Learning from the Line: The Drawing Practices of Ruth Asawa, Adrian Piper, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, and Sturtevant

Abstract

What can art history learn from the process of drawing? This dissertation asks why artists working in the 1960s and beyond might still be compelled to draw––to learn to draw, and to engage with longstanding, largely representational drawing techniques, such as life drawing––despite narratives that would tell us such techniques had by then become irrelevant. I argue, in turn, that art history can learn something from drawing’s staying power, but that doing so will require recognizing and resisting disciplinary habits of evaluation, categorization, and singular attribution, among others. Each chapter demonstrates how an artist learned from the drawn line, both by closely analyzing drawings within the context and sequence of their making, and by situating these artists’ practices within and against longer histories of drawing instruction. Chapter One traces how Sylvia Plimack Mangold taught herself a subjective form of linear perspective, circa 1965–1978, by drawing the floorboards of her home and the very rulers by which she pictured those floorboards. In doing so, her practice crafts a feminist version of a device that has been central to Western systems of representation and power. Chapter Two examines Ruth Asawa’s practice of observational and often collaborative line drawing, focusing on sketchbooks she filled with drawings of her family, friends, and colleagues throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Following the artist’s own theory of learning by “digestion,” I articulate how Asawa’s line engages three modes of drawing often undervalued within art history: the comic line, so-called blind contour, and the child’s line. Chapter Three positions Sturtevant’s practice of making repetitions of the work of other artists on paper, circa 1964–1966, through the framework of memory, rather than the copy. It thereby makes a case for resisting the art historical urge to single out Great Artists (in Sturtevant’s use of the term) and to identify who did what first. Chapter Four reads Adrian Piper’s 1967 series The Barbie Doll Drawings through the lens of the artist’s extensive figure drawing experience. Unfolding alongside sequential descriptions of all thirty-five sheets of the series, this chapter experiments with narrative while demonstrating figurative drawing’s capacity as a tool through which to challenge preconceptions of the human form. Informed by my own drawing practice, as well as fields ranging from feminist standpoint theory to cognitive psychology, this dissertation embraces the uncertainty of process through the stories of four artists for whom drawing was a practice of navigating their own embodied relationship to the world. It thereby makes a claim, beyond drawing, for approaching artists as people who are, simply, still learning. Such an approach, I argue, is one path towards countering the grand narratives and mythologized ideas of skill, genius, and singular influence that continue to persist in the writing of art history.