Afterimage: Drawing Through Process

by Cornelia Butler, Museum of Contemporary Art

The term "process art" describes a moment of radical, aformalexperimentation in postwar American sculpture. Through the medium ofdrawing, Afterimage revisits process art in terms of the artists whodefined the movement and suggests a transitional moment when many ofits practitioners anticipated the feminist and postminimalist art ofthe 1970s. Nancy Grossman's use of language, for example, suggests akind of material abstraction, and Nancy Holt's earth works and relateddrawings introduced content into a minimalist vocabulary. The bookalso explores the drawing as a residual object in works in which theprocess of making dictates the form of the drawing. Examples includeGordon Matta-Clark's stacked cuttings, Robert Morris' "blind time"drawings, and Sol Lewitt's folded construction drawings. Other works,such as those by Bruce Nauman and Robert Smithson, record a particularapproach to body-based and process-oriented sculpture. The book, which accompanies an exhibition, contains an essayby Cornelia H. Butler on the historical ambiguity surrounding processart and one by Pamela M. Lee on temporality in work of the late1960s. The artists included in the book are William Anastasi, RichardArtschwager, Mel Bochner, Agnes Denes, Nancy Grossman, RobertGrosvenor, Marcia Hafif, Eva Hesse, Nancy Holt, Barry LeVa, SolLewitt, Lee Lozano, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Gordon Matta-Clark, RobertMorris, Bruce Nauman, Yvonne Rainer, Dorothea Rockburne, Alan Saret,Joel Shapiro, Robert Smithson, Michelle Stuart, Richard Tuttle, andJack Whitten.Copublished with The Museum of Contemporary Art. Los Angeles.EXHIBITION Museum of Contemporary Art, Los AngelesLos Angeles, CaliforniaApril 11-August 22, 1999Contemporary Arts MuseumHouston, TexasMay-July 2000Henry Art GallerySeattle, WashingtonJuly-September 2000

Genres: Art

152 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

Cornelia H. "Connie" Butler is Chief Curator at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. From 2006-2013, she served as the Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator of Drawings at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA, New York City). Prior to that, she was a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA) from 1996-2005. Butler also held curatorial positions at the Neuberger Museum of Art (Purchase, New York), Artists Space (New York City), and the Des Moines Arts Center (Iowa). Her multimedia exhibition WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution dealt with international feminist art of the 1970s. Butler is a 1980 graduate of Marlborough School, and a 1984 graduate of Scripps College.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

you can borrow my podcast recitation if you'd like.