APRIL 2018
APPROACH
I was first introduced to Pamela’s work through a Google search. I knew that I wanted to do my recreation/betrayal project on a female artist, so I consulted the Wikipedia list of women artists, clicked on a few links, and found myself looking face-to-face (or, well, face-to-screen) with Rosenkranz’s Express Nothing (Some Touch Remainder). It was a highly evocative piece - the folds and creases of the emergency blanket, the finger-dipped streaks interrupted by opaque blobs of paint, layered. The colors themselves - the metallic silver of the foil blanket, and the peach of the acrylic - made for a fierce duo. I was instantly drawn to it, again and again, even after I tried to sway myself away from contemporary conceptualists. But it had pulled something in me that I needed to dive deeper into.
In a larger sense, Rosenkranz work occupies a sector of the contemporary conceptual field that focuses more on globalisation and consumerism, especially noted in her exhibition No Core, where several plastic water bottles are filled with a peach colored resin in order to mimic liquid skin. Her work has been held under the academic umbrella of “Speculative Realism,” a branch of art that deals with, essentially, understanding the relationship between people and the material world without relying on age-old humanistic subjectivity. But the absence of the body in Rosenkranz’s work elicits a paradox at the core of her practice, one in which she attempts to escape the centrality of the human while also recognizing it as the source of corporeal and intellectual perception’ and that is what drew me to her emergency foil blanket paintings series, Express Nothing.
Inspired by Yves Klein’s Anthropometry series, in which women are coated in the infamous Klein blue colored paint and press themselves against the canvas to make lasting imprints of their figures, Rosenkranz’s body paintings deal with the physical in a slightly more nuanced fashion. Her two-dimensional pieces show embodiment in a way that renders the physical body obsolete and defunct, simply a carrier for what was, with her pieces leaving behind the “true” artistic traces. Emergency blankets, the silver foil ones that Rosenkranz uses, have a very specific connotation in my head that I brought with me into this process - in my head, I see emergency blankets being used in the aftermath of car crashes or panic attacks, something to keep the body warm while you wait outside next to the ambulance in the dark of the night. I wanted to bring that understanding of pain and translate it in the same ephemeral way that Rosenkranz does, by highlighting the effects of what happens when the body interacts with pain.
On April 5th, I ordered a 16oz bottle of Sargent Art acrylic paint in the color “Peach” (“When I work with skin color in a monochrome form, it is to present an element from daily experience—both from advertising and from our interactions with real people—as an abstraction,” - Pamela Rosenkranz, 2015), and a pack of ten (10) silver Primacare emergency foil mylar thermal blankets that measured 52”x84”. I then brought the box of paint and blankets to the student-accessible art center on Bryn Mawr’s campus, Arncliffe Studio, where I proceeded to make paintings over the course of several days, securing the corners with heavy books found in the shelves of the studio.
RECREATION
April 11th, 2018
I started by pouring a substantial amount of the acrylic onto a piece of cardboard, then dipped the fingertips of my right hand (excluding the thumb) into the paint. I proceeded to drag my fingers in curved lines down the blanket. By starting at the bottom and working my way up, I was able to control the dripping process and make the “scattered” drips look less controlled than they were to work with. Pulling directly from Rosenkranz’s Express Nothing (Some Touch Remainder), which was the piece I was originally drawn to, I created a work that had more negative space than Rosenkranz original. While her piece seems to consist of a pre-spaced border of paint smears that she then filled in with other marks and smears, I chose an approach that was more linear, by putting marks down in an almost typewriter-like gesture. Upon reflection, my lines and smears have a much more orderly approach, whereas hers are true to the feeling that an emergency blanket evokes subconsciously.
April 14th, 2018
When I started working with this piece, I did so with the express purpose of making something more interconnected and conversational with itself; something that got more to the conceptual core of the phrase “express nothing.” I wanted to find that emergency blanket feeling. This time, instead of coating my fingertips, I dipped the entirety of my palms into the paint that had been poured onto my cardboard palette. Starting in the center of the piece, I slashed bold streaks of paint across the blanket. This was challenging to work with, as the blanket would want to stick to any unpainted part of the hand or skin that was touching it and would begin to pull, which resulted in me needing to adjust the books on each corner a few times throughout the process as to keep my material as smooth and as flat as possible. Working in a tornado-like pattern, I continued to make streaks across the blanket until the majority was filled with paint. At times towards the end, I would also continue to smear paint that had already been placed on the blanket in order to create a more hurried and desperate feel.
April 16th, 2018
This piece was my first foray into the more “speculative” part of Speculative Realism. I started by physically envisioning the feeling I wanted to embody through the finalized painting, then began. Using improvisational techniques curated in my everyday project on gestural work coming from the body at the present moment, I painted a series of short, tight strokes in the upper right hand corner, all vertical and relatively straight and even. Wanting a more push-pull relationship in this piece, influenced by my interpretation of Rosenkranz’s juxtaposition between the material and immaterial body, I used similar techniques to the first two paintings done and continued in arching orbits around the tighter, sharper strokes previously made, reminiscent of a halo of light around a sun or planet.
April 17th, 2018
This was the first day I decided to switch up my application method. Before, I had been pouring the paint onto a piece of cardboard and dipping my hands or fingers in as was necessary. With this painting, I wanted to see how the necessity of having it all be applied directly to the center, in order to increase the equality of coverage, would interact with my interpretation of the piece. Something I ended up really loving, physically, was the feeling of having to push the paint around in order to make it not pool. The pools in the paint cause it to dry much slower and become much more fragile and at-risk for damage, and since the foil blankets themselves are an inherently thin material I didn’t want to to risk a tear or the paint soaking through. This piece held a lot of heat for me in the way the paint showed handmarks and slashes and texture when it was dry, even though the process should have rendered the entire painting similarly-textured.
April 26th, 2018
Again, much in the same vein of the last piece, I wanted to experiment more with using different body parts and methods as a way of slowly branching out from Rosenkranz’s original thesis. As I moved through the recreation process, I was interested in the possibility of the betrayal being a movement/dance piece on top of a floor of emergency foil blankets with paint on my feet, but I wanted to go in a different direction in the end. However, I still wanted to realize the feeling of painting with your feet. It was incredibly slippery, and I don’t think this would have been the best/fully-realized betrayal, so I’m glad I did change it. Something I found interesting was the complete lack of control I felt here - in the other paintings, I was able to carefully position where I wanted marks to go by moving my hands there, but with my feet, it was paint wherever I stepped or moved or shifted. Painting with my feet really let me feel the vulnerability that I associate with emergency foil blankets, that need for safety.
BETRAYAL
While exploring Rosenkranz’s premises and actions through my process of recreations, something that kept coming back to me was the title of the series, Express Nothing. While Rosenkranz’s work deals with disembodiment and human form without physicality, I was more interested - and always have been - in the way the body moves and makes shapes with itself. I wanted to do something that would stay true to the ideas that I had outlined before, but took it in a different direction by applying the blankets to the paint as opposed to the other way around as I had previously been doing. By pouring the acrylic paint over my shoulders, arms, back, and chest, I was able to wrap myself up in the safety and security of the emergency foil blanket while also leaving the marks associated naturally with these ideas of embodied trauma. I was hungry for signs of involvement, signs of life; the other paintings had all been done strapped to the floor, pulled taut, and they had retained some signs of touch through the application of the paint. By wrapping myself in the blanket, I was able to experience the feel and sight of the wrinkled, crinkled blanket from where I had grasped the edges in my hands, pulling it closer around my body to shield myself from the wind.
Something gorgeous I noticed only through watching the documentation after the fact was the way the sunlight naturally reflects off the emergency foil blanket, making bright spots dance across it and the body. The way that I had been picturing the necessary use of an emergency foil blanket - the dead of night, red and blue lights reflecting as a siren goes off in the background, hubbub - directly opposes the video of me, standing and doing nothing but looking round and breathing, enjoying the sunlight and the feel of the blanket and paint on my bare body. It’s a celebration, an almost revolutionary 180-degree spin on how I had originally pictured it. It’s a good way to end.
FINAL THOUGHTS
It’s interesting to work with the emergency foil blanket as the canvas, and I’m sure Rosenkranz would agree. The physicalization of applying paint with your own body was so human, so yearning for connection, and it comes short with this cold, aluminum material. I think balancing that and the fact that the blankets are inherently for human touch, made to be consumed in a way that comes skin-to-skin(/blanket) with you, was something that interested me the most in working on these pieces. It’s a fine line that Rosenkranz balances herself on that crosses both humanization and capitalism and consumerism in a way that working with these “mundane” products is revolutionized. Along with that, her methods of painting are so viscerally beautiful to me. It’s nice and grounding to be able to work with your hands. And I do truly believe that Rosenkranz’s application (figured by studying the patterns and streaks on existing paintings) are incredibly at opposition to Pollock’s methods, something that John and I first were discussing in our initial meetings. While their work (or, at least, this series of Rosenkranz’s) seems similarly splattered at first glance, I believe the precision needed for the control of these marks, as I’ve come to call them, is inherently anti-ejaculatory; whereas Pollock's’ work is incredibly at odds with itself, the marks on the blankets are tied together in a way that gives a concluding narrative should enough study be done.
ARTIST BIO
(Courtesy of Miguel Abreu Gallery’s Pamela Rosenkranz: Selected Texts and Press)
Pamela Rosenkranz was born in Uri, Switzerland in 1979. She received her MFA from the Academy of Fine Arts, Bern, in 2004, and completed an independent residency at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam in 2012. Her project Our Product was selected to represent
Switzerland at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015, and was the first recipient of the Paul Boesch prize.
Previously, her work was featured in the 55th Venice Biennale, The Encyclopedic Palace, curated by Massimiliano Gioni. Rosenkranz’s first solo exhibition in the United States, Because They Try to Bore Holes, took place at Miguel Abreu Gallery in 2012. Other solo exhibitions include Anemine (Miguel Abreu Gallery, 2016), My Sexuality (Karma International, 2014), Feeding, Fleeing, Fighting, Reproduction (Kunsthalle Basel, 2012), Untouched by Man (Kunstverein Braunschweig, 2010), No Core (Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva, 2012), Our Sun (Swiss Institute, Venice, 2009), and This Is Not My Color / The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, a two-person show with Nikolas Gambaroff (Swiss Institute, New York, 2011). Recent group exhibitions of note include the 2014 Taipei Biennial, Beware Wet Paint (ICA London), Speculations on Anonymous Materials (Fridericianum, Kassel), Descartes’ Daughter (Swiss Institute, New York), EXPO1: New York (MoMA PS1, New York), Chat Jet: Painting <Beyond> the Medium (Künstlerhaus Graz), the 2012 Liverpool Biennial, In the Holocene (The MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA), A Disagreeable Object (Sculpture Center, New York), and When Attitudes Become Form (CCA Wattis, San Francisco). Her work is held in the collections of Kunsthaus Glarus, Kunsthaus Zurich, the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. A monograph on her work, No Core, was published by JRP|Ringier in 2012.
REFERENCED
No Core, Pamela Rosenkranz/Katya Garcia-Anton, JRP Ringier 2013.
“In The Studio: Pamela Rosenkranz,” Aoife Rosenmeyer, Art in America; https://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/magazines/in-the-studio-pamela-rosenkranz/#slideshow_17294.6.
Pamela Rosenkranz: Selected Texts and Press, various authors, Miguel Abreu Gallery; https://miguelabreugallery.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/PRosenkranz_SelectedPress_opt.pdf.