Installation/Drawing: Spaces of drawing between art and architecture

Banou, Sophia

Abstract

The text examines recent practices of expanding drawing from surfaces into three-dimensional constructs, through a review of drawing practices across architecture, installation art and land art. In particular, installations and architectural drawings are discussed as informing the installation/drawing, a new form of drawing that escapes the scale and dimensional limitations of normative print media and crosses over into an immersive site-specificity. This, the chapter argues, offers opportunities for a completely revised understanding of drawing practice as a situated experience; a spatial practice that requires the active ‘inhabitation’ of a representational space.
The works presented in this paper and the exchanges between art and architecture that they reveal, are framed by an inquiry into the origins of drawing. The tale of ‘The Origin of Drawing’ as discussed by Robin Evans (1995) and Stan Allen (2009) is examined to address questions of performance that put focus on drawing as a space of action, activated only at the participation of the viewer. The tale of Aristipp’s “happy landing,” used by Vitruvius to trace architecture’s origins in geometry (Oechslin 1981), highlights the agency of drawing on the experience of the real spaces it relates to.
On unravelling a discussion on installation and land art as forms of drawing in space, the chapter foregrounds the question of the ‘space of drawing,’ as a particular mode of spatiality that involves both physical and conceptual spaces. Miwon Kwon’s discussion of site-specificity in installation-art (1997), provides grounds for the understanding of this space through a definition of drawing’s multiple ‘site-specificities’. Drawing parallels between the architectural site and the situation of drawing, the text redefines drawing as a space in itself that enables the production of new experiences for the viewer/reader, through attachments to multiple real and conceptual spaces.

• Acceptance Date: Jan 17, 2019
• Publication Date: Nov 1, 2020
• Deposit Date: Feb 25, 2019
• Peer Reviewed: Not Peer Reviewed
• Pages: 431-450
• Series Title: Wiley Blackwell Companions to Art History
• Book Title: A Companion to Contemporary Drawing
• ISBN: 9781119194545
• Keywords: architectural drawing, installation, installation/drawing, spatial drawing, site-specificity, drawing conventions, linearity, space of drawing, space of representation, land art
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/853722
• Publisher URL: https://www.wiley.com/en-gb/A+Companion+to+Contemporary+Drawing-p-9781119194576
• Contract Date: Feb 25, 2019