Ingrid Schaffner

Author: admin

  • “Reflections on Silver Studios.” The Metal Party: reconstructing a party held at the Bauhaus in Dessau on February 9, 1929 / Josiah McElheny. New York: Public Art Fund, 2002, pp. 26-30.

    Reflections on Silver Studios

    In light of Josiah McElheny’s recent reconstruction, it’s a short hop from the Bauhaus Metallic Party to Andy Warhol’s Silver Factory, the pop studio environment in New York where a perpetual party reputedly took place from 1964 to 1968. Both were social spectacles of modernism with reflective backdrops: avant-garde events that merged art, fashion, music, dance, decor, even film.[footnote=1] The results were synthetic performance environments where every participant was also a creative constituent in a flow of actions and conversations (to say nothing of constituent participation in imbibing, ingesting, inhaling, and injecting). Together they advance an art history according to which parties signify as art. But what happens when the same retrospective light moves past the seemingly similar dynamics and meaning of the Bauhaus and the Factory and hits metal?

    The same year that Bauhaus students and faculty clanked and tinkled the Dessau Night away at a theme party devoted to metal, another silver studio environment came into being. Isamu Noguchi recalls the influence of his first meetings with Buckminster Fuller: “I first met Mr. Fuller, as I used to call him…at Romany Marie’s [a Greenwich Village artists’ hang-out and café] in 1929. Some time later I got an old laundry room on top of a building on Madison Avenue and Twenty-ninth Street with window all around. Under Bucky’s sway, I painted the whole place silver—so that one was almost blinded by the lack of shadows. There I made his portrait in chrome-plated bronze—also form without shadow.”[footnote=2]

    Reading this, one can almost see the chrome-plated head of Fuller dissolving into the silver backdrop of Noguchi’s studio. But even in less blinding circumstances, the Fuller head is almost impossible to see. The streamlined form appears to melt, like liquid, into its own reflective surfaces. (One writer recently likened the portrait to a car bumper.[footnote=3]) In so doing, it embodies the visionary architect’s machine-age aesthetic. In 1929 Fuller had just completed his plans for the metal Dymaxion House and was trying to find a means of having it industrially reproduced. Nochugi’s bust also makes manifest Fuller’s theory of the “fundamental invisibility” of “completely reflective surfaces.” As Fuller later explained it: “This fundamental invisibility was that of utterly still waters whose presence can be approached only when objects surrounding them are reflected in them…. Then only the distortion of familiar shapes in the surrounding environment could be seen by the viewer. In the brains of the viewer there would be induced a composite constellation of pattern information permitting the secondarily derived recognition of the invisible sculpture’s presence and dimensional relationships.”[footnote=4]

    Likewise, in a consideration of Fuller’s career, it’s the invisible impact of his teachings, writings, friendships, and other indeterminates that matter. He himself was completely unfazed when a geodesic dome—bolted together from venetian blind slat—collapse in the midst of a demonstration. Fuller simply dubbed it “the supine dome.”[footnote=5] This experiment was conducted in 1948 at the Black Mountain College, located just outside of Asheville, North Caroline. When it opened in 1933, the college had inadvertently assumed a legacy from the Munich Bauhaus, which had closed that same year after refusing to admit Nazi students, by bringing Joseph and Anni Albers from there to run the art department. Judging from all accounts, the events that occurred outside the Albers rigorous classroom curricula—the parties, lectures, meals, music, and other happenings—were as integral to the experience of Black Mountain as they were to the Bauhaus.

    Among the faculty who participated in the summer term of 1948 were, besides Fuller, Elaine and Willem de Kooning, John Cage, and Merce Cunningham. It was also the first of the three nonconsecutive years that Robert Rauschenberg attended Black Mountain as a student. Since he didn’t show up until the fall term, he missed both Fuller and Willem de Kooning. Rauschenberg says it was de Kooning’s work that inspired him in 1950 to paint the walls of his New York apartment/studio silver. He and Susan Weil, his wife at the time, were living on Ninety-sixth Street. As Rauschenberg told art historian Barbara Rose in a 1987 interview: “Betty [Parsons, the art dealer] came over to see some paintings. There was a man with her, looking very grim. Clyfford Still. She came into my studio with Clyfford Still. He didn’t even look up. We had problems. We had a Scottie that ate goldfish and stole butter. I had painted the house silver. I had noticed at the time Bill de Kooning would paint silver around the edges, the restrictions of an image on canvas. Noticing how well that worked, I had painted my house silver inside, thinking it might improve my own paintings.”[footnote=6]

    As incidental as this story may sound, it is also wildly suggestive. Four years before his first “Combines” upended distinctions between painting and sculpture, Rauschenberg was already thinking outside the frame. Three years before he asked de Kooning to give him a drawing in order to erase it, he was already consigning aspects of abstract expressionism to decor. Rauschenberg’s silver studio was short-lived—perhaps not enduring much past that studio visit, with eventually led to the 1951 gallery show that launched his professional career.

    Rauschenberg’s determination to engage de Kooning seems mirrored, a decade later, by Warhol’s determination to ingratiate himself to Rauschenberg. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is Warhol’s elegiac 1963 silkscreen portrait of Rauschenberg, based on family photographs Warhol solicited from him. At the time, Warhol had not yet moved into the East Forty-seventh Street space that would become known as the Silver Factory, so-called after his assistant Billy Name covered the interior in silver paint and foil. Warhol had enjoyed the effect when he first saw it while attending one of Name’s home hair-cutting parties.[footnote=7] (Indeed Warhol, a wig-wearer, must have also enjoyed the experience of watching people getting their hair done in this silvery domain, as the party inspired him to make a new film Haircut, starring Name.) In January 1964, he asked Name to decorate the new Factory space just like his apartment, in mirrors and foil.

    The light on the Factory’s aluminum surfaces has a tarnished, campy glow, like burned-out movie screens. It is completely unlike the shiny brilliance of metal (and its promise) at the Bauhaus party, which is, furthermore, unlike the revisionist light of McElheny’s postmodern reconstruction. In short, as this brief metallurgy proves: not all silver studios are created equal! And yet, there they are, a surprising ongoing trope of modernism as reflected in metallic surfaces. What these spaces do seem to share in common, however, is a desire to collapse the distinction between different disciplines—to provide a single foil, if you will, for music, dance, painting, sculpture, haircutting, etc. to occur against. Silvering also speaks of the will to break down basic figure/ground relationships, to create new fields, or contexts, in which to perceive works of art—fields, like parties, where people meet, things happen, and maybe someone goes home and paints the walls silver.

    Acknowledgments.

    I would like to thank Geoffrey Batchen, Susan Davidson, Donna Ghelerter, Brandon Joseph, Walter Hopps, David White, and Matt Wrbican for their insights and interest in this essay.

     

  • “On Collecting.” Pictures, Patents, Monkeys, and More…. New York: Independent Curators International, 2001, pp. 33-41. Excerpt pp. 33-36.

    On Collecting

    Why didn’t she try collecting something?—it didn’t matter what. She would find it gave an interest to life, and there was no end to the little curiosities one could easily pick up.

    —Henry James, The Spoils of Poynton

    I have been accumulating writings on collecting, and the reading is telling. One minute you might be reading about butterflies, for example, or about a person who devotes untold hours of his or her life to getting more butterflies—the next minute you find yourself grappling with questions about history, economy, destiny, science, naming, language, learning, love, immortality. Even the most. ephemeral, least significant writings on collecting somehow induce a bewildering amount of speculation.

    Sample the two modern classics. Walter Benjamin’s 1931 essay Unpacking My Library opens with a charge of the perverse pleasure this Marxist philosopher gets in seeing his private collection of old books emerge from packing crates.[footnote=1] Disheveled/dis-shelved, the unpacked books not only convey but arouse the collector’s passion. At his touch—almost a fondle—each volume relinquishes a “chaos of memories.”[footnote=2] He contrasts to this productive chaos the “mild boredom” of seeing any collection neatly arranged—its disorderly essence (a historic essence) subdued, made static, like facts in a chronology.[footnote=3] The pleasure his collection unleashes has little to do with its contents: the last thing a collector does is read his books![footnote=4] No, the relationship between collector and object is based on memories of a first encounter, a city, a dealer, a transaction, a touch. The essay concludes with Benjamin’s abrupt, yet wistful, prediction that private collecting would someday constitute an obsolete form of ownership. Bruce Chatwin’s short fiction Utz picks up where Benjamin leaves off, investigating the mysterious fate of Baron Utz’s vast collection of Meissen porcelain figurines, in postwar Prague. Utz has struck a deal with the Socialist government, allowing him to keep his acquisitions until his death. He warns: “In any museum the object dies—of suffocation and the public gaze…. Ideally, museums should be looted every fifty years, and their collections returned into circulation.”[footnote=5] And at the old man’s funeral, the entire collection has vanished, without a trace. Perhaps, the narrator speculates, Utz destroyed his aristocratic Harlequins, Columbines, and monkey musicians rather than have them possessed by the State. Or is it possible that after marrying his devoted maid, Marta, Utz no longer relied on the chilly comfort of Rococo porcelain objects, and the aged couple together smashed the lot?

    Turning to more varied sources, one discovers recurrent motives and points of consensus as well as some knotty contradictions. Compulsion, a word that smacks of perversion and illness, commonly describes the collecting impulse (which is also sometimes called a “mania”). As Chicago art collector Frederic Clay Bartlett testified, “l am a collector. It is a habit—a disease with me. I cannot help buying curios, antiquities, and works of art, even when I have no place to put them.”[footnote=6] And yet, this impulse has also been regarded as normal, as something to be cultivated from childhood on. “The tot of two,” a parenting article from 1919 assures us, “when he starts to collect, has entered the first business enterprise of his life.”[footnote=7] Sigmund Freud was deeply inspired by the act of collecting and by the objects in his own collection of some 2,000 (mostly small) antiquities. When the Nazis occupied Vienna, Freud refused to leave until safe passage to London was assured both his family and his collection. And psychoanalytic practice was built on the idea of retrieving things (material) from an individual’s collection of images, thoughts, memories, fragments, dreams, and fears—all of which Freud called the unconscious.[footnote=8]

    Hunting is the great metaphor of collecting, with tracking, the chase, the bluff, capture, the elements of risk and chance all presumed to be more thrilling than the quarry itself. Collectors are frequently likened to “lions,” and in one case to “ferrets”: “The collecting of one type…is bold and voracious; the collecting of men of the type of Balzac’s ‘Cousin Pons’ is artful, cunning, crafty.”[footnote=9] Embedded in the hunting/trophy metaphor is a tradition of collecting as plundering, or acquisition through conquest—to the victor go the spoils. In 67 B.C., for example, Roman emperor Cicero begged his contact in Greece to please send “as many other statues and objects as seem to you appropriate to that place, and to my interests, and to your good taste—above all anything which seems to you suitable for a gymnasium or a running track.”[footnote=10] In a strange twist to this adage, Napoleon, though defeated in battle, sacked Egypt of its treasures and carried them off to France in triumph—a triumph of collecting, that is.

    Love, learning, identity, immortality, and investment are the big motives for collecting. As one commentator observes of the tender ministrations that collectors lavish on their objects: “while love for another person may be spurned, no one was ever jilted by a book mark or a cheese label.”[footnote=11] Alternatively, however, collecting can lead to friendships and build community. Surely the members of MOO: Milk Bottles Only Association find exceptional company in their own midst. Built over time, a collection is a life’s witness. The writer Kenneth Breecher has observed: “There were postcards from every period of my life and they had become my private museum, a cabinet of curiosities, a personal history reflecting large and minute concerns.”[footnote=12] Every collector learns from his or her pursuit, and collections can also teach others. The seventeenth-century genesis of the museum—the curiosity cabinet, or Wunderkammer—was composed equally of natural specimens and cultural artifacts for study and teaching purposes. Joseph Pulitzer said that building his art collection goaded him to constantly rethink his own knowledge and taste: “If I have been troubled or dismayed or shocked or antagonized by a style that suddenly emerges on the scene, I usually take the trouble to find out about it.”[footnote=13] But collecting is not first and foremost about communicating with others, and collectors’ expertise can veer to the sheer arcane and be couched in a language sensible only to other collectors, with their knowledge of rare patterns, maker’s marks, years of manufacture, most desirable colors, and other minutiae. This is the parlance of the marketplace and is not usually relevant to discussions of culture or history at large.

    Collections establish and reveal identity. Mega-collector and twin Alex Shear has noted that he “didn’t know who [he] was,” until the day he found himself at a flea market, reconstructing the consumer landscape of his past (from bobby pins, to soda cans, to artists’ renderings of never-built cars) and started acquiring these products of his youth en masse. “Is my collection autobiographical?,” he asks; “you’d better believe it. A lot of my life is in that stuff.”[footnote=14] But collections don’t just reflect on a collector’s past, they also look forward to the time of his or her death. On donating his collection of Victorian art to Canada’s National Gallery, Joseph Tannenbaum declared: “There’s something almost immortal about collecting. It’s a heritage you pass on to future generations.”[footnote=15] Even when a collection isn’t fit to enter an institution’s pearly gates, there is a sense of its heft and responsibility anchoring the collector to this world. As a collector friend once said to me, “l can’t die; who will take care of all these things?”

    But collecting is also about investing in the here and now: “Most of us, of course, collect for profit, whether real or imagined.”[footnote=16] And, increasingly, everything seems collectible, and thus valuable. Each episode of the popular television program Antiques Road Show stars ordinary household accumulation that an expert’s word either transforms into a pearl of great price or reduces to trash. With e-bay and on-line auctions taking place virtually every second of the day, collectors are constantly buying and selling, incrementally and exponentially inflating their own economies in Russell Wright-designed dishes, Impressionist paintings, tractor brochures, and so on. Nonetheless, collecting is ultimately about accumulating, not about cashing-in. For what do true collectors do with any financial gains? They buy more stuff.

    Finally, the Golden Rule, encountered again and again throughout the writing on collecting, is that everyone collects something. On a certain level, collecting is naming (you name it and someone collects it…); it is a kind of pointing to the object. And collectors in turn are named: a deltiologist collects postcards, a phillumenist matchbook covers, a vitolphillist cigar rings.”[footnote=17] Snobs might quibble over the difference between dilettante and genuine collecting. “The latter,” one commentator observes, “has stilled once and for all any inhibition against spending money on the inanimate objects of his choice.”[footnote=18] But money isn’t really the issue when you collect, as some do, rubber bands, restaurant doggie bags, string, or other ephemera. We live in a culture so possessed by possessions that a person would almost have to make an effort not to collect. Emerson’s warning, “Things are in the saddle and ride mankind,” receives this update from the editor of The Antique Trader Weekly: “grab as much as you can and store it.”[footnote=19]

    An essential question remains, even after having sifted through my collection of writings on collecting: How and why do people chose what they want to collect? What is it about asphyxiated butterflies that can drive one person to distraction, while others daydream about small antiquities? How thrilling is the pursuit of miniature lamps if one is not already captivated by them? A fine collection of cheese labels may keep emotional entanglements with human beings at bay, but love is there nevertheless. Ultimately, I cannot explain the pleasure that I get from my own modest collection of old travel books—with their exquisite maps, handsome heft, delicate paper, stone-by-stone accounts, and obsolete accommodations—and I do not expect anyone else to fully appreciate or share it. (In fact, I hope you don’t. Like most collectors, I’m a little proprietary when it comes to my object.) This aspect of collecting—the hold certain objects can have on us—seems to lie beyond speculation. The desires and assurances they inspire remain ineffable.

     

    Pictures, Patents, Monkeys, and More

    The three (and more) collections that are the subject of this exhibition are each represented by selected objects and each depict a different kind of collecting: contemporary fine art comes from the Robert J. Shiffler Foundation in Ohio; the sock monkey toys, artifacts of popular culture, come from a private collection; the patent models, an example of a repository of public record, are from the U.S. Patent Office, and are now in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution. In addition, each participating venue has been invited to present a local collection.

    Seeing all of these objects side-by-side gives rise to a variety of questions and comparisons. For example, how are institutional and individual collecting different from one another? Art is generally considered the “big game” of collecting, because of the relatively high cost associated with obtaining and maintaining individual objects, and because of the status they confer. Yet, as expressions of innovation and individuality, are pictures actually unlike patents or sock monkeys? What about the power and significance of the collection itself? How does the fact that an object has been collected transform the regard we have for it? Is there a point when an accumulation becomes a collection? And can a collection itself become a work of art? We also have to pay attention to the context of display: art museums create a privileged form of presentation, which reflects on all the objects on view here. If Marcel Duchamp could, in 1915, turn a shovel into a sculpture just by showing it as such, what does that gesture mean for these monkeys and patents? By extension, is fine art leveled by such associations? I think not: art maintains its cultural position and its specific claims on our attention, though not at the expense of any of the other objects on view here. What attracts you personally is of course a matter of taste. But everything in this show, including the art, gains from the frisson, the excitement the exhibition generates simply by showing it together and making it possible to ask these questions in such a direct and open-ended manner.

     

  • “Rauschenberg’s Photographies.” Afterimage, 25, no. 5 (March/April 1998), p. 15.

    Rauschenberg’s Photographies

    The first work by Robert Rauschenberg to enter a public collection was a pair of black and white photographs purchased by Edward Steichen for the Museum of Modern Art’s photography department. In light of the noisy Pop assemblages for which Rauschenberg is known, these are straightforward pictures—a buggy and a portrait of his artist friend Cy Twombly: classic American silents with a streak of Surrealism. They also speak of the artist’s early ambition. As a student at Black Mountain College in the 1950s, where  Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind were fellow students, and where Rauschenberg received his first photography instruction from Hazel Larsen Archer, Rauschenberg says he was temporarily tempted to become a photographer. Ultimately he took a less focused course, making art into “the kind of adventure [he] enjoyed, like walking down the street,” often with a camera in hand.

    As benefits its subject—a painter, sculptor, photographer, printmaker, dancer, performance artist, theater set designer, fresco painter, Mud Muse-maker, world traveler, new technologies buff and first postmodernist—Robert Rauschenberg: A Retrospective is a gargantuan show. In New York, it filled both the Guggenheim Museum’s uptown and Soho locations, then spilled over into Ace Gallery, a veritable bunker of commercial gallery space on the fringe of Soho, where The 1/4 Mile or 2 Furlong Piece, a large-scale, Pop-operatic installation that has been unfurling since 1981, was on view. Organized for the museum by Walter Hopps and Susan Davidson of The Menil Collection with an important contribution on Rauschenberg’s performance by the Museum’s own Nancy Spector, the curatorial conceit is distinctly Hopps’s. In the catalog (also mammoth), Hopps compares Rauschenberg, to the artist Charles Willson Peale, who, in a well-known self portrait of 1822, proudly pulls back a curtain to reveal his seemingly endless collection of art and artifacts—the first museum in America. (For which, Peale subsidized the excavation of an entire mastodon skeleton.) The same analogy might be extended to Hopps, who staged the first Rauschenberg survey as a Bicentennial event in 1976 for the Smithsonian, and who once again pulls back the curtain, this time on a presentation composed by a lifetime’s intimacy, enthusiasm and full participation in the artist’s love of the encyclopedic. The exhibition is nearly a catalog raisonné in the round. For the viewer, it’s a lot—really too much—to absorb, and no doubt would be better served by fewer works. But for the Rauschenberg devotee (myself included), this was an opportunity to see the work on its own super-abundant terms and to explore in detail the roles and guises of one of its most consistent means: photography.

    Rauschenberg was introduced to the photogram technique in 1950 by Susan Weil (their collaborative photograms were included in the 1951 MoMA exhibition). In one of these almost life-sized studies, a woman washed in light clutches a cane as if to keep from blowing away in the wind that is billowing her skirts. It’s a ghostly image, fixing in blueprint the shadows that Rauschenberg originally envisioned flitting across his pure white paintings of 1951. (At the Guggenheim the White Paintings were rendered purely conceptual [really defunct] by barriers on the floor that keep viewers and their unruly shadows impossibly at bay.) Altogether these first works—the prints, photograms, white canvases—are emblematic of Rauschenberg’s indexical approach to representation: non-narrative, radically ephemeral and, in that the pictures practically make themselves, almost un-authored. The presence of Marcel Duchamp—who also liked to play with shadows, to casually mark junctures of time and space and who preferred to leave things open in his art—looms large over these first gestures by Rauschenberg.

    What makes Rauschenberg’s work so compelling (and perhaps prolific) is that the opposite impulses—to make pictures, to narrate, to construct allegory, to invent—are equally profound. The critical precedent here—explicitly conjured by early collages and box-like constructions (such as the Scatole Personali of 1952) and later called forth through concert themes—is Joseph Cornell. Both artists create worlds out of ephemera, trash and photography, collected, collated, collages into art. And like Cornell, who compulsively stocked photographs of favorite images, Rauschenberg’s art can also be read in terms of an archive. Over time, images routinely re-appear (the Rokeby Venus, John F. Kennedy, a pail), at first as if through convenience (pictures near at hand), then more rigorously recycled, as if refining the elements in a grand narrative. This has its pragmatic aspect: in 1980 Rauschenberg was sued for copyright infringement. He has since drawn more heavily on his photographs, making the structure of his archive—its limits, its themes—increasingly apparent.

    The two not-necessarily-contradictory side of Rauschenberg’s art (Duchamp and Cornell) are famously married early on in the survey, by the mid-1950s, with the “flatbed picture plane.” This is the term art historian Leo Steinberg coined to mark the inception of postmodernism within Rauschenberg’s Combines. “Neither painting nor sculpture but a combination of the two,” the Combines realize the artist’s expressed desire “to bridge the gap between art and life” by importing wholesale to his art the sights, sounds and stuff of the world. There are pictures of things reproduced in snapshots, book and newspaper pages, and the things themselves: chickens, shoes, mirrors, dirt, paint. This in not art as mirror, but art as an index, a plane upon which things land, adhere and resonate. The triumphal arch of all flatbed pictures Monogram (1955-59), stand about one third of the way up the Guggenheim spiral. For photography, look under the taxidermied Angora goat with a tire around its belly and paint daubed on its face to the canvas laying on the floor encrusted with pigment, old boards, signs and other elements of collage. There is a photograph and, nearby it, a footprint inked on paper. As mundane as these might appear amidst the spectacularly shocking surroundings, it is these two indexical items that segue into the next major phase of Rauschenberg’s art: the silkscreen paintings and transfer drawings.

    Initiated by Dante’s Inferno (1958-60), an ambitious illustrative picture cycle tucked away in a side gallery, these images are certainly less cumbersome and crude than the Combines. Driven almost exclusively by photographic reproductions transferred onto paper and canvas as rubbings and montage, the work of the 1960s might be seen as the platonic union of the index and the construct. However, in her catalog essay (the only one primarily on photography), Rosalind Krauss detects a step away from the non-literal flatbed approach and recourse to old-fashioned allegory with its attendant associations and narratives. The smoking gun is Rauschenberg’s straight photography, which Kraus describes in damning WPA terms (“the frontality, the relentless focus”) thus underscoring what she finds to be the conventionality of his work in general. (“We would sooner expect him to share a sensibility with Robert Frank,” she writes.) Krauss’s essay is compelling reading (moving effortlessly and pointedly from Breton to Richter) and yet, in the end, seems overdetermined, pinning its subject into a tight analytical corner that the work—by way of its generous movement and strong visual intelligence—patently resists.

    Returning to Rauschenberg’s photography one finds more than just refried Walker Evans. Starting in the late ‘40s, and continuing to the present is a body of work that on one hand informs and on the other stands independent of the artist’s assemblage. At The Guggenheim, the photographs were grouped in side galleries along with other works on paper and primarily served the role of fueling the Combines and silkscreens installed out on the ramp with fresh batches of images. But in a concurrent New York exhibition at Pace/Wildenstein/MacGill Gallery, Rauschenberg’s straight photography was allowed to stand on its own. RR Fulton Street Studio, NYC, a studio interior of 1951, is practically a Combine before the fact: fetish-like found objects on a shelf, postcard reproductions and a scrappy fabric curtain come to rest on the plane of the studio wall. Moving out of the studio, recurrent motifs are staircases, hand-painted signs, empty streets and headless bodies. These together, with the kind of strange juxtapositions and framing devices that give rise to a sense of the uncanny in everyday life, evoke Surrealism in general and Henri Cartier-Bresson in particular. Both artists were inveterate travelers, who quested further and further afield to fuel their pictorial appetites. Rauschenberg has spent great portions of the past two decades on extended exotic sojourns—for example, the Rauschenberg Oversees Culture Interchange (or ROCI), the artist’s personally incorporated adventure to encourage international exchange, took him to Tibet, Chile, Russia, among other places—collaborating with local craftsmen, taking pictures and making great souvenirs.

    It’s difficult not to be dismissive of much of the late work—large-scaled and expensive-looking—on view at the Soho Guggenheim. It doesn’t appear to demand the kind of looking (or, for that matter, thinking) required by the earlier work in the retrospective. These are big easy gestures, drawing on familiar photographs, at their best sweepingly cinematic (the tarnished Night Shades, 1991), at the worst simply inflated (the brassy Boreali, 1989). The photographically-minded spectator will want to tap any reserve energy for viewing the artist’s films and performance documents. Early choreography, such as Pelican (1965), shows the artist at his most intense and potent, an innocent and true believer in the power of art to draw participants (viewers, other artists, dogs, chickens…) into life. Something of the reverse is also true, when one starts to measure Rauschenberg’s influence on other artists: Gerhard Richter says he felt permission to paint after seeing Rauschenberg’s contribution to the 1959 Documenta; and, as far as younger generations, there is precedent in Rauschenberg’s work for artists as diverse as Matthew Barney, Jason Rhoades, Jessica Stockholder and Wolfgang Tillmans, to name but a few.

    Given the nearly constant presence of photography and photographic reproduction throughout the 40 years of work on view, one might argue that Rauschenberg never abandoned his initial ambition to be a photographer. (For that matter, the inquisitive and accumulative Rauschenberg seemingly never rejected anything that came his way.) He simply refused photography’s departmentalization, and with it, at times, art’s own marginalized status in society at large. (In 1987 he designed a wine label for Wolfgang Puck’s restaurant Spago, testified against Judge Bork’s Supreme Court nomination, and initiated a new body of work when he discovered a new technique for bleaching photographs.) In the work of Rauschenberg, a consummate sampler, photography gives way to photographies: what better means of fulfilling the desire to make art that is simultaneously abstract and allegorical, autobiographical and global, archival and indexical, in the museum and of the media, enduring and ephemeral, actual and fictitious. What better way to do all this and walk down the street at the same time?

     

  • “A Short History of the blp.” Parkett, 46 (1996), pp. 26-33+.

    A Short History of the blp

    To the extent that the blp epitomizes Richard Artschwager’s art, it also stands firmly on its own, an independent phenomenon, a little to the left of the artist’s painting and sculpture, on whatever ground it finds itself located by whomever has chosen to place it there. Stenciled or stuck anywhere by anyone, these lozenge-shaped marks create a juncture of ever-changing coordinates, admitting asides from such disparate realms as typography, poetry, music, even radar, as they gather their own context round them.[footnote=1] The following is a brief account—according to the artist, archival documents, and anterior association—of the blp.[footnote=2]

    The blp was born in the winter of 1967-1968, while Artschwager was teaching a term at the University of California at Davis. It arose out of a combination of graphic impulses, perhaps the result of the artist being cut off from the routines of his New York studio:

    At Davis I know I did two things: I graffiti-ed into magazines with a felt tip, blacking out eyes, etc. in somewhat the manner of Duchamp’s mustache on the Mona Lisa. Then I was also working in notebooks as usual and therein tried to pick apart my painting to see if I could take it somewhere else. There were dashes, Y-shapes and hooks, with pen or pencil. So out of this I decided to bring the elements into the space by making them bigger and more substantive…[footnote=3]

    The blps, evolved as a lozenge, “more effective than a dot,” were first shown as painted wooden cut-outs grouped in clusters at the university gallery. The original idea was to arrange them into illusional figures, which would disintegrate into abstraction upon approach.[footnote=4] This proved dissatisfying and Artschwager promptly began winnowing. Switching to singles, he found himself moving out of the gallery space, putting blps in the hallway, onto the ceiling, and so on.

    Thus liberated, the blps fueled Artschwager’s trip back to New York in the spring of 1968 in his Studebaker Lark with “a bushel basket of blps” in the trunk. By the time he got to Detroit, he had used up the last blp. In the course of the journey, it seems the blp had changed character, from a diverting pastime outside the studio, into an aggressive means of establishing identity and controlling space. In June, Artschwager made his debut at the Galerie Konrad Fischer in Düsseldorf, not with “signature” paintings and sculptures, but with blps, covering the interior, including the windows, in a blight of black spots.

    Back in New York, Richard Bellamy included the blps in one of his serial abstraction shows, “From Arp to Artschwager III” and parleyed for their inclusion in the 1968 Whitney Annual devoted to contemporary sculpture. Installed throughout the museum’s stairwells, galleries, elevators, and offices, the blps, now made of wood, hair, and plastic, were collectively titled 100 LOCATIONS. Cheap, nonretinal, unruly and invasive, they were singled out by a critic as “[p]erhaps the most significant contribution to the entire Annual.”[footnote=5] (Artschwager remembers Eva Hesse’s compliment during the installation: “I used to think you were really dumb.”) Indeed as blps actively broke with conventions of consumption and containability, they were confluent with a range of conceptual strategies from, say, Dan Flavin’s fluorescent sculptures, which fill the air with ephemeral, industrial radiance, to Vito Acconci’s guerrilla-style “blink” photographs, snapped in the streets at each bat of the eye.[footnote=6] Artschwager himself refers to them in “environmental” terms, revealing in his notes that the genesis of the hair blps stemmed from a desire to “make one which doesn’t look like a keypunch hole in space, but like a soft spot in the diamond hardness of the air.” Perhaps less evident is how the blps might relate to sound and film.

    In a 1968 lecture at Milton College, which began with the query, “What does it feel like to look?” Artschwager said, “Seeing is confined to what is in front of us, and to an area shaped something like a Zeppelin or blimp. Or…a cinemascope screen with all four corners lopped off.” Accordingly, the blp becomes a miniature movie screen, a portable field of vision. It is also filled with motion, as Artschwager originally opted for the lozenge over the dot for its streamlined zip. The soft edges of the hair blps actually enhance this effect with a blurriness that signifies movement in photography. The cinematic potential of the blp is presented in Artschwager’s project for Sonsbeek 1971 with a series of blps located throughout the nearby city of Utrecht.[footnote=7] A publication devoted entirely to blps documents the various sites, from flower stands to fields (where blps perch on little sticks), with full-page photographs that read like a film montage of a day in the utopian life of a blp.[footnote=8] In one sequence a blp on the back of a car travels down a street, growing tinier in the distance. Adding another ambient layer, or soundtrack, is a record tucked in the book’s back cover. One side plays the continuous ticking of a windup clock; the other the pinging sound of the same when muffled.

    If Utrecht was an idyllic departure into a panoramic blp Sensurround, blps were more generally experienced by the public as incidental stop-motion, doubletakes, if they were seen at all. Simultaneous to the official installation at the Whitney in 1968, Artschwager (helped by friends Gary Bauer and John Torreano) located blps around Manhattan. The cadre worked under cover of darkness, spray-painting blps outside the major museums as well as at less distinguished locales. A blp on a wall of graffiti suggests a comparative study. Like graffiti, blps are anyone’s mark. For a l978 exhibition, entitled “Detective Show,” held at Gorman Park in Queens, organizer/artist John Fekner informed the absent Artschwager, “Your piece was executed by a couple of fifteen-year-old girls with my supervision of course.” For even at its most surreptitious and streetwise, the blp must be correct, making it ultimately unsuited to expressive defiance and public defacement. Its true precincts are visibility and memory. Like a pointer that indicates “look here,” the blp calls attention to its surroundings which, no matter how raucous or sedate, seamy or banal, suddenly find themselves the subject of a second glance, and possibly even worth remembering.

    At the same time Artschwager was working the galleries and streets plying relatively small blps, he was also envisioning more ambitious venues. Photographic maquettes proposed monumental blps on the sides of brutalist bunkers in Hamburg, on a nineteenth-century row house on Wells Street in Chicago, and in the Telegraph Hill district in San Francisco. A forty-foot tall white blp was painted on a black smokestack of the Turtle Bay Steam Plant, located in Lower Manhattan. This was an inside job, arranged for by the artist with a Con Edison employee “long since retired.” After some twenty years of humming quietly above the F.D.R. Drive, the blp recently disappeared from the spot.

    According to Artschwager the first blps came out of drawings that were about painting. Closely scrutinized, there is something of the blp (along with “hooks” and “ys”) slipping around, paramecium-like, in the pools of black-and-white acrylic medium that ride and rise over the irregular celotex surfaces of Artschwager’s photographic imagery. One might even come to think of blps as Artschwager’s Benday dot—mechanical reproduction’s least common denominator that had gained such high visibility within the work of his Pop peers. Inasmuch as the blps managed to encapsulate the essence of Artschwager’s painting, they also may have precipitated a crisis. A 1968 notebook entry determining to quash such qualms reads, “Doing both is best way to say Fuck You Clement Greenberg.” Any real dilemma is startlingly enclosed in TINTORETTO’S RESCUE OF THE BODY OF SAINT MARK (l969), a long view down a barrel vault where a fragmentary icon of the Renaissance painting (St. Mark’s hand) floats alongside Artschwager’s own blps.

    Boundaries exist to be trespassed, exceeded, blurred in Artschwager’s art. The painting, sculpture, multiples, blps are all contiguous upon one another, working in concert to make art seemingly ordinary enough to pass into everyday experience. A function of the punctuation pieces that first appeared in 1966 was to frame space in the same way an Exclamation Point or Quotation Marks frames speech.[footnote=9] Similar attempts to disrupt patterns of seeing and reading occurred throughout the sixties as exemplified by the contemporary renaissance of concrete poetry, and the publication of Notations (1968), a collection edited by John Cage of new music notation which ranged from erratic angles, to creepy drips to simple language. (“Bloop. Blip./Bloop. Zeep,” Ken Friedman’s composition begins.[footnote=10]) But while Artschwager’s punctuation pieces performed a rhetoric of seeing using familiar grammar, turning their surroundings into floating concrete poems, if you will, the blps eschewed all references to reading by marking a site for just plain “useless” looking. For Artschwager, this is one of the blps’ most important features:

    First the blp. It is a mindless invasion of the social space by a logo-like, totally useless art element. It is small, has high visibility, relentlessly refuses to give up its uselessness. It is an instrument for useless looking. Being of small size and high visibility it converts the immediate surround over to The Useless. That is its “function.” It gets about as close to pure art as one can get.[footnote=11]

    When Artschwager clipped the “i” from “blip,” he snatched his invention from the dictionary and any direct associations with 1) a short crisp sound, 2) radar or 3) censorship in order to strengthen its purely abstract and aural impact. As much as the blp is a gestalt of vision (a blp is what it feels like to see), it also sums up the ever-critical Artschwagerian concept of “preliterate experience.”[footnote=12] He once told an interviewer, a blp “is one of those things you can’t drop into a verbal conversation.”[footnote=13] This notion was elaborated upon in the most recent large-scale blp installation held at the Clock Tower in 1978. Besides the usual assortment lurking around, up in the tower, and on all four faces of the clock—note that Artschwager had wired the hands of the clock to “race around (one set backward) at alarming speed, visible from the ground, but experienced in the tower only as eerie shadows”[footnote=14]—were a series of wall-sized blps encircling the gallery, like a blockade or a deafening tattoo. These passed through two passages of relatively unassuming wall installations: the first, a perspectival study, such as appears in the painting BUSHES (1970), of pencil lines all rushing to meet a central point on the wall that in turn establishes a rudimentary landscape beyond the phalanx of blps. The second, a representation of a piano keyboard, upon which the blps land like giant touch. In short, what wells up behind these seemingly stolid mute marks are all the unspeakable pleasures of music and pictorial illusion.

    Blps continue to appear. Most recently a mirror multiple was made in the shape of one and there’s some talk of making a giant blp out of bristle. But there are also a box of blp decals and a handful of stencils in different sizes lying around the studio, just in case…

  • “Snow White in the Wrong Story: Paintings and Drawings by Marlene Dumas.” Arts Magazine, March 1991, pp. 59-63.

    Snow White in the Wrong Story: Paintings and Drawings by Marlene Dumas

     

    I am the place in which something has occurred.  —Claude Lévi-Strauss

    Like fairy tales before they’ve been bowdlerized, Marlene Dumas’s paintings and drawings are not pretty pictures. As the Brothers Grimm wrote it, the wicked queen’s demise was far from Disneyesque; she was forced to wear red-hot iron shoes at Snow White’s wedding and dance until she dropped down dead. For Dumas Snow White is no innocent girl: she’s a naked woman strapped to a table in a clinic. And where are her loyal dwarfs? Replaced by a juvenile tribunal of not-very-nice-looking private school boys, scrowling and staring at this vulnerable female spectacle.

    The camera she’s clutching and the flurry of Polaroids beneath her cold bier incriminated Dumas’s Snow White and the Broken Arm (1988) for snapping one too many: a paparazzi crime of which the artist herself might be guilty, since her figurative paintings all originate in the myriads of pictures she takes. And though this isn’t a portrait likeness, Dumas can be further identified with the princess in the tale and its tellers.

    Marlene Dumas was born in Capetown in 1953; she received her bachelor’s degree in fine arts from the local university in 1975. Seeking a less provincial environment for her art, she left her homeland for Holland to participate in Ateliers ’63 at Haarlem in 1976. Though her years in South Africa may not have been the most culturally stimulated, the country’s political realities gave rise to a dilemma that remains central to her art:

    The fact that I realized that because I was white in South Africa I was one of teh oppressors greatly confused me. I personally don’t see myself as a real oppressor, but I am a part of the oppression nevertheless…It can never really be resolved. You have an individual feeling about yourself, but if you then see yourself as a part of something else you can reach an entirely different conclusion about yourself. The one is no more, or less, truthful than the other.[footnote=1]

    For Dumas, discovering the dubiousness of being “fairest in the land” of South Africa entailed a loss of innocence. Her complicated self-image is reflected in a 1984 portrait where she appears looking altogether like the sweet young girl she once was, framed in radiant fall of glowing blonde hair.[footnote=2] The title of the painting, Evil Is Banal, sheds a different light on her identity; in the cracked mirror, Snow White saw that she herself was the wicked queen. Or, to quote another of the artist’s works, Dumas discovered herself to be Snow White in the Wrong Story.

    Dumas currently lives and works in Amsterdam. Her earliest Dutch art is an explorative mixture of drawing and collage, probing problems of artistic representation by adopting different approaches, one “no more, or less truthful, than the other.” In a note scribbled in the wings of one such untitled work, dated 1977, Dumas prescribes for herself: “The problems of interpreting circular forms” with their challenging circumferences traveling “Between the Zen circle + the traffic circel [sic].” A newspaper picture of an infant inching towards a rolling ring-toy crowns the top of a stack of pictorial solutions, which read vertically, like Chinese characters, in standing script. Below, circled and printed in red, is another photo showing an “unknown political prisoner,” bound and blindfolded. The shape of his bellowing mouth is echoed by the first letter ONBEKENDE POLITIEKE GEVANGENEN. Dumas punctuates the list with the final image, in her own hand: a lushly brushed circle of black ink.

    Dumas’s solutions to the problem of circular forms also take up the three predominant modes of address in contemporary art of the eighties. Reviewing the collage, again from the top, we see appropriation’s decontextualized imagery, current political art’s graphic explications, and Neo-Expressionism’s egocentric hand. Another line of text in the drawing, ALLES WAT ROOD IS, IS NEIT BLOED (All that’s red, in not blood) adds a note of ironic uncertainty to the act of interpretation, which is certainly in keeping with the times. But from this point, Dumas hones her fluency in these strategies, so does she subordinate them, sometimes even in the same brushstroke.

    In 1983 Dumas started painting assiduously in oil, beginning with a series of large portraits, followed by paintings of nudes, school children, pregnant women. The subjects were all close at hand, part of Dumas’s environment or condition. The birth of her daughter in 1987 inspired her ongoing work about infants, including The First People of 1990. But no matter how familiar, Dumas never paints from life, she states as if confessing to a crime:

    My people were all shot by a camera, framed before I painted them. They didn’t know that I’d do this to them.[footnote=3]

    Owning up to the act of violation implicit in taking pictures, Dumas is equally candid about preserving the perversities of her source, using an episcope projector to translate her images onto canvas. Her painting compositions often emulate Polaroids with their closely framed subjects pressed forward against unnaturally glowing grounds, while the paint itself follows the photo from areas of high resolution into slippery pools of unfocussed light. But as Dumas intimates, her truth to photography has a dark purpose. The Polaroid’s grease and glare act as a scrim, behind which Dumas strips her subjects, throwing away their unique identities; she has use only for their hides. Via the episcope, the artist’s own child ends up robbed of any claim to her mother’s sympathy and is transformed into a powerfully writhing cipher: one of The First People, full of unknown potential.

    In a text to accompany her exhibition The Private versus the Public, Dumas railed against the current “cynicism towards representation.”[footnote=4] Particularly in a postmodern period, when all kinds of representation are possible, art in which “everything is used and nothing is related,” “where (for example) nudes become signs and not ‘erotic presences,’ strikes her as disaffected and irresponsible. In a group of works whose subjects are nudes, Dumas challenges structuralism’s inability to make meaning, while demonstrating her power to create significant images.

    The pair of paintings Waiting (for Meaning) and Losing (Her Meaning) (1988) each depict a nude woman bent over in a pose that obscures her face and makes her body prone to penetration. The waiting woman is bent backwards, with her legs dangling over the side of what appears to be a coffin (Snow White’s perhaps?), while her sister lies, Ophelia-like, facing downward in oily dark water. Contrary to appearance, these images are not open-ended. They are “erotic presences” offering no reprieve in the form of popular theory to regard them as “empty signs.” The paintings’ titles fully incriminate the viewer as a voyeur, whose lascivious gaze makes the recumbent nude into a signifier of very particular meaning.

    In an inscription on one of her drawings, Dumas can be heard muttering ALWAYS THE FEMALE BODY, ALWAYS. This note of disappointment is amplified and clarified in a statement, “I am against…the nude.”[footnote=5] But her intolerance doesn’t prevent her from taking pleasure in depicting flesh and eroitc rapture. Indeed, she even considered it an especially delectable challenge to depict “without hatred, distrust, disgust or blame” a nude man.[footnote=6] The corresponding painting, The Particularity of Nakedness (1987), shows him stretched, supine, with his head resting on one extended arm, his face turned full to the viewer. The title announces what’s essential to the painting’s success in meeting the artist’s criteria. His body is not idealized brawn (in fact he’s rather skinny), nor is it formalized porn. He is, as naked people often are, vulnerable and sexual, with a gaze turned steadily on the viewer, acknowledging that his is an arousing presence. Dumas responds to these particulars with her explicitly sensual representation of his face, his flesh, his languorous pose. And though his forthright sexuality could inhabit the boudoir next door to Manet’s undressed Olympia, it actually comes from the tomb.

    In a sheet of notes with the heading, “Thinking about PAINTINGS of the human Figure,” Dumas identifies the source of the painting’s composition and the figure’s sexuality in The Particularity of Nakedness as Holbein’s Dead Christ.[footnote=7] These notes read, in part, like someone’s little black book, providing a list of names and what the book’s owner figures she stands to get by them: from Nolde, the glow—from Lucien Freud, the ordinary—from Alex Katz, the flatness of modernism. Other contacts are Diane Arbus, Eric Fischl, whose portrayals of “sexual guilt” are “better to read about than to see,” Philip Guston, Frida Kahlo, Stephen McKenna, Jackson Pollock, and Vermeer. There’s also a bit of the secret diary, confessing to cast-off affairs with de Kooning, whose Women she eventually found “too elegant,” and Clemente; “too sweet.” Notes of admiration are made for Alice Neel’s “beautiful portrait of Andy Warhol”; Baselitz, “My favorite painting of a foot,” and Beuys, “A Big Man” who made “tender + frail drawings.”

    These remarks, which turn Dumas’s private-sounding opinions and liaisons into public knowledge, are not an isolated peep through a pinhole. Dumas repeatedly comments on her art; exhibitions of her work always include her own blunt assessments. Aimed at personal demystification, this information prevents any speculation over her intentions, sources, and meaning. Within the context of postwar figure painting, Dumas assesses her own work as being an attempt to avoid representing “men as monsters,” while admitting to the difficulty of the task. She addresses things directly, without resorting to stylization, in order to arouse “an experience of empathy with my subject matter” in both her viewer and herself.[footnote=8]

    Beyond artist’s statements, writing is indispensable to Dumas’s work. Within the art itself, words are as essential as brushstrokes, particularly to the drawings. A sketch of a bespectacled gentleman bears the observation that WEARING GLASSES MAKES MEN AGGRESSIVE; beneath a drawing of an unbeautiful infant, Dumas declares, THE START OF IT ALL: OTHER PEOPLE’S BABIES, and she teases a naive-looking blonde to SAY SOMETHING ABOUT SOUTH AFRICA.[footnote=9] Such broad declarations render one unsure of the artist’s true position. Is Dumas actually of the opinion that “A weeping woman is disgusting”? Or are these statements meant to read like in a way that is comparable to Jenny Holzer’s texts? As if trying them on for effect, each artist vocalizes a spectrum of viewpoints, whose range encompasses a complicated state of moral ambiguity. When Dumas and Holzer mimic voices of authority, they are also recording the seductive sounds of oppression.

    Dumas’s drawings, which also come primarily from photographs, are more lifelike than her paintings. They seem to represent the moment when the shutter flashes open and shut, rather than including the processes of development and reproduction that are so much a part of the paintings. Coincidentally, several drawings show men with cameras, like Good Shot and Record secret sources. It’s also in Dumas’s quick-handed drawings that one finds the most explicit references to sexual and apartheid politics: there are images of police activities, torture, sexual aggression, and sexual politicking: a drawing of a man mounted atop a naked woman, who seems to be THE EAGER YOUNG ARTIST DISCOVER(ING) PROFESSIONALISM referred to in the inscription. The man’s ogling eyes are the same pair planted in the head of one of Snow White and the Broken Arm’s schoolboys, as if we were seeing the character in the drawing as a juvenile gaining youthful bad habits from a woman who is no fairy princess.

    Though moral ambiguity may not seem to be one of their chief characteristics, fairytales are always cruel stories, with punishment served up in excess for both good and bad behavior. Even though “the good” live happily ever after, it’s only on the condition that “the bad” are banished, burned, beheaded, or otherwise damned: misery becomes a requisite for happiness, which, though lifelife, hardly seems all good. As the Grimms put it in the preface to their Nursery and Household Tales:

    …we are not aiming at the kind of innocence achieved by timidly exercising whatever refers to certain situations and relations that take place every day and that simply cannot be kept hidden. In doing that you fool yourself into thinking that what can be removed from a book can be removed from life.

    Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s collection of folk stories began as an attempt to preserve a vanishing vernacular tradition. In the preface to the first edition of Nursery and Household Tales (published in 1812), they emphasized the anthropological nature of their original work, describing how they traveled throughout Germany, recording as accurately as possible the tales they heard told by each village storyteller. However, as their project continued, their objectives changed. They came to recognize that what sounded like an infinite number was actually only a handful of stories, endlessly embellished in place after place. Adapting these for the second and third editions of their book, the Grimms sought to strip away local variations in order to recount the essential story, making fairytales into literature.

    In a similar way, Marlene Dumas’s art repeatedly recounts what was, for her, the essential experience of learning first-hand what it means to be white under apartheid in South Africa. Except for Dumas, South Africa isn’t the place in which something has occurred; she is that place. At the risk of soiling her snow-white reputation, she disarms her alter-ego, a woman equipped to make pictures, and renders her the victim of a somewhat sinister voyeuristic scene. Dangerous tension between positions of power and vulnerability coexist throughout Dumas’s work. The nude levels a challenging gaze, seducing the viewer with his erotic presence at the same time that he is the subject of pornographic exposure. In another double-take, in a self-portrait image, the artist depicts herself as an apparition of blonde loveliness, in whom she also sees responsibility for enacting oppression.

    The portraits, nudes, and modern-day depictions of fairytale scenes that Dumas paints push her loss of innocence outside of a local situation into a cultural realm. They present a picture of reality complicated by conflicted points of view, aggressive sexuality, seditious words, and inexplicable acts. Central to each of these pictures, however, is expressed in her art a moral dilemma. She instills in her work all the imperative of a physical situation, in order to goad, seduce, wheedle and compel the viewer into a like struggle. And while these pictures do not provide tidy, or even grim resolutions to the questions they communicate, Dumas’s art actively investigates ambiguities of existence central to to cultural and political experience.