Eliana Willis

When the instruments of artistic production are limited and direct, urgent expression the priority, drawing is often the medium of choice. So it should be no surprise that over the last six months, we’ve seen artists the world over turn to pen and paper.
“I think there’s often a tendency to turn to drawing in challenging times,” speculates Claire Gilman, who co-curated an exhibition of 100-plus such artworks completed in 2020 that goes on view at the Drawing Center October 7.
“It has to do with the intimacy of the medium and the necessity of touch, the physical act of putting hand to paper—there’s something very grounding about that,” Gilman continues. “Especially in this moment, when the condition of that trauma is rooted in a feeling of separation and isolation, there was a need for some kind of connectedness.”
Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Treasure Hunt #2 (2020). Collection of Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Donna Augustin-Quinn.

The show, “100 Drawings from Now,” began to take shape back in April, with Gilman working alongside curators Rosario Güiraldes, Isabella Kapur, and Drawing Center executive director Laura Hoptman. “Pretty soon after things had shut down and we were starting to see things on screen,” she explains, “we became aware that there was this immediate turn to drawing on the part of many artists. Some draw regularly, but for many drawing is not their primary medium.”
Indeed, the list of participating artists is a diverse one: Maurizio Cattelan, Paul Chan, Rachel Harrison, and Paul Giamatti (yes, that Paul Giamatti) all share the same set of walls in the exhibition, which provides one of the more in-depth looks at artistic output in the quarantine-era. All the themes that have dominated the discourse over the last half-year are present: state violence, a renewed investigation of domestic space, technology’s mediation of images.
Michael Armitage, Study for Curfew (2020). Courtesy of the artist and White Cube.

In some instances, 2020’s themes sit pointedly on the surface. A spare, ink-on-paper drawing by Michael Armitage called Study for Curfew, for instance, shows a uniformed man whipping a figure on the ground—a reference to recent protests over police violence.
More abstract is an India ink illustration of a tree by William Kentridge, populated with snippets of existential text that suggest isolation: “Escaping our fate.” “And I Alone.” Katherine Bernhardt, meanwhile, honed in on a different aspect of quarantine, via a watercolor picture of cigarette butts and Xanax pills.
Sam Messer and Rochelle Feinstein, offer a different window into the moment. The duo contributes a pair of portraits, each illustrating the other person through Zoom.  
There’s a fair share of abstraction, in shape studies by Xylor Jane and Sam Moyer, for example. There’s also a lot of self-portraiture. R. Crumb and Marcus Jahmal each examine their own likenesses. Both read as exercises in healing through making. 
Katherine Bernhardt,Untitled (2020). Courtesy of the artist and Canada Gallery.

“We didn’t seek out works that addressed specific ideas, necessarily,” says Gilman. “We wanted it to be a very natural portrait of the time. We felt that everyone had something to say. And I think that the artists that said they have something they wanted to contribute thought of their work in this way, as relative to this moment.”
All artists donated works to the Drawing Center for the exhibition, the vast majority of which are on sale now through October 4 in a benefit for the venue. (Prices were determined by the individual artists; some will pocket a percentage of the profits.) 
Mounira Al Solh, Self-Portrait (2020).Courtesy of the artist.

“100 Drawings from Now” will be on view October 7 – January 17, 2021 at the Drawing Center in New York.
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John Akomfrah‘s multichannel video installations are all-encompassing: the color, sound, and especially juxtaposition of historical footage with contemporary imagery make for a truly absorbing experience. And while his works address some of the most urgent present-day issues, Akomfrah also draws inspiration from the art of the past: he traces his interests back to masterpieces by artists like Constable and Turner that he encountered as a teenager visiting Tate Britain, after his family moved from his native Accra, Ghana.
“Turner’s my guy because there’s an act of will and imagination, which is at the forefront with what I call his ‘cinematic eye,’” the artist says in an interview with Art21. “It’s a painting, but it feels like you’re in the disaster.” The interview is part of the new season of the acclaimed PBS series’s Art in the Twenty-First Century series.
Akomfrah gestures to the turbulent ocean, a hallmark of Turner’s work, which figured heavily in his 2015 film Vertigo Sea. That work is an episodic meditation on the sublime beauty and horror of the water, incorporating scenes of migrants crossing the expanse in hope of a better life, images of the whaling industry, and readings of Moby Dick along with archival and newly shot footage.
“I’m more choreographer than creator,” the artist explains in the video, “I became interested in making multi-screen films because it seemed a way of bringing disparate interests together.” For Akomfrah, the addition of archival material introduces another voice, and so another perspective. 

Still from John Akomfrah’s Vertigo Sea (2015). ©Smoking Dogs Films, courtesy of Lisson Gallery.

For Art21, Akomfrah details personal experiences and global issues that he’s engaged in his films, including Brexit, race riots, the military coup in Ghana that forced his family to flee for Britain, and a number of other political and social events. All of those historical strands, the artist says, helped to shape his own view.
“Once you’ve understood that you are a product of things, you can’t shake off realizing that from across your life,” he says.
Watch the video, which originally appeared as part of Art21’s series Art in the Twenty-First Century, below. The brand new 10th season of the show is available now at Art21.org. 
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This is an installment of “Art on Video,” a collaboration between Artnet News and Art21 that brings you clips of newsmaking artists. A new series of the nonprofit Art21’s flagship series Art in the Twenty-First Century is available now on PBS. Catch all episodes of other series like New York Close Up and Extended Play and learn about the organization’s educational programs at Art21.org.

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Bruce Nauman has made a career out of unsettling audiences—or at least, shaking up the dailiness of life—with a various-and-sundry practice that has stretched from the absurdist, at-times whimsical performance pieces that first gained him recognition in the 1960s, to distressing sculpture and video works that boldly take torture as their subject matter.  
This month, Nauman, who at 78 is still very much at it, debuted three new works at Sperone Westwater in an exhibition that marks his 13th solo show at the gallery since his first one, 45 years ago in 1976.
Two new interactive 3-D video works and one hanging sculpture (Two Leaping Foxes, a return to the animal sculptures Nauman first made in the late 1980s) comprise the show and are given ample space in the gallery (which should be something of a comfort to those still hesitant to visit galleries in person).
Bruce Nauman, Nature Morte (2020). Courtesy of Sperone Westwater.

For fans of the provocative artist, the exhibition conjures up comparisons to earlier precedents in his long career, especially for those who still have last year’s MoMA retrospective, “Bruce Nauman: Disappearing Acts,” in mind.
That’s not to say the works are without innovation, however. The videos, Walking a Line (2019) and Nature Morte (2020), feel strangely and unexpectedly vulnerable. 
In Walking a Line (2019), Nauman walks with his arms extended out to his sides as he follows a straight line. Nauman’s Walk with Contrapposto from 1968–69 comes to mind—the seminal, and nonsensical, performance art video that showed the young artist following a path around his studio in slow-motion as he comically mimicked the stances of ancient sculptures.
But the mood of Walking a Line feels more precarious than punchy, as Nauman walks like a tightrope walker trying to maintain his balance. This is inevitably underscored by Nauman’s age—he is no longer a lithe, almost balletic young man. What’s more, the work has a 3-D element that splits the projection (and the figure of Nauman) horizontally, and plays the two segments out of sync, so that the overall effect is discordant and tenuous.
“There is transparency about his relationship with his own body as he completes what would have been a simple exercise in his youth,” Natasha Westwater told Artnet News. “In the editing, he again divides the body in half, creating asymmetry with each turn. Sometimes his lower body turns around, revolving 180 degrees before the upper half catches up, sometimes completely walking out of the frame.”
Bruce Nauman, Nature Morte (2020). Courtesy of Sperone Westwater.

What made Nauman so revolutionary in the 1960s and ‘70s was, of course, this invitation inside his space, inside the studio. In our age of Instagram and hyper-documentation, it can be hard to imagine the impact his gesture had. Already in 2001, with Mapping the Studio (2001), Nauman began to record his studio space at night, picturing it as its own object, full of mice and critters. 
But in his most recent work, Nature Morte (2020), the artist has gone much further, giving the public free reign to navigate his studio without his presence. Through three iPads, each linked to a projection, visitors can explore the space of his studio and inspect individual objects that Nauman has scanned. 
“Nauman disappears, his body is absent, and the spectator becomes the participant or performer… Nauman recorded hundreds of images documenting all parts of the studio—notes from previous artworks, books, coffee cups, vinyl records, tools, photographs of horses, the sculpture Two Leaping Foxes, and more, for over a year,” noted Westwater, who said the work “questions the conventions of art and the contradictions and ambiguities which characterize our existence in the world.”
The final effect, dizzying as it is, is provocative in a new way—it’s eerie, even lonely, especially in this unusual year, with Nauman suddenly appearing more like a seer than a jester of contemporary life. 
“Bruce Nauman” is on view at Sperone Westwater through November 7, 2020.
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