Markus Brüderlin
FLATLINERS
Crossing the Border Between Surface and Space
“The crust consists of what used to be living cells. While they still reacted the body of art made itself a protective shield out of these cells. (...) Our task as artists is to work so that once this crust has disintegrated a living, supple skin will develop below it which is capable of giving humanity a new image (idea).” 1
Luciano Fabro
Georgia Creimer's wall and space objects are flat, like squeezed tubes: limp like flattened bags and sometimes propped up with a pole. Sometimes a rubber hose extends into the room from the pointed end of a flat sack, is rolled in front of the onlooker's feet, inviting him or her to blow up this non-corporeal body (a fitting metaphor for the reverse process of "reception“ where not the onlooker is the receptacle, but rather he or she has to breathe life into the art objects). At the same time some of these "flatliners" feign corporeal volume, swelling to take on an imaginary corporeality through the illusionist painting of the surface. Others actually curve away from the wall as shell-like objects and splayed strips of cardboard, reaching out into the room. Inspite of their limpness, these objects are imbued with a force so that they really seem to be animate beings by virtue of their strange, semi-amorphous shape and their organic qualites. These beings are lurking on the white wall and on the smooth floor of the gallery, stirring silently and sometimes embracing each other. Some of these amorphous creatures evoke an archetypal reflection on one's own corporeality as amoebae, as unicellular denizens of a flat world. These creatures are associated with flagellates which, prior to the evolutionary split into animal and plant world, developed a ruseful skill enabling them to survive under unfavorable environmental conditions in a state of rest as capsule-shaped cysts before awakening and lashing their way through the primeval soup.
The Discrete Charme of Monstrosity
Before describing the poetic makeup of this world of animate creatures which seem to inhabit the studio and the gallery space, we should examine the objective and material factors on which the artist, born 1964 in Säo Paulo, has developed her approach. Georgia Creimer works with strangely shaped canvases whose surfaces are painted, in part with allusions to bodies. Sometimes, the skin of the canvas is made thicker through the application of numerous layers of paint and tanned by means of chemically active substances such as acids so that a tactile crust af paint results. The hues of this patina include dull earth and rust colors. The first 2-dimensional works which the artist presented in 1985 in Säo Paulo were thickly coated illusionist paintings, the cartilaginous outgrowths and volute-formed shapes which immediately recall the Rococo ear conch omament.(pp.4,35) The way they were placed on the flat wall surface and their subversive intrusion into the modernist architecture was clearly modelled after the most important function of ornaments in the past, i.e., to bring to life a functional world of objects designed and built by man.
This cross-reference to the manneristic ornament of the 17th and 18th century underlines another basic gestalt element in Georgia Creimer's art: the tendency of a small world of grotesque creatures to form a microcosm. Translated into our dimensions, it becomes a monstrosity, transforming the gallery space into a panorama of seemingly banal, but animate creatures. These seemingly monumental forms give the works their unmistakably humorous character with their "cucumber-like" appearance. Associating them with grotesque ornaments reveals yet another analogy: the grotesque and the monstrosity of the 17th century found its progeny in modern Surrealism as Gustav Hocke states in his theory of mannerism. Indeed, these creatures, inhabitants of a mysterious interzone, have a dream-like quality. Instead of reaching into the surreal zones of the unconscious, they draw their presence from a sort of counter-world.
Border Crossing Between Wall, Space and Floor
Given the neutrality of the modern white wall these flat figures lack all footing in our physical world. Here theyhave to take recourse to diverse found objects such as poles, pipes, wires, hoses, tin sheets, round poles or connecting rods. These objects are able to communicate between the two world vessels given both their material reality and functional abstractness. An illusionistically painted piece of pipe winds itself around a clamp fixture mounted on the wall. From this clamp fixture, a real pipe, which has been painted white, extends into the room at a right angle. It channels the flow of energy and diverts it into the space, (p.7) Given its s-shaped curvature, it can also be interpreted as a sort of "ear trumpet" which could be used to listen into the wall. Or could it be that the wall has taken on the trunk of an elephant?
In another work, a thin, man-sized pipe leans against the wall. On its lower end, the floor is covered by a small piece of canvas resembling a puddle of water, (p.9) The intensely worked, rust-colored, tanned surface corresponds to a circular sheet of tin also leaning against the wall; its surface is covered with rust and patina after it has been treated with acids. Here Georgia Creimer has created one of the most ingenious aggregrates she uses in an attempt to conquer the physical wall-space of these two-dimensional, colorful shapes. This ensemble seems sort of like a parody on Blinky Palermo's piece "Blaue Scheibe und Stab" of 1968. The German artist who died prematurely had placed a wooden pole and a wooden disk completely covered with tape against the wall. On this, Dierk Stemmier writes the following: "The picture (i.e., the disk) stares at the onlooker and into the room, the pole, by contrast points more to the left - to the right - into the wall space, which it requires in its quality as support and field.“2 In her more poetic version Georgia Creimer wittily notes that the floor was forgotten in this dialogue of invisible forces.
Poetic Animism and Somatic Intelligence
The association of illusionist-pictorial elements with the material reality of objects has a few things in common with the primordial methods of defining the world, which structuralist linguistics located in early, premythological tribal cultures. Claude Levi-Strauss has described how in socalled "totemism" such societies structured the relation of their culture with nature and individuals by means of joining pictorial-symbolic elements and natural objects. Totemism lives on in our civilization in the fetishist approach to objects in the sacral and commodity world. I am not referring to this approach to attribute a hidden atavism and fetishism to Georgia Cramer's works. I would prefer to allude with all due caution to what could be regional qualities that give the work of the Brazilian artist its fascinating foreign allure, making it a singular appearance within the Vienna art scene.
Given the conspicuously animated nature of the flat forms, their appearance and their tendency to evoke associations with living creatures in our survival-conditioned perception, the invocative nature of totemism moves into the background. However, this animism is strangely broken in Georgia Creimer's work: First, the flat creatures are imbued with the breath of life, in keeping with the classical Pygmalion myth. Second the flatly squeezed hollow forms appear to be pure body shells, skins from which the soul has just escaped. In 1972, the Italian artist Luciano Fabro had a canvas draped over his body that had been carved out of marble. One could vaguely recognize the contours of his body in the crumpled material, yet the head was missing. "Lo Spirato" (the exhumed)was the title he gave to this work. In today's art world, Fabro is one of the staunchest advocates of a metaphysical notion of art. A work is not an artwork until it is given metaphysical meaning. Georgia Creimer's animism proves to be less spiritual and metaphysical than psychological and sometimes even biological.
The anima vegetativa can be located first in the recollection of primordial microorganisms and forms of life between the animal and plant world, flagellates and cup-shaped corals, parameciae and ascomcete, similar to the forms that appeared in Wassily Kandinsky's painting in the late thirties and forties. In his late work the Russian painter was interested in a parable between the evolution of a painting and the genesis of the cosmos (the creation of the artwork is the creation of the world). Georgia Creimer's works, however, must be understood in terms of her use of basic forms, i.e., shell, pipe and receptacle, to process bodily states of mind and emotion. These forms can actually be seen as corporeal metaphors, as abstracted, externalized (sense) organs and body members which are scattered all over the room while at the same time they could form the totality of an organism. There were three “leg-like“ wall objects with trousers; on the lower end flat lead strips reach out to the floor, (p. 13) “As heavy as lead” is a proverb that is said when someone complains about tired feet. Two of its “trouser legs“ stand at attention, while the third one dances out of line. A stiff piece of lead and a similarly formed piece of canvas, hanging limply into the room, are like two embracing slabs of meat, (p.23) In 1990 the artist created a series of two-piece cardboard objects which extended into the room as “body armor", creating an erotic tension with their subtle mutual attraction, (p. 16) The same scale-like elements are arranged in serial form, creating a “backbone“. Among the earlier works one finds funnel-shaped wall objects recalling acoustic sound and sense organs.
Georgia Creimer is obviously presenting the paraphernalia ol a "somatic cosmos". The sensorium is intended to make universal sensitivity plausible as a body feeling, as something corporeal in the world. At the same time these objects evade the material world by virtue of their flatness and lead one to believe that they define the boundaries to an immaterial, invisible room that is inhabited by man who is surrounded by its infathomable presence. In the past few decades, feminist aesthetics has discovered its own form of thinking and feeling in the body, The human body is not just a "stuffed sausage" but a cognitive instrument in its own right which gives us access to the non-visible. The topicality of the body in contemporary art has, in large measure, to do with AIDS, even if the popes of hypermodern media technology see the body vanishing in the electronic cloud of a world mediated by technology. Recently, Hans-Joachim Müller tried to eliminate this misunderstanding: "In opposition to the real abstractions on the computerized margins of the art world seeking to make time and space as well as reality disappear, artists are working from a body apriori, accentuating their sensual here and now as opposed to the madness of the digital everywhere and anytime. Artistic imagination always crystallizes around a body-ego which seems to rediscover that the world of technical manifestations is not the whole world."3
What is the Canvas Without a Frame?
To avoid succumbing to a mimetic representation of image relation in dealing with body metaphors, it is also important to understand Georgia Creimer's somatic understanding of the object in terms of the way she deals with the medium of painting on which her art is based. The most conspicuous characteristic of her painting is that it has liberated itself from the easel, l.e., from the wedged frame and the square form. As a consequence, painting merges with its support to create a two-dimensional object, to a piece of "skin". The artist has reinforced this transformation by treating the canvas as skins extending beyond the angle bars in some of her works, pp.21,22)
However, one should take care not to interpret these membranes or veils as the artist's skin, succumbing to a common misunderstanding. The metaphor of painting as a skin that has been pulled away and mounted, as the "Nessus's shirt stripped bare"4 that no longer burns on one's own soul, goes back to the popular idea of the artist being exemplary of someone who suffers for society. The myth of Marsyas where the offended God Apollo flayed the impudent satyr alive when the latter outdid him in playing the flute, is related with horrific
force by Titian and Josö de Ribera. This myth stands for the artist’s role game between divine and secular forces. For contemporary art, the metaphor of the skin is a purely objective attribute of painting. In Georgia Creimer's art, the reflexive preoccupation with the basic material elements of the medium of painting is not the main focus. Nevertheless, her works inevitably refer to the conquests of modem abstract painting in this realm. In 1890, at the beginning of this tradition the symbolist painter Maurice Denis made the following statement: ‘that a painting, before it is a battle horse, a nude woman or some anecdote, is by essence a flat surface, covered with paint in a certain order.” 5 The discovery of the surface has had far-reaching consequences also for sculpture and its conquest of space.
The Discovery and the Paradox of the Surface
In painting, this discovery led to a program of ’ontological reduction’ which resulted in a literal understanding of all elements of the easel painting. This development led from the smoothening of illusionist 3-dimensionality to the surface of the painting, the identification of the pictorial means of paint and form with the reality of the picture surface in concrete art to the identity of surface and color in the fifties. ’Everything is color and surface, and all of this has to merge", Kenneth Noland stated. With Frank Stella's adaptation of the inner structure to the contour of the painting, all painterly and illusionistic 3-dimensional elements were washed to the smooth surface.
What was eliminated in this linear process of literalization was, however, what accounted for the essence of painting. Identity had become a bewitching tautology of the visible, transforming painting into a smooth, transparent object. Yet the question as to what secret forces came to bear time and again between the material support and the surface of the painting, between the tangible world of objects and the visible field of a picture's surface, was by no means answered. In periodic intervals, the monochrome zero surface reappeared, with all its folds and allusions to 3-dimensionality, without painting reaching its ultimate end, as Alexander Rodshenko had first declared in the thirties. 6
One main reason why this continent of total autonomy and identity never can be reached is the basic contradiction between being in the world and our awareness of it. Science has come closest to it on the level of perception theory: It is the aporia of the perception of the world as a complex convolute of surfaces constantly being ‘peeled off (or abstracted) from the world of objects as images by our eyes and the knowledge of corporeality lurking invisibly behind these pictorial skins. It is an existential rupture affecting us closely since we both perceive the world peeling and inhabit it. In the realm of psychology, this phenomenon has been referred to as the subject-object split. On the sensual level, this split alludes to the difference between visibility and tangibility, between visual sense and body feeling. Surprisingly enough, not sculpture but painting turns out to be the aesthetic equivalent to this self-evident yet ultimately unfathomable state, with painting's unresolved alignment of pictorial imagination and objective facticity. The human mind has introduced the notion of 'surface" to mediate between the two ontologically different spheres (of 2- and 3-dimensionality), surface being neither nor but at the same time both. The most prominent and familiar surface is the skin, a complex organ serving simultaneously as a receptacle for body volume, as a boundary and as a sensitive layer.
The Body and the Vastness of the World's Inner Space
In Georgia Creimer's non-corporeal bodies that inhabit the mysterious realm between 2- and 3- dimensionality, we are best able to trace this paradox of ontology and perception phenomenology in the topicalization of painting as skin and surface. In this connection I would like to refer to a work the artist created in 1990, in which the three functions of the surface are revealed in exemplary fashion: in this piece three pillow-shaped cardboard objects resembling ornamental fields painted white are hung next to each other on the wall so that they extend into the room, (p.26) If interpreted as marginalized empty fields, they function as projection shields for possible inscriptions. On the left and right rims, the curved surface snuggles to the wall, merging with its surface and becoming tangible, inversely, as a partial swelling of an organically animated wall. Seen as ‘pillows' they prove to be corporeal: it is as if the volume of the viewer's space leans on them. A third interpretation would be to see these deformed squares as protective shields whose surfaces conceal a hollow space.
Luciano Fabro: "Unter der Kruste der zeitgenössischen Kunst," lecture on 1.16.1992, Accademia di Brera (eit.cat. "Transform". Basle 1992. p.178.)
2 Dierk Stemmier: "Blinky Palermo, Zu dieser Ausstellung", in: cat. "Palermo", Städtisches kunstmuseum Bonn, 1981, p.t06.
3 Hans-Joachim Müller: 'Vom Verschwinden der Wirklichkeil - Über einige Fiktionen Im Umgang mit den computergestützten Künsten', In: BaZ, 10.14.1993, feature page.
4 Nessus shirt. In Greek mythology, Hercules received a lovely shirt from his wife Delanelra. She had received It from the revengeful centaur Nessus who promised her that it had a love spell. However, when the first ray of sun hit It, the shirt went up in flames, from which Hercules was freed and taken to Olympus where he became an Immortal demigod.
5 Maurice Denis: ‘Definition du N6o-Traditionalisme*. in: ‘Art et critique*, August 23 and 30. 1890.
6 'I have brought painting to its logical end and have exhibited three paintings: a red one. a blue one and a yellow one and with this statement: Everything is over. ...Each surface is a surface and there should be no more representations.* A.Rodchenko ’Arbeit mit Majakowski* (1939), in: 'Von der Malerei zum Design*, (cat.) Galene Gmurzynska, Cologne 1981, p.191.