Krcma, E.J.; (2007) Drawing time: trace, materiality and the body in drawing after 1940. Doctoral thesis , University of London.

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Abstract

Focusing on specific episodes from the rich history of drawing practice after 1940, this thesis examines issues of time, materiality and the body in relation to drawing's production and reception. The stakes and potentials of modern drawing remain largely under-theorized and under-acknowledged. Here I explore the way in which drawing involves an array of bodily, imaginative and affective investments how it has been configured in relation to other technologies of representation and how it has provided a small-scale, unspectacular yet complex means for artists to investigate problems of signification, materiality, and the registration of time. I concentrate largely on drawings from the 1940s and 50s, although I do also open onto a small number of key works from the late 1960s and early 70s, as well as some crucial contributions to contemporary practice. My thesis is organised into five chapters, which are bracketed by an introduction and a coda. Chapter 1 explores the relationship between drawing, writing and cinema as it is played out in Henri Matisse's suite Dessins: Themes et variations, made in the early 1940s. Chapter 2 examines drawing's physical and discursive 'smallness,' framed with reference to Rosalind Krauss's formulation of the 'expanded fields' of artistic practice. Here I focus on the drawings of Wols, as well as drawing's 'flight from the page' in the late 1960s and early '70s. Chapter 3 looks at the mobile work of erasure in the drawing practices of both Willem de Kooning and Robert Rauschenberg. Chapter 4 explores drawing's immersive material engagements, specifically in relation to liquidity in the practices of Joseph Beuys and Marcel Broodthaers. Lastly, Chapter 5 brings my concerns up to date with an examination of Tacita Dean's blackboard drawings framed in relation to the digital/analogue binary.

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