One role of the museum is to provide a setting in which spectators might gain insight into how art can express new ways of understanding contemporary culture. By providing exposure to innumerable artists and infinite possibilities of cultural expression, these institutions help us to re-consider our perceptions of the complex world we live in.
I asked my friend and fellow Professor Ben Buswell to weigh in on the debate. Buswell references the drawings of sculptors Alberto Giacometti and Richard Deacon in his response, yet his comments speak to the essence of what needs to occur to validate the status of the studio drawing to a museum level.
Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Texas, for instance, hosted the first museum retrospective of Rachel Whiteread Drawings. Included in the exhibition are over one hundred drawings from the artist’s studio, select sculptures, and a carefully chosen “vitrine” of personal artifacts.
“The value of a sculptor’s drawings lies in their ability to communicate the ideal context of the physical object. The drawings create an artificial ideal while the object creates a palpable surrogate. Each, in its own way, needs the other to catalyze the viewer’s apprehension. The dialectical function of these two modes does not speak to the lower value of the drawing (as an “in-between”) but rather to the place of both the artist and the viewer in relationship to the works.”
Whiteread is a respected British artist known for her monumental public art sculptures and casting the spaces in and around domestic objects such as tables and chairs. I approached Nasher Sculpture Center Curator Jed Morse to talk about the Whiteread drawing exhibition in the context of revealing the artist’s process. As we walked around the exhibition, Morse indicated that the drawings were an extremely important entry into Whiteread’s thought processes behind her work. “Modern art and abstraction can be difficult to understand, yet, there is nothing in the drawings in this exhibition that is unintentional,” Morse says, as he points to Study for Valley (1991), a small ink and watercolor drawing of a bathtub. “They are independent works that serve as parallel interpretations of similar themes.” The drawings range from quick, unresolved sketches, technical ruminations, photo collages and explorations with materials such as correction fluid and varnish. If you consider the purpose of correction fluid, its intended function is to erase text. Whiteread’s sculptures bring forth this erasure, in that the trace remains of human activity are captured through the casting process (the text) and the physicality (the language) of her forms. The varnish equally allows Whiteread to explore these surfaces. The material is significant in another way, as it mimics both the color and texture of the plaster, cement, and resin so often utilized in Whiteread’s larger works. But this connection doesn’t really occur for spectators unless they are willing to investigate what they are viewing more closely. How does the work relate to the social or political consciousness of our time? In revealing that process, Morse says, “you have to let yourself go on that journey.” It is important for spectators to be willing to take that risk as well.
The goals of the museum go beyond the collection and preservation of art. Museums are “the keepers of cultural heritage” as they are contemporary culture communicators and the liaison between artists and spectators. Spectators will always bring their visual preferences and aesthetic sensibilities to the debate of what art is and is not, and this is part of what makes viewing art such a rich individual - and also collective - experience. Both Whiteread and Boise comment on the intimate and often taken for granted relationship between our bodies and the objects in our daily lives. They use the studio practice to deeply investigate these overlooked relationships, give them voice through the use of their materials and design, and bring these relationships into our view again. “We sit ‘in-between’ the work and our own perceptions,” Buswell continued. “The relationship between the drawing and [the] object serves to inform us of our place and, in the best of circumstances, allows us a more involved relationship with it.” The way artists think and work in the studio can lend insight into this relationship. Is it art? The answer is in the looking. Each spectator then gets to decide for himself. n
Dustin Boise, Edmond, Innocence, Paper and pencil
Dustin Boise is an Edmond Oklahoma native and graduate student in Art at the University of Cincinnati.
Rachel Whiteread Drawings is organized by the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. It will travel to the Tate Britain Museum in London September 8, 2010-January 16, 2011
Ben Buswell received his MFA from the University of Wisconsin Madison. He curated The Necessity of the Sculptural Object, an exhibition consisting entirely of the preparatory sketches of numerous 3D artists. Ben teaches Sculpture and Design at Portland Community College, Oregon. Special thanks to Marguerite Winslow, Lisa Staton, and Angelique Naylor
Cedar Marie makes art and writes. She is a professor of art at the University of Oklahoma.
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