The Pleasure of Erasure

John Hilliard March 1996

Their picturesque vistas screened by a hail of unruly streaks and blotches, the battered, splattered and beaten canvases of Constable’s large, late oil sketches from the 1830s (A River Scene, with Farmhouse Near the Water’s Edge; Cottage at East Bergholt) crackle with an energy far less ardently exhibited in their more pacific, more finished counterparts. In a series of paintings of lions and tourists (1975), Gerhard Richter chooses to obscure those very objects from our hopelessly searching gaze, both vexing and intriguing us, the anarchy of a muddied camouflage of pigment more challenging, finally, than the soft-focus, photo-real perfection of other works from within his extensive oeuvre of shifting styles. And Rauschenberg’s Erased De Kooning Drawing (1953) seems more austerely purged even than his own white monochromes, yet remains as spikily, angrily and indelibly inscribed into the distressed paper as any other work styled with the signature of the Dutch-American donor. In all these cases, an unimpeded gaze is not merely refused but redirected to another site – that of the obstruction itself. The attack on the image is also an endorsement of the instrument of destruction (the very medium or tool normally employed to fashion that image now turned against it, boldly asserting instead its own presence, yet in so doing re-inflecting the original subject from a re-positioned perspective). In music, Jimi Hendrix’s feedback is both raucous cacophony and fluent articulation of sound, his inspired rendering

Oil on canvas

190 × 230 cm | 74¾ × 90½ in

Erased De Kooning Drawing 1953

Traces of drawing media on paper with label and gilded frame

64.1 × 55.3 cm | 25¼ × 21¾ in of the Star-Spangled Banner (1969) ambivalently abusive and celebratory. In writing, William Burroughs’s cut-up texts are destructive yet productive, Doctor Benway’s antics in The Naked Lunch (1959) driven to even greater extremes by the bizarre verbal juxtapositions conjured out of this chance technique. In cinema, the chain of nuclear bursts that ends Stanley Kubrick’s Doctor Strangelove (1964) is both awful and awesome, annihilating and exhilerating, each at its blinding vertex cancelling the film and everything else, yet impacting upon us in an explosion of aesthetic pleasure.

If the cathartic excitement of controlled violence constitutes one dimension of the spectator’s perverse fascination for such creative acts, obliteration is also enjoyed as a purgative, annihilation as a cleansing, a purification. The image may be razed or erased to attain such purity, but it may equally be screened, obstructed or blockaded in a defiant act of refusal, obscured by a white noise of impenetrability or a blank wall of silence.

Such draining, reducing and veiling recurrently features throughout my own previous work, the evident symptom of an incurable discomfort with that very means that is also the medium of choice. Light both illuminates and extinguishes the instrument recording the timed increments in Sixty Seconds Of Light (1970; pp.40–41), the bleached over-exposure of the final image being increased to its zenith in the vacant squares of White Expanse (1974; pp.78–79) or reduced to its nadir in Black Depths (1974; pp.80–81) – blanks signifying nothing without the dubious assistance of a peripheral caption. And so on – excesses of contrast and exposure, fogs of unfocused uncertainty, mobility blurred into oblivion, all in turn collude in a rebuttal of the aspiring transparency of photography.

This ostensive transparence, cuing the uncritical acceptance of photography’s ‘window’ into an unmediated reality, is observable as a present convenience within contemporary art, feeding a straightforward quick-fix documentary need, or satisfying the quest for a ‘new objectivity’, in amnesiac disregard for the deconstructive attentions of the 1970s. Perhaps in reaction to such re-grouping, and doubtless as confirmation of a personal reluctance to concede an easily secured image, the litany of obstructions continues.

These purgative measures can also be seen as a corrective to a perceived deficiency in a body of my own work from the 1990s – triple exposures from the same viewpoint, each successive shot differentiated merely by selective re-focusing. In spite of ensuing layers of unsharpness, these pieces open up the appearance of a deep space whose imaginary recesses give encouragement to their narrative and pictorial tendencies. The apogee of this practice is registered by the aptly titled Wrong (1992; p.94), whose overlays of