Author Description

<p><i>Drawing Degree Zero</i> examines a pivotal moment in the history of drawing, when the medium was disengaged from its connoisseurial associations and positioned at the forefront of contemporary art. From Mel Bochner's seminal exhibition <i>Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to Be Viewed as Art</i> of 1966 to the Museum of Modern Art's major survey <i>Drawing Now</i> ten years later, Anna Lovatt documents this period of restless artistic experimentation and fierce political ambition.</p> <p>Traditionally considered a preparatory or subsidiary practice, drawing's notational, provisional, and incidental qualities accrued new value in the context of post-Minimal and Conceptual art. Considering the work of Bochner, Sol LeWitt, Rosemarie Castoro, Dorothea Rockburne, and Richard Tuttle, Lovatt explores the strategies these artists used to confound long-standing presumptions about drawing, rendering it systematic rather than autographic, public rather than private, and conceptually rigorous rather than manually dexterous. <i>Drawing Degree Zero</i> argues that these artists pursued a neutral, anonymous mode of inscription analogous to Roland Barthes's concept of "writing degree zero."</p> <p>A lively examination of the resurgence of interest in drawing, <i>Drawing Degree Zero</i> highlights the medium's ability to foreground issues of authorship, process, location, and participation that remain fundamental to contemporary art. Scholars and art aficionados will welcome Lovatt's insights.</p>