What is 'performance drawing'? When does a drawing turn into a performance? Is the act of drawing in itself a performative process, whether a viewer is present or not? Through conversation, interviews and essays, the authors illuminate these questions, and what it might mean to perform, and what it might mean to draw, in a diverse and expressive contemporary practice since 1945. The term 'performance drawing' first appeared in the subtitle of Catherine de Zegher's Drawing Papers 20: Performance Drawings, in particular with reference to Alison Knowles and Elena del Rivero. In this book, it is used as a trope, and a thread of thinking, to describe a process dedicated to broadening the field of drawing through resourceful practices and cross-disciplinary influence. Featuring a wide range of international artists, this book presents pioneering practitioners, alongside current and emerging artists. The combination of experiences and disciplines in the expanded field has established a vibrant art movement that has been progressively burgeoning in the last few years. The Introduction contextualises the background and identifies contemporary approaches to performance drawing. As a way to embrace the different voices and various lenses in producing this book, the authors combine individual perspectives and critical methodology in the five chapters. While embedded in ephemerality and immediacy, the themes encompass body and energy, time and motion, light and space, imagined and observed, demonstrating how drawing can act as a performative tool. The dynamic interaction leads to a collective understanding of the term, performance drawing, and addresses the key developments and future directions of this applied drawing process.

Making connections between drama and drawing, Drawing as Performance introduces visual artists and designers to rehearsal techniques, theory, and games as ways of developing image-making and visual communication skills. Drawing from the fields of theatre and anthropology, this book is full of practical exercises that encourage experimentation and play as methods of making expressive, communicative, and meaningful images. Ideas are adapted from the rehearsal room to the drawing studio, offering artists a fresh approach to translating experiences into visual images. Games and exercises are accompanied by demonstrations and responses from professional practitioners and visual communication students. This one-of-a-kind book guides students and professionals alike to improvisation, self-expression, and reflective visual communication techniques in order to narrow the gap between the handmade image and inner experience from which artists draw their inspiration.

"A history of the understudied but highly inventive Fluxus collective founded in NYC in the late 1950s/early 1960s. Fluxus was an unruly, endlessly shifting gang of performers, conceptual writers, musicians, and installation artists who wanted to integrate life into art using found and ordinary objects and processes (like cooking and shaving). Fluxus first arose in the United States under the leadership of George Maciunas and quickly spread to Europe. Artists from Claus Oldenberg to Allan Kaprow to Dick Higgins to Allison Knowles to Joseph Beuys to Gerhard Richter to Nam June Paik to Yoko Ono to Robert Filliou all participated in Fluxus at some point. Unlike other books about Fluxus, this one explores not just the movement itself but also how it figures the transition from modernism to postmodernism, and the historical origins of experimental art practices of the present"--

On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century explores the radical transformation of drawing that began during the last century as numerous artists critically re-examined the traditional concepts of the medium. In a revolutionary departure from the institutional definition of drawing and from reliance on paper as the fundamental support material, artists instead pushed the line into real space, expanding the medium's relationship to gesture and form and connecting it with painting, sculpture, photography, film and dance. Published in conjunction with an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, On Line presents a discursive history of mark-making through nearly 250 works by 100 artists, including Aleksandr Rodchenko, Alexander Calder, Karel Malich, Eva Hesse, Anna Maria Maiolino, Richard Tuttle, Mona Hatoum and Monika Grzymala, among many others. Essays by the curators illuminate individual practices and examine broader themes, such as the exploration of the line by the avant-garde and the relationship between drawing and dance.

This enlightening study explores the set design drawings for theatre and live performance, highlighting their unique qualities within the greater arena of drawing practice and theory. The latest volume in the Drawing In series, Scenographic Design Drawing encourages an interdisciplinary dialogue in the field of drawing with the inclusion of illustrations throughout. Scenographic design drawings visualize the images in the designer's 'mind's eye' early in the design process. They are the initial design tool in the creative engagement with theatre, opera, dance, and non-text-based performance. It is, in particular, this body of drawings that is unique as both a performative and a theatrical representation of multiple worlds within the 'stage space'. Sue Field illuminates this illustration process and identifies how these drawings have functioned and developed over time. Scenographic Design Drawing serves to satisfy an emerging global curiosity and a thirst for new knowledge and understanding in relation to the drawings executed by the historical and contemporary scenographer. This work addresses a critical research gap and shows how the scenographic design drawing continues to be a principal site of innovation, subjectivity, originality and authorship in theatre and live performance.

Over the last three decades, the visual artist William Kentridge has garnered international acclaim for his work across media including drawing, film, sculpture, printmaking, and theater. Rendered in stark contrasts of black and white, his images reflect his native South Africa and, like endlessly suggestive shadows, point to something more elemental as well. Based on the 2012 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, Six Drawing Lessons is the most comprehensive collection available of Kentridge’s thoughts on art, art-making, and the studio. Art, Kentridge says, is its own form of knowledge. It does not simply supplement the real world, and it cannot be purely understood in the rational terms of traditional academic disciplines. The studio is the crucial location for the creation of meaning: the place where linear thinking is abandoned and the material processes of the eye, the hand, the charcoal and paper become themselves the guides of creativity. Drawing has the potential to educate us about the most complex issues of our time. This is the real meaning of “drawing lessons.” Incorporating elements of graphic design and ranging freely from discussions of Plato’s cave to the Enlightenment’s role in colonial oppression to the depiction of animals in art, Six Drawing Lessons is an illustration in print of its own thesis of how art creates knowledge. Foregrounding the very processes by which we see, Kentridge makes us more aware of the mechanisms—and deceptions—through which we construct meaning in the world.