Sorcha Dallas

For Better or worse, the catalogue is a necessary part of this exhibition. The essay, by artist-curator David Musgrave, and the works that are reproduced in the catalogue as an alternative or addition to those in the show, develop a subtle, twisting argument about the enduring potential of drawing. The selection of historic and contemporary work expands upon Musgrave’s artistic concerns. Moreover, the bringing together of artists recently given solo UK exposure – including Durer, Rembrandt, Philip Guston, Sigmar Polke, Ed Ruscha and Paul Noble; plus So LeWitt, David Shrigley and Musgrave himself, in their London dealer galleries – reinvigorates the ideas that Musgrave first set out in a lecture given during ‘EAST International’ last year, sparking the curatorial invitation for this show. The careful understatement and thematic complexity of the ideas here put many of the recent exhibitions about drawing in the shade.

At the centre of ‘Living Dust’ is the coupling of Noble’s pencil drawing Nobpark (Big Tent), 1998, with an engraving by Durer, St Jerome in His Study, 1514. In the latter, Durer buries his haloed scribe at the back of a cluttered room, a lion presiding sleepily at the front. The elaborate visual detail reverberates with that in Noble’s industrialised but quiet and static rural scene. The pairing of the works brings to life Musgrave’s core curatorial contention, with an economy of gesture that is typical of his artistic practice; the materiality of drawing, despite its illusionistic potency, is succinctly opened up. Durer and Noble use the same departures from visual experience – mixed perspective and irregular animal form – to underscore the artificial, or rather the virtual, reality of drawings.

There are other moments in the exhibition where work gains from similar transhistorical juxtaposition. At the end of one wall we find Musgrave’s own drawings, Transparent Head, 2003, in which the accumulated graphite of the artist’s soft pencil suggests a background seen through and around a ball of polythene scrumpled to roughly form a face. We then see Untitled (Irregular Desert), 1973, by Vija Celmins: an expanse of scattered rocks and pebbles rendered in graphite from a photograph. Alongside in The Escaped, 1926, by Max Ernst: a graphic fish/bird, with a giant eye, afloat over a sea of pencil-rubbed metal mesh. In this grouping we explore the enduring human tendency to see imaginary scenarios through the drawn and printed page, in collections of mere dust and line. Moreover, we find this tendency subjected to self-reflective, self-critical play: each artist exploits our pictorial urge to see forms of our familiar world – to find a face, survey a landscape, or spy an animal in its habitat – while simultaneously drawing attention to the implausible paucity of the trigger image. The baseness of the illusion is exposed yet its credentials are thereby reinforced. We are given bravura demonstrations of our capacity to invest dust with life.

There us a Surrealist thread running through the exhibition: Ernst and Yves Tanguy give a warp to the weft between Durer and Rembrandt. Unfortunately, however, each strand suffers somewhat from thinness, lacking the reinforcement of key works reproduced in the accompanying catalogue, in particular Alberto Giacometti’s facetted Skull, 1923, and Leonardo da Vinci’s curvaceous anatomical drawing of the Genito-urinary system, c1492-94. Likewise, the work by Guston on show, Midnight, 1955 – an early drawing suggesting a crowd scene; abstraction on the brink of figuration – less convincing in this exhibition than the catalogue image of his later work Web, 1975.

Perhaps the key omissions from the show ensure that recent works by the youngest artists represented – Dean Hughes, Clare Stephenson, Rupert Norfolk and Musgrave himself – are allowed to slip free of any art-historical tethering. Working simultaneously to loosen any such ties is the evident influence of contemporary graphical work and the new media now widespread in this field: the digitised dust and line of the laser-printed page or posted, and of the video-game screen. For instance, the plucked-smooth appearance of the animals in Noble’s Nobpark (Big Tent) resonates with the brittle slickness of what could be wool-balls or tumbled weed in Stephenson’s La Technique, 2003, reminding us of the difficulty that computer-animators face in the virtual rendering of organic textures like fur and feathers, fluff and foliage. Similar chords are struck in the work of such draughtsmen as John Ruskin and Colin Self, even though these works predate hyper-real computer graphics. The concept of draughtsmanship may seem to lack contemporary currency, but the term usefully conveys Musgrave’s insistence in the catalogue that ‘an air of fact’ about drawing is still present in our culture, allowing artists to draw with extravagant deviation from visual appearance.

The only work of expressly graphic art included in the exhibition is a flattened and framed copy of Chris ware’s comic book Quimby the Mouse,1994. Here again our dogged commitment to narrative and pictoral conventions is both exposed and mocked and yet satisfied. However, it is hard to pick up on this contribution to the gathering curatorial argument without having access to the whole comic (let alone to The Acme Novelty Library of which it forms part) and we are thrown back upon the exhibition catalogue.

Without something more of the curatorial thesis on the gallery walls, the final intellectual leap of the show, from Quimby the Mouse to a wall-drawing by LeWitt, is a risk. It is perhaps inevitable that a project that begins as a scripted lecture will rely upon an essay to lever lift-off when developed into an exhibition. Continued …