Wish for
Centricity—An Act of Art-Making of Pamela Rosenkranz and the Dismantling of
Identity (March 11, 2007)
Shinya
Watanabe
* This text was originally written for the exhibition catalogue "Portrait Session" at Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art.
1. About the Participating Works
2. History of the Portrait and the Works by
Pamela Rosenkranz
3. Rosenkranz’s Understanding of
"Kafka"
4. Understanding the Aspirin;
"Thinking about an Effect of Thinking Itself"
5. Wish for Centricity—An Act of Art-Making
and the Dismantling of Identity
1. About the Participating Works
In this exhibition,
under the rubric of “Portrait,” lots of interesting artists with different
backgrounds have submitted remarkable works executed in different media. I put
up some of these works, and want to examine them.
At first, the
portrait by Hideaki Kawashima—who uses big eyes with completely white hair and
skin as his expression—got my attention. Kawashima experienced the ascetic
practices of the Tendai sect of Buddhism at the
The work "Untitled
(Lost Mt. MIWA)" by Ryuta Otake also has a strong presence. Its mysterious
white blank space spreads through the big crack in the earth and sends out a
mysterious charm, tempting the viewer. The white upheaval appears in the crack
in the earth, whose existence was accepted by the exhibiting of the other
realistic portrait work, which seems to me a portrait of "woman."
Like the smile on Mona Lisa’s face, the upheaval located in the middle of a
crack in the earth is an extremely complex metaphor.
Furthermore, the
triptych of works “Cutting a Pots’ Neck” by Kazuna Taguchi deserves special
mention. Needless to say, there is a neck on the top of the pot, through which
flowers are inserted. However in the second scene of this portrait, the smiling
face of Miwa Suzuki, the model of this portrait exhibition, disappears from the
neck unnaturally.
First of all, the pot
is a symbol of acceptance. It retains water and so makes flowers live; this is
the essence of its very function. Taguchi intensifies the loss of the person’s
neck by locating this portrait on a pot, the symbol of acceptance. In addition,
the pot, which is filled with flowers, is located behind a portrait of Miwa
Suzuki, suggesting that the pot that does not contain flowers does not function
as a pot. It reminds me of a folk song by Sachiko Kanenobu: "The only
thing you did to me is pour water onto the flower, which you broke off."
Of course, in this song, the flower is a woman, and the subject who pours the
water and breaks the flower off is a man.
Furthermore, in this
work, Kazuna Taguchi goes through a triple process; he has produced the
painting, which resembles an existing pot, and he has photographed this
painting as well. In other words, this is neither painting nor pot, but rather
the photograph which contains an image of the painting depicting the pot.
Because a shadow of a photographer (perhaps Taguchi herself) has been cast in
this work, we can recognize that this is a photograph. In other words, this
portrait is formed on the borderline of three different media—photography,
ceramics, and painting.
2.
History
of the Portrait and the Works of Pamela Rosenkranz
There is one
particularly interesting and difficult work: "Portrait of Something I
don't know about You" by Pamela Rosenkranz.
The stick, on a
general human eye-level height and painted in a color of human skin, is
standing on the egg-shaped mirror, installed on a floor, and is leaning against
a wall. When you look into the mirror to perceive the work, you will see your
own face and the stick, which together compose a mysterious triangle between
the floor and the wall. What does this work mean?
To understand this
difficult work, I want to analyze the history of portraiture in Europe, as well
as examine Rosenkranz’s work "Aspirin" in the Sato Collection in
First of all, the
emergence of the portrait is related to the recognition of self. “Jiga (means
self in Japanese),” in German “das Ich”, involves a recognition process. When
we ask a German-speaking artist for "portrait"-themed art work, it
may be said that the request inevitably entails creating an art work about
self-consciousness. In addition, regarding the emergence of self, recognition
itself seems to have been different in
Image 1:
“Self Portrait as Zeuxis” c. 1662 82.5 x 65 cm. Wallraf-Richartz-Museum,
Collogne
When we talk about
Rembrandt, we cannot avoid talking about two of his contemporaries (roughly
speaking) in
Spinoza took time to
study Descartes’s writings and learned the skill of geometric demonstration.
Descartes defined substance as "the thing which did not need some others
for the existence"; but Spinoza departed from Descartes’s idea of
substance. In addition, Rembrandt created many portraits of the Jews who were
his new neighbors, and these new strangers became a new group of “others,”
necessary to the building of a new identity for the Dutch, who fought to become
independent from
Image 2:
“Menasseh Ben
Rembrandt painted a
portrait of Rabbi Menasseh Ben Israel, who helped found a way of giving the
Jewish people the right of residence in
At the end of
nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, an analysis of
Rembrandt was done by Georg Simmel, who sought to find an ideal life of Jewish
"foreignness" in
I was shocked by the
difficulty in understanding Rembrandt’s “portrait,” which I saw on my trip to
Europe; but by studying the history, I could finally explain to a certain point
that the emergence of this motif shows a difference in the process of
self-recognition between
3. Rosenkranz’s Understanding of "Kafka"
In the work
"Head over Heels and Away", which Pamela Rosenkranz produced in collaboration with Pavel
Büchler as a commission for
Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland, they extracted the entire original German text of Kafka quoted in the book Kafka:
Toward a Minor Literature by Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari. The text was presented on the windows of a city centre café, legible
to the guests inside but reversed as in a mirror for the passers by. It was
also printed as a leaflet, which looks as if the pages just fell out of the
original book.
Image 3: Pavel Büchler & Pamela Rosenkranz
"Head over Heels and Away. The Complete Writings of Franz Kafka from
Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari”
In addition, the word
“minor” has a very restrictive meaning, and its special meaning can be
recognized especially with regard to the Oedipus complex. I will talk about
this later.
4. Understanding the Aspirin:
"Thinking about an Effect of Thinking Itself"
Next, let’s look at
Rosenkranz’s work “Aspirin”, which is in the Sato collection in
Image 4: Pamela Rosenkranz “Aspirin” close up and
installation view
This work
is an image of the world-famous headache reliever, aspirin, a white tablet. The
image was created by photogram by putting this pill in the center of photo
paper. Aspirin has a symmetric conical shape so as to be easily ingestible, and
by using the technique of photogram, the light that slid into the bottom of
white tablet’s conical shape creates a ring of light as shadow, giving us a
sense of a three-dimensional tablet.
Rosenkranz says, “Generally, Aspirin is a headache
reliever. To think about its impact is interesting, because it means to think
about your head first, and then, the impact of thinking itself.” However, what
on earth does it mean to "think about . . . the impact of thinking itself"?
To "think about
. . . the impact of thinking itself" is a criticism on the cogito itself. Modern philosophy was
formed by the invention of cogito as a concept by Descartes, and cogito brought thinking itself to
consciousness. In addition, it was the expectation to give birth to a new
divine geometry based on and extending Augustine’s Trinity in Christianity,
which needed to be saved. However, it is impossible to "think about an
effect of thinking itself" in completely the same subject. A person who
logically explained this impossibility is, for example, Kurt Gödel, who wrote
the incompleteness theorem, and also Deleuze and Guattari, as I will mention
later, criticized this problem by psychoanalytical and timeframe approaches.
Emmanuel Levinas, the
person who created the philosophy of others, mentioned that the self is tied to
others before its origin. Levinas also mentions that a body and a place that
the body occupies is a surplus that I have for subjectivity of
transcendentalism.[4] Rosenkranz placed aspirins on an
approximately central point, and repeated the same thing and placed these on
the same line. This uncovers the gap of centricity, and it exposes the problem
of the surplus of the body. Then this surplus creates I as “I.”
Rosenkranz placed
these tablets on what she thought to be a “center” and exposed them to light.
This white ring, surrounded by different particles of light, is almost like a
vanishing point. This ring has a beauty reminiscent of Vermeer’s technique
called pointillé, a painting technique of using round points to make
highlights, by using the technique of camera obscura, which is an origin of
photogram.
However, what is this
desire, this wish for centricity? Rosenkranz describes a tablet as "the
thing that powder gathered into one." Even if she was able to criticize cogito, Rosenkranz’s wish for centricity
is not satisfied.
5. Wish for Centricity—An Act of Art-Making
and the Dismantling of Identity
Image 5: Oscar Schelemmer, Drawing from Mensch und Kunstfigur,
published in RoseLee Goldberg’s "Performance Art: From Futurism to the
Present" P105
As an artist who
treated horizontal and perpendicular planes expressively in a cool or even
inhumane way, an artist of the Neue Sachlichkeit movement, such as August
Sander, can be cited here. His centricity is especially German, it may be said.
Similarly, one recalls the space recognition of Oskar Schlemmer, a member of
the German Bauhaus.
In the drawings of
Schlemmer, starting from the body, space expands radially. Descartes invented
Cartesian Coordinate System as an extension of his sense of the cogito, but after all, the body of the
self is located at the center. Also Schlemmer understood space from the vantage
of self, and this idea itself is particularly European, or in other words,
particularly related to cogito.
So, let’s return to
Rosenkranz’s work "Portrait of Something I don't know about You"
created for this exhibition.
Image 6: Pamela Rosenkranz ”Portrait of Something I Don't
Know about You”
First of all, the
mirror placed on the floor invites the viewer to look at a reflection of
himself or herself. However, the image that the viewer will see is, of course,
the face of himself and herself, and also the triangular shape of the stick,
mirror, and the wall. The structure of inviting the viewer to regard the work
is similar to that of Marcel Duchamp’s last work “'Given:
1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas.” Moreover, the image of a mirror,
which invites a viewer, is similar to Taguchi’s pot as a symbol of acceptance.
Furthermore, it was Mondrian who recognized the horizontal and the vertical as
figurings of woman and man, and here the horizontal mirror and vertical stick
can be recognized as evoking libidinal forces.
Painted to resemble a
skin color, the stick which is almost of human height is standing on a mirror
that is placed on the floor perpendicularly. This stick keeps its own balance
from the entropy of frictions that occurs: the weight of stick by gravity, the
mirror that supports the stick, and the support of the wall. Of course, without
the wall, this balance cannot happen, and the continuity of support creates the
angle of the stick. Both this stick and aspirin’s tablet deal with the problem
of gravity.
Also the mirror
placed on the floor is egg-shaped. The oval, which is an egg-shaped base, is
the circle which has two center points. In
In addition, eggs of
amphibians are round, but amphibians keep eggs underwater. However, birds keep
eggs away from steep slopes or on the tree to keep the eggs away from enemies
to protect them. When a parent bird holds an egg and warms it, if the egg is a
circular shape, it just keeps rolling when something wrong happens. However, in
the case of an egg-shape, even if it rolls, it turns by making its way
circularly, and comes back to an original position. In fact, the eggs of birds
which have eggs in steep areas have a more pronounced egg-shape.
Here, the problem is
again body and gravity. First of all, gravity is a distortion of time and
space. However, a body that exists as a surplus against subjectivity of
transcendentalism reacts. Martin Heidegger’s Being
and Time was written
under the influence of Einstein, but the people who used timeframe to explore
self-recognition and criticized subjectivity was Deleuze and Guattari, who
wrote “Kafka”.
In addition, a stick
leaned against this wall results in a triangle between the wall and the
mirrors, and to begin with, the triangle is symbolically related to the
awareness of father and mother that establishes self-recognition. Deleuze and
Guattari write that the triangular relationship of family (father–mother–child)
defines the subjectivity of a child. In addition, in an analysis of Kafka’s
"Dearest Father," which Rosenkranz referred to, Deleuze points out:
"One of the related items which creates triangle of family can be
rearranged by an item which can make the whole as non-family.”[5]
By not denying the
existence of the Oedipus Complex itself, but opening the triangular element
that constituted a family to the outside, it was linked to social groups in the
case of Kafka, and tied to the American technocracy machine, governmental bureaucracy
machine of the
In addition, this
triangle seems to accuse the Trinity of logical contradiction with regard to
the relationship between father and child in Christianity. "The person who
gives word" = father; “word” = child; "love which is transferred by
love" = spirit—these were arranged by Augustine as “Father as god,” “Jesus
Christ as a child and logos,” and “spirits which were given to apostles,"
and god is defined as three different phases and statuses, but the substance is
the same.
In other words, the
father in a triangle of the family is equivalent to God in the Trinity, and
therefore, Deleuze and Guattari will accuse divine power itself as Oedipus, but
not as American technocracy machine, governmental bureaucracy machine of the
One question is not
about freedom, but exodus. Not about the Oedipus problem concerned with how to
become free from the father, but about how to find a way at the place that the
father did not find. In other words, the problem is not to recover the domain
of self in a family, but to put Oedipus in the world as a non-domain.
Before modern times,
there was no concept of human being as a general idea of the individual or
separate entity. Naturally there was no universal concept of the human, either.
Then, naturally, a problem of subjectivity had been raised. Perhaps the act of
art-making is the way that is related to the dismantling of identity. The act
of art-making, in other words, is to find a way at the place that father did
not find, Pamela Rosenkranz achieved this dismantling of identity in this work,
”Portrait of Something I Don't Know about You”.
Narcissus was tempted
by an image of himself reflected on a surface of water, which is fragile
medium. He kissed his own image and destroyed it. So, how about you, as a
person who views of this art work? I hope that viewers have a better
understanding of Pamela Rosenkranz’s work ”Portrait of Something I Don't Know
about You” , and I set down my pen.
Shinya Watanabe
* Shinya Watanabe is a
curator based in
Reference Book
INOUE, Jun'ichi “Georg Simmel's Jewish Consciousness” Ritsumeikan International Research, Book 12 No.2 December 1999