Gregor Stemmrich – författare

Seeing the Unseen Erased de Kooning Drawing is an artwork that radically challenged the very definition of art and questioned the notion of the artist as creator. Three American artists were involved in its creation: In 1953, Robert Rauschenberg erased a drawing by Willem de Kooning, who had somewhat reluctantly been giving his consent. Jasper Johns created a label for its first public presentation that proved to be key to the psychological framing of the piece. Having been transmuted into something new, the obliterated drawing was soon perceived as a pivotal moment in art history: In the 1950s it was considered Neo-Dada, in the 1960s it was hailed as the beginning of conceptual art, and in the 1980s saw it as a departure into postmodernism. Numerous artists referenced the work and it became a touchstone in Rauschenberg’s oeuvre. Gregor Stemmrich outlines its status as a litmus test for the definitions of modernism, literalism and postmodernism, and demonstrates its continuing relevance for the theory of the image and the question of appropriation.

An easel painting was created for the purposes of a presentation that prevents looking at its other side. An object that is not supposed to be visible from all sides makes its own status as an object dubious. In the modern era, artists began to recognize this as a problem of art’s self-definition and its place in history and culture. They felt bound to create situations intended to benefit an understanding of this problem. This led to an expansion of the themes of artists’ awareness of the problem in the wake of which the institutional framework of art and the cultural and political self-understanding of its viewers could be addressed. The present book presents this historical process in selected stages of its evolutionary dynamic.

The reception of art without the postcard is inconceivable, whether one thinks of the art postcards that museums offer for sale, invitation postcards from galleries, or postcard editions by artists. Less commonly addressed is the fact that artists developed projects dealing with postcards that reveal a considered position on the art context.The present book focuses on artists’ postcard projects since the early 1960s, especially those of On Kawara, Lawrence Weiner, Susan Hiller, Marcel Broodthaers, Michael Asher, and Mathilde ter Heijne. In each of these projects, one can observe a self-institutionalization of an artistic practice and at the same time an impetus to reflect on it together with a virtual emblemizing of contemporaneity.