"Drawing Now" at MOMA Qns

Every generation looks for a way out of the impasse set before it by a preceding one. This has been a constant in art's development, at least since the impressionists chucked out 400 years of painting tradition in the 19th century. The closing of the last 100 years has been no different. At the tail end of a utopian visual experiment that assumed its present shape in the radical 1960s, today's most important artists see the refined postminimalism of their artistic forefathers much as the impressionists saw the Salon d'Automne. Namely, as a set of formal conventions to be broken and cast out with yesterday's newspaper.

Several generations of young artists, embracing genres, sources, strategies, influences and wholesale artistic practices that only recently were utterly disqualified from interest, bravely rewrote art's rules during the last decade. Exhausted by some 20 years of anti-estheticism and the doctrinaire prohibitions of much conceptualism, today's brightest artistic lights kick-started disciplines that, except for the work of important stalwarts, had been left to languish. Among these were, principally, drawing, painting and sculpture. Freed from academic orthodoxy and pseudo-political cant, these disciplines thrive today, though warily and not without constantly reconsidering their own validity.

Take a show like "Drawing Now," one of a reduced group of museum exhibitions to consider the reaction of younger artists to the proscriptions of a revolutionary period turned Jacobin in its old age. What the Studio Museum's "Freestyle" exhibition was to the pieties of identity art (remember "post-black is the new black"?), the Museum of Modern Art's most recent contemporary exhibition is to the legacy of process-oriented drawing. A kick in the pants delivered politely inside the MOMA QNS' velvet boot, the drawings in the museum's current show reassess as well as reject a tradition whose time came and went long ago.

If the text of "Drawing Now" relates what artists are drawing today, then its unavoidable subtext concerns what they have long been admonished not to draw. Curated by Laura Hoptman, until recently assistant curator of drawing at MOMA and now curator of contemporary art at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, the exhibition features some 250 drawings by 26 international artists in a welter of figurative styles that have been long discredited or neglected. Warts and all, "Drawing Now" is MOMA's most serious effort at a large-scale exhibition of contemporary art in more than a decade. A better exhibition is conceivable; MOMA's inexperience with contemporary art and its past historical commitments make such an effort all but impossible.

The drawings in the exhibition are grouped into eight loose taxonomical categories that Hoptman dubs "propositions," and range across a genuinely pluralistic panoply of themes, styles and methods. A commissioned mural by the Cuban collective Los Carpinteros in a section the curator calls "Architectural Drafting" renders Jeremy Bentham's panopticon as a gigantic spice rack brimming with compartmentalized drawers for individual souls. A work by Ugo Rondinone, in a section called "Science and Art, Nature and Artifice," vastly grows his own nature sketches from notebook size to wall-sized forests large enough to walk into. A third drawing by Chris Ofili, grouped under the theme of "Ornament," superimposes his own signature decoration, the Angela Davis Afrohead, onto Victorian motifs with lovely and hilarious results. And so on.

Hoptman's categories turn out to be something of a hindrance to enjoying the exhibition, especially where they succeed. Too loose to be specific and too specific to be helpful in encapsulating an idea still in formation, they most often suggest an activity not unlike trying to grab a fish in the water. It's hard to resist the notion that several of Hoptman's categories could have been collapsed into one another, especially those associated with architecture. Others, like the "proposition" that treats the theme of portraiture, could have been expanded to encompass more artists and many fewer fragmentary ideas.

But no matter. "Drawing Now" does not lack for surprises and the exhibition's best ideas are provided by the art on display, which is precisely as it should be. Kara Walker's little-known book of watercolors, The Negress Notes, includes virtuosic color counterpoints to her well-known silhouettes of minstrel imagery. Toba Khedoori's enormous drawings of life-sized doorways and pared-down architectures push their trompe l'oeil effects into a Twilight Zone that recalls the work of Magritte, whose paintings coincidentally hang just feet away. And lastly there is the work of David Thorpe, a fabulous young British artist whose paper collages of bunkers and trailer homes dwarfed by fantastic Montana ranges brings to mind another artist who never visited the Amerika he envisioned: Kafka.

The names of other artists haunt surveys like this one. Given that most curators seem to start out with the very same lists, tallying the missing is one way to gauge the exhibition's importance. "Drawing Now" is no exception to this rule, and its inclusions say as much about the state of generalized curatorial taste as its exclusions. But the segregation of two very different but fundamental artists proves particularly enigmatic. Few artists, after all, could be said to have contributed as much to the present inversion of artistic values as Lisa Yuskavage and William Kentridge. The paintings and drawings of the former and drawings and films of the latter, respectively, set in motion and fleshed out precisely the historical transition ("an efflorescence of contemporary drawing") curator Hoptman describes.

Unavoidably, other names come to mind too. An alternate list could have included Mark Lombardi, Lane Twitchell, Ghada Amer, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Margaret Kilgallen and Yi Yun Fei. James Siena's inclusion would have gone a ways to patching the exhibition's near absolute lack of abstraction (there is just one artist in the exhibition, Richard Wright, whose work could be called abstract). But all in all, "Drawing Now" is a very positive experience as a lay-of-the-land art exhibition, one in which the curator actually does what she is supposed to do.

If only more curators followed suit, the art world would undergo an even more significant revolution of values than the one outlined in this exhibition. And that would be, in a word, great.

"Drawing Now: Eight Propositions," through Jan. 6 at the Museum of Modern Art in Queens, 33rd St. at Queens Blvd., Long Island City, 708-9400.