WORKING THROUGH, FOLD BY FOLD

At first I supposed that I should be able to overcome the contradiction quite easily, and that probably there was some trivial error in the reasoning. Gradually, however, it became clear that this was not the case. A contradiction essentially similar to that of Epimenides can be created by giving a person a piece of paper on which is written: “The statement on the other side of this paper is false.” The person turns the paper over, and finds on the other side: “The statement on the other side of this paper is true.” It seemed unworthy of a grown man to spend his time on such trivialities, but what was I to do?¹

Paradox is an ecstasy, then a loss—one of the most intense.²

WHEN WRITERS DESCRIBE DORETHEA ROCKBURNE’S art, they usually comment with considerable sincerity on the way the drawings and paintings “make themselves.” This reading accepts Rockburne’s ingenious written pun (in titles) literally, turning it into a running joke of misreading. The “mistake”—projecting sentient qualities onto insentient things—is not a true error, or merely a confusion, but a blind metaphor. This projection functions as “primary-process thinking” in Rockburne’s art, in her dialogue with her materials. It permeates the very meaning of her art, not only the splendid titles. No art makes itself: a person makes it.

“How could drawing be of itself and not about something else?”³ A rhetorical question always demands two answers, both appropriate and contradictory. Yes, drawing could be an autonomous discipline, self-generating and self-reflexive; and no, of course drawing cannot be only of itself and not anything else (how could it be?). To interpret these metaphorical “making itself” and “being of itself” and the readings they imply allows us to understand the real title of the various works known (singly and together) as “Drawing Which Makes Itself”: not only “Art Which I Make,” but Person Who Makes Herself.

This rewriting should not strike us as capricious. At the very beginning of Rockburne’s public career, she answered the question about how and why her work took the form it did by saying: “I’m interested in the ways in which I can experience myself, and my work is really about making myself.”⁴ The meaning of this sentence could not be less ambiguous, although the interviewer happened to be interested in discussing set theory and does not pursue this elementary feature of Rockburne’s thought. Perhaps at the time (1972) such a statement did not square with the experience of the art; more probably, this proposal for meaning appeared too anomalous in its reversal of the priorities established by Minimalism. But the meaning of Rockburne’s art hinges on her observation, and its value resides not only in an abstracted mathematical metaphor, but in a metaphor of self.

To understand Rockburne’s art at all means to interpret it metaphorically, as it relates to the (her)self, through the form the making and experience take. The material and the form yield nothing except as they correspond to the mental processes of the artist, and, by extension, of us all. Rockburne’s art shares, reflects, and is formed by, these processes. As a movement over time, it describes metaphors for the transformation of operations from successive psychical states, from one set of works to the next, and from one layer in a work to another. This self-identity suggests the autobiographical. As such, Rockburne’s art resolves the dilemma, so consistently frustrating, that is at the heart of individual experience, by embracing at once, for artist and viewer, both intellect and natural phenomena, conscious subject and relational object.⁵

Since its appearance in a Drawing Which Makes Itself, the fold has anchored itself as the fundamental forming operation in Rockburne’s art. The fold has been described by some as the vehicle of “information.”⁶ But we must go beyond that. The fold forms, informs, and deforms. With the fold, the “work” comes to exist: it takes its form from the fold differentiating itself from other, nonart blank sheets of paper and linen. With the fold the material transforms itself to contain its subject, allowing access to its content. The fold articulates the art as an object while punctuating its dynamic subject-content. Most importantly, the fold moves us emotionally by the implied and real physicality of its active displacements.

A fold initiates the first step toward a cut, which is the way the edge of the paper has been made. The lines Rockburne draws on her drawings according to the folds trace the perimeters of the edge. The edge is the boundary between front and back, the boundary as a side, as a line, as a cut, as the mediating relation between two irreducible sides of one sheet. Thus the line of the paper’s edge mirrors the crease of the fold: a mirror as a displaced folding. The fold is the increasing possibility of a cut, of a rupture in the surface. The crease reflects the true cut of the edge, a difference that isolated this sheet from all others—it renders the drawing individual, discrete, discontinuous, concentrated.

Folds and creases traumatize and damage the body of the material. Rockburne’s creasings create shadows, places approaching the nonappearing, or the absence of light. The body begins the transformation which will end in the permanent turning-back upon itself on the hinge-fold. If the material functions as a metaphorical body, the fold portrays a schematic threat to the integrity of the body and self—a rupture, effraction, sudden disorder, fatal intrusion.⁷ This folding act, which physically and emotionally twists and distorts a “body,” was first interpreted as a new, liberating move toward greater literalness and consciousness of material qua material.⁸ What small truths the truths of literalness are.

The folding allows a simultaneous presence of a front and back by means of a radical and intrusive force—a force which demands that the nonappearing appear. The consequence of the fold is to require the acknowledgment of a metaphor for the coexistence of presence and absence at the origin in an interdependent relationship between terms that both reveals and conceals. What is discovered must first be absent—the unseen back as missing—and then uncovered, recognized (Freud: “The true subject is always the barred subject”).

The information or knowledge uncovered, there all along, becomes the recognition of difference. Not a difference created by the arbitrary intervention of a transcendental force (time), but difference at its origin, the origin being always already inhabited by an articulation of difference. Difference, built into existence at the start, as the origin of inequality, makes it impossible to say that one side of paper logically precedes the other, that one moment takes priority over another. Difference is another species of absence: presence which implies the absence of all it is not. To reveal the back means that it no longer be the back. And to accomplish this shifting of identity (not merely a new linguistic mapping, but an existential transformation [trans-form-ation—forming: working; trans: through]), we must lose the front, which depended on its identification as a presence to be meaningful (as a front). To repress the front in order to gain the back requires that the pleasure of a continuous presence of the front be deferred. For the fold as a recognition of difference describes facts about materials as well as a movement towards something—something else, an other, in a transformation of the given, a reversal of topologies.

The initial fascination of Rockburne’s art is the fascination with the appearance of the previously nonappearing—the other—mediated in terms of the fold, as a metaphorical expression of the relationship of inner and outer, intrinsic and extrinsic: existence as both the repression of one thing over another and a union of the two, metaphor as both the repression of difference to promote similarity and a particular kind of combination (not a way of referring to the unknown through the known).

Rockburne: In a sense, looking at my own work, I must come to grips with . . .

Tucker: What you are?

Rockburne: No, who you are.⁹

The question “Who am I?” is the question asked when a person has found herself to be lacking in unity, discovering the previously hidden Other in herself as a subject rendered as an object of self-contemplation in her materials. Even if we mention only in passing the possible significance of Rockburne’s pronoun shift above, it would show how the subject of her art is the search for the self in the Other as a movement toward wholeness, a transformation of the self to reinclude the Other, showing their relationship as both complementary and supplementary, as interdependent and interchangeable.

This movement toward wholeness originates desire, the desire of the Other to be mythically whole at the origin; in absence, the Other becomes the love-object. Moreover, having the material and the self in perpetual, mutual complementarity and supplementarity—like two sides of a page—activates yet another dual relationship expressed metaphorically: that of conservation and loss, and their dialectical relationship in the nature of all change and transformation. Achieving a gain always at the expense of a loss. “I had wanted to approach painting in a way which takes as givens certain conventions while questioning others.”¹⁰ That is, to repress something, absent it, in order to concentrate on—to make present under questioning—an other.

Rockburne has titled one of her series the “Conservation” drawings. The need to conserve demands that the art(ist) continually seek a wholeness that is always postponed. By folding Rockburne gains the back and loses the front: the distinction between the two is both made more emphatic and erased.

It is an error to read Rockburne’s art as exposing the back to purge art of even one more illusion. But we may understand in her art that this act shatters one illusion replacing it with another. What is seen or known is always seen or known at the expense of not seeing or knowing something else. No ideal clarity, but the impossibility of clarity. Movement in the face of frustration. Clarity means the body in the state of pre-desire, of ideal unity—undifferentiated repetition; neurotic inertia; in a word, the Id. But the pristine instinct does not exist in Rockburne’s art (Derrida: “The very idea of a first time becomes enigmatic”¹¹).

Drawing is a way of seeing into your own nature.

—Richard Serra¹²

I relocate the interest in language, which is so frequently mentioned in art writing, away from either syntax or semantics and toward the visuality of language: writing. Characteristics of writing conform, more than any general abstract linguistic concepts, to a list of the analogous visual properties of drawing: a movement of line over a surface, an articulation of space, a retracing of the boundary, a play of presence and absence (word and space) on a field, a sheet of already present articulations. This writing—metaphorically a self-writing—locates and dislocates, condenses and envelopes, separates and layers, ravels and unravels.

I have concentrated on the fold and its possible meanings because it shows where the drawing is most under pressure. The fold as the “point” of departure in Rockburne’s art functions as the instant de passage, a term used by Georges Poulet to indicate “the sudden leap from one extreme to the other. It is the moment at which both extremes come together . . . it is an état de passage, less a state than a movement, the motion by which, within the same moment, the mind passes from one situation to its precise opposite.” The fold confuses our ideas about the mutually exclusive nature of opposites, since contradictory things are made to exist side by side without contradiction, as if no conflicting perception could simply be edited out as illogical. The perception of these nonoppositions transforms them into metaphors of symbolic representations which enable Rockburne to combine what has always been kept apart, or else shown only successively, in other art.¹⁴

Pressing, the act of creasing to fold, initiates a writing on the surface, (works) through the surface: the crease—the fold—as a writing—a division of the sheet into space/articulation/space. If we combine the efforts of folding-as-writing with drawing-as-writing, there appears a new set of active transformations which may portray both the internal workings of individual drawings and paintings and also the general movement of the art from the “Drawing Which Makes Itself” to the paintings of the “Robe” series. I name these transformations, which correspond to the actual physical nature of Rockburne’s art, pressing, impressing and repressing. They relate to three metaphorical operations designating three possible subject-contents: topography (perception as a writing over a surface), time (considerations of memory) and the operations of the unconscious.

If a drawing “made itself” it could be argued that there would be no need to act on the paper at all; if it makes itself, then it possesses in a latent state the properties Rockburne only makes manifest. The paper, by its mere temporal existence, is already a topographical surface defined by the “written” line of its boundaries. But as a body of material engaging itself in the world of experience, it is also acted upon, besides being self-reflective. This acting upon, equivalent to self-consciousness, first takes place under the terms of the givens—the conventions of the body. Thus the drawing receives its “perceptions,” written upon it by Rockburne, as an extrinsic catalyst—either by folding or tracing—in such a way that the paper might “understand” them, within the framework of its physicality: edge as cut, body with two sides, properties of boundary and location. This act can be rewritten as a metaphor for the action of the world on human perception.

In one sense, we can distinguish between two basic kinds of “Drawing Which Makes Itself”: one “self”-written, and one which writes. The first kind uses paper to explore its interior, and all articulations appear on the front surface, or can be deduced from the appearance of the surface. The other kind; although it takes its body (usually carbon paper) through self-foldings, extends these foldings over the wall, floor, or wall and floor, marking an area exterior to its body.

The first kind—the drawings which reflect only upon their own surfaces—presents us with a very definite metaphor for what is termed the stade de miroir, the mirror stage: self-perception in the mirror of materials, “I” as a subject and “I” as an object. We see this stage in a child’s development as a confrontation in the mirror, which initiates the radical disunity of the body. As a play of presence and absence, the body “appears” before the mirror and “disappears” in the move away from the reflecting surface, which is essentially a process of locating, dislocating and relocating. This distance in the mirror, as I have mentioned, acquires a new meaning now as a self-writing through space. The mirror stage involves a projection of properties onto the other (the sheet of paper) in a transference of properties. This projection has a euphoria about it—this play where the subject controls the movement of its mirror. Note that such control belies the stated self-creation of drawing. The projection within the self, between self and art, and within the art, materializes in the fold, but in a formation created, then resisted and deferred. For the back has not yet achieved equal status with the front, and the fold waves free. And this resistance is a source of power. The trace of the edge acts as if the power were self-created, but already the traces are doubly defined—by an extrinsic force according to an intrinsic structure.

These drawings “inform” us that the surfaces we see rely on a surface that we do not. The whole sheet is more comprehensive in its totality than we see or know. We are forced to hypothesize about the unseen. Creases on the front mean creases on the back, through to the back; creasings leave double creasings, double inscriptions. The folding, even if it turns only upon itself, is nonetheless a writing writing doubly, simultaneously registering and inscribing, writing and tracing.

The other kind of drawing, which uses double-sided carbon paper (also called “Drawing Which Makes Itself”), impresses double inscriptions over a surface. These drawings act upon themselves as they are first folded, and then act upon the area around themselves, extending influence. In the series “Carta Carbone,” folds in the carbon describe both where traces are to be made and lines on the body of the material, by giving up carbon on the traced lines: a concrete example in Rockburne’s art of the lack of priority of presence, for here disappearance itself writes as it separates from the trace as absence.

Freud describes consciousness as a surface exposed to the external world. The world acts as a stylus writing on the surface of consciousness. This writing of the stimuli of experience refers back to the space of internal writing, psychical writing or self-reflection. The fold writes doubly in writing which continues over the edge onto the back. Lines which disappear signify lines which continue.

If we imagine one hand writing upon the surface of the Mystic Writing Pad while the other periodically raises its covering sheet from the wax slab, we shall have a concrete representation of the way in which I have tried to picture the functioning of the perceptual systems of our mind.¹⁵

In Freud’s “Note on the Mystic Writing Pad” we are given many terms with which to approach the workings of Rockburne’s art. Experience writes on the surface of consciousness; a surface retains this writing as does the wax slab of the unconscious; the outer sheet may be lifted to take on new writings; the apparatus is multi-layered, with two sheets attached at a fold-hinge, one an outer protector of the other; the whole system is given a concrete representation with definite physical characteristics that take on writing according to its constitution. Freud’s metaphor is a writing metaphor; we can read Rockburne’s surfaces as a simultaneous literalization of the metaphor and as a metaphor of the metaphor. Consciousness presents itself in a layered, folded form. Rockburne’s surfaces intensify and create continuous writing by continual folding, in the oscillation of this movement of writing. What is retained is the trace of this movement within stratification. Writing and lifting: a double movement which in Rockburne translates as writing onto an exterior which unfolds while the surface folds.

These many sets of double movements within the subject all arrive from difference as a dynamic process; or, as Freud says of the “writing pad,” “it solves the problem of combining the two functions by dividing them between two separate but interrelated component parts or systems.” The “two functions” refers to the ability to receive new perceptions while retaining old ones. These two functions become in Rockburne the folding and the trace.

What is now newly placed under questioning, as the creation of meaning in the subject under question, is what “drawing” “is,” and what properties drawings have that show the possibility of meaning. Freud attaches to the phallic stylus, as the generator of writing, the mastery of presence as meaning. But the “mystic pad” is always lifting its outer sheet and undoing the mastery of writing as presence by its periodic disappearance. Drawing: a writing surface, a topography where the writing never penetrates the surface, a writing sown over the surface again and again without germination, a writing which can only trace, never finding rest or controlling the surface at any point. The fold always sends the line off in another direction, lifting it over the edge into disappearance, ceaselessly condemning writing, as presence, to write over and over again. A surface always folded, a never single, never simple topology where the hand draws what Derrida calls its “dissemination”—a discharge of writing over a layered surface as an impenetrable screen, an intact tissue resisting the written line. In drawing, Rockburne destroys drawing, resisting appearance as a source of meaning—metaphorically, that of giving presence to the disembodied ephemeral voice of spoken language—for the surface drawn over opposes union, recording the difference and distance of self and other, subject and object, identity and transformation, front and back, with one never prior to the other. If we desire to handle the drawings to find out if they have been penetrated by writing, we catch ourselves in this metaphorical resistance, deferment and sufferance. Clearly, we can speak of “drawing” as a dissemination of writing over the hymen.¹⁶

Folding destroys the perfect coordinates of traditional (Cartesian) space, coordinates of origin and reference; it breaks them up into discontinuous segments. So too does it cancel the smooth flow of time by a dislocation, a detemporalization that leaves its trace within the trace of writing. The impression of writing as a trace vouches for the close relationship between space and time. Time becomes interval and spacing, rather than a given, arbitrary, originary force. Traced pencil lines not only tell us something about the present state of the drawing, but of previous states. We can conjure up the earlier history, the movement (in time) of the drawing. Yet the more general movement of Rockburne’s art puts into question this very notion that we can conjure up the past.

The pencil tracings impress the folding onto the surface, making the trace a function of the back-as-front. With the group of installation drawings culminating with Neighborhood, the tracings become archaic markings whose nonoriginary status confuses us: the lines cross and lead off, earlier and later states exist along with intermediate stages, the itinerary of the operations becoming irretrievable. Carbon paper or translucent vellum, the bodies which facilitated the writings often are returned to their first locations, as if the relocation at the origin stood for the ability to remember. But even the translucency of vellum, used for the purpose of greater clarity regarding the operations, does not enable one to reconstruct the movements at all; rather, it makes all the more apparent how the hidden just protects us from too much information. If we try to retrace the steps of construction,we come to understand how imperfect memory is, even the work’s “memory.” The only way to understand the operations would be through a severely reactionary force unfolding, undoing the work from its final state. The replacement of the body of vellum or carbon paper to its original position can only appear as a desire for positioning to assume a double movement back and forth and back again, participating in a system characterized by double movement. But the relocation does not get us anywhere.

By the time Rockburne had finished Neighborhood and the carbon paper drawings, her art was no longer a simple, tentative look in the mirror, an unequal power-play between the self and its double, but, instead, the full stare of a body impressing itself upon, and being impressed by, the world of experience. The complexity of this impression leaves no doubt that the simple reconstitutions which allowed one to say without questioning that the “drawings make themselves” cease to hold sway. Neighborhood no longer charts its movements in a manner that can be comprehended step by step, moment by moment. Many of the “Drawing Which Makes Itself” drawings folded and wrote themselves into configurations where they were immediately understood (although how they were made was not always a simple affair). The folds and traces made crosses, triangles, bisections, geometrical figures of extreme simplicity. This simplicity had to be sacrificed as the art began its movement outside itself and took on the complexities of a body moving through lived experience. The fold, as the instant de passage—the fold as the act which extended into series of flippings and irretrievable relocations—completely undoes the traditional notion that memory conquers the distance separating the present from the past. In these complex works memory becomes important as a failure; continuity can no longer be reestablished by reconstituting the transformations held in the art. Memory turns out to be just another moment of transition, which will in turn have to be remembered.

Rockburne found a passage out from this impasse of memory and the degeneration of time. The first paintings, those whose structure incorporates foldings according to the golden section, rediscover time in a new way. The golden section introduces a method of working which inscribes space and time together as interval. This system is not arbitrary or overlaid upon an already intact, complete art, but a necessity that will drive the art away from the failure of memory. The Golden Section: not a thing, not a system, but proportion, an interval, a division of wholes; the relationship between intervals, the time relationship of a movement over space. What is its appeal? Normally, when it is presented in its most simple form, as a division of a whole, the sublimated pleasure of the sectioning takes on the form of a temporal clocking that corresponds with the movement from one length to the next. Could it not be implicit internal clock time made manifest in this sectioning,which corresponds to the time of folding?

Freud hypothesized that the origin of the human perception of time might come from the “flickering up and passing away of consciousness in the process of perception,” a discontinuous process, which, in the metaphor of the writing pad, is the appearance and disappearance of writing on the surface sheets. Time proceeds from this lifting of surface from surface in a movement of layers from the contact of identity to the contact solely across the fold. Replacing this “flickering up” with the square and its golden section-derived rectangle, Rockburne frees the paintings from either continuous or discontinuous concepts of time. For the whole painting now takes on properties of both concepts: folding in time, discrete and individual, and continuous as a final state, with foldings glued down permanently. The painting in its entirety is treated as a malleable space with permanent thickness—a sheet with depth, a drawing surface no longer double but multiple in its interior. Retaining the tracings of their pressings and impressings, these paintings posit a new space, mobile and static, where all writings occur wherever they are traced, sometimes, it seems, in total disregard for the existence of other traces. Lines run every which way, disrupting the surface and bulging into thickness. The space where the simple logic of consciousness no longer holds, where perception presses both outward and inward under the weight of countless experiences, is the dream space, the space of repression.

The “Identity Class” drawings present the penultimate stage of folding transformations—permanent and still traced. In the “Copal” drawings, which are like forever-sealed envelopes, stiff varnish holds the folds in a closed, final form—psychologically, in a repressed unconscious state. In the “Golden Section” paintings, the folds are glued down. This new surface—if we can still call it that—exists without support, without flatness, alternately smooth and rough, matte and shiny, clear and mottled, single and multiple. Score lines are drawn before the material is folded up, as if the trace could definitely be said to exist before the pressing; writing in blue pencil folds into the drawing. All along there has been no “back” that can be called an “unconscious,” nonappearing surface. The “front,” appearing as a topology of writing and retention of the trace, of surf ace and depth, now excludes these simple dualities. We cannot conceive of any strictly independent surfaces, but of the entire drawing or painting as a (metaphorical) topographical unconscious: the dream-space. A private, nonappearing space not made public, but recognized in all its layered complexity of exposure and concealment.

The dream space cannot dispense with the writings which impress onto, into, it: it is the surface which retains. The question becomes: how does the dream-work deal with the dream-thought? In the Interpretation of Dreams, Freud lists the techniques employed by the dream-work of the psychic apparatus to distort the dream-thought. Even the space of noncontradiction must do something with its repressed material. Might the dream-thought bring us back to the manifest desire to be whole at the origin—undivided, regressed—if we treat the whole drawing or painting, whether front or back, as a unity? No, for the dream-work will transform this space, defer this desire by the operations of displacement and condensation.

While Rockburne displaces material by folding—and cutting, in her art since the “Golden Section” paintings—she also condenses it by adding extra layers. Repeated layers give an intensity to the material that only folding could give before, the layers being understood as single conceptual units (but perhaps not single visual units). Over the exposed surface, two opposite sides of a sheet exist side by side, in a smooth transition which belies their opposition. We can move from one to the next like the dissociated breaks of time and space so common in a dream. The condensation of space, of surface, seems physically obvious: the final drawing. or painting takes up less space in comparison to the material from which it began, like the dream telescoping the perceptions it transforms as it shifts and dislocates objects in time and compresses their differences into symbolic, metaphorical units. This is the condensation of meaning, in Freud, overdetermination, as a metaphor of energy, energy moving through the (dream, drawing, painting) space. Opposed forces play against each other, constituting so-called identity of phenomena. Operations employed by the dream-work pressure things into representing more than they would in conscious life, and these meanings converge at nodal points. One can also imagine nodal lines and nodal planes. Surface and depth, front and back, exterior and interior, fold and writing, pressing and impressing all intermix in the repression of movement—not its suppression, not its oppression, but its occurrence, retained and caught in the form of a painting whose surface writes furiously.

The paintings of the “Robe” series seem almost imponderable in their wealth of intricate and complex detail. Even after two years one can only trace an outline around them, scratching their surface.

(1) Color: not systematic or arbitrary, not anti-systematic, but clearly idiosyncratic, consistency by force of decisive personality. The Discourse disrupts color conventions, successfully retrieving the moment when colors could work against each other without compromise: acid green and biting orange don’t “work,” reclaiming the disharmony painting has lost in its effort to level difference. A repetition of green and orange disrupts “flatness”: it splits forms apart rather than making them cohere. And not at the expense of incoherence. These splits seem to show what is “behind” (tan and blue wedges), but that reading does not hold, for color which advances may be actually on the same or higher plane than its neighbor. Tan and blue wedges, like spikes, cut through the painting’s smooth surface.

(2) The Discourse and Sepulcro, even in their quasi-symmetry, tip off-balance, pointing up, rather than concealing, their displacements and disruptions. Points do not match up, and not due to inaccuracies in folding or painting. If one wanted to reconstruct the split forms, which want to “get back together” by similarity in color, such a move could be made visually: but the eye would see then that the linear sectionings might not match up at all. Color does not always coincide with folded divisions, and it may contradict them completely, turning clear equivalences of layered folds into disorienting breaks in the visual surface. Restlessness and disharmony exist side by side with a static finality and harmony which is always being put into question. As always, one cannot say that either dynamism or stability prevails or takes priority: each may be focused upon while the other is repressed, but looking in time will reveal both. This asymmetrical communication between parts and states is a metaphor for the asymmetrical relationship between artist and materials (the paintings exhibit a control by force that did not declare itself so openly at first) and between viewer and object. Rockburne says, “I look at the shapes until I see them in color.“ The intensity of that stare becomes the intensity of unmodulated color acting willingly, projecting from eye to form and back again, in a trajectory where self and shape are each the anteriority of the other.

(3) The titles: Descent (from the Cross), Noli Me Tangere, Sepulcro, all evoking the early Italian Renaissance. It is obvious how the folded linen corresponds to the folded linen of the clothed figures of Duccio and Giotto. Folds in the clothing translate into folds in the linen. But what of this “secularization”? Exactly this: clothing as a covering which both marks the outline of the body and hides it, describing and sheathing. From represented to projected body. Material which gives presence while repressing. Conforming to the traced shape of the body, the material also makes that body mysterious in its covering. Clothing as a protective layer of clothing, a crust which is a metaphor for the crust of medieval space waiting to be pierced by deep space perspective. And Rockburne’s paintings of layered crust resist this penetration.

(4) The only photograph I have seen of Rockburne places her before Noli Me Tangere in a body position very similar to the gesture and angles of her painting: arm crossed across the waist, holding the other arm, straight down, in a suggestion of “don’t touch me,” with elbow out at an angle like the yellow, bisected square, both floating and weighted, at the waist of her painting. The paintings might relate either to the non-rectangular but horizontal eyesight or to the uprightness of the human body. And the movements of the folds, as writing, draw on implied movements of the body—the gestures as a writing in space, a writing which corresponds to the look of the person who made the art, or a surface which must be examined as the viewer himself moves toward it, by it, and away from it, in the explicit movements of a viewer’s body relating to the movement of the work’s body.

There is something about the look of the work corresponding to the look of the people who do it; that is, I think very often unconsciously or subconsciously objects contain statements about the person who makes them.¹⁷

“Person who makes them,” not “thing which makes itself.” And also: “unconsciously” as if the artist is not in complete control either, but engaged in an activity of unconsummated writing which is the precondition for the continuation of making art at all. As if Rockburne dreams the question: what would I look like if I were a painting?

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet,

Are of imagination all compact.

One sees more devils than vast hell can hold:

That is the madman. The lover, all as frantic,

Sees Helen’s beauty in the brow of Egypt.

The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,

Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;

And as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen

Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name¹⁹

Postscript: In May 1978, Dorothea Rockburne exhibited four new drawings. They were made by folding what appeared to a translucent vellum, with a shiny varnish applied to one side. On this folded surface were drawn approximately quarter-inch wide arched lines. The sheer beauty of these drawings was unsurpassable. “Sheer” is not an idle adjective: the translucency of the vellum allowed the viewer to study the diverted paths of the curved lines as they reversed themselves along the folds. Placed far above (my) eye-level, the drawings were like kites or angels; their winged fragility was such that movements of air might blow them away (not true: the paper was made stiff with the varnish). The folds were not glued down; pushpins held the drawings to the wall like butterfly specimens. The drawings encouraged one to move around to look at the sides because the vellum seemed to promise a revelation about the exact way they were made. At least one drawing, defined across its folds with green pencil, allowed one to see how many layers there were at any given point, the layers fanning out from the wall, reminiscent of the freedom in the “Drawing Which Makes Itself.” The arcs created a new fluidity across the surface, in the most superb counterpoint to the geometric severity of the folded paper.

—Jeff Perrone

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NOTES

1. From Bertrand Russell, Autobiography, vol. I, pp. 191–95, quoted in Jacob Bronowski, Origins of Knowledge and Imagination, New Haven, 1978, pp. 74, 82.

2. Roland Barthes, in Roland Barthes on Roland Barthes, New York, 1977.

3. Statement in the catalogue for “Eight Contemporary Artists” at the Museum of Modern Art in 1974, p. 50.

4. Interview with Jennifer Licht, Artforum, March 1972, p. 34.

5. See James Olney, Metaphors of Self, Princeton, 1972.

6. Bruce Boice, essay accompanying a catalogue from “Dorothea Rockburne,” an exhibition at the Hartford Art School, 1973. The reader will learn more from what Boice leaves out than from what he writes. Revealingly, he begins his essay by writing about writing. In the first paragraph he employs the term “metaphor” as a device to interpret Rockburne’s writing, but, curiously enough, he drops the term when discussing her art.

7. See Jean Laplanche and Serge Leclaire, “The Unconscious: A Psycholanalytic Study,” in French Freud, Yale French Studies. vol. 48, p. 143.

8. Cf. Nietzsche: “. . . to be able to read a text as text without the interference of an interpretation is the latest-developed form of ‘inner experience’, perhaps one that is hardly possible . . .”; quoted in Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight, Oxford, 1971, p. 102.

9. Interview with Marcia Tucker, catalogue for an exhibition at the New Museum, New York, “Early Work,” unpaginated.

10. “Eight Contemporary Artists,” p. 49.

11. Jacques Derrida, “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” in French Freud, p. 79.

12. Interview with Lizzie Borden, included in a catalogue for an exhibition in Baden-Baden, Germany, “Works 1966–1977,” pg. 223.

13. In Etudes sur le temps humain, vol. pp. 148–52.

14. Not quite always: Jasper Johns drew 0 through 9 through this kind of space, and then there is the painting Canvas, where front is front, back is front and front is back.

15. Sigmund Freud, in “Note on the Mystic Writing Pad,” Standard Edition, Vol. XIX, p. 232.

16. This metaphor rephrases Derrida’s hymenal counterargument to Freud’s meaning as phallic presence. See La Dissemination, Paris, 1972, and Of Grammatology, trans. by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Baltimore, 1974, pp. lxv-lxvii.

17. Tucker interview (Note 9).

18. William Shakespeare, A Midsummer’s Night Dream, V: i, 6–16.