"International Paper" at the UCLA Hammer takes delight in sensual pleasures and material substance.
Conceptual art, which downplays the visual quality of objects in order to emphasize artistic ideas, is long established as a mainstream practice. It has transformed the international cultural landscape over the last 30- plus years.
One place the effect can be seen with unusual clarity is in the way artists now casually regard the medium of drawing. At the UCLA Hammer Museum, a sizable and often engaging survey of recent drawings by emerging artists from the United States, Mexico, Europe, Japan and China -- all under the age of 46 -- shows how. Drawing has always served as the most direct evidence of the unfolding processes of artistic thought -- the record of an artist's mind at work -- so drawing is a natural for today's post-Conceptual art world. And if the show, which is cleverly titled "International Paper," did not set out to chronicle that development in all its complexity and nuance, it nonetheless embodies it.
