Studio as Study: A Selection of Drawings by American Video Artists

Drawing, that intimate act of the hand often perceived as the most basic skill an artist must possess, was once described as "the bearing mother of all arts and sciences." ¹ Ingres insisted that drawing was "three quarters of painting," while Cézanne refused to distinguish between the two media. "When one paints," he wrote, "one draws." Sculpture has had its share of master draftsmen, like Rodin, and yet sculptor's drawings, like those by architects, are frequently seen to be purely utilitarian, because they lead to a three-dimensional final product, and reveal a process of conceptual trial and error. "A means of finding your way about things," as Henry Moore put it, drawings are a way of envisioning possibilities.

In the mid-twentieth century, drawing was radically reinvented by artists as different as Jackson Pollock and Sol LeWitt. Pollock uniquely fused drawing with painting, his energetic lines of paint literally flying off the canvas, while LeWitt redefined the idea of the commission, and moved the act of drawing from the page to the wall. Through written instructions or "scores" describing precise arrangements of lines ultimately executed by others, LeWitt forged a sensual partnership between drawing and architecture, and helped transform the traditional notion of the studio.

Often a place where a work is crafted by hand in paint or clay, in the mid-1960s the studio developed a paper counterpart, the studio on the page, or in a notebook, where a work is crafted conceptually, as an idea. When art critic Lucy Lippard noted in 1968 that "the studio is again becoming a study," it was this phenomenon that she was trying to describe. ² As art gradually "dematerialized," drawings of happenings, performances, environments, and video installations became fascinating documents of works ultimately, if temporarily, realized in physical form.

With a title evoking Lippard's insight, "Studio as Study: A Selection of Drawings by American Video Artists," explores the various roles drawing has played during the last 35 years of video history. It brings together drawings by 15 artists of different ages and orientations, from pioneers of the medium to members of the latest generation, from makers of single-channel tapes to multi-channel installations, from those with backgrounds in anthropology and photography to those trained in sculpture and painting. The resulting portfolio, extraordinary in its range of styles and moods, contains drawings that are personal and expressive as well as technical and utilitarian—drawings which reveal the agility of the moving hand and the ingenuity of the thinking mind.

To contribute to this collection, each artist was asked to submit a drawing from any period of his or her work, past or present, along with a statement describing that particular work, or explaining how and why he or she has used drawings. The pages which follow contain these things and more, including excerpts from the audio text used in an installation resembling a computer play-station (Julia Scher), a phonetic cue card serving as both drawing and statement (Gary Hill), and images which expand the definition of drawing, dissociating it from an activity performed by the human hand and locating it in the waveform possibilities programmed in a machine (Woody Vasulka).

For some of these artists, drawing has been a fundamental and continuous part of the creative process. Joan Jonas describes drawing as a basic graphic element, one she often incorporates into live action performances. Chip Lord carries a pocket sketchbook whenever he travels, and Sadie Benning doodles, sometimes while editing. Mary Lucier and Bill Viola produce volumes of hand-drawn material, creating extensive paper trails for virtually every work. Some artists, however, feel that drawing should not be limited to an arrangement of lines on a page. Jonas distances drawing's intimacy by showing the process live, on closed-circuit monitors; and Tony Oursler calls the...