Year: 2019
Type: article
Abstract: In this essay, I present La Monte Young's groundbreaking Composition 1960 #10 (Draw A Straight Line And Follow It), and the various permutations it engendered, across media and contexts, as a turning point in the longer history of straight lines in modern art and their relation to wider infrastructural conditions and changes.My argument is that Young's work introduces a new and distinct form of infrastructural sensibility that may ultimately provide some points toward an archeology of a contemporaneity oriented around sensorial synchronization or alignment Essay slated for publication in Critical Inquiry, Summer Issue, 2019.Do not share or quote. "And Follow It". Straight Lines and Infrastructural Sensibilities Ina BlomLines are always expressive of . . . the way things are going. John Ruskin, The Elements of Drawing 1The human hand cannot draw a straight line, John Ruskin claimed.No matter how well trained, it will inevitably produce curvature or a variety of direction.2 A century later, his claim seemed to underpin La Monte Young's musically wayward Composition 1960 #10, which simply consists of the instruction "Draw a straight line and follow it".Young's earliest performances of this work in 1961 show his awareness of a straight line's implicit challenge for human bodies.Like a good construction worker, he used plumb lines and yardsticks to make the lines, which he drew with chalk directly on the floor, as straight as possible, repeating the exacting and time-consuming procedure over and over again.3 If the work called for drawing, his own hand was clearly not up to the task.The recourse to technical aids may of course also have served to indicate that "drawing" here was associated less with the work of the hand than with techno-mathematical operations, represented by the electronic media that were invading artistic practice around 1960.In fact, a number of the new technologies foregrounded the question of nonhuman drawing skills: the 1968 Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition in London sums up a decade's development of computer-driven drawing machines.There was Ivan Moscovich's Pendulum Harmonograph, which produced stunning Lissajous figures, or Desmond Paul Henry's Drawing Computer, a nonprogrammable, modified mechanical analog computer whose visual output was based on a pure mechanics of chance.And with the revolutionary graphical user interface of Ivan Sutherland's 1961 Sketchpad program, even the somewhat humanoid drawing arms of these and other 1950s and '60s computer pen plotters seemed destined for extinction.Yet, even if Young's Composition 1960 #10 was "unambiguous enough to be executed by a machine," it was only peripherally in dialogue with the new world of
Source: Critical Inquiry
DOI: 10.1086/703959
Author: Ina Blom
Language: English
Topic: Sound Studies and Aurality
Subfield: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2952950927