Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled, 1985, cut-and-pasted paper and oilstick on paper, Museum of Modern Art, New York © The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Image: Museum of Modern Art/Scala, Florence
It is unclear how much of the work’s surface has been reworked and superseded by new grafti, however this question is the driving force behind Stingel’s multi-layered process of creation that complicates traditional ideas of authorship. As each individual creates a new gesture, aggregate in rich layers of expression, each mark loses its unique identity and becomes absorbed into a collective mass. The artist explained, ‘I hadn’t planned on this reaction. This abstract shell appeared to be perfect in a provocative way and apparently invited [each individual] to manifest [his impulse]. Numerous motives appear to have led to this behaviour; the neutrality of the installation paired with the anonymity of the visitors certainly plays a role. I wouldn’t know where to say intervention stops and destruction begins’ (Rudolf Stingel, quoted in Reiner Zettl, ‘The Trickster’, in Francesco Bonami, Rudolf Stingel, Chicago, 2007, p. 35). Casting Untitled in gold, Stingel transports the spoiled, incised and scribbled surface of the museum walls into an item of elaborate opulence, disrupting our preconceived expectations of this precious valuable medium. Emulating the efect of gold leaf used to adorn Byzantine mosaics or icon paintings, the work metamorphoses into a modern altar piece and site of devotion. The artist uses the precious material to encase the
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Celotax, completely disrupting the malleable and tactile properties of the original medium, toying with the spectator’s sensory associations. Similarly the present work invokes the aesthetic of religious grafti on church walls such as that as seen in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem. Stingel has previously adopted religious subjects within his work, such as his compilation of black and white paintings of statues of saints which he debuted at Paula Cooper Gallery in New York in 2009. An object of adoration, the present work displays an articulation of the public’s discourse, presenting us, the collective, as the deity to be worshipped. In Untitled, the visual syntax of the public is transfgured into grafti, its abject appearance transported from an arena, whereby the act of drawing on the walls is permitted, to the picture plane of an individual artwork. Allowing the public to deface the walls of the respective galleries, Stingel created a space where the forbidden is suddenly possible, creating an opportunistic outburst of visual signs and signifers. At the same time, the mark making by the public may also be afected by the possible taboo nature of the drawing act, therefore creating areas of tapered and controlled grafti which are equally valuable to our nuanced understanding of the public’s relationship to hierarchical structures, our collective sense of rules and high art.
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