Exhibit of the week: On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century

Museum of Modern Art, New York

Through Feb. 7, 2011

MoMA’s current definition of “drawing” might leave some viewers cold, said Jerry Saltz in New York. In this survey show, the work itself isn’t the problem. In fact, it’s often “wonderful”: Far more female artists are included than in a typical MoMA exhibit, and their welcome contributions often remind us “how important dance and movement are to modernism.” Kandinsky famously proposed that “line” is a point set in motion, and a prominently displayed 1890s film clip of burlesque dancer Loie Fuller establishes that idea as a theme of the exhibit. But for a show that promises to chart “an alternative history” of drawing in the 20th century, the surprise isn’t that traditional, figurative drawings are scarce. It’s that visitors eventually encounter so many explorations of “grids, systems, and performative procedures” that they might think it’s still the 1970s.

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But even the dreary grid gets a fresh workout here, said Holland Cotter in The New York Times. The Venezuelan artist Gego contributes “a small grid from jigsaw blades; Mona Hatoum a big one from barbed wire.” At every turn a viewer will find new reason to view On Line as speculative in spirit and eager to knock “old hierarchies off balance.” Sure, the show begins with Picasso and his 1912 cut-cardboard guitars—which pushed line off the page and into a third dimension. Still, this is no “usual-suspects story of modernism.” In Umberto Boccioni’s drawing States of Mind I: The Farewells, lines become “emblems of technological speed.” In a well-known 1973 performance piece we see in a video, Carolee Schneemann creates wall-size crayon drawings “while swinging above the floor in a harness.”

Despite all the inventiveness on display, the show “dramatically tracks a crisis” in art that developed during the century it surveys, said Peter Schjeldahl in The New Yorker. Marcel Duchamp is represented by a toolbox containing three meter-long “rulers”—each with an edge whose shape was determined “by the way dropped strings fell to the ground.” With such works, Duchamp made art a game, and made it more important than ever what museums decided was art. The way many artists responded was by abandoning art’s Dionysian side; they became apostles of abstract concepts and tried to pare their work down to essences. One of the last “drawings” we see here is a thin line of trash mounted along the walls of one room near its floor. The piece, by Luis Camnitzer, “seems whipsmart while slightly pathetic.” The pleasure isn’t in beholding it, but in having just strolled through an exhibit that shows how and why “we’ve come to this.”