- Title
- Ghosted forms
- Creator
- Lowry, Sean
- Relation
- Erasure: The Spectre of Cultural Memory p. 199-218
- Relation
- http://www.libripublishing.co.uk/products/erasure
- Publisher
- Libri Publishing
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2015
- Description
- Overpainting is a term used by painters to describe working in layers. Traditionally, overpainted layers do not entirely conceal underpainted layers, instead functioning as a contrasting or nuancing mechanism. The term is also used in archival restoration, where X-rays help identify preparatory elements or layers added by restorers. The now infamous 2012 incident, in which elderly Spanish amateur Cecilia Gimenez ‘restored’ the 1930s fresco Ecce Homo by Elias Garcia Martinez, provides a farcical example of erasure through overpainting. Yet once we expand these traditional conceptions, together with a broad suite of other methods for erasing literal content, we enter an aesthetic realm in which opacity, obliteration and invisibility demand interpreters look into, beyond, or outside a work. What does it mean to perform acts of erasure or concealment through artistic practice? How do these expressions differ from the idea of erasure, as it is understood in other areas of human discourse? Tracing a partly invisible line from Kazimir Malevich’s seminal 'Black Square' (1915), via Robert Rauschenberg’s 'Erased de Kooning Drawing' (1953), to the role of erasure and concealment in post-conceptual practices in the digital age, this chapter will explore art’s ongoing evasion of literal interpretation. Although some of the approaches presented in this chapter concern interactions between a gesture and its partial erasure, our discussion will focus primarily upon works, that, in operating at the outermost limits of visibility, problematise tensions between the vehicular functions of artistic mediums and immaterial projections of thought. Considered together with the reductive elimination of subject matter, the metaphysical qualities of blankness, the obfuscation of history, and the way in which erasure and concealment can simultaneously constitute forms of addition and subtraction, this chapter will demonstrate that strategies for deliberately establishing referential ambiguity remain a key mechanism within the ongoing deferment of literal meaning and interpretation in post-conceptual practices.
- Subject
- contemporary art; post-conceptual practice; erasure; concealment
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1309494
- Identifier
- uon:21891
- Identifier
- ISBN:9781909818620
- Language
- eng
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