Afterimage: Drawing Through Process

The term "process art" describes a moment of radical, aformalexperimentation in postwar American sculpture. Through the medium ofdrawing, Afterimage revisits process art in terms of the artists whodefined the movement and suggests a transitional moment when many ofits practitioners anticipated the feminist and postminimalist art ofthe 1970s. Nancy Grossman's use of language, for example, suggests akind of material abstraction, and Nancy Holt's earth works and relateddrawings introduced content into a minimalist vocabulary. The bookalso explores the drawing as a residual object in works in which theprocess of making dictates the form of the drawing. Examples includeGordon Matta-Clark's stacked cuttings, Robert Morris' "blind time"drawings, and Sol Lewitt's folded construction drawings. Other works,such as those by Bruce Nauman and Robert Smithson, record a particularapproach to body-based and process-oriented sculpture. The book, which accompanies an exhibition, contains an essayby Cornelia H. Butler on the historical ambiguity surrounding processart and one by Pamela M. Lee on temporality in work of the late1960s. The artists included in the book are William Anastasi, RichardArtschwager, Mel Bochner, Agnes Denes, Nancy Grossman, RobertGrosvenor, Marcia Hafif, Eva Hesse, Nancy Holt, Barry LeVa, SolLewitt, Lee Lozano, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Gordon Matta-Clark, RobertMorris, Bruce Nauman, Yvonne Rainer, Dorothea Rockburne, Alan Saret,Joel Shapiro, Robert Smithson, Michelle Stuart, Richard Tuttle, andJack Whitten.Copublished with The Museum of Contemporary Art. Los Angeles.EXHIBITION SCHEDULE:The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los AngelesLos Angeles, CaliforniaApril 11-August 22, 1999Contemporary Arts MuseumHouston, TexasMay-July 2000Henry Art GallerySeattle, WashingtonJuly-September 2000

Cornelia Butler is Ahmanson Curatorial Fellow at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and The Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator of Drawings at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.