The politics of paper

What makes drawing different? In her book Out of Paper: Drawing, Environment, and the Body in 1960s America, the art historian Katie Anania argues that the answer lies in the politics of paper. Her five-artist study considers how diverse practices navigating the ‘conceptual turn’ in 1960s American art grappled with the ideological possibilities of a material so fundamental that it is routinely overlooked. Anania’s book is scrupulously detailed, multi-layered and often surprising. The selected timeframe of her study is determined not by traditional art-historical markers, but rather sweeping political events that changed shape over the course of the decade. As she reminds the reader, the 1960s were ‘a decade in which paper media lay at the center of public life and revolutionary politics’ (p.1). Each of the book’s chapters examines ‘a distinct generative process that drawing mobilised between the Cold War and the early environmentalist movement’ (p.20). This construction – generative processes mobilised by drawing, rather than the other way around – shapes the book’s perspective. Anania considers drawing to be an active, ambulatory agent in the world. She is less concerned with ‘end product’ drawings destined for art market consumption and more focused on what is generated by the creative freedom, uncertain terrain and bodily vigour offered by paper.

As the subtitle of Out of Paper sets out, the slippery subject of paper enables Anania to trace a constellation of artists whose practices converge around the body, the environment and the medium of drawing. Her five chosen artists – Carolee Schneemann (1939–2019), William Anastasi (1933–2023), Richard Tuttle (b.1941), Robert Morris (1931–2018) and Charles White (1918–79) – are not typically grouped together in the scholarship of this period.¹ Although they moved within similar circles, to greater and lesser degrees, in the 1960s and early 1970s, the visual differences in their work have led to divergent art-historical classifications and uneven institutional recognition. Anania is attuned to the intersectional inequalities of American society that allowed Morris and Tuttle to flourish, while Schneemann and White were routinely excluded from various professional opportunities. Nevertheless, her five artists share a copious and rigorous use of paper: they make works both on and about it, drawing on the material’s particular qualities to reshape the conceptual limits of their practice.

The book embraces paper’s dual identity as a naturally derived and industrially manufactured product.² Similarly, Anania does not treat the preparatory sketches of Schneemann and Morris differently to the ‘finished’ drawing work of Anastasi, Tuttle and White, recognising the temporal complexities of such categorisations. This ‘both/and’ formulation underpins Anania’s critical scaffolding and object analyses, resulting in a nuanced assessment of paper’s intrinsic ambiguities. This aligns her position with recent curatorial assertions of the inherent flexibility of drawing, for example by Rosario Güiraldes, who observed that:

Group drawing exhibitions of the past half century have frequently been either/or propositions, arguing for drawing as either a preliminary or preparatory practice, or conversely, as a resolutely finished object. Binaries abound in the debate: verb/noun, primary/secondary, study/artwork. […] But ultimately drawing’s sustained indeterminate position may be one of its most vital assets.³

Anania avoids the all-too-easy trap of binary oppositions, instead translating this indeterminacy into a richly specific set of case studies, thoughtfully guided by the artists’ own approaches to paper. By focusing on paper rather than drawing, she rightly acknowledges that the ‘expanded field of drawing’ has been thoroughly accounted for by other art historians.⁴ Her strategy to embrace ‘drawing [and that which] acts […] like drawing’ (p.2, emphasis in original) arises from how the artists themselves described and treated drawing as an intermedial ‘extension’ into many other areas of medium-hood and materiality.⁵

In chapter 1, ‘Wild waste: Carolee Schneemann’s shredded figures’, Anania examines two related performances – Body Collage FIG.1 and Illinois Central (1968) – alongside associated works on paper, demonstrating how ‘Schneemann used shredded documents to reimagine capitalism’s continual cycles of extraction and exploitation’ (p.206). Anania describes Schneemann’s use of paper not only as a tangible, friable material applied to the body in her performances, but also in terms of the artist’s branched network of flyers, collages, scores and studies produced both before and long after the events themselves. Illinois Central Collage FIG.2 is one of many works in which she reappropriates Fred McDarrah’s press image of Body Collage. Schneemann treats this copyrighted photograph pragmatically – like any other paper matter – destined to be composted by her process. As Anania notes, in ‘Illinois Central Collage, we are called to attend not just to the picture’s flat surface but to its physical connections to other kinds of matter: soil, trees, and yes, garbage’ (p.32). This waste-ecology is emphasised by the collage’s jagged strata of diluted paint washes, the forms of which recall the abject, gluey clinging of shredded printer paper to the artist’s body more than a decade earlier.

In Anania’s opening and longest chapter, the reader gradually accumulates an understanding of Schneemann’s undeniably complex practice, in which she viewed her drawings as ‘part of a living, portable landscape’ (p.46). Vibrantly – even flagrantly – alive in the face of so much death and decay, Schneemann’s fleshy correspondences between paper and body were a means of calling attention to the American military–industrial complex that was, at that very moment, causing unimaginable bodily and environmental destruction in Vietnam.⁶ This chapter sets out Anania’s stakes in unequivocal terms: Out of Paper is concerned with articulating the place of paper within the burgeoning environmentalism of the art world and its connective tissues. Central to this is her commitment to more-than-human theoretical frameworks and to the role of embodiment within them. By foregrounding ‘anti-Cartesian and nondualist philosophies’ (p.12), she positions her study in contrast to other recent publications on drawing in the 1960s and 1970s.⁷

In the second chapter, capitalism’s instrumentalised body is activated in relation to William Anastasi’s interest in stenography as an emblem of professionalisation. Anania’s analysis goes beyond the Surrealist-inflected trope of automatism that has frequently been applied to the artist’s under-appreciated urban drawing practice.⁸ In Untitled (Pocket Drawing) FIG.3, the title indicates the activity undertaken: walking the city streets, Anastasi would make a drawing with a pencil and folded piece of paper lodged in a trouser pocket while looking at the environment around him. Removing decision-making and sight from the creation of a drawing means that its generative agency emerges instead from the paper ground. It is the paper that translates the body’s movements onto its surface without conscious thought. These incidental impressions echo the logic of stenography, aligning with the chapter’s broader focus on machinic registrations.

Anastasi’s strategy highlights one of Anania’s key motifs: the agency of drawing, which underwrites her examination of both environment and matter, the human and non-human. Connecting the terrain implicated by this chapter to her wider ambitions, Anania notes: ‘In the Pocket Drawings, the page is an especially interesting more-than-human entity since it teeters between an archive, an agent, and a tool’ (p.77). Oscillating between a repository and a manual, this successfully sets up the following chapter on Tuttle, particularly its focus on pedagogy. ‘Cutting into things: Richard Tuttle’s complete functions’ considers some of the artist’s early cut paper works, such as untitled paper cubes FIG.4 FIG.5, which are informed by pedagogical exercises centred on geometry and spatial problem solving. The chapter probes ‘what it means to have a body’ (p.111), linking paper’s ‘motility’ to Tuttle’s idea that it could embody ‘place without location’ (p.119). The chapter also posits drawing and paper cutting as a ‘space of friendship’ (p.134) by focusing on the way these paper objects move through the world. Anania claims that Tuttle’s strategies of making and remaking, using templates and other tools that are seemingly anathema to the uniqueness of drawing, ‘rendered the object porous to its environment’ (p.119). His adaptations and handling of paper, she argues, produces a transit system for these objects to traverse art environments and non-artistic spaces alike: a radical socialisation of drawing that again imbues it with agency, this time through empathy.

The body’s vulnerability to violence links the first and last chapters in Out of Paper, connecting Schneemann’s feminist performances to White’s trompe l’œil recreations of folded posters as a ground for Black bodies’ resistance against state-sanctioned violence and commodification. In his Wanted Poster series FIG.6, White ‘used oil wash to simulate the archival page, overlaying the present with the past to propose a new permutation of selfhood that resisted the United States’ ongoing erasure of its racist history’ (p.176). By concentrating on this body of work, the final chapter unfolds the implications of White’s multi-year effort to reclaim a historical site of objectification and nullification through transformational dexterous drawing. Considering the backdrop of civil rights organising and the SNCC Freedom Schools’ alternative curriculum, Anania reminds us that for White, and any political subject, ‘drawing was a portal to intellectual freedom; it allowed almost anyone to seize and reconstitute the tools that had been kept from them’ (p.194). This nuanced reassertion of the politics of paper stands as a rousing concluding chapter for Anania’s project.

With a concentrated focus on drawing practices that remained resistant to immediate institutionalisation – as opposed to later art-historical and curatorial recuperations – Out of Paper embraces the marginal status of its titular material. Recognising the subversion possible in the banal omnipresence of paper, the book’s ambitions build towards a cumulative exploration of the material’s archival, bodily, bureaucratic, capitalist, environmental, historical, pedagogical, political and social functions in 1960s America. Perhaps most foundationally and unexpectedly – especially against the backdrop of conceptual art’s apparent disengagement from the artist’s hand – Anania argues for the continuing relevance of paper’s ‘dialectical relation with creativity, sometimes generating it and sometimes obstructing it’ (p.177). With an epilogue that refutes the inevitability of paperlessness in our digital age, Out of Paper is a bracing papercut that reveals what has too often been overlooked.