La Cienega Area

Drawings have always been the closest link to the working process of an artist’s mind. Small, portable and made with relatively cheap materials, they traditionally have served as a means of “thinking out loud” about images and issues. But the rise of conceptual art has made the activity of drawing seem less private and preliminary. Today, a drawing is often simply an alternative method of making finished art.

A stunning exhibit of 117 drawings by 112 different hands, “A Decade of American Drawing 1980-1989,” includes work by just about every major artist working in two-dimensional media in the United States as well as many lesser-known names. What the show doesn’t include, unfortunately, is a catalogue with an essay to put all this work into some sort of perspective.

“Drawing” in this show embraces not only pencil, ink, or charcoal on paper but a host of other materials as bizarre--in this context--as fabric paint on flannel (Robert Gober’s “Untitled--Sleepers”). Richmond Burton paints elegant arrangements of lines on canvas and mounts them on paper in “Brooklyn Bridge.” In “Triangle,” Barbara Bloom scribbles triangles and equations (perhaps relating to the Greek “golden mean”) on the mat surrounding a photograph of people looking at antique sculpture in a museum.

As a group, the familiar artists offer few surprises; rather, their drawings encapsulate in miniature--or, considering the substantial size of some of these works--in humbler materials, the kind of work for which they are celebrated.

Given the absence of dates of similar works in other media by the show’s artists, however (here’s where that essay would come in handy), it’s impossible to know when--in the development of an artist’s particular line of thought--a drawing came into being.

It may have been intended to greet the world as a drawing--regardless of the continuing dominance of painting in the hierarchy of art media. But it might have been a dry run for a series of similar works on canvas or a method of plotting out an installation. Or it might have been an afterthought, a pause to reflect before moving on to other themes.

As it happens, few of the works on view actually suggest the process of thinking out a problem. (The exceptions include James Rosenquist’s “Study for Skull Snap,” an image of a skull with an attached dripping spigot and mousetrap, Brice Marden’s knotted, rhythmic “Cold Mountain Study” and Susan Rothenberg’s hauntingly ambiguous untitled drawing of a hand and peculiarly shaped foot supported by long bamboo splints.)

The sampling of realist imagery in the exhibit includes nudes by Alfred Leslie and Eric Fischl and portraits by William Bailey, David Hockney, David Salle, Robert Longo, Alice Neel, Malcolm Morley, Wayne Thiebaud and Larry Rivers. Their rationales and working methods, of course, vary wildly. One looks at the Salle, for example--an untitled charcoal drawing of a topless young woman pinching her underarm--and tries to imagine the source from which it was probably copied.

The abstract entries--by Sean Scully, Agnes Martin, Bill Jensen, Ellsworth Kelly, Alan Saret, Elizabeth Murray and a few others--are relatively few. But their ranks do include such unexpected delights as John Chamberlain’s tiny “Howling Excess,” a squirming mass of gold, silver, purple and orange squiggles and Cy Twombly’s “Untitled (Proteus),” a jagged gasp of irregular strokes of oil stick that seems to metamorphose (like the Greek sea god) from vegetable to animal form.

Yet (although a roll call of names may not bear this out) conceptual work in its various guises gives the show its most pronounced flavor.

Peter Halley’s road sign words (“Maintain Speed,” “Road Ends”) cut out of pieces of Kodalith, Richard Prince’s pairings of New Yorker-style cartoons with John Cheever-style anecdotes, John Baldessari’s fragmentary images sketched on plastic for the 1984 Summer Olympics poster--these and other works at once confound and enlarge one’s notion of what a drawing can be. (Daniel Weinberg Gallery, 619 and 625 N. Almont Drive, to Aug. 26.)