Jonas Müller-Ahlheim

This drawing studio serves as a broad introduction to historical and contemporary drawing practices. This course presents drawing as an organizer of thought, experience, and image.

Students will investigate a full range of drawing materials and supports. Lectures and exercises introduce various concepts of drawing, possibly including illusionistic form and space, gesture and expressive mark-making, or collage and found imagery, depending on the instructor?s emphasis.

Designed to accommodate many skill levels, students can explore various creative strategies through technical drawing exercises, material explorations, and individual projects. Structured classroom critiques will bring drawing concepts into personal student work.

This course looks at the role of the observer and the performer through drawing and performance. Both practices respond to each other by mapping movement and moving mappings. We explore performance through drawing as a description, a medium, and a score for an embodied gesture. We use drawing to imagine movement and to move concepts, in which lines can act as tracing and foreseeing. Performances become descriptions and embodied marks and vice versa. We will look at performance art, presence practice, being seen and remarking on what will remain unseen, scores, methods of performance documentation and notation, as well as drawing as an embodied mark making and thinking process. We will look at artists like Francis Alÿs, Lygia Pape, The Gutai Group, Valie Export, Remy Charlip, Amy Sillman, among many other artists at the intersection of drawing as a performance practice like Janine Antoni, David Hammons, Stanley Brown, Raven Chacon, Joan Jonas; Artists in conversations such as Paul Chan and Martha Rosler, John Divola and William Camargo, Matthew Goulish and Lin Hixson. We will work through texts like Keeping Score: Notation, Embodiment, and Liveness by Hendrik Folkerts, Walkaround Time: Dance and Drawing in the Twentieth Century by Cornelia H. Butler, The Aesthetics of the Performative by Erika Fischer Lichte, Death of the Author by Roland Barthes, and How to Disappear: Notes on Invisibility in a Time of Transparency by Akiko Busch. Working in and with public space as surface, students should expect to blur the lines between traditional and non-traditional drawings and performances. All formats will be approachable, self determined, nothing more or less than walking if you so choose.