Afterimage: Drawing Through Process » (New Edition)

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.

The term "process art" describes a moment of radical, aformal experimentation in postwar American sculpture. Through the medium of drawing, Afterimage revisits process art in terms of the artists who defined the movement and suggests a transitional moment when many of its practitioners anticipated the feminist and postminimalist art of the 1970s. Nancy Grossman's use of language, for example, suggests a kind of material abstraction, and Nancy Holt's earth works and related drawings introduced content into a minimalist vocabulary. The book also explores the drawing as a residual object in works in which the process of making dictates the form of the drawing. Examples include Gordon 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 particular approach to body-based and process-oriented sculpture.

The book, which accompanies an exhibition, contains an essay by Cornelia H. Butler on the historical ambiguity surrounding process art and one by Pamela M. Lee on temporality in work of the late 1960s. The artists included in the book are William Anastasi, Richard Artschwager, Mel Bochner, Agnes Denes, Nancy Grossman, Robert Grosvenor, Marcia Hafif, Eva Hesse, Nancy Holt, Barry LeVa, Sol Lewitt, Lee Lozano, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Gordon Matta-Clark, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, Yvonne Rainer, Dorothea Rockburne, Alan Saret, Joel Shapiro, Robert Smithson, Michelle Stuart, Richard Tuttle, and Jack Whitten.

Copublished with The Museum of Contemporary Art. Los Angeles.

EXHIBITION SCHEDULE:

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

Los Angeles, California

April 11-August 22, 1999

Contemporary Arts Museum

Houston, Texas

May-July 2000

Henry Art Gallery

Seattle, Washington

July-September 2000