Rail: As you just said earlier, they are products of lines, as much as representations of the young female adolescent performing different gestures in multiplication. Does the reference to Paul Gauguin\u2019s painting\u00a0Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897\u201398) share a similar idea?\u00a0<\/p>\n
Ackermann: Yes, in the way that Gauguin\u2019s painting could be looked at as a storyboard. From right to left, time passes through life, from the infant to the elder woman. It reads like Hebrew or Japanese. I wonder if Tahitians read like Japanese? It\u2019s cool Gauguin painted the story from right to left in the opposite direction of his own culture. Could it be to hold our attention and to slow down the time of viewing? Or did he simply just want to become a Semitic, aboriginal rebel against his Parisian contemporaries?<\/p>\n
Rail: I think so too. Yet we think of the idea of seriality itself as a form of narration. Andy Warhol\u2019s\u00a0Shadows (1978\u201379), for instance: without the 102 screenprints of the same images painted in different colors, hung as an abutted installation, it wouldn\u2019t have this rather hypnotic, filmic, and narrative sequence. My question is: how would you describe your use of repetition in this new body of paintings, as a group of fourteen, in relation to your fascination with speed and the aesthetic of disappearance, both being Paul Virilio\u2019s lifelong meditation? In other words, I can see how the images get made visible in the buried part, or simply disappear then reemerge in different contexts. Once again, we spoke of this eternal return in de Kooning\u2019s paintings of the woman. Still, his deployment of speed is consistent in one or two gestures. We also see this in the work of Jackson Pollock and Robert Ryman, or in paintings by, say, Joe Bradley, Ann Craven, and Josh Smith, to name a few. But in your case, Rita, it\u2019s an anarchy of multiple gestures, moving slowly to a very fast pace.<\/p>\n
Ackermann: Back in Budapest I had a professor named P\u00e9ter Gy\u00f6rgy, who taught courses on Virilio. His theories about speed and the notion of time and their relation to history and violence resonated with me. In fact, when I came to New York, the only book I brought with me was Virilio\u2019s\u00a0The Aesthetics of Disappearance\u00a0in Hungarian. What fascinated me about Virilio is really that he was able to link together the fear and violence of stillness and the speed of technology and perpetual war\u2014even in his earlier book,\u00a0Bunker Archeology, which contains his photographs of the deteriorating German bunkers from WWII as monuments of the desire and fear of disappearance. I believe Virilio wrote the way he did because he was a multitasker doing a million things at once. He was a trained architect who started a magazine and built a chapel together with the famous French architect Claude Parent. He made the stained-glass windows in the chapel, then set out to photograph bunkers on the French coasts. He would refuse to be pinned down as a philosopher; he preferred the title \u201cthinker.\u201d To investigate the space between objects, he picked up drawings of still lifes inspired by Giorgio Morandi\u2019s paintings. His pencil line drawings focused on the negative spaces between objects and the way they would define the positive space.<\/p>\n
Rail: The same can be said of how the phenomenology of space treats the lived void and the physical object as an inseparable unity. We should mention that he had audited lectures given by Maurice Merleau-Ponty at the Sorbonne.<\/p>\n
Ackermann: Ahh\u2014anyway, Virilio introduced me to this way of thinking of running multiple tracks simultaneously, and you\u2019re investing in every single track with the same speed and energy and devotion and passion all at once. That\u2019s very present in\u00a0The Aesthetics of Disappearance. In other words, all these thoughts are running on parallel tracks. While you\u2019re reading it feels like an information grenade went off in your head. How will Howard Hughes\u2019s iconoclastic behavior come to make sense with bunker archeology, and how did the German fairytales relate to the first photo images? He\u2019s running so many different currents and ties them all together. It\u2019s such shocking mastery at the end. Maybe he inspired me to do things simultaneously.<\/p>\n
Rail: Virilio famously once said, \u201cWhen you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck. When you invent the plane, you also invent the plane crash.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Ackermann: There\u2019s no other way than the double. Reading Virilio\u2019s other books,\u00a0Open Sky\u00a0and\u00a0The Original Accident made me realize that it is inevitable not to crash in the acceleration that our comfort culture imposes on us. So might as well run a practice on multiple tracks. Never declare one thing as your \u201csignature brand,\u201d because that is going to turn on you and empty you out. So, I keep changing tracks and play the same song in different styles until it is unrecognizable, like Bob Dylan does. I admire artists who have the freedom to do so, like Richard Prince.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Rail: The gestures are letters from the Hebrew alphabets, which are then painted with charcoal board green in broad gestures over silk-screened images, taken from your drawing after Jean-Fran\u00e7ois Millet painting, which is then painted in different colors with different cropping, and so on. In addition to the mark making, what can you share with us about your impulse to erase painted and drawn images with various sizes of sponge?\u00a0<\/p>\n
Ackermann: Damn, it already sounds too complicated to explain the paintings of the alphabet. Maybe it\u2019s best not to elaborate on this simple method, but just to say I\u2019m combining different elements of my previous series. The concept behind chalkboard paintings is based on disappearance, layers, and layers of erasures. Meticulously drawn pictures being erased in a couple of hasty seconds. What made the whole thing interesting was how time stood still on the picture\u2014not to take it back to the film idea, but there was an entire animation film underneath that frozen, stretched image in its finished state.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Rail: Unlike Joseph Beuys\u2019s chalkboard drawings, which he used as a tool to articulate his ideas about freedom, education, and democracy, and often appeared as diagrams during his lectures or performances.<\/p>\n
Ackermann: Yes, it was not about the subject. It was something to do with the recordings of the movements and how things disappear; what remains is the becoming of the picture.<\/p>\n
Rail: I noticed the accumulation of repeated layers in the wiping process on the surface of each painting leads to different results in the alchemy of imagery. I was taken by the lower left portion of the painting\u00a0In the Valley of the Missing Link (2026), in which some kind of chemical oxidation that occurred in the washing and wiping process altered the screenprinted Millet image below. Would you feel the gesture that makes things disappear is the same gesture that makes us look at things that emerge?<\/p>\n
Ackermann: Yes, that sounds about right.<\/p>\n
Rail:\u00a0At times it looks like the glimpses of images that appear and disappear from a car\u2019s window wipers, both from the sliding streams of water outside from the pouring rain and the condensation on the inside of the windshield. It\u2019s an amazing perception of filmic interplay between negative and positive space, as you mentioned. The difference here is there are fourteen of them in a random order, identical in their vertical format, evoking time and timelessness simultaneously.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Ackerman:\u00a0We could say that their \u201cbecoming\u201d is visible. Their history is transparent. The concept of obscuring readability by transparent layerings of ballpoint pen drawings happened first in my ballpoint pen painting series.<\/p>\n
Rail:\u00a0Like\u00a0World War III Around My Skull\u00a0(1996\u201397), for example.<\/p>\n
Ackerman:\u00a0Yes. Some of Virilio\u2019s photos of bunkers showed up in those paintings to represent the art of disappearance. I wanted to see how images that were drawn up on the top of each other could lose their original figures and morph into something new. Each layer transformed itself and the picture below by adding to it and destroying it at once. You see, the idea of constructing a picture by making the images vanish on the surface has been a lasting interest for me to this day, even with this new group of chalkboard paintings. Over time the same ideas reoccur, and you find new ways to execute them.<\/p>\n
Rail:\u00a0In some ways, by controlling, or rather orchestrating different tempos, different speeds, different physical touches\u2014I mean, different ways to apply paint or pastels on the surface lying flat on the floor, or hung on the wall\u2014there appears these frictions between the huge and stable structures of the letters, the aggressive wiping gesture, the clusters of expressive marks, and the delicate, thin, fragile white chalk outlines of the young adolescent girls. Is there a big Rita and small Rita working together here?<\/p>\n
Ackermann: The goal is, like when two magnets oppose each other, to make that positive side of the magnet into a negative. Then they just click and all come together. That\u2019s the moment when you know painting knows more than we do, and you should trust that the intellect and the hand are both just instruments for the action to make it happen.<\/p>\n
Rail: It\u2019s a many Ritas ritual, I think. What are your thoughts on cave paintings?\u00a0<\/p>\n
Ackermann:\u00a0Cave paintings are ultramodern art in my opinion, bypassing Popism, Minimalism, and Conceptualism. The merit was the successful hunt and no extra bullshit of artist\u2019s ego or self-therapy, etc. All those factors eventually take art out of the picture. Cave paintings are good reminders to always ask the question before making an image: Why make it?<\/p>\n
Rail:\u00a0I think necessity is deeply related to our desire for freedom. This brings me to my next question: in Meyer Schapiro\u2019s classic 1969 essay,\u00a0\u201dOn Some Problems in the Semiotics of Visual Art: Field and Vehicle in Image-Signs,\u201d he refers to \u201cfields\u201d as an unbounded, unprepared, irregular surface, like the natural surface of the cave wall, depending on whatever segment of the wall the cave painter chose to paint. I don\u2019t think it\u2019s random, since many of us have seen the great Werner Herzog film\u00a0Cave of Forgotten Dreams. The idea of painting in a portable format was a later invention in human development.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Ackermann:\u00a0No frame, no background, no foreground. Everything is suspended, but exactly where it needs to be.<\/p>\n
Rail: I wonder if the painter was motivated by pleasure or anxiety? Anyway, the \u201cvehicle\u201d implies the use of material and binder\u2014be it animal fat, bone marrow, urine, saliva, or whatever pigment they can extract from plants and vegetables. Whereas \u201cimage-sign\u201d relates to both \u201cfield\u201d and \u201cvehicle\u201d insofar as they function as a structural carrier.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Ackermann:\u00a0Those cave paintings functioned as instrumental for survival. We don\u2019t exactly know how, but they outlined substances into modernism.<\/p>\n
Rail:\u00a0Do you feel the elemental, primal urge to make marks, to make images which may or may not correlate to graffiti art at all?\u00a0<\/p>\n
Ackermann:\u00a0Not at all. Tagging or street calligraphy can be cool, but I prefer to keep the infantile act of invincibility and destructive tendencies on canvas rather than risk life on the streets. Collage can also be a deconstructive act of cutting or tearing things up in order to create chaos, then you bring them to a coherent order. You remember we talked about Raymond Queneau, who wrote the book\u00a0Exercises in Style. It was made into a play in Budapest that I was obsessed with when I was a kid. It acts out a rather insignificant happening off a mundane afternoon in sixty different styles. Still today, I\u2019m doing that same act in seventy-seven different styles, approaching one thing from different angles in light of discovering something new. Painting isn\u2019t really my life; painting is a study of style.<\/p>\n
\u00a0 Rail:\u00a0Let\u2019s return a bit to\u00a0The Aesthetics of Disappearance. Virilio was talking about how our society\u2019s addiction to speed and technology can alter our consciousness and perception, and that with the acceleration of speed becoming so powerful, it would obliterate all the subtleties among our communication. These fourteen \u201dChemical Alphabet\u201d paintings were made with a mixed media that embraces both technical images (produced by screenprinting in different scales, different colors, different cropping and orientations), and made images (products of painting and drawing with acrylic paint, soft pastels, white chalk, and your new invented tool, the sponges of different sizes and textures). Can you share with us the impulse that lies behind them?<\/p>\n
Ackermann: It is curiosity rather than impulse that led me to experiment with combining elements of previous works to get to something new that holds my interest. I had to find a compositional core to provide the structure\u00a0within each picture. The block-style letters of the Hebrew alphabet become the anchors of each canvas to sustain the green field for the chalkboard method, through which blows the destruction of a \u201ctornado of pastels and chalks.\u201d There is always stillness before the storm. Studying the AlephBet through these paintings, I came to understand that a letter doesn\u2019t symbolize a fixed meaning. It can hold two opposing forces, and in the same moment when you try to define its meaning, it contradicts itself.<\/p>\n
Rail:\u00a0When did the images of Millet\u2019s painting first appear, and does its specific use in this series function any differently than it did in the past?<\/p>\n
Ackermann: I don\u2019t have a good enough explanation why and when the drawings that I made after Millet\u2019s paintings became enlarged screenprints. His figures radiate humility in a way you want to make them your own. My favorite is the shepherd girl character whom he painted with the flocks of sheep. They strike me as modern, puritan, Minimalist paintings, with their restrained palette depicting peasants holding themselves with dignity, working on the fields with their heads down.<\/p>\n
Rail:\u00a0Without the trappings of social realism\u2019s melodrama.<\/p>\n
Ackermann:\u00a0Exactly. By obscuring the human faces and always painting them in shadow, we\u2019re directed to look towards their bodies in action in the environments of rural nature. Simple humans, not gods.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Rail: Which was why he was admired by Vincent van Gogh.<\/p>\n
Ackermann: And Honor\u00e9 Daumier.<\/p>\n
Rail:\u00a0The Sower (1888),\u00a0Noon: Rest from Work (1890) are among many paintings that van Gogh had painted in the manner of or in translation after Millet.<\/p>\n
Ackermann:\u00a0Yes, van Gogh adopted them into his own best works! How amazingly generous is that?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Rail: As you just said earlier, they are products of lines, as much as representations of the young…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":362631,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[1149,3458,3457,3459,3456,2878,98,3461,3462,100,99,3455,17,1117,3465,749,2538,9,3463,24,63,3460,3464,905],"class_list":["post-362630","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brooklyn","tag-art","tag-art-books","tag-art-critic","tag-art-reviews","tag-artists","tag-books","tag-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn-art","tag-brooklyn-culture","tag-brooklyn-headlines","tag-brooklyn-news","tag-contemporary-art","tag-culture","tag-dance","tag-fiction","tag-film","tag-music","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-art-scene","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-phong-bui","tag-poetry","tag-theater"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/362630","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=362630"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/362630\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/362631"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=362630"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=362630"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=362630"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}