To isolate line as sufficient subject for particular attention is to recall something of the formalist preoccupations of the twentieth century. At the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1921, Paul Klee described line as 'the most primitive of elements', and famously took it for a walk.¹ Klee's line could be anything: it could be figurative, abstract or (more commonly) somewhere between the two; it could be drawn with a ruler or (more commonly) freehand. Whatever it might stand for, it was always also just itself.

Again in 1921, but this time in Moscow, the Constructivist artist Alexander Rodchenko published a booklet called, simply, The Line.² Like Klee, Rodchenko claimed to have emancipated line from any subordinate role in visual description. On the cover of his booklet was a single ruled diagonal line. Rodchenko's line never stood for anything else: it was only ever itself, and thus an element within a pictorial construction. There were other differences: Rodchenko's line was ideologically committed (to the Russian Revolution and to the development of visual language somehow equivalent to it) and urgently modern; Klee's line resisted ideology, and would be instead released from all but timeless, natural principles. The potential claimed in and for each line was different: Rodchenko's was calculated - produced with pen, rule and compass - and depersonalised. Klee's was unexpected - created by the exercising of a freely wandering point - and singular. Above all, perhaps, Rodchenko's line was real and therefore present; Klee's was the consequence of a process, the record of an action, and therefore the material trace of something that had occurred in the past.

Do either or both of these modern lines extend to the contemporary? The answer is that Klee's probably does - it is still strolling, as it always has been and always will - but Rodchenko's does not, having been deflected by the course of twentieth century history. Within contemporary practice, Santiago Sierra maintains Rodchenko's rejection of art's claim to reproduce nature, and likewise has no interest in pictorial problems, but, in tattooing a 30cm vertical line on the back of a (barely) remunerated individual - as was performed in Mexico City in 1998 - Sierra is inscribing a different line than that constructed by Rodchenko. In 1999, Sierra hired (for 30 dollars) six unemployed young men from Old Havana to be tattooed. This time the line tattooed on their backs measured 250cm when stood side by side. Most infamously, in Salamanca in 2000, Sierra hired four prostitutes to be tattooed. Their pay was calculated according to the local cost of a shot of heroin. Both Sierra and Rodchenko provoke on a material and political level, but the universal, socialist line drawn by Rodchenko has become, in Sierra's practice, a global, capitalist line. Sierra's line asserts economic power of one party over another, and thus separates. Such is the nature of globalisation, and what distinguishes it from the universal rights promised by modern internationalism.

The global has superseded the universal. Gone too, apparently, is Rodchenko's belief that line could function as the primary element in the construction of anything whatsoever. Lines are now at best contingent, and at worst arbitrary political designations of zones of control and power (or absence of control and power). Rather than join disparate points, political lines are now more likely to divide them. As a consequence, perhaps, few artists today seem terribly interested in the formal commitment or the political ambition of Rodchenko's line, and few are prepared to draw as uncompromising, provocative and brutal a line as Sierra. More seem interested in a subjective, organic, unmediated line that, like Klee's, innocently travels without any assumption of precision. Lines are now more likely to be found, recovered or revealed, than created, produced or imposed.

Maryclare Foa
Tracing Manhattan (2003)

In Klee's walking line there is a sense of it being something independent of the artist. Alternatively or additionally, there is an implication that the line is a pet (simultaneously independent and dependent) that relies upon its owner for its opportunities to exercise. Without direct reference to Klee (but with a nod to the work of William Pope L.) Maryclare Foa, quite literally, takes a line - or, more exactly, a lump of chalk - for a walk in her performance work, 'Tracing Manhattan' (2003). The chalk, attached to a makeshift lead, is towed the sixteen-mile length of Broadway, naturally leaving a linear record of its own journey. Broadway cuts a rebellious route through the Manhattan grid: Foa's chalk traces an even more irregular course in defiance of the city plan's orthogonal logic.

Maryclare Foa,
Drawing your Desire (2005)

The freedom claimed by the irregular geometry of the line in 'Tracing Manhattan', is further stated in Foa's 'Drawing Your Desire' (2005). The lines traced by chalk in this work are called desire lines. Desire lines appear over time, and mark the routes that pedestrians take instead of or to cut between official pathways. Desire lines might be thought of as the automatic product of the collective unconscious, and as a spontaneous form of resistance.

Townley and Bradby
Sweep and Veer (2005)

This work is a mischievous variation on the notion of desire lines. Here, a network of white lines painted on the ground encourages shoppers and workers to deviate from their usual routes. There would appear to be obscure rules being set: a playful prescription.

Townley and Bradby
Dust (2006)

'Dust' is a performed line. In it, the artists wear the high-visibility clothing of the commercial or municipal cleaner, but the line that they follow and sweep is invisible. From dawn until dusk on the winter solstice, Townley and Bradby swept a line from a hospital morgue to a crematorium. The work possesses the aesthetics of community service, but the line being drawn and the passage being prepared is beyond the utilitarian.

Lizzie Hughes
Paris (2005)

In Hughes' 'Paris' a line is indicated in text form. The text appears as instructions. A set of directions describes a route that covers the full length of every street within the Periphique (the ring road circling the French capital), and which ends where it began. In one sense, Paris - historically and culturally the site of Surrealist or Situationist intervention - is here regarded as a coherent, navigable space; but, in another, the relentless block of matter-of-fact text itself pushes towards a non-functional deconstruction of urban space.

Blair Cunningham
Cartograph 3 (2006)

Cunningham's 'Cartograph 3' references certain map-making conventions in both the presentation of a network of lines suggesting interlocking courses and in the folded paper format. Rather than represent something external (something geographical), however, the artist claims to use automatic procedures that rely upon the spontaneous rather than the reasoned to chart something internal (something psychological); that the lines map the unconscious. Such processes are, according to psychoanalysis (and Surrealism), thought to be a direct means of releasing normally repressed thoughts and desires.

Bruce Sharp
Videowork No. 26 (2006)

This video work might be seen as a deadpan, absurdist critique of the essentialist authority of the automatic line. The idea that a line drawn directly from the subjective interior is an authentic line of unmediated, non-repressed truth and unsullied purity is here parodied. The line, in this case a taut length of clean white string, is slowly and solemnly pulled from a closed mouth.

Gillian Cooper
Secretion (1996)

Gillian Cooper's 'Secretion' (1996) looks like a linear deposit. In the course of a week, Cooper reportedly distributed a thousand tiny pink, royal icing 'worm casts' on and around a public walkway in Bristol, but the little 'mounds of line' look more like something produced by the body than by a confectioner. As in Bruce Sharp's piece, there is here a sense of the absurd and of something irreducible and, in this case, abject being expelled.

Rupert White
Drawing Arm (a4) (2006)

Of the lines presented here, the following two works are, perhaps, the closest to that drawn by Alexander Rodchenko. Rupert White's 'Drawing arm' shows a simply improvised device recording a line drawn by the breeze. As has been apparent with the other lines, however, it is Klee's model of practice that is more appropriately applied: White's line is less concerned with embracing the precise line produced by modern technology than it is with directly channelling and tracing natural lines.

Joung Hee Kim
Room (2005)

Exceptionally in the context of the current survey, the line of black tape in Joung Hee Kim's 'Room' (2005) does not allude to nature or make visible an already existing line. This is the most determined and the least found line selected. It is specifically sited in a particular room; a room shorter than the line, thus forcing it (the line) up two facing walls. The line is thus made responsive to the space, but it also asserts a status independent of it. It is as though the line existed before it was fitted here.

Clara S Rueprich
condition M (2006)

A different form of determination is found in Clara S Rueprich's 'condition M' (2006). It is the contemporary, global line that is presented in this work. A man with a whip strides along a line of meat, opens a door, and suddenly fifty dogs emerge, waiting for the necessary permissions to devour the line. The work observes a ritualistic and disciplined violence, and a line of power.