Rosemarie Trockel / Drawings, Collages and Book Drafts

Talbot Rice Gallery is the only UK venue for Rosemarie Trockel: Drawings, Collages and Book Drafts, the largest display of works on paper to date by the internationally renowned artist. The exhibition is a partnership between Talbot Rice Gallery, Kunstmuseum Basel and Kunstmuseum Bonn. The following paragraphs describe the main areas of this exhibition, discussing selected works in more detail to offer a point of entry to Rosemarie Trockel’s work.

Within the Academic tradition of Fine Art, drawing was exclusively part of a (predominantly male) artist’s preparatory work and training; it was a starting point for a longer process that was intended to result in a fully resolved oil painting, meticulously worked to remove all brush stokes and signs of uncertainty. Within Rosemarie Trockel’s contemporary practice this uncertainty has become a central part of a strategy to undermine the authoritative systems that have, and continue to, administer specific representations of reality and prescribe certain subjective positions. As Christoph Schreier writes in the exhibition catalogue, “Trockel mistrusts the evidence of the pictorial, the clarity and lack of ambiguity of the absolutist approach, and prefers to populate her pictures with chimeras and grotesques that at times seem comical, at times inscrutable.”* Trockel’s ‘mistrust’ stems from the fact that she has continually encountered opposition within a male dominated art world; although the artist builds upon a strong German artistic context, which includes Joseph Beuys and Martin Kippenberger, she is critical of its implicit machismo. Against an Enlightenment tradition to treat the self as a rational, finite entity, the anthropomorphic figures in Trockel’s drawings blur the boundaries between representations of conscious and unconscious, human and animal states.

This drawing evokes a series of works Trockel made in the 1980s that include black hats or masks. As the exhibition catalogue highlights, “As a motif that preoccupied Trockel for many years, the mask or outer shell could indeed be understood as a metaphor for a work that in many respects is enigmatic and ambivalent and derives its disturbing impact from precisely these qualities.”* In this case the veiled subject has the appearance of an anonymous torture victim, while the title, and the loose fit of the mask, suggests that the black form relates to the flower from which poppy seeds and opiates are extracted. The absence of a face is common in Trockel’s works, where figures may be cut off at the neck by the top of the page. This makes the images more difficult to interpret, the gaze and facial expressions being so central to how viewers would tradi- tionally be able to read certain scenes. In this work, this ambiguity seems to add to the title’s ambivalent association with the legitimate consumption of a food or medicine, or the illegitimate intoxication of drugs.

Since 2004, collages have become a distinct part of Rosemarie Trockel’s oeuvre, often allowing her to recombine aspects of her multifaceted practice, which has included photography, film, sculpture and installation. If drawing allows Trockel, “both springboard and experimental space [that] for all its heterogeneity evinces continuities of both form and space,”* then collage allows those forms and spaces to be reworked and re-contextualised.

This collage brings together works made by Rosemarie Trockel mostly in the 1980s. The painted background evokes a generic painterly theme that conventionally suggests the ‘expression’ of physical or psychological ‘depth’. At the top left, ANONYMOUS,1987, includes Virginia Woolf’s statement that, ‘For most of history, anonymous was a woman’. This quotation sets this collage up for discussion along the lines of gender politics, the image of a woollen pattern in the same work then reflecting what has been a typically subjugated, ‘domestic’ and ‘feminine’ art. In the bottom left, Frau auf Sockel (Woman on Pedestal), 1982, the female form returns as an (art historical) object, gazed at by the crudely fashioned brown, gorilla-like head. At the top right, Wo ist Niemand (Where is Nobody),1984, seems to speak of anonymity, the two female figures seeming like inter- changeable types rather than individuals, while in the bottom right, the more recent, Collection Desir, 1998, a male figure seems to pose much more confidently, looking out at the viewer.

Rosemarie Trockel has long worked on book drafts – small examples of books that could possibly be produced – which became a central part of her practice. This exhibition marks the first time book drafts have been exhibited so extensively. Bearing a similarity to sketchbooks, they, “reveal much about Trockel’s thinking process while keeping the inquisitive reader at a safe distance.”** Like her drawings, the book drafts consciously play with expectations and negate easy readings. They open up the possibility of interpreting Trockel’s work in a non-linear fashion, seeing them as potential ideas for future works, while simultaneously being a record of her past ideas. These works seem to be used in a therapeutic way, in which fears might be realised and faced. Indeed, the exhibition as a whole seems to reveal a much deeper set of fears, where all that is repressed by strict systems of representation appears to return.

In this image we see Rosemarie Trockel as a teenager, surrounded by posters of the popular movie icons of the time. Rosemarie Trockel’s idea for this book draft was that isolated details of this image be reprinted as additional pages and feature as posters inside the finished book. The title, 'My Films Just Make Me Laugh,' refers to a remark Brigitte Bardot made about her own career after leaving the film industry and it suggests that Trockel might be distancing herself – in a playful fashion – from her own past. If we imagine the completed book then the isolated details, blown up to become new posters, might take on a meaning of their own, abstract and independent of the young Rosemarie Trockel. Representation is an activity that here displaces rather than unites Trockel with her own past, contrary to the belief that photographs allow deep connections to the past to be made. Brigitte Bardot has been a well known subject matter for Trockel since the early 1990s.

Rosemarie Trockel (1952) became prominent in the mid 1980s with her now famous ‘knitted pictures’. Today Trockel is highly regarded internationally and has won several awards for her sophisticated practice, represented Germany at the Venice Bien- nale (1999 and 2003) and her work is represented in collections worldwide. Rosemarie Trockel lives and works in Cologne.

References: * Christoph Schreier (2010) in the exhibition catalogue (Questioning the Middle: People, Animals, and Mutants in Rosemarie Trockels Work’s on Paper). ** Gregory Williams (2010) in the exhibition catalogue (The Art of Indecision: Rosemarie Trockel’s Book Drafts).