‘Women are regarded as deep… Women aren’t even shallow.’ – Nietzsche.
Entering the Rumpelstiltskin gallery in New York, we begin with a black and white, 8 by 8 inch photograph of a semi-reclining young woman, her left arm and torso leaning against an inflatable beach ball. She is wearing a gathered white shift, tied under the breasts and at the waist with strings, her nylon bra inadvertently visible at the neckline. In her right hand, she holds a wooden rod. She’s posing, as a goddess or heroic figure of some kind, and her flawless skin, poured across clavicles and cheekbones, reflects the light. The classical aspiration is undeniable, despite the daybed that she’s arranged on, the wrinkled sheet, the painted cinder block wall behind her, and the dusty footprints on the photographer’s paper on the floor. Her sandals lie discarded; an inch of lace around the hem of her dress casts a shadow on the bed. On closer inspection, we note the inflating valve of the beach ball is still protruding, and it is then that we take in the disembodied wrist entering the frame from stage left, an almost invisible hand supporting the beach ball, a necessary intervention so that the woman’s torso remains sufficiently upright. The image has a purpose, evidently, although this scene also suggests adults playing a game, enjoying the exchange. In three quarter profile, the young woman gazes into the distance, propped up by the hand on the beach ball; her pose is a fiction, some kind of proposition, or promise.
On the wall around the corner, the purpose is revealed: the woman reappears, transformed, in an engraved vignette on a one thousand dollar ‘sinking fund debenture’ certificate, issued by the SCM Corporation in 1967. The certificate, and the photograph that provided a reference for its vignette, come from the collection of the eminent numismatist, Mark D. Tomasko. Here, the beautiful woman’s beach ball has been translated into a globe: her left breast rests against the western United States. Behind her bare legs, an engraved cityscape appears, a set of futuristic cubes, complete with smokestacks and a tower with a ball on top, recalling Seattle’s Space Needle, or Berlin’s Television Tower. The length of wood she holds has become a staff in the form of the classical caduceus, a snake spiral with two small wings at the top, signifying commerce and communication: it was carried by Hermes, the messenger god. She is cross-hatched and stippled, and she no longer leans against the ball or globe, but rather floats slightly, in a magical solution to the problem of weight and balance. This working girl, likely a model at the Ford Agency, trying to make it in New York, has become symbolic, a timeless image of value, industry and trust. She’s moved outside history into allegory, from a photographic studio in 1964, to an imagined place that somehow promises the gravity of the classical within a financially dynamic future. It’s a little unclear how that works, but as she’s the presiding genius of the exhibition, we’ll keep her in mind as we look at the other things on display.
The specimen debenture certificate feels like another game: a piece of paper, in itself almost worthless, is made precious by means of its classical iconography and the elaborate decorative border that surrounds the image of the woman and her globe. All of these elements function as ornament, a visual excess promising security in possession and preventing easy forgery. In this, the certificate is not so different from any kind of paper money: a thing with little inherent value that nevertheless represents certain powers of transaction and exchange. It’s a collective illusion, or delusion, and our submission to this fairy tale is a requirement for participation in the system.
On the wall nearby there’s a proof of a 500 drachma note from Greece, dated 1932, printed by the American Bank Note Company, which produced notes for over one hundred nations. Another idealized engraved woman, this time a helmeted Athena in profile, performs the function of national validation. There’s also a specimen banknote from Bulgaria, dated 1922, again the work of the American Bank Note Company. Here, the name of the bank appears in French, Banque Nationale de Bulgarie, while the image shows women in traditional peasant dress, harvesting wheat. The central figure, her scythe tucked into her belt, heaves a massive sheaf onto her shoulder. In the background, a man with a moustache, wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat, stands looking out at us.
My bonnie domino state places art works from different periods alongside these documents, and in doing so reminds us that the images on these paper notes and certificates are miniatures, among other things. We peer at them, in thrall to the appeal of the tiny. Postage stamps are another kind of precious paper: portable, potentially fungible, and certainly collectable, wall art for a doll’s house. From 1971 until his sudden death aged 31 in 1977, the American artist Donald Evans made postage stamps for invented countries, hand painted in watercolours. He shared his work with friends, who participated in the projection of nations and landscapes, their imaginary iconographies. Currency, bank notes, postage stamps, passports: they each prop up the fiction of the nation, ensuring transactions at the border that designate location and identity.
Evans’s postage stamps, like other works in the exhibition, perform a transvaluation of values, where the authority of the official documents we live by is turned inside out, into a story or a game. If the nation itself is an imaginary construct, then how do we make sense of our rights of entry or abode (as they say in the United Kingdom), or the papers and booklets that verify those rights? The exhibition title combines two of Evans’s imaginary countries: My Bonnie was a version of the United States, which he regarded from the distance of his residence in Amsterdam, ‘over the ocean’, and Domino State a land where the game of dominoes was a national sport. The domino stamps that Evans painted allowed him to play the game around the edge of an envelope, turning the corners as one would turn the row of pieces on a table.
Matt Mullican’s painting is in the form of a very large domino, eight circles on a vertical rectangle, each providing an incomplete perspective onto a scene. The eight views show parts of things: in one there’s a hand reaching in from stage right, in another, part of what might be a wishing well, in another, a cluster of foliage. The circular pictures are made from oil stick rubbings, so there’s the further implication of another kind of elsewhere: the rubbing is the indexical trace of an object or site that resembles the forms in the image; it touched the surface and left a mark. It may be long gone, but it must have existed somewhere.
All printmaking invokes the deferred logic of the rubbing: something, somewhere, made this image possible, in a relay that moves across space and time, through the materiality of the surface and toward its invisible origins. Andrew Gonzalez’s Puzzle Certificates present a series of graphite rubbings, each one a slightly different configuration of puzzle pieces. (People who know would recognize the different puzzle manufacturers’ proprietary cutting designs.) Each certificate shows the lower left corner of a puzzle, straight edged, with the top and right edges punctuated by holes and tabs to connect to the missing remainder. Looking closely, the graphite surface of puzzle pieces starts to seem alive, like outlines of small figures, or chess pieces: the simplified shape of a head, two arms, two feet. They’re clinging together, and the tabs along the edge are like arms reaching out, to connect up the image, put all the pieces in place.
The graphite frottage traces a surface, an object of tactile irregularity, and the puzzle piece patterns that emerge evoke a visual image that is concealed from us, perpetually out of reach. (The puzzle piece is an image-bearing shape, always.) That image – the key to doing the puzzle – floats through the work, a possibility withheld, like Mullican’s roundels opening onto spaces we cannot enter, or Evans’s stamps invoking places we’ll never visit. A puzzle piece, a postage stamp, a circle cut out of a larger scene, the vignette on a banknote or a certificate – these forms propose the artwork as a broken-off fragment, an incomplete stand-in for a more expansive reality, or a miniature part of a much bigger proposition. (Is that what a dollar bill is?) And the vignette, the stamp, the often-illegible part of the larger scene that appears on an individual puzzle piece, these small pictures draw us in – as if we were peeking through a keyhole into another world, or Alice at the tiny door. (The bank note is a miniature that we take in our hands, fold into our wallet, hold out to another; it functions as a token for something too large to grasp, something vast and unseeable, like ‘the state’ or ‘power.’) In place of the image that would allow us to finish the puzzle, the shiny graphite frottage makes an x-ray, providing a view of the puzzle’s infrastructure, repetitive and manufactured, yet always alive with the implied possibility of completion.
Gonzalez’s puzzle certificates are displayed in pairs within plastic document protectors, and suspended on wire hangers that have been bent into decorative forms. (One hanger still wears a colour-coded paper tag, a memory of its previous use value for the dry-cleaning establishment that initially sent it into circulation.) The array of hangers on the wall produces another overall pattern, arranged like a playing card, the eight of hearts, with the paradoxical effect that the slight distinctions between them become activated. The sheets of stamps produced by Donald Evans also insist on their status as a singular pattern, in particular the repeated tartan weave that is displayed here. The consolation of a pattern is that you don’t need to look at each unit – there are too many to take in – and they can go on forever.
In a linear frieze high up on the wall, thirty feet long, a row of small pieces of cardboard, each three inches square, are connected together by a single string, like flags or bunting. Each square is decorated with a one-cent US postage stamp. The string is threaded through the corrugated cardboard, not unlike the cable at the Apple Store that securitizes the sample phone, or the silver strip of metal that runs through banknotes, to impede forgery and give a tactile proof of value. The squares are covered in ‘interference paint’ that offers a different sheen and colour depending on the angle of vision, another security device used on banknotes. So this untitled artwork by Andrew Gonzalez is play money, maybe, another kind of game, and at the same time a formal proposition about how money works. Imagining these cardboard squares standing in for cash – after the apocalypse, perhaps? – we encounter the deep absurdity of our collective agreement to play along. Nevertheless, the one-cent stamps provide a jaunty vignette with natural connotations, a couple of apples on a branch, and when you add it up, the thirty-foot row of cardboard pieces may be nominally worth about seventy cents.
The chain of cardboard squares, lined up like a sheet of stamps or printed money, extends from the gallery’s office window to the edge of the exhibition space, and beyond. (In fact, the extra squares are piled up in the storage closet at the end of the wall.) Looking out the window of the gallery’s office onto West 27th Street, the building opposite shows a Greek Key frieze that performs the same decorative function: to connect and to distinguish, an architectural border that holds these forms together and apart.
Returning to the photograph of the beautiful woman and her beach ball, I remember the hand coming in from the right, giving her necessary support, at the very edge of the image. The certificate of debenture has a decorative boundary, marking out the space of value and interest. The architectural line of the cardboard frieze, like the edge of the certificate, invites us to see the gallery itself as a site where value is inscribed and transacted. The play of likeness and difference rocks back and forth: is the gallery like a certificate? Is a certificate like a gallery? What does an ornamental edge do for us?
Looking up, a large, unfolded sheet of paper hangs from the ceiling, with intaglio printed script and an enormous watermark of an eagle; it’s an American passport dated 1889, also from Tomasko’s collection. Embedded in the paper itself, the watermark is another security device disguised as decoration. On the wall, Donald Evans’s sheet of tartan stamps invokes traditional weaving, warp and weft, their embedded patterns denoting history and territory. In a more playful mode, the long string threaded through the cardboard squares is embedded too. Different visual strategies of validation and security accumulate, along with an awareness that art is another game of image-making, where forgery, authentication, and value are in play.
In the middle of the room sits Matt Mullican’s generator, a refunctioned found object, somewhere between an antique piece of scientific equipment, an old wooden vitrine, and a sculpture. The artist has removed the circular metal discs that once generated electrical sparks and now it’s a machine that only produces mental associations, something like a memory box or projection device. It stands on its four feet (two are missing and have been replaced with blocks), heavy with decorative form, yet it won’t lie still and be one thing or another. It keeps insisting that it’s something else.
And over here, paired with the generator, an almost life-size mannequin kneels on the floor, naked, leaning backwards on her hands, her head thrown back, her chest pressing upwards, her enormous breasts standing up in a fantastical imagining of gravity denied. Like most mannequins, she has joints where her limbs can be detached for the purposes of dressing and undressing. She is hard, and beige, and profoundly anatomically incorrect. Draped around her body and head in symmetrical lines, a harness made from pennies implies both weight and sound: like a heavy beaded dress – or chain mail – anyone wearing this would feel it. (People who know would recognize her as a type of display device, used in sex shops where she might show off particularly thrilling lingerie or accessories of one kind or another.) The artists, Mattie Rivkah Barringer and Amanda McGowan, are a collective called Women’s History Museum, whose work circulates around fashion, shoes, bodies, and desire. They punched holes in the pennies to create this garment. The pennies are grubby and tarnished; they’ve passed through many hands. Here they masquerade as sequins or costume jewellery, their light muted by grime. (It’s well known that a penny is more expensive to manufacture than its face value, and yet we go on making them.) The lines of pennies perform the same function as the decorative pattern of the architectural frieze across the street, the string of cardboard squares along the wall, drawing the eye to the different parts, bringing the totality together into a singular form. The mannequin is a support for the penny harness, or the harness is a support for her, and the suspenders that rest on her long thighs would hold up stockings – an excess element that’s left to our imagination. She’s a fiction, disembodied, impossible, despite her indelible presence.
On the opposite wall, there’s a found postcard that shows a black and white photograph of a woman whose body, by contrast, is almost entirely covered in drapery. The caption reads: ‘359. Scènes et Types. – Mauresque (Costume de Ville).’ The woman is from North Africa, and wears a white gathered skirt or ‘Turkish trousers’, her head and arms wrapped in fabric. Only her shoes, and her downcast eyes and eyebrows, are exposed. We recognize the postcard of the covered woman as a mass-produced image, designed to circulate internationally, one of a series (No. 359). In 1972, Donald Evans carefully copied this image to make a fictional postage stamp. Superimposed on the painted stamp is his postmark, activating the imaginary itinerary of the postcard. By gluing his handmade postage stamp onto the image side of the original postcard, we can compare them: a photograph of a woman who existed once, somewhere, and whose indexical trace remains in this picture, contrasted with the indexical trace of Evans’s fascination, the wet strokes of his tiny brush indicating a wish to copy, to get very close. Her details dissolve in the translation from photograph to postage stamp, a move that recalls the girl with the beach ball, an ontological shift out of history into something like allegory.
A zig zag energy, triangulating through the room, draws connections among and between the objects, one feminine body after another. The covered figure from the postcard joins the girl with the beach ball, the peasant women working in the field, the profile of Athena on the banknote, the heavy mannequin on the floor – an imaginary collective of silent women from different times and places, all asking, how does this work again?
And then the chorus of women starts to sing: If the decorative and the ornamental are always associated with the feminine, and the feminine is (therefore?) associated with deception, seduction, and surface – not even shallow – then how come it’s the allegorical feminine body that keeps reappearing on these notes and certificates? What kind of use value does the decorative feminine, the feminine decorative, have, for capitalism, for territory, for power? And when the woman can be seen as an individual (like the girl with the beach ball) does she drop out of allegory, into history? And is the sexy mannequin, robotic and stiff, an allegorical ideal too? What kind of validation, what kind of verification does she perform?
The singing continues: And when the stamp or the note is hand-made, a singular and romantic object, can it work to loosen the weave of the system – by insisting on our recognition of our own performance, our collective submission to the ornamental logic of security printing? And when the image is printed – when it’s an indexical trace of a process that implies an original object elsewhere, offstage, a scene or a surface or a support, a body, out of reach but real – when the image is printed, does it reach out a hand to link us up to that other place? Or does it break the chain of connection?
Their voices are raised: What are we leaning against? What are we propping up?
The women go on singing, asking their questions, and we keep looking.
Read on: Lola Seaton, ‘Trusting Art’, NLR 152.