Ivan Hewett

This is an odd book. It's the catalog for an excellent show of drawings by the composer Xenakis (1922-2001).

Xenakis was many things, key among them a composer and an architect, two fields in which his documentation often involved graphically beautiful two-dimensional objects. In effect, drawings (some, later on, were computer-based, but even on those he was known to draw and color). This show was put together by The Drawing Center, a Manhattan gallery focused on, you guessed it, drawing. I saw the exhibit when it was moved to the MoCA Pacific Design Center toward the end of 2010.

So, two things are odd about the book.

The first is that of its five essays (really three, plus an intro by the curator and a brief coda from Xenakis' daughter), none really spend an enormous amount of time discussing Xenakis' drawings. The introduction comes closest, but otherwise they're really just brief career/biographical overviews, often overlapping in ways that suggest their writing wasn't really effectively coordinated. Drawing certainly comes up in all the essays -- you really can't avoid the subject, any more than you could write about Georgia O'Keeffe and never mention flowers. But none of them really wrestle with it as their primary focus.

The second is -- and I say this as a fan of white space -- many of the detailed scores are reproduced so that they take up less than half of a given page, often closer to a third. Why they weren't just turned on their side and allowed to be seen more fully is beyond me.… (plus d'informations)