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PAINTINGS AS LIVING THINGS:

On Rita Ackermann

First published, 2021, Turps Magazine ~ Issue 24

“Ackermann’s ambitious body of work, spanning nearly thirty years, cannot wholly be viewed with an animist lens. It’s too rich and multifarious to be contained in the single thesis of the paintings as living things. However, there seems a willingness on the part of the artist to embrace such a sense of the work.”

Let’s pretend that Rita Ackermann’s paintings are alive – that they’re living, breathing things, with minds and feelings of their own. Let’s pretend that they have complex psychologies, that they’re paintings as selves, paintings that live just like us. Animating the inanimate is a common human behaviour. All manner of objects can come alive depending on who’s doing the looking and what’s being looked at; it’s not limited to the imaginations of children but apparent across cultures throughout history, and in both religious and secular societies. The name we give the phenomenon is Animism. The term was originally used by nineteenth-century anthropologists to describe certain indigenous cultural beliefs that all matter has sentience, including natural forms like mountains and rivers, or hand-made and sacred objects. In postmodern and contemporary anthropology, animism is also used to describe our relationships to a wide range of things – sentient or not – such as cats, teddy bears, and cars.

In What Do Pictures Want?, W. J. T. Mitchell explores the notion of images – digital pictures, paintings, and sculptures – as animated beings with desires that exert their own power over the living. He observes that not only do we talk about images in animistic ways, but when we conceive them, they’re not just static ‘imitations of life’, they take on ‘lives of their own’. Outlandish as it might seem, we have a desire to create things out of inert material and will them into being. We have a desire to see the inanimate world of objects in our own living image.

But why might we regard Ackermann’s paintings, in particular, in this way? Shouldn’t we think of them as the inanimate objects that they really are? I propose such a formal analysis would only get us so far, and instead, have a hunch that we can only get to the beating heart of this work by suspending our disbelief a little more than usual...

The artist herself alludes to the potential of her paintings as living things in several commentaries and interviews. In a statement relating to her recent exhibition, Mama ‘19 at Hauser & Wirth, New York, she says “What I hope for my paintings is that they think themselves into existence.” Similarly, in a 2017 interview with the painter Josh Smith, Ackermann suggests “There’s an energy that moves through them that is my very own but that I don’t possess. I want these paintings to live happily ever after.” It seems the artist is willing for the works to be animated beyond their base materiality, propelled into being as it were. But if there’s a will on the part of the artist to breathe life into inert matter, the question then becomes “how might this be done?”

Portraits can have presence. How often do we feel their eyes following us around the room, or recognise the paint itself as uncannily like our own skin? But I don’t think that Ackermann’s paintings stare back at us in quite this way. They occasionally have eyes, but not always, and they’re not of the following type, favouring instead abstracted smudginess over illusionistic clarity. Rather any embodiment found in her paintings lies in the works’ painterly traits: in erasures; in the overpainting or removal of imagery; in the reworking of motifs to the point of obscurity; in the embracing of ambiguity to complicate our perceptual expectations, and in the works’ openness to chance and accident. There’s a visual complexity in all of this, one that layers up, that makes the works ultimately unknowable. And what better mirror of the self – that very thing that eludes total comprehension – than a painting that can’t be pinned down, that dodges even our best attempts at understanding it? My hunch is that the more unknowable the painting, the more like a self it becomes.

To get us there though, Ackermann hasn’t just got to convince us but must estrange the works from herself during the making process, so she too cannot know wholly what they are. The role of chance is important here. One way to make painting ‘think itself into existence’ is to subject it to the contingencies of chance and accident, allowing such contingencies to take over. By removing herself from the authoring process – distancing herself through the implementation of experimental approaches – Ackermann can step back a little and observe the painting unfolding as if under its own autonomous volition. For instance, paint and mediums are often applied with abandon – there are stains and spills, splashes and drips that morph into what’s around them
– creating emergent forms. In Negative Muscle (2010) a somewhat abstracted eye peers into a section of soaked canvas that takes on the quality of a liquid expulsion as if from the image itself. The work is also full of incidental traces of the artist’s movements – fingermarks, drips and scuffs from the rapid application of marks. Her materials are as varied as her approach and include traditional oil on canvas, but also moulding paste, Vaseline, sand, latex, glass, motor oil, and rabbit skin glue, which is applied to some works not as a traditional canvas size, but as a final layer after the oil paint has dried. There’s an inherent experimental attitude to materials and their application that increases the unknowability of the outcome.

It seems important that the works can evolve over time and can take unexpected turns. A recent work, Mama, Skirt on Fire (2020), is an example of a painting wherein the image clearly ignited with its own being at a certain point in its making. In an interview with curator Gianni Jetzer, Ackermann stated that “...the painting just develops in front of me, and then I start seeing things in it... I saw a skirt on fire in the painting.” Clearly, whatever the initial intent of the drawings underneath, this intent was overridden by an incendiary vision.

Perhaps accident and chance reach an apotheosis in Ackermann’s series Fire By Days. What could be more strange than an image that appears as if from nowhere? One that is not an abstract image, nor an image derived from a photo, nor some pre-meditated motif. The group of works on canvas and paper from 2010-13 are defined by a single, haunting figure appearing over and over again in different permutations. According to the artist, “I had an accident – I spilt paint on the floor, and I wiped it up with a fire safety poster from Hungary. But it wasn’t the poster that inspired the series – it was the accident.” One of the resulting pieces, Burnt 3 (2010), is brilliantly poised in its figurative ambiguity. It acts like the well-known duck/rabbit image: a double image in which the viewer’s perception oscillates between two different figurative forms in a kind of hysterical vibration. Burnt 3 presents us with both a torso – a body with its legs spread – but also a face, seen side-on, with a Pinocchio-like nose jutting out. The whole body of work explores such radical indeterminacy, with some works pulling towards the figure, others towards the face.

In Fire By Days I (2010), the glowing red form has the licking contours of flame: red heat with a blue tracing halo. It stands like a figure on the painting’s oil-stained canvas ground. Again, we see the body form shift between two possibilities: either its thighs are spread and an arm works down towards its crotch, or, instead of an arm, we see an ear, and instead of the legs, a chin and a neck. The image has a vivacious multiplicity – shapeshifting – shirking categorization – flickering this way and that. Ackermann succeeds in making an image that isn’t anything. It’s neither a figure, nor a face; it isn’t an abstract painting, nor a representational painting.

It is only itself: an amorphous being that belies categorisation. She’s said of this series of works that “By repeating the elements of the raw creation of a ‘disaster’ and failing to keep it from unintentionally learned gestures, I arrived at something that violently pushed itself between figuration and abstraction, pushing through to make itself completely free. This type of freedom in painting only arrives for mere seconds, or rather for an immeasurable amount of time, but it reveals infinite perspective.”

The works in Fire By Days attain a certain singularity. They are indeed individual and free, and yet are variants of each other, part of a larger whole. Works that are as strange, ambiguous, and complex as these, are perhaps the most acute instances amongst her paintings – ones that enable our own fantastical sense of them as living beings.

Ackermann has employed other ways to maximise the potential for unlikely outcomes – ways which are equally fruitful. For example, her layering of imagery works to create chance instances and combinations. In the recent Mama series, images overlap and infiltrate each other to create new possibilities, very much like what we encounter in Francis Picabia’s ‘transparency’ paintings. In Mama, Painting for Mars (2019), an assault rifle floats (apparently innocuously) over a girl’s torso, fusing with her body as it overlies a patch of blue paint. Further afield, an upside-down tank patrols the top-right corner, trailing curved body lines in its tracks. Motifs unfold on the canvas plane at the speed of our perceptive capabilities, only to disappear again. Bodies fold into the machinery of war, and back out again, in a cross-fade of image fragments emerging as we follow imagined trajectories at changing velocities, forcing difficult connections. Some drawn forms are obliterated by bursts of colour or are incessantly scraped away with paint-caked fingers until they’re gone. Sometimes memories of forms are re-inscribed into fresh paint patches, making furrowed ridges as the china marker that she uses ploughs through. Then there are the ghostly rendered imprints of past imagery. In Mama, Painting for Mars, I can see two seated girls in red, faceless and featureless, with just a mere suggestion of hair, of postures, of limbs and shoes, all softer than a Degas. By layering different painting processes, Ackermann conjures new forms – new thoughts arise out of old ones. She paints an analogue of the mind – she pictures how we think – and in doing so, she makes thinking pictures.

Erasure has been a primary approach for Ackermann, and is employed with conviction in her ‘chalkboard paintings’. These canvases are painted initially in a deep ocean green and then drawn over in white chalk. The images, some drawn from her previous paintings (as is also the case in the more recent Mama works) are then violently erased with swift moves that we witness as unselfconscious smudged arcs: traces of a body at work eliminating content. In Coronation and Massacre of Love II (2017), all that’s left of an older image are a few piercing lines at the very edges of the canvas, and in the place of the image, there’s only a mound of smears. Smears take on an almost phosphorescent glow as they are edged with the chalk and pigment from around them. Some works in the same series are less brutal in their iconoclasm, leaving more pronounced figures and parts of figures as ghostly apparitions. Here, in this painting, everything has almost all gone, evoking a sense of lost memory. But if this erased image is an analogue for something repressed or forgotten, the bulging form that we now see dominating the canvas is surely a new kind of thought-form. Pushing this idea, we could say it’s as if the canvas itself is a mind on whose surface images come and go almost with a will of their own. If Ackermann disengages self-conscious aesthetic decision-making during the process of erasing – like we do when we’re cleaning a window – what’s left will surely be a surprise to us all including her, as if it were a new thought that pops into the imagination.

It might be argued that both the chalkboard works and the more recent Mama series of paintings perform as if they were minds: actually mimicking and presenting an image of the thinking process. These paintings don’t need to look like persons to create an analogue of conscious subjectivity. And whilst these paintings evoke the living, the works from Fire By Days are equally restless. Even though the series came to a conclusion around 2013 with a series of blue renditions, its defining image still lives on in more recent work. We see it incarnated in paintings such as Nude Turning Air Blue II (2017), where it seems to have a will of its own. Here the face has receded, but we can still ascertain the long nose and the compositional structure of the Fire By Days multi-stable motif. As the body now takes over – becoming icy and fleshy at once – that devilish profile still asserts its being.

Ackermann’s ambitious body of work, spanning nearly thirty years, cannot wholly be viewed with an animist lens. It’s too rich and multifarious to be contained in the single thesis of the paintings as living things. However,
there seems a willingness on the part of the artist to embrace such a sense of the work. Her statements and her approach to the practice of painting stand as testimony to this. Why such a view might be meaningful comes down to an emotional investment on the part of the artist, and if they are willing, the viewer too. If paintings are created with characteristics that enable us to see them as living things, then the stakes are higher – there is an attachment that goes beyond our usual relationships to the inanimate world. Ultimately Ackermann’s paintings are alive because we want them to be that way, and as animated forms, they’ll mean more to us.