Erasure

This essay, and 35 others, are published on Medium.com

In 1953 (irrelevant fact: the year I was born) Robert Rauschenberg asked Willem de Kooning for a drawing he could erase. De Kooning obliged with a dense mixed media drawing (reportedly, as no photos of the artwork in its state prior to being erased) just to make it as difficult as possible to remove. De Kooning said he that though he didn’t like the idea, he understood it and wanted to oblige (though it is possible the bottle of Jack Daniels Rauschenberg brought was influential). He decided it had to be a drawing he would miss, as opposed to one he was happy to sacrifice.

Rauschenberg worked on the disappearing act for a month, with a variety of erasers, finally removing the drawing, and later asked Jasper Johns to provide a title. Johns decided on:

Erased de Kooning Drawing

Robert Rauschenberg

1953

And Johns obliged with the label and the gilded frame in which it still sits.

Rauschenberg had come to the idea of erasure as art, or erasure as an act of art, after working on all white and all black paintings; it was his idea of the next logical step in his pursuits. He tried erasing his own drawings but concluded ‘it wasn’t art’! Other than the idea itself, the criteria for what qualified as artwork ready for erasure may be the most interesting aspect of the effort.

Questions, even 70 years later, abound:

Was erasure about removing value?

Rauschenberg’s own work in 1953 had just begun to appreciate, and his Biennale prize was still 10 years away, while de Kooning was at the height of fame, among the most important living artists in 1953. A de Kooning was inherently more valuable, that day in 1953, than Rauschenberg’s own, but was his choice really about financial sacrifice?

Or was it the presumptuousness he felt declaring his own work ‘art’ before ‘disappearing’ it?

Would just any drawing from any other artist suffice? Or was it, as I suspect, the shrewd observation that the fame that accompanied the ‘act of art’ erasing a de Kooning would be notable, while erasing his own work was almost equivalent to never having drawn it at all.

As the SFMOMA museum caption (they own the piece) illustrates, there were erasures by de Kooning that are part of the original drawing, not the art removed by Rauschenberg. So not just the act of removal, but the act of removal by a third party (though I guess it was really a second party) defined the new work.

And what if de Kooning had (also?) erased one of his own drawings?

He had already given it value as a drawing he would actually miss. Would erasing his own drawing simply be ‘finishing the drawing’?

And what of the lack of impulse to photograph the drawing prior to erasure? It’s not just a ‘tree falls in the forest’ question, but one of faith.

Was there ever a drawing? Was it really difficult to remove? Would it matter?

If the act was a collaboration between one artist claiming to have made a drawing and another claiming to have erased it, would that be a variation on redefining art, or a negation of the entire idea?

A first expression of any new idea in art carries special value, but is Erased de Kooning Drawing the alpha and omega, the first and last of its kind that is even possible? Are any further explorations necessary, or would they even be valid as anything but referential works? or worse, plagiarisms? At what point does inspiration or even homage cross over to mere imitation?

And finally, whose art is the work? Who is the artist? Rauschenberg is named in the label as the artist, but then de Kooning is noted in the title. Of course both are critical to the final piece, but without an image of the original does the notion of ‘whose art’ change? Should there be an asterisk (*as in doubtful sports achievements)?

Was the drawing a watershed for Rauschenberg? Did this moment of negation allow him to change course, to start the series of his ‘combines’ in 1954? After his white and black experiments was erasure the beat he needed before exploding the canvas in a riot of colors and 3D inclusions?

Erased de Kooning (perhaps like all great art) raises more questions than it answers. It is further proof, as if we needed it, that AI can’t make great new art by mining the past to project the future; none of Rauschenberg’s inventions could be predicted by his past.

It is a bit like the question a publisher asked my friend Linda O’Keeffe after she published her book on the color white, Brilliant: White in Design. He wanted to know if her next book would be on black, to which Linda easily answered “No!” (it was on stripes).

Erasure, a 2011 novel by Percival Everett, now the Oscar nominated movie American Fiction, is less about erasure in the common sense, and more about a disappearing act cynically played on by a writer to spoof the public.

Based on the excellent movie (I haven’t read the book, so let’s assume they are close) the erasure in question is the actual, varied, multi-valent lives of Black Americans, in contrast to the flattened picture of virtually every published version of that experience. A ‘Black Book’ has to be street, or jailhouse, or rap or urban or any other Black stereotype, not the full spectrum of roles played by the 40 million or so actual Black people in America. Erasure, the book/movie, is about the comedy of that expectation, and is modeled on Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (not irrelevantly, published at nearly the same moment as Rauschenberg’s erased drawing). Erasure’s main protagonist’s name, Theolonious Ellison, is the most obvious reference to Invisible Man, but like the book of 70 years ago, is a paean to the same quandary.

Erasure is a specific kind of loss, and loss is one of those things we all learn to cope with at some point.

We might manage past the loss, but then loss is generally irretrievable, leaving an unfillable void. Loss, in some cases (one I am particularly familiar with) leaves a void stretching into the future, but loss is not necessarily retroactive: the past remains intact (though often relegated to memory).

Language conspires to conflate terms like loss with expiration or death. Personally I hate the euphemism ‘lost’ or ‘passed away’ when referring to death. It’s an attempt to sanitize the term just as we sanitize the act of dying. On the other hand, I still say we ‘put our dog to sleep’ when that’s not exactly what happened! If anyone says they ‘executed the dog’ the next sound you hear might be the SWAT team.

In Italy the deceased are often interred vertically; limited space and the finite size of mausoleums demand these ‘inverted towers’ as a solution to the preserving remains. But as soon as all the people who knew the deceased are themselves deceased the bones relinquish their meaning and are removed. They become mere anatomical relics, whereas they once possessed the power to evoke memory, emotions and even love.

Is the meaning erased by the outside events (loss of those who ‘knew’ the bones)? Are the bones the McGuffin in this story? The bones in addition to being dispensable (at the right moment) are invisible, buried beneath the more recently deceased*.

[*One question I have is how they remove the bottom (oldest) set of bones without massively upsetting the rest. I may just leave that as a mystery…]

Erasure seems different than loss; it is often an intentional act, an act of removal, of negation. It isn’t loss as much as a conscious act of clearing the stage for the next act (as Rauschenberg may have done). Loss may be involved, but it is not the primary condition.

Is the act of transforming an event from the truth to a lie a kind of erasure? Isn’t the Republican party’s recasting of January 6 an erasure of truth? Or is it more like a competitive (untrue) opponent to the truth? Can truth even be erased? Is a lie an attempt to overwrite the truth, more an act of obscuration, or misdirection, than erasure?

Overwriting can be erasure; when one inadvertently overwrites a file, or when one alters graffiti to change the meaning (like the not so famous joke about ‘making BOOK’ out of the graffiti FUCK). Deletion, the cousin of erasure, in a computer is usually an act of declaring a file ‘deleted’ by tagging it, not actually erasing it. Keep that in mind when attempting to erase some incriminating files! And is inaccessible information, like a broken hard drive, an act of unintentional erasure? Or is the data just out of reach, like the set of keys in nearly every movie involving a jailhouse escape?

A palimpsest is, in part, about erasing without loss, or erasing while allowing multiple layers to coexist. It comes from the practice of scraping off the original writing in order to reuse the media below. Imagine the mountains of writing, and the history they might rewrite, that have been erased just to reuse the surface! The modern equivalent, erasing tapes of early TV shows to reuse for later recordings, seems tragic as we know (partly) what was lost. The palimpsest only hints at the world of deliberately removed ideas, records, art, or whatever else was considered dispensable by the palimpsest-ees.

Painters have, of course, deliberately erased or overpainted earlier unwanted attempts, but what happens when art restorers deal with the top or bottom layers of paintings? Revealing an underpainting is usually greeted with much enthusiasm, as it is an insight into a (usually quite famous) painter’s thoughts, opinions or progress. And it is most often not found by erasure but by technology (like x-ray or some variation). Erasing, as part of restoration or cleaning, the top layer of artwork, as at the Sistine Chapel, is often greeted with considerable outrage that the images have changed, whether accurately reflecting the original or not.

But some history is intentionally erased when it is seen as defiling the memory, the majesty of the ‘original’, from our current perspective. Greek temples, like the Parthenon, were originally polychromed, as was Greek sculpture. Our modern sensibilities are utterly offended by this version of authenticity; we have grown to love the denuded relics of the colorful past despite their inaccuracy. Color destroys the purity of the form, and form is what we want to believe was the highest achievement of the Greeks (along with democracy, feta cheese and a few other things).

Snow does the opposite; it turns the landscape into pure form, without the details of color, texture, flora, etc. It isn’t erasure, though it does manage to erase much of the sound we hear in its absence. It’s part of the stripping away of detail that snow achieves.

While walking through Washington Square Park around Christmas I saw a group of carolers at the arch singing appropriately non-religious holiday songs, while a counter-protest (yes, at a group of carolers) sang ‘Free Palestine’ as a retort. Besides making no sense as counter-protest, singing Free Palestine just 2 months after 10/7 was an attempted act of erasure itself.

Erasing memory is an attempt to erase context. When someone chants “White Lives Matter” or “Blue Lives Matter” or “All Lives Matter” these are not simply innocent, self-evident proclamations, or truisms. They are deeply racist reactions to “Black Lives Matter”. Chanting “Free Palestine” years ago was something I would support, without much hesitation. But after 10/7 the same phrase is deeply antisemitic. Context matters.

In late breaking news the Museum of Natural History will close its Native Americans exhibitions pursuant to new federal rules about the consent required before researching Native American artifacts.

It’s a tricky one; is the removal of artifacts from public view, like the removal of Confederate statues and flags, an act of erasure? Of admission? Of civility? Of rehabilitation?

And what of the removal of ‘offending’ books from school libraries?

Is there any consistently valid approach to the accommodation we make in the present to address concerns of the past?

Maybe the past can’t be erased, just clouded with a fog of obscuring counterfactuals (as much as some try) or illuminated with scholarship about the past.

Erasure may have been most clearly defined back in 1953 by a young artist trying to make a place in history for his own future.