The best books about performance drawing for artists

This book was important for us because it was the first time the live method of drawing was first described as performance drawing(s).

The term ‘performance drawing’ first appeared in the subtitle of Catherine de Zegher’s Drawing Papers 20: Performance Drawings, in particular with reference to Alison Knowles and Elena del Rivero. This volume accompanied a series of five solo exhibitions at The Drawing Center, New York (2001) of work that "explored the interrelation of drawing and performance." Since then, performance drawing has compellingly become an operational term – a trope and a thread of thinking to describe the process dedicated to broadening the field of drawing through resourceful practices and cross-disciplinary influence, including dance, audio, moving image, and technology. It made a big impact on our research.

As today’s artists are shifting boundaries of genres, creative debates are opened up and generate transformative methodologies. This book was instrumental for us, in instituting and revealing the relationship between drawing and performing, Butler, and de Zegher’s catalogue, demonstrates artworks at the forefront of the progressively vibrant and forward-thinking approach to art that contributes to the expanded field of drawing.

At times, it may seem apparent that successive generations of artists reinvent the wheel and explore performance drawing across a range of disciplines; it was in particular, Tania Kovat’s writing in The Drawing Book, that gave us the broad contextualization of things – it seemed to reach into diverse yet significantly relevant references of historical predecessors that excited us. The book is complete with brilliant replications of artworks and quotes by a collection of artists.

A scholarly / anthology resource, this book is a collection of ideas around a theme that made a big impact on us and our approach to writing. We love this book. The book is a collection of writings that provide much debate for researchers in the field discussing themes regarding live art; the book brings together artists, theorists, and historians as contributors and addresses disciplines, such as dance, theatre, action painting and expanded cinema, as forms of live art that today’s artists are inspired by.

Throughout this book, the artist and editor, Avis Newman converses with the editor Catherine de Zegher about the practical process of drawing. This approach was also important and also most impactful. In the book, de Zegher asks Newman "What happens in the space between the gesture and its landing on the page?" And we love all conversations around the artist’s “doing” and “thinking." Following this conversation, the book gives the reader a window into how the drawer is thinking in the process of making and illuminates a link between performance and drawing by revealing how a drawing is performative as it comes into the world.