An exhibition entirely of drawings on small paper.
No frames, no titles, no prices. The gallery's most quietly subversive show in years. We spent two hours with it on a Tuesday afternoon, in a room that gave us no help at all.
The show consists of one hundred and thirty-two drawings, all on paper, none larger than A5, pinned directly to the gallery's white walls with small steel pins. There are no frames. There are no captions. There are no prices. The artist has been making one drawing a day, on a single sheet of plain paper, for the past four years and four months. The exhibition presents one hundred and thirty-two consecutive drawings from late January to early June of this year.
The drawings are not, individually, ambitious. Most of them are quick. Many of them are quite small in subject — a sketch of a chair, a hand, a window, the outline of a teapot. Some are unfinished. Some have been corrected and corrected again on the same sheet. Several have been marked, in the corner, with a single brief note in the artist's hand. None of them is signed, dated, or titled in any conventional way. The viewer, walking into the room, is given essentially no help.
What the room does
The lack of help, it turns out, is the show. The viewer who is willing to spend time with the drawings — which is to say, the viewer who is willing to walk slowly around the room without the conventional curatorial scaffolding — is rewarded in a way I have not, recently, often been rewarded by contemporary drawing shows.
The first thing one notices is that the drawings are in chronological order. This is not stated. It is, however, fairly quickly inferable from a number of internal clues — a small repeated motif of a piece of garden furniture that gradually changes as the seasons move on; a sequence of three drawings of the same tea cup at slightly different angles; a brief gap of two days in late February that, from a small parenthetical note, one is invited to suspect was the result of an illness.
The second thing one notices is that the drawings are, in aggregate, about something. The "about" is not declared. It accumulates. The viewer who has spent thirty or forty minutes in the room with them begins, without conscious effort, to see the patterns. A particular kind of attention to a particular kind of domestic object. A particular relationship between the hand and the page. A particular willingness to leave a drawing unfinished rather than to overwork it.
The drawings are not, individually, ambitious. Collectively, in chronological order, they are something I have not yet found a word for.
What the absence of frames means
The decision not to frame the drawings is, on the face of it, a small one. It is, in practice, central. A drawing in a frame is, by the convention of contemporary gallery practice, an object. It has a market value. It has a category. It has a relationship to the room — and to the other drawings in the room — that is mediated by its frame. A drawing pinned directly to the wall, with no frame at all, is something else. It is closer to a sheet from a notebook than to a finished work for sale.
This shifts the viewer's relationship to the work in a way that is difficult to describe without overstating. The viewer is not, in this room, in front of a series of "drawings" in the conventional commercial sense. The viewer is in a room where one hundred and thirty-two consecutive pages of an artist's working life have been made available for direct inspection. This is a different proposition. It is, in my view, a more interesting one.
What the absence of prices means
The drawings are not, the gallery confirms when asked, for sale. The artist has stated that the show is conceived of as a single piece of work, and that the work will be archived together after the show closes. The drawings will not be sold individually. They will not be sold as a complete set. They will, the artist hopes, eventually find an institutional home where they can be kept together. In the meantime, they exist in the room for the duration of the show, and then they will be packed away in acid-free folders and stored in the artist's studio.
This decision — and it is a decision, with real economic consequences for the artist — is part of what makes the show subversive in the precise sense of the word. Almost every contemporary drawing exhibition is, structurally, an instrument of sale. The drawings are made to be exhibited; the exhibition is made to facilitate the sale of the drawings; the sale of the drawings is what allows the artist to make more drawings. This show breaks the cycle.
What I would say to a visitor
The show runs for another fortnight. The room is small. The drawings are best seen, in my experience, by spending at least an hour in the room, walking around it slowly, returning to particular drawings that one has noticed on a first pass. The show rewards repeated visits; I have been told by the gallery staff that several of the artist's friends have been back three or four times.
What I would not do is bring the show's lack of curatorial help as a complaint. The absence of help is, here, the structure of the work. The viewer who walks into the room expecting to be told what to think will leave unsatisfied. The viewer who walks in willing to spend the time will leave, as I did, with the strong suspicion that they have seen one of the more carefully made drawing shows of the year.