Mona Hatoum | + and -

Mona Hatoum

 + and -

[n.p.]: Self-published, 1994

7.6 x 29.2 x 29.2 cm.

Edition of 14

Since a young Robert Rauschenberg arrived at Willem de Kooning’s door with a bottle of Jack Daniels, begging for a drawing that he could erase in 1953, erasure has become a staple in contemporary art. 

One of my favorite examples is by Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum, who created Self-Erasing Drawing [below] in 1979. The work is a kinetic sculpture with a motorized, toothed metal arm and a circular bed of sand that rotates five times a minute.

The sculpture's hypnotic and perpetual grooving and smoothing of the sand “evokes polarities of building and destroying, existence and disappearance, displacement and migration.”

In 1994 the work was remade in miniature as an edition, with the new name + and –.