Yes, but is it drawing? London 2011 Biennial Fundraiser

Grayson Perry's Chapel de St Claire is one of more than 200 drawings being auctioned by the not-for-profit space at a starting price of £250. Photograph: Grayson Perry/Drawing Room

This article titled “Yes, but is it drawing? London 2011 Biennial Fundraiser” was written by Adrian Searle, for The Guardian on Monday 25th April 2011 20.00 UTC

Every two years the Drawing Room in east London holds a fundraising exhibition, sending artists a sheet of A4 paper and inviting them to return it with an original drawing. Anyone can bid at the silent auction on 18 May for works by Turner prize contenders and winners, younger artists and well-known names such as Tacita Dean, Richard Long, Grayson Perry and Paula Rego, all with a starting price of £250.

A not-for-profit gallery focusing on drawing and housed in a canalside studio block in Hackney, the Drawing Room is a good thing.

The Biennial Fundraiser is democratically arranged, with more than 200 drawings hung up in plastic sleeves three-deep, and there is always a lot of humour. Mark Wallinger has supplied a self-portrait reduced to nothing but his pair of spectacles, which are as distinctive as Eric Morecambe’s.

Michael Landy’s self-portrait is a cartoon of a council rubbish bin. Gavin Turk has just written his signature with a bit of charcoal stuck on the end of a long stick, emulating Henri Matisse, who drew in similar fashion on the ceiling when bed-ridden in the last years of his life.

There is a lot of writing-as-drawing. Goshka Macuga’s just says Transubstantiation, while Bob and Roberta Smith (aka Patrick Brill) has copied out his raging manifesto against the arts cuts.

Is a photograph of a bird’s nest a drawing? You wonder whether nests are drawings anyway. Maybe they’re sculpture. Tania Kovats, who supplied the photograph, recently wrote a book about drawing, so maybe she knows.

Heather Deedman has copied the cover of Adrian Hill’s What Shall We Draw, a 1960s TV spin-off teach-yourself book, and Fiona Banner has painstakingly copied the worn, plain cover of Life Drawing by George B Bridgman. There is a lot of interesting anxiety about what drawing is or isn’t.

The good stuff really declares itself among the dots and scribbles, the self-regarding and the silly. Here’s a drawing of a yellow duster, there’s some mad calligraphic nonsense produced under hypnosis by Matt Mullican.

All works can be bid for online. I covet Angela de la Cruz’s sketch of a figure in a pile of boxes, and a hermaphroditic photo-collage by John Stezaker. But I might change my mind on the night.

Until 18 May, Drawing Room, Tannery Arts, London E2

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