TRACE: An Historical Contextualisation of the Theme

Anthony Bond

The idea of a crisis in representation has been a recurrent theme in twentieth-century art.  Given the ever-widening chasm between our perceptions of reality and the illusion of its appearance, many modern artists have sought to redefine the relationship between life and art.  The question remains as fundamental at the end of this century as it was at the beginning: what kind of relationship can art have with the real?  TRACE looks to contemporary conceptual art for a rich and diverse range of responses to this question.
 
Fig. 1.  Ian Burn  No Object Implies the Existence of Any Other  (1967)

The artists represented in this exhibition, like a majority of their contemporaries, take it as given that art can engage with complex issues in real life by exploiting the associations of an almost limitless variety of media.  This tendency is often assumed to have originated with the conceptual art movement in the 1960s (and for that reason is often confused with a particular visual style of the ‘60s and ‘70s).  In this essay I wish to provide a broader context for understanding the history, and continuing role, of conceptual art with particular reference to the function of the trace.  By incorporating the traces of people, events or natural forces, artists are able to maintain an open text, so to speak, so that the work is recreated anew by each viewer, and in each act of viewing.  In this way the trace connects the internal and external worlds of artist, viewer and object, allowing the work to operate in the present, while also functioning as a sign of past or absent referents.

In the twentieth century, the perennial contest between form and content became a structuring element of artistic endeavour.  Abstraction (as ‘pure form’) seemed to deny any representation of the real (the banished ‘content’); yet paradoxically, abstraction paved the way for the emergence of conceptual art.  It did this by breaking the nexus between reality and appearance: a visual logic that had dominated Western art since the Renaissance.  This development is perhaps most succinctly expressed in Ian Burn’s No Object Implies the Existence of Any Other.  The work consists of the title text painted on a mirror.  While reading the words that deny the possibility of visual representation, the viewer confronts his or her own likeness in the mirror.  The obvious contradiction in this work marked a phenomenological impasse in the language of abstraction.   

Burn’s work also foregrounds the contradictions inherent in the reflected image.  Looking into the mirror one has the experience of moving beyond the space of the frame.  As we read the text, however, the surface of the mirror comes into focus as an object in itself.  The mirror was modelled on an ordinary shaving mirror.  This vernacular context for self-reflection provides a contemporary twist to the mirror’s historical association with vanitas: an association that brings us back to the ephemeral nature of appearance in comparison with ideas.  It is Burn’s precise choice of object and text that produces such an elegant and persuasive experience for the onlooker.  With its white text and its simple white box frame the work has all the elements of a sublime formal painting.

Historical ties between the avant-garde and conceptual art movements have meant that textual and conceptual critiques of representation have often been linked.  But there is far more to conceptual art than text-based interventions.  According to Sol Lewit’s founding statement in 1967,  conceptual art prioritises content over form and material means.  This dictum has sometimes been taken too literally as an instruction to dematerialise the work of art, disparaging its aesthetic dimensions.  Conceptual art should more accurately be understood as freeing up the formal and material means of production. 

I would strongly contend that conceptual art did not originate with Sol Lewit’s dictum in the 1960s, but rather had a long gestation in modern art.  Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp are two pivotal figures in this history.  Their aesthetic attitudes were divergent, yet each in his way was a precursor to surrealism.  Both artists looked to non-European and pre-modern cultures for different models of visual representation.  Tribal art, like pre-Renaissance art in Europe, offered an alternative to the Western preoccupation with imitating the appearance of things.  In very different ways, tribal artefacts and medieval icons were traces of the invisible.

Both artists also experimented with re-introducing objects and materials as signifiers.  This was to become a crucial strategy for opening up the boundary between art and life, at a time when the emerging modernist orthodoxy was proclaiming the autonomy of the work of art.  It was not, however, an entirely new strategy.  The religious significance of medieval icons far exceeded their pictorial or iconic content.  Devotional images were treated like relics, imbued with the personality and sacred power of the figures they represented.  Reliquaries, pendants and liturgical objects often combined images of Christ, the Virgin Mary or a saint with their sanctified remains: a piece of the True Cross, a drop of the Virgin’s milk, or a tiny fragment of bone.  As material traces and complex symbolic images, such objects stimulated the intellect as well as the memory and the senses.

The rhetoric of the avant-garde on one hand, and formalist criticism on the other, has distracted historians and theorists from a coherent interpretation of realism in art.  Both limit the interpretation of art to the narrow concerns of either social progress or a transcendent aesthetic.  Together and separately, they blind us to the strategies artists have evolved to make art a powerful vehicle for our apprehension of the world and each other.  Semiotic analysis is another critical tool that has provided a means for excavating the text embedded in the image.  Because of its literary origins, however, it has little to say about the sensory effect of materials that engage bodily memory.

A very down to earth example of layered readings that incorporate this bodily response can be found in Picasso’s Bull’s Head (1942).  The ‘head’ comprises a bicycle saddle and handle bars.  It has the right shape to substitute formally for a bulls face; it is made of cowhide (polished by use); and its shape has been moulded to the contours of the human body, so the idea of being thrown by a bull is also present.  There is a playful association with bike riding, and the thrill of rodeo.  There are air holes arranged vertically down the central ridge of the seat, which in light of Picasso’s tendency to turn the plane of the features through ninety degrees, creates the appearance of an African mask or cubist portrait.  The particular quality of the material, and its potentially fetishistic overtones, could produce further readings.

Some of the most powerful art of the post-war period draws upon the mnemonic function of materials and objects.  Freed from a purely instrumental role, the artist’s materials may be used both symbolically and formally.  The effect is a multiplication of the metaphorical and sensual possibilities of art.  Because every viewing produces a reading based on the memories, associations and sensations of the viewer, there is an indefinite delay in the foreclosure of meaning.  This strategy courts a degree of ambiguity.  Arguably, however, there is sufficient qualitative gain in individual experience to justify the risk.  There are also grounds for anticipating a degree of commonality in our bodily and affective responses, as Susan Best argues later in this volume.

Fig. 8.  Doris Salcedo  Atrabiliarios  (1991)

It is crucial to appreciate the role of bodily memory (and not just intellectual responses) in these processes.  Bodily memory is perhaps most clearly grasped in extreme states of attraction and repulsion.  At the most fundamental level, it functions like instinct: a series of unconscious physical and emotional reactions.  Of the many contemporary artists who have exploited this phenomenon, Doris Salcedo’s work is possibly the most profound.  In Atrabiliarios, for example, she evokes absence and loss by using materials and processes that located memory in the body.  The viewer’s response is, in turn, emotional – even visceral – rather than purely intellectual.  Niches cut into the plaster wall contain shoes donated by the families of people who have disappeared in the political and economic turmoil that has racked her native Colombia.  The niches are sealed with a membrane of cow’s bladder that is literally sutured into the plaster of the wall.  Barely visible through the membrane, the shoes are a particularly haunting evocation of their absent owners.

Salcedo pays obsessive attention to the nuances of material and process in her work.  The suturing of the membrane into the plaster of the wall is done with exquisite care.  Tiny holes are first drilled through the plaster.  The horsehair is then carefully threaded through and taped back while the holes are made good.  When the membrane is stitched onto the wall the holes are once again made good.  The layers of plaster and paint give the work a temporal dimension, as if it has evolved over a long time.  The suturing begins to look like stitches in skin, and the plaster takes on the unsettling appearance of scar tissue.  The effect of this process (which is not known to the viewer) is critical to our empathetic engagement with the work. 

Conventional accounts of representation always present it as a substitution of one thing for another.  A symbol stands for an object; a narrative scene for an event in the real world.  The effect of these substitutions is a closed system of signification that, by virtue of its completeness, excludes both the experience of the real, and the memories or associations of the viewer.  The strategies adopted by artists in TRACE invite the participation of the viewer by transgressing this logic of substitution.  

It is possible to chart the re-introduction of the material trace from Picasso’s Still Life With Chair Caning in 1912 and Duchamp’s introduction of the Readymade in the same year, through the evocative assemblages of Joseph Beuys, to a proliferation of found objects in contemporary art.  While Duchamp’s Readymades were originally conceived as a conceptual strategy to destabilise conventional definitions of art, his use of materials and objects changed dramatically in the major allegorical works, The Large Glass or La Mariée Mise à Nu Par Ses Célibataires, Même (1915-23) and Sans Titre.  Etant Donnés: 1º La chute d’eau  2º Le gaz d’eclairage (1968).  In both cases materials are used for their intrinsic properties, such as transparency and reflectivity.  Glass, of course, has further associations.  It is notoriously fragile and sharp, so a large plate of cracked glass in a public space has connotations of danger.  It is also commonly associated with modern hygiene: a subject of abiding fascination to Duchamp.  His persistent theme of “gas and water on every floor” is an example of this.  The optical uses of glass are also exploited in the Oculist’s Witnesses in The Large Glass.

Fig. 2.  Pablo Picasso  Still Life with Chair Caning  (1912)

In May 1912 Picasso assembled his most important collage, Still Life with Chair Caning.  It is a marvellous and complex experiment that explores the possibilities of a visual language that incorporates the material trace.  He made an extraordinary conceptual leap forward with this work yet simultaneously took a step back in time to a pre-iconic form of representation.  The complex layering of icon and index in this composition turned out to be Picasso’s most conceptual work and in this respect it stands apart from his later experiments.  He never followed up the many possibilities that this collage unleashed, preferring instead to exploit the pictorial adventure that came out of cubism.

The conceptual intentions of this work – in which the visual elements refer to ideas as well as material objects – are evident in many aspects of the composition.  One example of this is the shape of the canvas.  Picasso and Braque often used oval canvases in their analytic cubist works to subvert the tyranny of the rectangular frame, which has traditionally suggested a window onto reality.  Clustered around the centre of the canvas, their cubist compositions challenged the compositional hegemony of the rectangle.  The oval shape in this still life is unusual in being horizontal.  It gives the impression of a circular plane seen in perspective, so that the composition as a whole takes the form of a tabletop.

The subject of the composition is a still life arranged on a tabletop, but the edge of the table doubles as the frame of the painting.  The frame is now an element within the composition, as well as functioning as a containing device to separate the image from the real world.  As a consequence it has at least two, apparently contradictory, functions.  To complicate matters further, the frame is constructed out of a rope coil made by a sailor.  This endless loop binds the work in a literal sense, as if parodying the role of a frame.  The rope also mimics a table in Picasso’s studio that had a carved rope motif at its edge.  In this case it is a real thing standing in for its own representation.  By using a manifestly vertical rope (which we can see and feel) to represent an emphatically horizontal tabletop, Picasso compromises the integrity of the painting/collage as an autonomous, two-dimensional artwork.  This is standard practice in illusionistic painting; with the important difference that here the surface is made real in its own right as a vertical plane. 

Among the painted elements of the composition is a piece of oilcloth: a material that was commonly used to cover tables in Parisian cafés.  Such cloth was often decorated with photographically generated motifs, in this case a design simulating the caning of a chair.  This raises the possibility that the still life may in fact be arranged on a chair, and not on a table as we had first supposed.  Then again, perhaps the chair caning is simply being the tablecloth!  In Paris at the time tablecloths like this were often held in place by a rope coil, so the table in the studio with its rope motif may also have brought to mind the perfectly ordinary sight of a roadside café table.  

Fig. 3.  Marcel Duchamp  Bicycle Wheel  (1912/15)

In the same year that Picasso explored the conceptual possibilities of chair caning, Duchamp placed a bicycle wheel onto a stool.  He later claimed that he decided to do this after taking an apartment with no fireplace.  Duchamp liked to stare into the flames while musing, and the spinning bicycle wheel was to be a surrogate object of reverie.  Three years later, and now living in New York, he wrote to his sister Suzanne asking her to go to his studio in Paris.  His instructions were to sign the assemblage and give it the title Readymade.

This was a simple act with complex implications for the subsequent history of modern art.  The wheel and stool are found objects: objects that were made into art by proxy, at a distance, and according to a set of rules invented by Duchamp.  The title itself is an irrational adjunct that deflects attention away from the purely visual and defers any final answer to the question of the object’s representational status.  In his letter of 15 January 1916 to Suzanne, the artist gave his sister some reassuring advice: “do not struggle too much to understand the meaning: romantic, impressionist, or cubist has nothing to do with it.”

Duchamp’s objects encourage endless conjecture, keeping the process of interpretation and response open.  His ongoing project was to find ways of delaying closure indefinitely.  Works like Bicycle Wheel cannot be reduced to a Marxist critique of the art market, although they produced a good laugh at its expense.  Duchamp’s famous ‘delays’ (of interpretation, of closure) take us, as it were, through the looking glass.  It is no coincidence that so many of his works exploit the reflective and transparent qualities of glass to render the boundary between the image and the viewer’s spatial/temporal reality ambiguous (forty years in advance of Ian Burn’s No Object Implies The Existence of Any Other).  In Etant Donnés he produces the ultimate delay, by co-opting the viewer as a found object.  In order to see the erotic tableau created by the artist, the viewer must bend down and peer through a hole in a door.  Duchamp not only determines what we will see, just so much and no more.  He also makes the viewer complicit in this act of voyeurism.

Fig. 4.  Dust in The Large Glass  (DATE)  Photo by Man Ray

Duchamp employed other strategies to keep the work open to the world.  By allowing chance to direct his artistic choices, he effectively used nature to contaminate culture.  The dust that accumulated during the production of The Large Glass is a good example of this strategy.  The elements derived from The Standard Stoppages and Lingering Veils in The Large Glass also depended on chance.  The veils, which dominate the upper part of the composition within the pink cloud of the bride’s blossoming, were based on actual veils captured photographically while fluttering in the breeze from an open window.  This breeze becomes the energy that brings on the bride’s blossoming.  The Standard Stoppages, which were produced by allowing three one-meter lengths to fall randomly to the ground, form the capillaries for the bachelors’ secretions.

Found materials were used widely in art after Duchamp.  Surrealism, Dada, neo-Dada and nouveaux realisme are some of the more obvious examples.  In music, John Cage’s 4’33” is an acknowledged Duchampian gesture.  Composed in 1952, the piece consists of ‘found sound’ within 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence.  In the same decade, Joseph Beuys began to make objects and assemblages that raised the affective power of the found object to a new level.  His work later evolved into an environmental and political campaign, but in all of this he was committed to investigating the boundaries of art and culture.  Beuys made his connection to the real in a less conceptual way than Duchamp.  His great gift was to bring out the inherent voices of objects and substances and to orchestrate them into highly provocative assemblages.

Beuys’s work was informed by two traumatic events.  The first was his near death in a wartime air crash in which he was presumed dead.  He was found and cared for by nomadic people in the Crimea who wrapped his frozen body in animal fat and felt.  This experience, which was easily mythologised, became the basis of Beuys’s subsequent claim on the role of artist/shaman.  The political context of this personal experience was the greater historical trauma of the Holocaust itself.  Beuys had been an enthusiastic member of the Hitler Youth, revelling in the sense of power and energy it created.  He returned from the war and his physical trials to realise he had been an active and willing participant in the Holocaust.  His subsequent mental collapse is a significant personal fragment of the greater trauma of an entire generation. 

Fig. 5.  Joseph Beuys  Untitled Drawing  (1955)

While Beuys was recovering he spent time on a friend’s farm where he took refuge in the cow barn whenever he was unbearably troubled.  He later recalled how the smell of manure, milk, straw and cow’s breath connected him back to a material – and, he felt, a more feminine – world from which his wartime experiences had separated him.  Beuys equated the feminine principle with a pre-iconic civilisation: a time before language and the knowledge of mortality (Prometheus/Adam) separated mankind from nature.  His many drawings of animals and prehistoric goddesses during the time of his convalescence provide a clear demonstration of this idea.

Fig. 6.  Joseph Beuys  Queen Bee  (1952)

The restorative, organic connotations of the cowshed are revisited in Queen Bee.  In this series of works Beuys used bees and beeswax to make a variety of objects, including prehistoric Venus figures and the cuttlefish pictured here.  The idea of a kind of sculpture or architecture formed out of bodily secretions fascinated him.  If chemical changes in the body were seen as providing the engine (and potentially the medium) for creativity, then nature and culture were one and the same.

In public performances Beuys used his body heat and actions to manipulate materials.  By biting pieces of fat, for example, he left the imprint of his body on the objects themselves.  Some of the photographs documenting these performances – taken by the artist Ute Klophaus – can be seen in this exhibition.  Klophaus used the traditional silver gelatine process and the quality of her printing emphasises the chemical trace of light that makes photographs such a powerful index of a moment in time.  In TRACE she has included 20 photographs of Beuys’s Celtic performances taken in Edinburgh in 1970, along with a series of 20 new photographs commissioned by the Biennial to document the streets of Liverpool at a moment of impending urban renewal.  The aesthetic sensibility Klophaus brings to her current urban photographs is similar to the quality that gave life to the performance works she documented 30 years ago. 

For most of us the enduring images of Beuys from the 1960s and ‘70s are the photographs Klophaus took as she accompanied him around Europe.  Her photographs of the residues of Beuys’s performances are also unequalled in their ability to capture the intensity of his work.  They are extraordinarily atmospheric, with a dense, grainy texture that reveals the metallic chemistry of the photographic process.  This process – by which the energy of light is transformed into silver salt – is itself a metaphor for Beuys’s theory of sculpture as energy transformed into form.  These are not simply documents.  They are material residues: relics of an ephemeral reality.

Fig. 7.  Joseph Beuys  Explaining Pictures to a Dead Hare  (1965)

Photography as trace is a subject in itself.  The photograph has an ambivalent status in relation to representation and the perceived world.  This is partly due to the historical distinction between its documentary and artistic functions.  On the one hand, the photographic image seems to offer an objective record of events; on the other, the photographic print can be seen as an object or process in its own right (in a New Realist or post-minimalist context, for example).  Take, for example, the confusion that surrounds terms like photo-realism.  Works identified in this way take the photographic image as their object, rather than the real world.  They seek to replicate the quality of the photograph, with all its translations of surface and reduction of spatial effect and tactility.  In other words, photo-realism is the opposite of realism.  It is illusionism.  None the less, most people think of these images as ‘realistic’.  In one sense they are realistic – as faithful renditions of the photographic image – but they bear little direct relationship to the ‘original’.

The idea of the photograph as a material object implies a different kind of relationship with ‘the real’: one that is quite distinct from the notion of photography as a representation or pictorial record of the visible world.  This is photography as a physical trace of the past.  When the camera’s shutter opens, light travels from the object to the film where it causes a chemical change to the silver nitrate.  This, in turn, leaves a permanent record of the passage of light, and a shadow (the image) of the object.  Because the resulting print is literally a material trace of the object, it can function like a relic.  A photograph is literally touched by the events of a moment and altered to form the permanent record of its circumstance.  Old prints – especially those in black and white – often carry this association.  The photograph of a loved one that we keep in our wallet is none the less significant for being bent and faded.  The fact that our love is now older, or even lost, makes it an object of deep attachment.  When we take a photo of a lost love from a box or forgotten draw, the shock is not just of visual remembrance: it is doubly disturbing because it seems to be a trace of that person, like finding a strand of their hair. 

While walking in a small town in northern Italy I came across a profoundly moving example of the photograph as reliquary.  In a colonnade near the street corner was a panel extending from floor to ceiling.  It was made up of hundreds of small squares of glass.  Each little square contained an old photographic portrait.  Some had faded in the sun, while others were affected by damp.  Some were cracked, and some of the photographs had become unrecognisable as images.  It was a memorial to the dead of World War II.  The individuals it commemorated would be unknown to the casual visitor, yet the panel itself was a powerful signifier: of loss, the passage of time, and of human frailty.

The photograph is also, inevitably, associated with the news media.  There is something authoritative and iconic about the great news photographs.  The blurred shot taken from a moving car leads us to imagine the photographer’s split-second action.  The lack of focus confirms our belief in the photograph’s authenticity.  This stands in sharp contrast to the photo-realist notion of the meticulously accurate illusion.  In the documentary photograph the emphasis is on process and the feeling of being there.  Many artists have exploited this quality, reproducing it in different media.  Gerhard Richter, for example, simulates the blurring effect in his paintings, while Warhol transferred the photographic image to silkscreen, playing on the mis-registration of the printed photograph in old movie magazines.

Several artists in TRACE have shown an interest in the archival and museological possibilities of film and photography.  Alex Rizkalla collects photographs and other objects that are historically specific, yet have the capacity to exceed their original significance and function.  Rizkalla’s collections occupy the line between archive and Wunderkammer.  He uses his objects to tell historical narratives, while allowing their material qualities to generate a range of associations and emotional responses.  Susan Norrie has edited archival film of the test site at Chernobyl with other fictional film footage to create a chilling representation of the aftermath of nuclear disasters.  The use of the photographic image to create real or imaginary documents has been extensively exploited by Stephen Willats.
 
Fig. 8.  Stephen Willats  Pat Purdy and the Glue Sniffers Camp  (1968-80)

In 1980 Stephen Willats returned to England from Berlin, where he had been working for two years, to revisit the Avondale Housing Estate at Hayes in West London.  Here he met one of the occupants, Pat Purdy, and together they initiated a new strategy for Stephen’s practice.  His work in the past had always involved tracing social systems and documenting people’s attempts to escape the determinism of a planned environment.  For six years prior to this visit he had been photographing the working or living environments of ordinary people, often focusing on objects he found on their desks.  Through these collections of objects, people were able to tell their own stories and create a personal space.  Together with texts – often quoting the artist’s ‘collaborators’ – the photographs were assembled into graphic structures.  Purdy pointed out that instead of photographing objects, they could be applied directly, and that the text could be written unedited onto the design by the collaborator.

The resulting work, Pat Purdy and the Glue Sniffers Camp, is an exemplary case of the trace in contemporary art.  Its physical context was a residential tower block originally built to re-house families displaced by slum clearance at the other end of London.  The site chosen for the tower was an isolated area in the middle of a wasteland typical of urban fringes.  Between the wasteland and the housing project there was a cyclone wire fence.  The work took the form of a photographic triptych, with an image from the estate on one side and the wasteland – which Pat called the “lurky place” – on the other.  In the middle was a smaller panel with a close-up photograph of a hole in the fence.  Objects associated with the lurky place were attached to the middle panel of the triptych.

Pat Purdy described how the kids on the estate would crawl through the fence and create camps on the vacant land.  In these camps they escaped the deterministic environment of the project by inhaling the fumes from heated glue cans.  A can of Evo-stick applied to the image of the hole in the fence could be seen to have reversed its meaning.  In the world of the towers it would be a pragmatic object associated with binding and restoring, while once it passed through the fence into the lurky place it became the focus for a dysfunctional ritual of fragmentation. 

Like Pat Purdy and the Glue Sniffers Camp, many of the images, objects and environments in TRACE can be understood in light of the historical context I have begun to sketch out here, even while they respond to changing technologies and social conditions.  Many of these works convey ideas and engender responses through direct sensory encounters, making for a particularly rich and tactile experience.  A significant number of the artists represented in the exhibition work on public projects alongside architects and planners while still pursuing their studio practice.  They are often at home with new technologies, and use sound and moving image as expressive materials. 

The very different objects that result from these diverse practices may serve a genuine social purpose while still functioning as part of a symbolic economy.  Indeed it is often difficult to differentiate between art objects and their everyday counterparts.  At the end of the twentieth century we have reached a point where artists are working in an expanded field; a point where conceptual art can no longer be considered an avant-garde gesture.