Serial Drawing

Book excerpt: Serial Drawing offers a timely and rigorous exploration of a relatively little-researched art form. Serial drawings – artworks that are presented as singular works but are made up of distributed parts – are studied in fresh, contemporary terms with a novel philosophical approach, emphasizing both the way in which this unique form of visual art exists in the world, and how it is encountered by the beholder. Inspired by the quadruple framework of Graham Harman's object-oriented ontology, Joe Graham explores a variety of serial drawings according to the idea that, in being serially arrayed, such artworks constitute a rather particular form of art object: one which is both unified yet pluralised, visible yet withdrawn. Examining works by artists such as Alexei Jawlensky, Ellsworth Kelly, Hanne Darboven, Jill Baroff and Stefana McClure, Graham interrogates the manner in which serial drawings are able to be appreciated by the viewer who beholds them in object-oriented terms. This task is carried out by paying attention to the manner in which three tensions – space, time and seriality –emerge for consideration within the beholders performative encounter with the work: an encounter which is 'seen serially', and which the medium of drawing specifically directs their attention towards.