Anna Lovatt

Television and video’s influence on drawing practices and the ways they inspired new modes of graphic expression in the twentieth century From the late 1950s to the 1980s, a period known as the network era, television reached its apex as a cultural force in the home, and portable video cameras became widely available. Examining how this new technology spurred artistic experimentation, this study considers the relationship between drawing and art made for the small screen of the domestic television set and early video cameras. These electronic screens entered artists’ studios for the first time and became a new source of imagery and a device that could be manipulated to generate entirely new kinds of drawing. An essay by Anna Lovatt looks at the ways in which early television and video images—captured, transmitted, and displayed through raster lines—inspired new possibilities for abstraction and expressing concepts of self-reflection and surveillance, while Kelly Montana explores artworks made by women who used the immediacy and familiarity of drawing to disrupt objectifying media representations of their gender by recording themselves drawing, often on their own bodies. This copiously illustrated volume features drawings, film stills, videos, and multimedia installations by more than twenty artists both well-known and heretofore obscure, and includes discussions of the televisual imagery that permeates works on paper by Walter de Maria, the ways artists such as Anna Bella Geiger and Dennis Oppenheim used video to capture performative acts of drawing, and how Nam June Paik and Howardena Pindell treated the screen as a site of inscription. Distributed for the Menil Collection Exhibition Schedule: The Menil Collection, Houston, TX (October 4, 2025–February 8, 2026)

Drawing Degree Zero examines a pivotal moment in the history of drawing, when the medium was disengaged from its connoisseurial associations and positioned at the forefront of contemporary art. From Mel Bochner’s seminal exhibition Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to Be Viewed as Art of 1966 to the Museum of Modern Art’s major survey Drawing Now ten years later, Anna Lovatt documents this period of restless artistic experimentation and fierce political ambition.Traditionally considered a preparatory or subsidiary practice, drawing’s notational, provisional, and incidental qualities accrued new value in the context of post-Minimal and Conceptual art. Considering the work of Bochner, Sol LeWitt, Rosemarie Castoro, Dorothea Rockburne, and Richard Tuttle, Lovatt explores the strategies these artists used to confound long-standing presumptions about drawing, rendering it systematic rather than autographic, public rather than private, and conceptually rigorous rather than manually dexterous. Drawing Degree Zero argues that these artists pursued a neutral, anonymous mode of inscription analogous to Roland Barthes’s concept of “writing degree zero.”A lively examination of the resurgence of interest in drawing, Drawing Degree Zero highlights the medium’s ability to foreground issues of authorship, process, location, and participation that remain fundamental to contemporary art. Scholars and art aficionados will welcome Lovatt’s insights.