Exhibition catalogue, Sammlung Friedrichshof, Schlebrügge Editor 2016
Text
What Absence Is Made Of
Gianni Jetzer
"You can’t revisit your childhood, because it no longer exists."
While various notable artists have previously altered, painted over, or effaced the works of others (at times with considerable success), one is altogether astonished to encounter this kind of iconoclasm within an artist’s own oeuvre. Why would an artist possibly want to destroy something she herself had made—especially something generally considered, in itself, to have been successful?
Effacement is, for Rita Ackermann, a way of revealing the blind spot of representation, a means by which to considerably enlarge the interpretation of her work while allowing it to be revisited through the introduced aesthetic of disappearance and absence.
In a series of paintings entitled Meditation on Violence (first shown in 2014 at the Sammlung Friedrichshof), she makes figures disappear, dissolving their traces and, eventually, erasing her own paintings. The process of accumulation is countered by a destabilizing self-eradication. This tactic marks a new development in a progression of radical changes that Ackermann has introduced to her paintings over the past years. Neither absent nor present, the painted figure resides in an unstable state. Rather than abandon figuration for abstraction, she instead aims for an ambiguous interstitial zone, literally blurring the lines that divide one from the other.
A pink brushstroke traces a half circle at the top left corner of the canvas. Its right end collides with a cloudlike spot that hovers above a green-primed background. Moreover, a number of contours beneath the surface of this abstract landscape are visible, evoking the shadows of eradicated bodies––smudged members, a weightless torso, a face that is hardly recognizable in the brume of chalk residue. Large parts of the canvas are left empty. The painting, monumental in scale, is based as much upon a bouquet of arabesques and voltes as it is upon the underlying presence of ghostlike figures. Its singular composition expands beyond its frame, out into several other paintings of the same series. Hanging in pairs, or opposite one another, the paintings form a chapel-like environment and become windows into an abstract world, subtly inhabited by human figures.
In 1953, Robert Rauschenberg decided to create a work using an eraser. After a failed attempt at enacting this with one of his own drawings, he decided that he would have to erase someone else’s piece for the resulting work to be conceptually relevant. Eventually, he contacted Willem de Kooning, who reluctantly agreed to give him one of his drawings for the project. The elder artist took great care in selecting the right drawing, and eventually chose one of a female body that appeared particularly difficult to erase. Rauschenberg eventually succeeded in erasing the drawing, however, and was pleased with his result. In 1968, Harold Rosenberg referred to the work Erased de Kooning Drawing as “the most significant creative gesture of the last two decades.”
What exactly makes Rauschenberg’s gesture so creative, and why is it so significant? Interestingly, the plate on the frame alluding to the work’s complicated origination with the designation “ERASED de KOONING DRAWING ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG 1953” was added by the artist at a later point and only then declared an integral part of the work. The crucial information that the original drawing had actually been made by one of the finest artists of the time only to be impertinently erased by a younger colleague turns the beholder’s attention away from the drawing itself—away from its sparse visual signs, their ghostly presence, and the total absence of a figure. Rather than remaining a drawing, or even an erased drawing, the work became, with this gesture, what Lucy Lippard once described as an “ultra-conceptual artwork.”
Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing can be understood as emblematic of a radical shift that took place at the beginning of the 1950s. While de Kooning presented the female figure as the main subject of his drawing, the hopeful young man not only suggests that figure’s absence but also asks us to interpret it. It is not about the drawing itself, but rather about the thread of its extinction, about its disappearance. In considering the relationship between linguistic signs and objects, Jacques Lacan wrote that the word, as such, is “a presence made of absence.” Words, and, in fact, any other symbols, are used in the absence of the things they represent; signifiers only exist insofar as they are opposed to an absent signified. Just as a word refers to its missing object, Rauschenberg’s “present” work functions as a signifier for the erased and now “absent” original drawing. This “presence made of absence” could be said to be the crux of any act of erasure. Finally, Erased de Kooning Drawing turns what was an original drawing into an observation of absence detached from any material. It is a similar effect that Rita Ackermann introduces in Meditation on Violence. By erasing her own figures, she creates a void that is filled by the pictorial fantasy of a viewer who, perhaps revisiting her earlier work, makes assumptions about what the erased work might have looked like.
The gradual dematerialization of the body in Ackermann’s works is a process that has unfolded in several steps over the course of her career. Working in New York in the mid-1990s, she began to produce paintings that presented her own image in fictional scenes. Her nymphets, big-eyed female figures with heart-shaped faces she understood to stand for herself, introduced an unexpected autobiographical element. These early works seem to present narratives and depict female bodies halfway between innocence and cruelty, artificiality and sensuality, uniqueness and commonality, and fiction and reality. They are schematic and stylized yet aspire to be read as placeholders for real bodies. The paintings depict some kind of violence, seemingly driven by ennui and sadistic cruelty, that has resulted in bleeding wounds and burnt flesh, evidence of the nymphet’s humanlike nature.
Ackermann has refined this figurative practice for more than a decade, and those early iconic figures, the nymphs with the artist’s own features, remain an almost subliminal presence in later work. Even as she radically expanded her work to include abstraction, the figuration of the early paintings kept coming back, remaining an apparition—something that could never be fully erased. Symptomatically, during a 2009 residency in Marfa, Texas, she made a first attempt to make the nymphets of her early work disappear. In an act of auto-vandalism, she smeared color over the figures, defacing them and rendering them mere silhouettes.
Ackermann considers Negative Muscle (2010) to be a touchstone among her oeuvre, and the work would appear fundamental to this process of dematerialization. It was the first painting she began after a collaboration with filmmaker Harmony Korine and she has said that, after the collaboration had ended, not having to react to someone else’s art turned out to be a relief—one that emerged in her painting. The formal result was extra compositional space, which she decided, very deliberately, to leave mostly empty. Rather than depict an entire body or an anthropomorphic contour suggesting human presence, she only evokes figuration directly in the painting’s title, however anatomically specific. The visual language itself is almost purely abstract, but Ackermann’s palette of pink and red tones cannot fail to recall flesh. Oil, enamel, spray paint, molding paste, crayon, and tempera are employed to produce a thick layer of paint. A form that reads as a torso is hastily painted onto the raw canvas, composed of a series of gestures that bleed into the fabric, leaving behind a greasy stain. Compared to the contained structure of earlier works, the painting seems raw, and its brushstrokes full of gestural presence. We sense the vitality of Ackermann’s body engaged in the act of painting and, with this, the introduction of a palpable physical energy. We understand that perhaps the “negative muscle” of the painting’s title does not reflect what is depicted, but refers rather to this moment of deeply gestural, engaged production. Negative Muscle, its palette of colors, and this specific softness of the flesh that feels so real, recalls some of de Kooning’s own paintings—he who famously remarked how “flesh is the reason oil paint was invented” and whose paintings also oscillated between figuration and abstraction. Ackermann’s is an unchained, gestural way to apply brushstrokes, a kind of painting that is full of self-confidence and expression. The beholder’s perception is shifted from any depiction of the body to the dominant presence of the artist’s acting body, from representation to gesture. If this was a shift first enacted by the heroic and mostly male figures of Abstract Expressionism, here Ackermann re-appropriates the gestural mode for the female artist.
She further dissolves the human figure in a slightly later series titled Fire by Days, undertaken between 2011 and 2012. These paintings came to her, Ackermann says, by accident, “Suddenly the forms and shapes of hastily cleaning up a mess of paint on a surface suggested something that wasn’t a figure or a face, but rather both, or abstract.” The paintings only hint at possible figuration. The figures depicted are not made out of blood and flesh. They belong, instead, to the etheric body. The Neo-Theosophical conception of the etheric body is understood as the first or lowest layer in the “human energy field,” a kind of auratic presence. In photographs attempting to capture this “aura,” the etheric body is depicted as brightly colored spots that have a presence similar to the splashes of Ackermann’s compositions. The bodies in Fire by Days seem unreal, beyond material representation, even beyond three-dimensional space. They enact the dematerialization of the human body, a process that eventually results in the body’s partial or complete dissolution.
Extinction is the last of Thomas Bernhard’s novels. Therein, the autobiographical testimony of protagonist Franz-Josef Murau ends in a dramatic denial of his own identity. Murau speaks of the void he has created for himself through a hybrid strategy of exaggeration and understatement. In her essay “The Art of Erasing Art,” the literary theorist Bianca Theisen analyzed the literary techniques of the Austrian writer. She suggests that the operation of self-erasure is itself unrepresentable, but that the narrative can, however, point to it. Murau’s report will, by the end, efface what it reports. Similarly, the act of erasure in Rita Ackermann’s Meditation on Violence is a crucial part of the work’s identity. The artist deliberately erases the source material from which it unfolds, and then, doubly, erases this very operation of erasure by turning the smudged lines, the evaporation of water, the wiping of the hand into an abstract painting. The lines on the canvas’s surface state what they negate and negate what they state. The intact and pained bodies of the nymphets have been eradicated and replaced by a discourse on violence intrinsic to the act of creation of the work itself. Left without any explicitly autobiographic elements, we can only read human presence in its violent absence.
