Visual artist and composer
This project stems from Robert Rauschenberg’s 1953 work entitled Erased de Kooning Drawing, in which the artist entirely erased a drawing by the famous painter Willem de Kooning.
This iconoclastic gesture, which marked art history, is certainly a provocation. However, in art as in life, provocation often calls for retaliation. Such is the form taken by this project: a retaliation, attempting to throw back at Rauschenberg’s work the full extent of its audacity, by re-appropriating it as it once re-appropriated De Kooning’s sketch.
Here, a reproduction of Rauschenberg’s work was printed, then framed, respecting the original dimensions. During the printing process, electro-magnetic sounds produced by the printer were recorded in order to be played back through six speakers near the reproduction. If Rauschenberg’s proposal highlighted the processes of erasing and disappearing, it is subverted here in order to emphasize processes of writing and appearing. This new version, as an auditory interpretation of Rauschenberg’s work, displaces its focal point, oscillating between visual absence and auditory presence.
The creation of this work was made possible thanks to the collaboration of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.