979

11 x 8 1/2 inches

Pen on paper 11 x 14 inches

110

PL . 43

PL . 50

Skew Lines, March 1979

Poem and Name: Happy Birthday, Anne,

Pen on paper

November 29–30, 1991

11 x 14 inches

Pen and crayon on paper 10 1/2 x 13 1/4 inches

PL . 44

Skew Lines, March 1979

PL . 51

Pen on paper

First Name Piece for Clarinda, Happy New

11 x 14 inches

Year 1978, December 31, 1977 Pen on paper

PL . 45

12 x 17 1/4 inches

Skew Lines, March 1979 Pen on paper

PL . 52

11 x 11 1/2 inches

Happy Birthday, Annie, December 1, 1994 Pen on paper

PL . 46

8 1/2 x 11 3/4 inches

Skew Lines, March 1979 Pen on paper

PL . 53

11 x 14 inches

For Anne with love for her birthday, December 1, 1987

PL . 47

Oilstick and scratches on paper

Stephanie Vevers, August 1977

9 x 12 inches

Pen on paper 8 3/4 x 11 1/2 inches

PL . 54

Trope Market, 1989 PL . 48

Crayon on paper

A Vocabulary for Peter Innisfree Moore,

21 3/4 x 30 inches

February 1974–July 1975 Pen on paper, two parts

PL . 55

14 x 22 inches

Dear Annie, Be My Valentine, 1992 Crayon on paper

PL . 49

Words from A Vocabulary for Annie Brigitte Gilles Tardos, 1981 Ink on paper 12 x 11 inches

111

8 3/4 x 12 1/2 inches

PL . 56

N o t I ncl u ded in

Happy Birthday 57th for Anne, 2000

E x hi b iti o n C atal o g u e

Crayon on paper 14 x 20 inches

Drawing-Asymmetry #2, 1961 Ink on paper

PL . 57

8 1/2 x 12 inches

Untitled, October 15, 2001 Pen on paper

Tara Gatha, n.d.

9 x 12 inches

Pen on graph paper 8 1/4 x 10 1/2 inches

PL . 58

Funguses, 1995

Mani Gatha, n.d.

Graphite on paper

Pen on graph paper

9 x 12 inches

11 x 8 1/2 inches

PL . 59

Govinda Gatha, n.d.

Sun, 1995

Pen on graph paper

Graphite on paper

11 x 8 1/2 inches

9 x 12 inches I Had Chosen a Rose (Mishima), PL . 60

September 5, 1973

Moss, 1995

Pen on graph paper

Graphite on paper

11 x 8 1/2 inches

9 x 12 inches 1st Sharon Belle Mattlin Vocabulary Crossword Gatha, November 15–16, 1976 Pen on graph paper 11 x 8 1/2 inches 2nd Stephanie Vevers Vocabulary Crossword Gatha, January 6–7, 1977 Pen on graph paper 11 x 8 1/2 inches

112

Free Gatha 2, mid-July 1981

Sunset, 1995

Pen on graph paper

Graphite on paper

11 x 8 1/2 inches

9 x 12 inches

An Alphabetic Gatha on the Name Annie

Stone, 1995

Brigitte Gilles Tardos and for Anne, 1992

Graphite on paper

Pen on graph paper

9 x 12 inches

11 x 8 1/2 inches Clouds, 1995 Name Piece for Franklin Furnace, April 26, 1978

Graphite on paper

Marker on paper

9 x 12 inches

12 x 14 inches Trees, 1995 Happy Birthday, Anne, December 1, 1997

Graphite on paper

Acrylic and scratching on paper

9 x 12 inches

14 x 17 inches Wind, 1995 Word Pair Poem, 1990

Graphite on paper

Oil stick on linen

9 x 12 inches

36 x 48 inches Leaves, 1995 Birds, 1995

Graphite on paper

Graphite on paper

9 x 12 inches

9 x 12 inches Dogs, c. 1995 Rain, 1995

Graphite on paper

Graphite on paper

9 x 12 inches

9 x 12 inches Mountains, 1995 Graphite on paper 9 x 12 inches

113

C O N T R I BU T O R S

Sylvia Mae Gorelick is a writer, poet, and translator based in New York. She holds a Masters in philosophy from the Université Paris-Ouest Nanterre. Her chapbooks include Olympians, we are breathless for the “Poetry will be made by all!” project, curated by 89plus (2014) and Seven Poems for Bill Berkson (Kostro Editions, 2008). He work has recently appeared in the anthologies In|Filtration: An Anthology of Innovative Writing from the Hudson River Valley (Station Hill, 2016) and For Bill, Anything: Images and Text for Bill Berkson (Pressed Wafer, 2015). Her translation of Nietzsche’s Journey to Sorrento by Paolo D’Iorio was published by Chicago University Press in 2016 and her translation of Stéphane Mallarmé’s Le Livre is forthcoming from Exact Change Press.

Brett Littman is Executive Director of The Drawing Center.

Anne Tardos, French-born American poet, is the author of ten books of poetry and several multimedia performance works. Among her recent books of poetry are I Am You [second edition] (BlazeVOX, 2017); NINE (BlazeVOX, 2015); Both Poems (Roof, 2011); I Am You [first edition] (Salt, 2008); and The Dik-dik's Solitude (Granary, 2003). She is the editor of Jackson Mac Low's The Complete Light Poems (Chax, 2015); 154 Forties (Counterpath, 2012); and Thing of Beauty (California, 2008). A Fellow in Poetry from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Tardos lives in New York.

BO A R D O F D I R E C T O R S

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Co-Chairs

Jackson Mac Low: Lines–Letters–Words is made

Rhiannon Kubicka

possible by the support of Glenn Horowitz,

Jane Dresner Sadaka

Steve Clay and Julie Harrison, Susan Bee and Charles Bernstein, and several anonymous donors.

Frances Beatty Adler Dita Amory

Special thanks to Anne Tardos, Executor of

Brad Cloepfil

the Estate of Jackson Mac Low, and to composer

Anita F. Contini

Michael Byron.

Andrea Crane Bruce W. Ferguson 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

2 016 – 2 017 I ndivid u al S u pp o rters

A rtist ' s Patr o n

G aller y S u pp o rter

Jacques and Emy Cohenca

Mary Arouni

Barbara Toll

Liza Berdnik

Claire Weisz

Gregory Drozdek Charles Fears

C atal o g u e S p o ns o r

Saskia Friedrich

Libby and Adrian Ellis

Jack Hazerjian

Patrick Kissane

Edgar Howard and

Giorgio Spanu and Nancy Olnick

Elizabeth Wallau Howard

Lisa Kirt E d u cati o n Benefact o r

Carla Klevan

Mia Enell and Nicolas Fries

Rod Morton

Francis Greenburger

Paul Pearson

K. Brad Van Woert III

Michael Putnam Bob Ryder

P r o gra m Underwriter

Thomas Buser Heide Fasnacht Denis Gardarin George Held Neil and Angelica Rudenstine Robert Schechter

Anita Thacher

A nn u al F u nd

Elizabeth Albert

Eric and Fiona Rudin

Judy Angelo

Suzanne Salzinger

Naomi Antonakos

Louisa Stude Sarofim

Jeffrey Beck

Joyce Pomeroy Schwartz

David and Wendy Coggins

Dominique Singer and Joan Greenfield

Gwen and David Feher

Susan S. Shiva Foundation

Ruth Fields and Gerald McCue

Calvin Towle

Vincent and Shelly Fremont

Lily Tuck

Galerie Lelong

Steven and Kara Wise

Rob and Stacey Goergen Stuart and Nancy Goode Francoise Grossen W. Keyes and Allison Hill-Edgar Ken Hudes Gilbert and Rebecca Kerlin Patrick Kissane Andrew Kohler and Michael Koch Werner H. and Sally Kramarsky John and Duff Lambros John Laughlin Raymond Learsy Billy Martin Constance and H. Roemer McPhee Marion Miller Nevco Contracting Inc. Carolina Nitsch Peter and Heidi Nitze Mary Obering Sandra Perlow Barry Redlich Janelle Reiring Jane L. Richards Steve Roden

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

This is number 131 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 Puritan Capital in Hollis, New Hampshire.

I S B N 9 7 8 - 0 - 9 4 2 3 24 - 5 0 -1 Š 2 017 T he D rawing C enter

THE D R AWI N G CENTER

3 5 W OO 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

Essays by Sylvia Mae Gorelick, Brett Littman, and Anne Tardos

D R AW I N G PA P E R S 1 3 1

$20.00 US

IS BN 9 78 0 9 42 3 24 5 01 52000

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