Drawn/Taped/Burned: Abstraction on Paper » Suzanne Bocanegra

Suzanne Bocanegra on Jill Baroff

Rachel Nackman — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 22:41:41 +0000

Autumnal Equinox.

The sequencing of the five panels is meant to demonstrate the passing of the season, I think. The panels are swatches, bits of a whole, framed in a line and read from left to right; the grid grows larger as we read. The lines divide and make a whole, in rhythm, like an eye closing and an eye opening.

Then you look closer.

The lines repeat the horizontal and the vertical fibers of the paper. The lines are like a warp and a weft, yet this warp and weft aren’t woven in cloth, but rather drawn – fleshy and pale, somewhat brown, somewhat red. This warp and weft weave the eye. The closer you look, the farther you see – the changes in focus, in scale, in detail. Ever focusing, ever fading.

Allyson Strafella on Suzanne Bocanegra

Rachel Nackman — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 16:08:47 +0000

Lines
standing side by side.
Rows arouse doubt,
—a search
for an exit.

Yet during the performance
in the poppy field,
the crowds stand tall, swaying slightly.
Each figure moves like a pendulum,
bowing to its forces.

The percussionists at the center
work in teams of two
to invent a sound accompaniment.

Moving through the mass
has not been an easy navigation.
But alas, I have found the way out.

Annabel Daou on Suzanne Bocanegra

Rachel Nackman — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 16:08:26 +0000

Thinking about the title of the poem by Wallace Stevens, Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself, I made this response from one sheet torn from my little (8″ x 5″) notebook. I wanted to let my first encounter with the piece, my first view of it, and my “notes” on this encounter become the response itself.

Suzanne Bocanegra on Mel Bochner

Rachel Nackman — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 15:08:33 +0000

There is a paradox at the center of Theory of Painting—the graph paper gives it away. It is a set of instructions about how to make something: a plan, an architectural description of a kind of sequential change. And yet, it’s four drawings. Mel Bochner is making something and thinking about making something at the same time.

This piece was drawn just a few years after Bochner’s groundbreaking conceptual installation, Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to be Viewed as Art, and it follows his revolutionary thinking about where the action is in a piece of art. But it also fits into the larger tradition of making study drawings to prepare for the creation of larger works. The larger work in this case is not a larger, more detailed, but still two-dimensional version of the original; the larger work is an action, an environment, a change in time. A study is a preparation, an exploration of how to accomplish a future task. In this piece, the task for which Bochner is preparing himself is a series of actions in space and in time.

I have always thought of this piece as choreography. It’s an instruction that tells you where and how to move, how to change a body’s relationship to its space, in time.

The real paradox is that it’s an abstraction and a narrative, all at the same time. It is an orderly square of drawings that describe disorder. It is the dance and the set, the performer, the performed and the performance.