From words and string structures to floor plans, “On Paper: Works from the Cohen Collection,” an exhibition in the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA), provides a thoughtful collection exploring Image and Meaning for its visitors.
Located on the third floor on exhibit 17, the Cohen Collection is a collection of artwork on paper, mainly drawings.
The collection opened on Feb. 13 in honor of former Board Member Suzanne Cohen. Cohen had collected these pieces because they represented how artists had reinvented drawing.
The artists of the twenty pieces featured in this collection are minimalists and conceptualists who dealt with different elements of drawings. This collection deals with human language, meaning, image and experience in a provocative way.
The artwork is placed in a tight line around the room, framed in white.
The arrangement of these pieces provides a clear transition of the works around the room, which makes it easy for the viewers to enjoy these pieces.
The collection starts off by exploring words and their associated meanings. Two distinct and thought-provoking pieces of art highlight how drawing was reinvented.
A highlight of the collection is American conceptual artist Mel Bochner’s “Axiom of Indifference,” which is a floor plan created using opaque watercolors, black ink and graphite. This is a drawing of a room size installation with description of the location of “dots” in the floorplan.
This piece examines how the visual representation of an idea compares to the way we perceive language alone. The description underneath the piece explains further.
For example, in this drawing, there is a room whose description is given as “all are not in,” meaning that not all of the dots are in the room. When people first hear this statement, they think that some dots are outside the room and some dots are inside the room. However, Bochner illustrates all the dots as being outside the room.
The description goes on to explain further that the artist wished to use this piece as a medium to question the ability of language to convey meaning.
The title of the piece itself, “The Axion of Indifference,” mocks the well-known axiom, “self evident truths”.
Another piece that delves into words and their meanings is Bruce Nauman’s “Violins, Violence, and Silence,” made by graphite and pastels on paper.
Naumann’s main interest is in language and wordplay as a subject for exploration.
In this piece, he creates a structure of the three words (Violins, Violence, and Silence) in a triangle by writing them right side up, backwards and upside down.
Although there is a slight difference in the sound of one word to the next, the meaning and the images they evoke change greatly.
As one of the larger artworks in the collection, this piece is prominent in both display and meaning.
Then, the collection cleanly transitions to show words as images. A model of this concept is Carl Andre’s “Atlantic Arms,” which was created in 1963 using typewritten ink.
In this piece, a poem’s words are interspersed in so-called “bodies of water (dashes)” in a nonlinear fashion. For example, the word “island” is all alone in a body of dashes. The description underneath states that Andre wants to challenge poetry and drawing.
Lastly, drawing is used to indicate the connection between motion and images.
A unique piece by William Anastasi is named “Untitled,” which was done in 2002 using graphite. While on the subway in New York City, Anastasi would place two pencil points on a blank sheet. The motion of the subway would dictate the drawing. He later created a series called Subway Drawings.
The description mentions that he wished to take advantage of chance and external forces to create art and felt that this method was a form of meditation for him.
Each piece in the collection was clearly carefully chosen to represent a way how the medium of drawing was reinvented.
From illustrating how drawing can show that meaning and words are not always one to portraying motion in a still, two-dimensional artwork, the Cohen Collection is through-provoking and a pleasure to view.
