Alternative Histories

Pia Fries’ new group of over-painted prints, presented for the first time in her exhibition in Museum Kurhaus Kleve under the title Polymorphia,raises the question regarding the status of the image in contemporary culture. The new works ask us what does it mean today to make an image. Their answer starts by indicating that they were not generated onto the surface ex-nihilo, but rather incorporated into processes of repeating, extracting, cropping and circulating other images. The new group of works is a sort of continuation of Hendrick Goltzius’ series of engravings from 1588 depicting the tormented figures of Tantalus, Icarus, Phaeton and Ixion. Goltzius’ series is in itself a continuation, since it followed the painted compositions of Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem (1562-1638), which makes Fries’ continuation of Goltzius a continuation of a continuation, a repetition of repetition. An additional layer of repetition is provided by Fries’ technique. Fries reproduced Goltzius’ figures by printing them in an unregulated manner on top of sheets of paper which she later pasted on wooden panels. In other words, she reproduced by means of one reproductive technique (screen print) what was originally done by means of another, quite similar, reproductive technique (engraving). Fries’ new works offer a particular standpoint towards the circulation of images between networks, contexts and platforms, without subjecting themselves to the discourse of ‘appropriation art’ or ‘art in the information age’. Their proposition is strictly independent, concrete, personal.

The conceptual self-reflexive aspect of Fries’ new group of works is further elaborated when considering the fact that the images with which she chose to articulate the status of the image in contemporary culture are the figures of the falling bodies of Tantalus, Icarus, Phaethon, and Ixion, as depicted by Goltzius. The works parallel the image to a falling body, to a displaced body severed from its background. For Fries to become an image means to be taken from one form of existence to another. It means to lose control over the body, to lose the ability to influence reality, to cease to exist as an active entity in the world. She lets the fall of Goltzius’ figures to fall even further. Her figures continue to drop, to disappear. She does not necessarily record Goltzius’ figures, but rather participates in their removal, their disposal. Her painterly interventions on top and inside the printed figures can be regarded as an act of physical torture that disintegrates the body, rendering it helpless, contourless, deformed, illegible.

Fries’ notion of appearance and representation does not involve fixity. Her bodies and body parts float into and outside the field of vision, into and outside the picture. She confronts her fragmentary approach to painting with the fragmentation of the body. Her painterly gestures around, on top of and inside the falling bodies obscure, dissect, conceal, and erase them, yet, strangely enough, they also animate them as a blind faceless physicality. They turn the body from an image into a painting, i.e., into abstract sensuality, into living materiality. Fries decapitates and amputates Goltzius’ falling bodies (as seen for example in corpus transludi A7 (2017)). As a result of which, the series can be also read in affinity to George Bataille’s conception of the Headless (Acéphale). In 1936 Bataille founded the magazine Acéphale with the image of André Masson’s drawing of a headless man on the cover of the first issue. In the opening article of the issue Bataille writes: “A headless man, like a headless society, is emancipated from control and reason … human life is defeated because it serves as the head and reason of the universe. Insofar as it becomes that head and reason it accepts slavery. If it isn’t free, existence becomes empty or neuter, and if it is free, it is a game.” The affinity to Bataille signifies Fries’ decapitations as an expression of emancipation, opening her current works, as well as her oeuvre in general, onto a horizon of irrational, almost Dionysian festivity and carnality.

The fragmented bodies of Fries are perceivable as the hidden truth underlying her whole body of work. Fries’ paintings resist structure, resist totalization. Though emerging as if on the verge of formation, they are collagistic in nature, avoiding unified pictorial fields in favor of ruptured constellations of paint reliefs. Fries’ configurations of paint are never all-encompassing. She is not a painter of all-overness. Her paintings are local insertions of agitated paint scattered over the surface like short outbursts. The blank white areas in her paintings are as important as the ‘busy’ areas. Therefore, many of the paintings also prevail as negative spaces. They are based on actual void. In this sense, the void that the bodies of Tantalus, Icarus, Phaethon, and Ixion are falling into is the extension of the void that many of her other paintings are established upon.

The association of Fries’ current group of over-painted prints with ancient Greek myths enables her to mythologize and magnify the components of her painterly universe, to situate them in an in-between space, between the actual and the imaginary, the factual and the symbolic. It moves her work back and forth from the context of history to that of ahistorical values. It enables her to refer to the negative spaces in her paintings also as bottomless abysses, and to mark her local painterly outbursts as amputated body parts continuously floating in lower and higher worlds.

The current group of works is not the first time Fries uses the engravings of Goltzius. The Fries/Goltzius enterprise was launched in 2010, on the occasion of Krapprhizom Luisenkupfer, Fries’ solo exhibition in Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe. In it, Fries presented her fahnenbild series, a series of over-painted silkscreens based on a single engraving by Goltzius from 1587 titled The Great Standard Bearer, which depicts a military flag bearer in a heroic posture. The series did not repeat Goltzius’ image in its entirety, but instead integrated enlarged printed segments of the flag. Taking the dynamic waving of the flag as its point of departure while ignoring, not to say erasing the figure of the young bearer, the series serves as a representative example of Fries’ fundamental approach to painting. On the one hand, it demonstrates her motivation to alter and intervene in art history, and particularly in the collection of Kunsthalle Karlsruhe which Goltzius’ engraving is part of. On the other hand, the figure of the moving flag, or rather, the moving fabric, carries Fries to a different territory, allowing her to thematize the material preconditions and properties of painting in terms of manipulation and activation of fabric (such as canvas). In the series, Fries takes the crowded linear topography of Goltzius’ flag and conceals it under fleshy paint reliefs which she then furrows (as seen in fahnenbild 1 (2010)). The different layers of lines, those of Goltzius’ segmented flag and those of Fries’ furrowed paint reliefs, not only reveal the material support of the painted canvas as a configuration of interwoven threads; they also refer to and convey the filaments of the painter’s brush. On the basis of which, one can characterize Fries’ painterly work as a peculiar combination between art history and ‘process art’, between depiction and experience.     

Fries constant shift from art history to ahistorical art practice corresponds to the inner shift of her current group of works from the space of the archive to the space of art, from the document to the painting. Fries treats Goltzius’ series of engravings as documents, yet her work does more than storing and recording them. In many aspects Fries destroys the memory of Goltzius’ engravings, forgets them. The works are archival only in the sense that the archive is also the site of loss, of potentially impossible recollection. Fries uses history as painterly material, but she stretches historical documents as she stretches the paint in her paintings. Her act is ambiguous, transforming the work of an artist such as Goltzius into an archival document, but then violates its integrity and destroys its legibility in order to animate it as a placeless ghostly body. The ways in which she processes source materials recall Jacque Derrida’s notion of the archive as a site of potential loss of memory. Derrida writes: “Right on what permits and conditions archivization, we will never find anything other than that which exposes to destruction […] the archive always works, and a priori, against itself.”¹

Fries’ current group of works amplifies the unresolvable tension in her work between the ‘here and now’ of the painterly act and the ‘there and then’ of art history. It creates a certain sense of temporality, which bears resemblance to the definition of messianic time in Walter Benjamin’s Theses on History (1940)². In these theses Benjamin contrasts messianic time to homogenous empty time. While homogenous empty time is linear, progressive, and sequential, messianic time is ruptural, cyclical, and redemptive. Messianic time is an experience of immediacy that explodes homogenous empty time, generating non-linear connections with particular moments and instances of the past.

Launched from Goltzius’ modified figures, Fries’ local, yet expansive, painterly explosions are a continuing event which blurs the distinction between different times, different histories, different experiences, and eventually, the distinction between life and death.