The Reversed Icons of Martin Heine

 

 Art is a Lie, but now Artists have become Liars too.

Martin Heine.

 

—the experience of modernist autonomy and of its cultural sphere projects a very different historical stereotype on the mind’s eye than that litter of postmodernist artifacts which one thinks of rather like a junk pile of video cassettes, or those older “pictures” or “representations” of the reality of the  realist moment either. . . 

Yet this autonomy of high modernism is in reality, as we have warned, more strictly speaking a semi–autonomy, culture herein taking on the appearance of Hegel’s ‘inverted world,’ which floats above this one and reflects it upside down—a space in which the Utopian negation by art of this world and of the socially and materially existent can equally well be seen as the futile and idealistic caricature of a complacent bourgeois aesthetic resigned to its constitutive exclusion from praxis and worldly action (as well as from epistemological authority).

Fredric Jameson.[1]

 

Now, in a gallery far, far away, these icons have a presence that painting never achieved. They clot across the retina, as grease tangles matted hair. Like a filthy back street wall, covered with posters and graffiti, they resist ordered vision. They offer no surface, no depth, no solid, no void, merely the universal density of life. Even so, a residue, a precipitate of shadows, forms and voids, rotates slowly within each icon, like the corpses caught in Dante’s infernal lake.

 The forms embedded there began as pornographic photos, mined from the Internet. The titles of the Caravaggio series are the jpeg numbers of each long vanished original. The distanced, banal logic of pornography evaporated through a rigorous alchemical process, leaving a condensate of curiousity, glowing desire, diffused throughout the work and, ultimately the entire material world.

 Traces of this change accumulated slowly. Cracks, black lines, oddly shaped patches of brilliant colour, whose edges leak into the surrounding substance like ink stains on carpet, a woven pinpoint texture, present a galactic history, an infinity of incidents and processes. Besides galaxies, viewers ‘see’ all kinds of images from butterflies to mountains in the work.

In 11a/Jpeg for instance - click here X - it is as if moulds or chemical patina had encrusted the work with explosions of mineral brown and yellow. One half–intuits a limb or a glass, in its flickering net of black lines, but it is the process itself that lives in the mind’s eye.

In another icon, a fragile cluster of crushed yellow forms, like dying petals, fills the centre of the work. Their jpeg showed a set-up of legs, kneeling in submission. Now this contrived sadism has evaporated, to leave a landscape wrecked by the waves of mass solicitude around it. Elsewhere, fugitive faces roll through powdered red and black

These are icons from an upside-down continent, symptoms of resistance to an alien artistic condition, the cynical disenchantment of contemporary art. For the past 17 years Martin Heine has lived here in Perth, Western Australia, though he has exhibited and performed in galleries as far apart as New York and Manila. Australia, where everything is ‘upside down’, gave him a unique perspective on recent times when artists everywhere became liars, cynics with a good conscience, whose lifework is to be one more commodity in the Hegelian cultural supermarket.

Picasso’s conviction that ‘art is the lie which tells the truth’ assumed that art existed, as an autonomous practice, from a position of critical revelation for artist and viewer alike, but without direct social consequence.

Now that successful artists, like everyone, are liars, disciplined for the market, their works dare not even whisper freedom. Bad faith is an article of faith. Richter considers himself merely a ‘bourgeois painter’.

The ‘paintings’ to  be seen here trace Heine’s response. They are his attempt to transcend the limits of high modernist ‘autonomy’ without cynicism, to reaffirm its ‘heretical’ humanist imperative, despite decades of ever more efficient affirmative culture.

Heine calls them Reversed Icons, however, unlike every artist and writer for centuries past, he will not hold a mirror up to nature. Heine’s reversal has nothing to do with reflection. Jameson, amongst others, has made clear that nature vanished long ago into the system of commodities. Any art that relies, however discretely, on an idea of nature is doomed to the banality of the market.[2]

In painting, the vestigial remains of the picture plane always indicate the persistence of a foundation dichotomy between art and nature and the reflective semi–autonomy, the un–freedom that this imposes.

This is clear with Monet, Picasso or Hans Hoffman for whom nature was still a possibility and for Stella, for whom the approaching demise of nature was infinitely traumatic. It is also true, however, that the one persistent aspect of Richter’s work is his lifelong romance with the picture plane. Since nature has long since evaporated, Richter must be ‘economical with the truth’; he must abjure freedom or cease to paint.

In his Reversed Icons, Heine has, for the first time, abolished the picture plane and, consequently, recovered the full autonomy of art. His ambition is to reverse the very being of contemporary art, to turn it inside out, physically and as an aspect of cultural praxis, to return art to the real, to its full existential presence and the possibility of liberation. He aims for what Jameson calls the ‘deconcealment of reality’, a process of decontamination—disinfestation, rather than a utopian reflection of the real.[3]

These images, which persist in the gallery, solid as rock, impenetrable as the knotty tapestries for which they are often mistaken, are his first small step. The ‘upside down’ Australian art scene has pushed him to this effort.

For non-indigenous artists, the contemporary scene is always a tabula rasa, an empty catwalk, in wait for the latest overseas fashion. Art here is double–crossed by its unique, contradictory history. This over–determination forces contemporary artists to manifest dependence, an abject submission to arbitrary external authority, in every work. It is unlikely that any ‘white’ painter has ever ‘seen’ the Australian landscape except as mandated by European culture.[4] In Australia there is no organic history of vision here, nature had become the Lacanian ‘Other’ long before the market absorbed it.

Heine, an ex-Berlin punk, began with exercises in hyper banality aimed to recover the ‘Serious Shit’ of art.[5], In the absence of nature however, excess does not produce the desired utopian contradiction, it merely aggravates dependence.[6] Heine next looked to his memories of Beuys turning culture inside out by recovering nature as entirely human. Even so, he took the substance of his work, its material culture and predicaments, directly from the most banal of Western Australian realities.

Early each summer billions of flies hatch and travel down the west coast. They follow the sun in massive waves. Almost every house is fitted with fly screens on doors and windows. A tough but transparent gauze-like metal or plastic mesh bars their entry but allows the movement of air from the brilliant white-hot furnace of ‘nature’ to a cool dark interior.

The screen in Australian culture provides multiple material metaphors, all concerned with the duality of nature and the human, private and public, nature as the other. It can also act as a version of the picture plane, whose resistant ‘materiality’ cannot be distilled away by perspective. It sticks all over the eye.[7]

As Heine watched the passing cars through his flyscreen, it occurred to him that their images could stick in the mesh, to fuse with it in an intractable substance. His first fly screen painting was small, the image of a fly painted directly on the screen. This little joke would lead to the downfall of the picture plane.

 Next he produced the Biedermeier Wall. He obtained fly screens damaged during burglaries from a local insurance company. Then he floated liquid oil paint on the surface of a tank of water. He trawled the screens through the tank to catch the paint on the mesh to produce a dispersed ‘painting’ that made no reference to a picture plane since the substance of the painting flowed through it on both sides. It also evoked a dense dispersed vision in which solid and void do not exist. This vision traps all forms in a uniform material substance, like fossils in rock.  

 He then screen-printed highly coloured, hard edge images from suburban interiors over the paint. The torn screens with their broken frames, were evidence of the initial violation of a once secure suburban space. This undermined the deceptively crisp, fragile, silhouettes. Their self-confident outlines could barely hold their place in the new dispersed vision.

 Biedermeier utopias are constantly besieged. Physical and social realities will break in, moth and rust will corrupt, the mirror will crack from side to side. It became clear that Beuys was correct, art could only find freedom by existing as material in the material world, not as a utopian reflection of it.

 To achieve this required a sensual, revitalised, vision, with no vanishing point, the ‘forensic’ vision of the blind, more akin to touch, as it trawls like the finest of nets through the entire visual field. The flyscreen was the perfect embodiment of such a vision.

 It also enabled Heine to find a way to paint on both sides of the support at once, to render them simultaneously present in the material world, thereby abolishing the picture plane. 

 One recalls Ernst’s dictum that the surrealist painter works with one eye looking out and the other looking into his skull, to his subjective conscious—a good definition of any artist who wishes to overcome the picture plane by surrounding it. 

Despite his experiments with ‘reversal’, Ernst the image-maker remained shackled to the picture plane. Rauschenberg, whose silkscreen paintings also prefigure Heine’s Reversed Icons, wanted to act ‘in the gap between Art and Life,’ a gap which he could never close. [8]

 For Heine there can be no such gap.

 Life and art must coincide as the same solid substance.

 He began to work by pushing solid pigment through from the ‘back’ of the screen to build up an image on the other side. Thus the image on the ‘front’ of the support is always a reversal of the image on which he worked but there is no gap since both images coexist in the same dense sensual material.

For his medium, Heine chose elements extracted from a domestic gap sealer often used to fill cracks in window frames, which he then combined with liquid pigments to achieve a smooth and fleshy consistency. He describes the medium — ‘it’s creamy, one pushes softly, it’s very sensual, very sexy, like working in the kitchen with cream—the medium is the exact material equivalent of Heine’s diffuse sensual incarnate vision, the substance of vision as it circulates through the image, as ‘flesh through the mesh—I reach the point where it becomes unchangeable. I let it dry, then, I look at the front’.

Once set, the medium becomes diamond hard, a stone tapestry in which the image is locked like a fossil in rock. Heine then covers the front of the image entirely with black paint—to make it totally dark. He slowly removes the black paint until he feels he cannot go on—‘you see this open thing that you identify with and you think I don’t want to go further. This unique forensic discovery, redirects Heine’s diffuse vision as a form of archaeology, a vision that springs from the ‘embeddedness’ of all things.

Heine attributes his realisation of this method, in part, to his many years’ work as a silkscreen printer, which required constant accommodation for images seen in reverse, from the back, in photo-negatives and in the screens themselves.

His first Reversed Icons were images drawn from the vocabulary of banal provincial, woodcuts drawn from peasant proverbs and fantastic bestiaries. Soon, however, he began to work with pornographic images that he found on the internet.

He begins by manipulating each image in digital form. He undertakes a process of stripping back, decontamination that leaves only a pattern of black and white lines that occasionally evoke an early German woodcut. This is the first step towards the rematerialisation of the image, the decontamination of the real.

Heine copies this, much enlarged, on the back of a flyscreen. He undertakes the reverse ‘painting’, so that the image is reconstituted as an element of this world, material, substantial, timeless. This is not a process of abstraction from reality so as to reveal the corpse of an ideal. It is, rather, an attempt to put living flesh, so to speak, on the bare bones of the pornographic image.

 Heine chose pornographic images, because they attempt an infinite delay. There is never an end to them, they invoke streaming desire, a bottomless curiousity, the probing, poking eye will always find something new.[9] He chooses specific pornographic images, because they suggest—‘an intense uneasiness, not a rape, but something that is close to a rape situation, forbidden and sinister’.

 His choice is not about the banal commodification of sex; any routine hard-core image could do that. Sinister images are transgressive. They contain dissonant excess. Heine finds the same sinister transgression in Caravaggio, the stripping down of banal religious imagery via an excessive realism so that the relation of these myths to the material life of his subjects is plain to see.

Heine’s series has nothing to do with Caravaggio except that their work shares an immediate presence. He too wants to know how it feels to be ‘in the painting’. He fantasises that he could disappear into a painting one-day, and then have someone ‘buy’ him.

 Pornography remains the only commodity, the last ‘public’ imagery held in common, with a capacity for excess. In his Reversed Icons, Heine is able to tap the energy of this excess so as to strip away the commodification of image and body, to re–engage his obsession with the authentic. Any other subject matter would be far more intractable. In any case if Heine succeeds with pornography then he can overcome commodification anywhere, however efficient. 

 Amongst others, Hardt and Negri have suggested that , ‘the ‘modern dialectic of inside and outside has been replaced by a play of degrees and intensities, of hybridity and artificiality’.[10] Machine made nature and machine made culture immerse all experience in an indifferent homogenous medium. This poses a crisis for contemporary artists who are necessarily concerned with difference that has largely gone unnoticed.

 Heine’s abolition of the picture plane is the first clear recognition of this dilemma and its consequences for an art of liberation. One may hope for the return of an uncontaminated representation, for renewed baroque vision, the pure joy of the eye, but it is hard to imagine the form such an autonomous art of the real might take in this artificial universe. In the meantime, these icons from far away present a glimpse of what is possible—‘that thing we call nature without mimesis–which defines us as human beings’.

 As I finish this, Heine has just completed his latest performance—Mediocre Shunga (Use Your Head)—in which he painted the canvas-draped walls of the Kurb Gallery with his head, covered by a mop. There was a silent witness to this intensely physical struggle for immediacy between body and painting, the ultimate attempt to close the gap between life and art. Heine’s ‘Friendly Little Watercolour’ a view of the Queensland bush, painted when he first came to Australia, watched on from the corner of the room. It was a souvenir of the time when he too believed in nature and in art as a mirror of reality.

David Bromfield

East Perth

Western Australia

August 28, 2004