Sometimes, the most powerful expressive act is to take something away.
This is a familiar idea to historians of twentieth century art, because of Robert Rauschenberg’s famous Erased DeKooning of 1953. A young artist’s gesture of insurrection against the previous generation, Rauschenberg’s work also draws on a long tradition of iconoclasm. The V&A’s British Galleries includes a fascinating display of objects defaced by early Protestants, who were taught to abhor ‘graven images.’ I’m a curator, so I guess I’m supposed to prize original condition. But I bet I’m not the only one who finds medieval stained glass or paintings like the ones below, in which the faces have been scratched out by fervent believers, to be more haunting and beautiful than intact examples ever could be.
Erasing can also be an important design process in its own right. Anyone who’s ever done a layout sketch in pencil, traced it in ink, and then erased the pencil underdrawing knows how this process can ‘snap’ an image into focus.
When faced with a graphic design, we’re usually not privy to these early stages of development. Fortunately, the V&A has drawings like the ones below, by the great poster designer E. McKnight Kauffer, which show the process at work. In the pencil sketch, you can see his first, second and third thoughts. But the final ink rendering (produced using tracing paper, not literal erasing) has an inevitable, almost mechanical quality produced through the elimination of such uncertainty.
Like many run-of-the-mill design processes, erasing has also been subject to conceptual experimentation in recent years. The ‘Erased Classic’ rug designs of German designer Jan Kath are a great example. They look almost like pencil drawings that have been rubbed out, or perhaps woven carpets in a state of advanced wear, which have had their colour leached out.
In fact they are woven by craftsmen based in Kathmandu, Nepal, and then treated with acid. Interestingly, according to my colleague Myriem Naji, what Kath is doing is only an exaggeration of what many craftspeople in Northern Africa and the Middle East do anyway. Because tourists and other buyers prefer old carpets, weavers bleach and distress their work when it’s brand new, not unlike the manufacturers of acid-wash jeans.
A final example in the V&A collection takes us back to the realms of fine art, but to an expressive register that is the direct opposite of Rauschenberg’s Oedipal act of defacement. Paraguayan artist Claudia Casarino makes drawings using a brush dipped only in water – no ink, no paint. Her subjects are drawn from intimate female experience (the one below shows, or rather doesn’t show, a woman shaving her own legs – another act of erasure). It’s a political work, certainly – a Feminist graphic equivalent to the silent marches of antiwar protestors. But Casarino has also found, in the nearly absent, a hidden terrain of self-expression. When you know what its barely perceptible traces represent, this blank sheet of paper seems filled with meaning.
