Leah Emery, Christian Flynn, Julie Fragar, Miles Hall, Jonathan McBurnie, Arryn Snowball
Apocryphal or not, there is an anecdote about Picasso throwing his hands up in despair over the success of a young parvenu artist by the name of Marcel Duchamp, who had begun to exceed the older master’s influence. ‘And he has produced hardly anything’, said Picasso in exasperation. In the wake of Duchamp, an artist did not need to draw. Picasso, one of he greatest draftsmen in the history of art, knew that art had shifted away from its zero degree registers, for drawing had for centuries been the essential rite of passage for any artist worth his/her salt. It was typical for academic training to begin with several years of drawing before a student was ever permitted to lift a brush. However the displacement of drawing, from the beginning of the twentieth century onward, in no way diminished its importance. On the contrary; it was no longer taken for granted, and it assumed a more polyvalent position in art production, where the modern artist was highly self-conscious of gesture and mark-making and where the postmodern artist had an increasingly fluid relationship to technology, which could do the drawing for him/her.
Special Moves brought together six artists who share a common interest in the value of drawing. Its rationale, defined eloquently in the catalogue essay written by Jonathan McBurnie, was in no way to reinstate drawing or to suggest that they were doing anything new, but, more simply, to celebrate the importance of a fundament to art that, on occasion, falls from view. In McBurnie’s words, ‘Consider the strengths of drawing: intuition, improvisation, gesture. These qualities are growing more essential in response to the slick disembodied experience of the techno-capital