Drawing the Conventional Conceptualist’s Conclusions

Earlier this year, Martin Kersels made a funny series of photographs in which he was shown tossing different friends in the air. The pictures, usually taken at precipitous angles and from low vantage points, show the artist in the energetic moments just after the toss, his trusting friends in midair flight, arms akimbo and destiny uncertain.

Also this year, Paula Hayes built a low wood platform bounded on opposite sides with wide wood shelves, which she painted an acidic yellow-green. On them she piled mounds of autumn leaves and some gourds gathered from Vermont, along with a small stack of snapshots of the state’s colorful fall landscape.

Elsewhere, Joseph Grigley was engaged in written conversations with friends and strangers during a variety of social situations. Grigley, who is deaf and reads lips, often communicates with the aid of pen and paper, then frames or pins the unsigned and fragmentary notations to the wall for exhibition.

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What do Kersels’ photographs, Hayes’ installation and Grigley’s notes have in common? They do share an obvious lineage in Conceptual art. What’s less obvious is that all of them are drawings.

At least, they’re drawings according to a lively if perplexing show that opened last week at the Museum of Contemporary Art. “The Power of Suggestion: Narrative and Notation in Contemporary Drawing” is the debut exhibition organized by Connie Butler, MOCA’s recently appointed curator of drawings.

It brings together diverse work by 13 younger artists (all are in their 30s). Kersels, Ginny Bishton, Meg Cranston, Russell Crotty, Sam Durant, Pauline Stella Sanchez and Frances Stark work in Los Angeles; Hayes, Grigley, Matthew Antezzo, Aki Fujiyoshi, Sowon Kwon and Kathleen Schimert work in or around New York.

If you’re wondering why ordinary photographs, autumn leaves piled on shelves and barroom notes should be considered drawings, you’re not alone. None seem appropriately described by the word. Instead, what we’re apparently witnessing is another example of the degree to which Conceptual art continues to dominate the cultural landscape.

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Conceptual art, which during the last three decades has made the use of non-art materials and photographic techniques wholly conventional, is characterized by a focus on ideas. Before the 1960s, drawing was typically the medium artists used to work out visual ideas. So, add the non-art materials and photographic processes of Conceptual art to a curatorial bent toward drawing as an idea-oriented activity, and voila: “The Power of Suggestion.”

The mix doesn’t make for a convincing survey of drawings, though some notable younger artists are included. But it is easy to see how narrative and notation are significant elements of these works, as the show’s title observes.

For instance, Kersels has completely transformed the terms of a famous faked photograph by Yves Klein, in which he showed himself leaping headlong into the void from a second-story window. In Kersels’ clever hands, Klein’s dramatic 1960 icon of risky artistic independence is turned into a playful game of mutual reliance and trust.

Hayes, who is also a garden designer, has accumulated seasonal fall colors from nature and arrayed them on store-like shelves painted this season’s most fashionable fall color--that unmistakable Pucci/Gucci green. And Grigley’s work might be productively thought of as Kurt Schwitters-style collages, or disparate scraps of printed paper that gain new and disruptive meaning through juxtapositions that were unanticipated when the notes were written.

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Interestingly enough, if each of these causes you to scratch your head and wonder what drawing’s got to do with it, some of the strongest works in the exhibition don’t puzzle you at all. Using conventional tools like ink and graphite on paper, Sanchez, Bishton and Durant benefit from taking drawing for granted, then maximizing its effects.

Sanchez’s “g wiz . . . POP” (1989-93) is a fetching Post-Modern mandala. Overlapping rings of ballpoint ink drawings and computer-generated color photocopies fan out on the floor beneath a screaming yellow mushroom-covered crown. The obsessive drawings, many of which recall mathematical extrapolations of crystalline forms, posit the artist as a sorcerer’s apprentice, madly attempting to orchestrate an unstoppable torrent of visual information.

Bishton’s wonderfully tactile drawings are made from skinny, heavily layered, linear doodles of acrylic color, which are composed into free-form blocks recalling printed columns of text. But the connection to language has become purposefully unhinged, with blocks colliding into one another and lines scooting off into tangled webs. Rationality is visually short-circuited.

While utterly different from one another, Sanchez’s and Bishton’s drawings both have a compulsive, can’t-stop-the-art-making edginess. They’re the grittiest works in the show.

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By oddly elegant contrast, Durant makes pungent juxtapositions of the cerebral aura of art and the plain-spokenness of a carpenter’s diagram. A pencil drawing of the plumbing system of a house is paired with one of a classic 1968 sculpture by Robert Morris, in which industrial odds and ends are scattered randomly around a gallery. Morris’ sculptural evocation of scientific Industrial Age entropy, or the steadily increasing degree of disorder that characterizes the life of any system, is wittily butted up against an image of domestic innards.

Durant’s pencil drawings have a presence that would be missing from, say, the juxtaposition of a plumbing blueprint and a photograph of the Morris sculpture. Ever since the Renaissance, the hand-eye immediacy of drawing has made it the medium of choice for an artist to register the unfolding processes of thought, thereby offering evidence that he or she is more than just a craftsman who executes a program predetermined by a patron.

Durant’s drawings, as renderings that depict other artists’ work, add another twist: They don’t place full value in individual autonomy, while insisting that craftsmanship still counts.

Old-fashioned drawing is important to Durant’s vocabulary in a way that it simply isn’t to Hayes’ featherweight installation, Kersels’ delightful photographs or other Conceptually oriented works on view, like a projected video and a film by Fujiyoshi and Schimert, respectively.

The weakness of “The Power of Suggestion” isn’t that it has categorized drawing in too expansive a manner. It’s that Conceptual strategies are by now so conventional in art that an expansive idea of drawing has lost any elastic power.

* Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S. Grand Ave., (213) 626-6222, through Jan. 26. Closed Mondays.