Take a leap, 2009. Photo by David Allison © 2010 Sheila Makhijani

Agnes Berecz’s December 2, 2010 lecture/slideshow On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century, coinciding with the MOMA exhibition through February 7, 2011 and part of the Brown Bag Lunch Series gave maximum attention to the most minimal unit of drawing—the line.  On Line, explores the radical transformation of the medium of drawing.”

Berecz contrasted the simple line, aligned as it is to the intimacy of drawing (it’s close to the body) to the rambunctious line as executant of the sculptor, choreographer, and filmmaker who pulls it “off the page and (pushes it) into space and time” beginning with Ellsworth Kelly’s Pine Branches VI, (1950, Pencil on paper) an example of automatic drawing, where the hand draws indeterminately in an expression of the unconscious, effectively removing the artist from his work.  Next, she moved to Richard Tuttle’s controversial, site specific, wire constructions (automatism, yet again), which negotiated sculpture, drawing and performance all in one.  Berecz described the installation:  Tuttle drew a line on the museum wall using a pencil. Next, he attached a nail on each end of the line, then placed a wire over the pattern drawn.  Upon lifting his hands from the taut wire, it sprang into a new shape, undirected by the artist.  Shown at the Whitney in 1975 and called a “debacle” by one critic, the show was rumored to have contributed to the dismissal of Marcia Tucker, then curator of painting and sculpture in 1977.

With subsequent slides, Berecz describes increasingly radical lines.  Soon, they are unframed, off walls, and decidedly “on stage”.  Line as performance is explored using Carolee Schneemann’s 1973-76 “Up To and Including Her Limbs”, meant to subvert the maleness of Jackson Pollack’s mark-making.  Here, Schneemann used her nude body, suspended in a tree surgeon’s harness as a mark-marking tool, harassing lines into a drawing/performance/video. Also, Lygia Clark’s Caminhando, where line is performed by museum “viewers” who, rather than the artist, become the fabricators, cutting pieces of paper and “making lines”, then Piero Manzoni’s Linea, 1959 which conceptually challenges viewers to risk believing the length of a “hidden” line enclosed in a container and labeled, a kind of line-making as a secret.