Collection Study
Rosemarie Trockel, Oh Mystery Girl 3, 2006

Text by Matthew McLean
January 2016

Oh Mystery Girl 3 is a collage made in 2006 by German artist Rosemarie Trockel (b.1952, Schwerte, Germany). It is composed of mixed media and includes two silver discs reflecting distorted skulls, and two flesh-coloured pink ears. The work measures 67.5 x 57 x 3.8 cm.

Based in Cologne, Trockel’s work has been highly influential since the 1970s, working with collage, sculpture, painting, video and performance to address feminism, female identity, sexuality and the human body.

The work was first exhibited at Albion Gallery, London, in 2007 as part of a duo exhibition RO’MA with the artist Marcus Lüpertz. It was acquired from Albion Gallery for the David Roberts Collection, London.

It has since been loaned to a large number of exhibitions, including Rosemarie Trockel: Deliquescence of the Mother at Kunsthalle Zurich (2010), Flagrant Delight at WIELS, Brussels (2012), travelling to Culturegest, Lisbon (2012) and Museion, Bozen (2013). It was included in Le Musée de la Nuit at the Fondation Hippocrène, Paris, in 2014; DRAF’s first exhibition outside the UK.

Trockel has selected four additional works for this exhibition, which are on loan courtesy of Sprüth Magers. Untitled (2004) is a digital pigment print on Epson paper. Solitude (2011) is a mixed media work. Training (2011) and Training 2 (2012) are sculptures cast in acrystal.

Study

‘‘…[I]t may be surprising to find, at the end of several readings”, Elvan Zabunyan writes in a 2013 catalogue of Rosemarie Trockel’s collages, “explicit reservations about the possibility of invoking a “gender” option when Trockel’s work is mentioned”.¹ To my eyes, the feminine is everywhere and nowhere in Oh Mystery Girl 3 – like a title: technically external to the work, but determining every scrap of it.

¹ Elvan Zabunyan, ‘Upside Down’ in Dirk Snauwaert (ed.), Rosemarie Trockel: Flagrant Delight (exh. cat.), Brussels and Paris, 2013, p.152

Perhaps because of the presence of two rubbery ears to the work’s centre-left, when I read the words of its title, I imagine them aurally. Surely, with that interjection ‘Oh’, they must be lyrics from a song? More specifically – and perhaps because a severed ear famously plays a role in the plot of David Lynch’s 1986 Blue Velvet – lyrics from a mid-century crooner’s song of longing, something by Bobby Vinton or Bobby Darrin. When I enter the words into a search engine, no obvious pop lyrical source for the title appears. When I shuffle and reassemble the search terms, still the best result I can find is a question posted on a forum: “Mystery girl (what is the name of this song?)”. A commenter responds that the song in question is in fact Promiscuous Girl (2006) by the singer Nelly Furtado.

Mystery Girl / Promiscuous Girl. The elision brings into relief what Trockel’s collage has been reminding me of from the start: a medical propaganda poster, disseminated by the British government during the Second World War to warn soldiers of venereal disease. In the poster, a skull rendered with gothic relish wears a hat tilted at an alluring angle, a tropical lily perched atop it. Glancing between the two images, the pink of the artificial ears in the Trockel collage begins to acquire some of the decorative quality of the poster’s corsage – each one appears to be positioned just-so.

From the skull on the poster’s hat hangs a hot pink veil: is she dolled up to attend a wedding, or a funeral? Either way, she invites the reader to come along, the words across the poster read: Hey Boy Friend Coming My Way? Even if the original message (warning the reader of the ‘easy’ girlfriend’s syphilis and gonorrhea) has been erased under grey paint, as with the copy in the National Archives, the message is legible: that under the pink is grey bone – that the mystery girl is a promiscuous girl, is a diseased girl, and for any man spells death. “For a whore is a deep ditch; and a strange woman is a narrow pit” (Proverbs, 23:27). I first read that quotation in the last chapter of Andrea Dworkin’s Intercourse (1986), whose title – ‘Dirt/Death’ – might just as well apply to the poster.

Trockel maps a complex of deeply ingrained cultural beliefs, affinities and identifications, making their terminus grimly explicit – Oh Mystery Girl 3 re-traces the implicit equation of woman, sex and death and reflects that unconscious projection back (as through a glass, darkly). To underscore the fact that an act of reflection is going on, two discs appear within the work framing each skull – to explain the doubling of the skulls and their inverted positions these must be read as mirrors. Indeed, together, they even suggest the two halves of a woman’s compact, a discreet mirror for applying cosmetics. ‘Vanity’ is still a term for a mirror electrically lit for optimum application of make-up. An 1892 illustration by Charles Allan Gilbert made popular as a print in LIFE depicts a woman at her dressing table, in front of a large mirror; re-focus your eyes and the composition becomes a looming skull. The work is called All is Vanity.

I speak of the forms in Trockel’s work as “skulls”, but they are not straightforwardly identifiable, despite their exposed teeth, and empty sockets. They are blurred, twisted things – as if a finger had got inside each one, and then smeared it across the page. In this way, they resemble the faces of figures in certain paintings by Francis Bacon, whose own portrait features in another Trockel collage, Nobody Will Survive 2 (2008). Moreover, they evoke another skull – perhaps the most famous in the canon of Western art – which lies diagonally across the foreground of Holbein’s Jean de Deintville and Georges de Selve (‘The Ambassadors’) from 1553, like a slash made into the canvas. Holbein’s distortion is anamorphic: that is, distorted to the ‘naked eye’, requiring further action to be brought back into regular form. Stand at an acute angle to the canvas – or indeed, hold a mirror against it – and the skull is rendered forth vivid, almost solid. “Thus the image is constructed according to two perspectival systems” write Oskar Bätschmann and Pascal Griener: that of things, and that of death, which “coexist in one painting but are at the same time mutually exclusive: to comprehend fully one of them the viewer has to lose sight of the other.”² For portraitists of Holbein’s era, Bätschmann and Griener argue, capturing a physical likeness in a moment in time inevitably drew attention to “the secret, gradual work of Death on the living body”. ³ Including a skull in a composition was one way to instantiate a memento mori inside the portrait, unfinished-ness was another. Bätschmann and Griener quote a 1538 text on Death by Jean de Vauzelles: “Death, fearing that this excellent painter could paint her so alive that she would not be feared any longer…shortened his days to such an extent that he could not finish many other figures designed by him” (note that death here too is women’s work).⁴ Trockel’s collages are often read as makeshift, interim, provisional as Brigid Doherty emphasises, their elements are not pasted permanently in place, but more loosely affixed by metal staples, and the recirculation of imagery and elements across differing iterations also implies that, on some level, each collage is a temporary constellation of elements which, whether or not any individual one is actually re-worked, is open in some more profound sense to reconfiguration.⁵

³ Oskar Bätschmann and Pascal Griener, Hans Holbein, London, Reaktion Books, 1997, p.188
⁴ Ibid. p.151
⁵ Quoted in Ibid, p.153

If the form isn’t fixed in Trockel’s collages, neither is meaning secured. For all the looking glasses present and alluded to in Oh Mystery Girl 3, Trockel’s work doesn’t come with a mirror – there is no device to bring it sharply into focus like Holbein’s skull, revealing its ‘secret’. Despite – and indeed because of – this refusal to be revealed as one thing or the other, Trockel’s work does, like Holbein’s, demand a shift in perspective. Viewed from one angle, Oh Mystery Girl 3 appears the product of a chain of equation that links femininity, sex, disease and demise – yet from another perspective, all the elements shift and the focus changes. If within the “discursive construct of sex/gender” in the WWII poster “it is simply not possible to imagine the ‘easy boyfriend’ causing women to become blind, mad, paralysed or dead” as one scholar notes, is that not at least a perverse kind of power?⁶ Isn’t that “an assault on a viewer assumed to be male and an award to his fantasies of their worst fears”?⁷

⁶ Tamsin Wilton, EnGendering AIDS: Deconstructing Sex, Text and Epidemic, London, 1997, p.62
⁷ Rosalind Krauss, Bachelors, Boston 2000, p.19

Doesn’t that make woman something less, but also something rather more than human? That is the question that emerges when lingering over the skulls from this other perspective, as they seem to acquire an inhuman lustre. They remind me of the ersatz Aztec skull carved in quartz in the British Museum, but rather than handcrafted have an almost robotic quality. The merging of subject and technology is familiar terrain for Trockel: from her 1990 Painting Machine to even her technique of stapling, which Doherty describes as “the body become mechanical”. ⁸ Already dead – or never alive? – Trockel’s skulls are invulnerable, fleshless, and thus impervious to wounding, even to touching. There is a mordant enjoyment to them, a ghastly kind of delight in their toothy grins. Flagrant Delight was the title of Trockel’s 2012-13 quasi-retrospective whose catalogue was dedicated to her collages; the words are both the literal translation of a term for coitus but also, perhaps, indicate the pleasure apparent in the making of this series – the relish as the pink ears are laid atop the image, like a garnish on a plate of meat.⁹

⁸ Brigid Doherty, ‘She Is Dead: The Disfiguration of Origins in Rosemarie Trockel’s Collages’, in Dirk Snauwaert (ed.), Rosemarie Trockel: Flagrant Delight (exh. cat.), Brussels and Paris, 2013, p.137
⁹ At Wiels (Brussels), Culturgest (Lisbon) and Museion (Bolzano)

The ungraspable blurs of these skulls, then, are signals of the deeply ambivalent, infinitely elusive, quality of Trockel’s thinking; they are tokens of refusal. Like Holbein, she insists on the coexistence of the mutually exclusive.

The epitaph on Duchamp’s tomb reads: “D’ailleurs, c’est toujours les autres qui meurent”

“After all, it’s always the others who die”. To describe death means not to have experienced it.

For Trockel, it’s as if all experience is afflicted with this either/or condition – if you think you’ve experienced it, you haven’t really experienced it; if you think you get it, you haven’t really got it; and like the skulls – if you think you see it, you haven’t really seen it. Success is really a kind of failure: “The minute something works”, Trockel once told an interviewer “it ceases to be interesting. As soon as you have spelled something out, you should set it aside”.¹⁰

¹⁰ ‘Rosemarie Trockel talks to Isabelle Graw’, Artforum 41:7, March 2003

For Trockel, this seems nowhere truer than in the field of the visual. “Trockel’s is a deadpan imagining of disappearance as a precondition for seeing anything”, says Doherty, with an opaqueness that’s fitting. Dotted throughout Trockel’s oeuvre are images that seem to predicate seeing on disappearance, that play on looking as a business of frustration. There are the images in which a figure’s sight is occluded. The Bacon lookalike in Nobody Will Survive 2 has his face obscured with a single, jet black blob which recalls more a mannequin’s nipple than an eyeball. The series of works whose titles all share the phrase ‘Living means’, in which life-sized photographs of prostrate female figures lie face-down on the floor, surrounded by ephemera, but unreadable, so that while it’s implied they are looking at something, the viewer cannot see what they are seeing, cannot see them in the act of seeing. Untitled (2004), also displayed at DRAF, enacts the same frustration, with the subject’s face buried in a shiny metallic surface which reflects nothing back, like the 2012 ceramic O-Sculpture (its title and its blocked circular form might offer a way to read the ‘Oh’ of the collage’s title), which superficially resembles a mirror but offers the viewer “a blank stare”, evoking “the experience of gazing upon the mute faces of walls”.¹¹

¹¹ Gregory H. Williams, ‘Blocked Access: Rosemarie Trockel’s Recent Ceramic Works’, Parkett 95, 2014, p.95

This latter tendency among Trockel’s works to promise a scene to be looked at but instead render only a barrier includes several collages: Duration (2008), a window covered by shutters; Solitude (2011), also on display at DRAF, in which the picture space appears barred by wooden planks; or, from the same year, The Origin of the World, in which the plane is occupied by a similarly deadening wire pattern, resembling a underside of a cheap bedstead. In its repeated wave pattern, the object also recalls the repetition loops of Trockel’s famous textile works – the so-called ‘woollen paintings’ – which too invite looking only to exhaust it, their form of abstraction utterly void of gesture, touch, incident. All these works invite looking, but offer the eye nothing to attach itself to, no place to come to rest. So that while the work may be visible, it can hardly be seen.

Of Trockel’s ‘Living Means…’ works, the title of one is lodged in my mind: Living means to appreciate your mother nude (2001). Origin of the World shares it title with that by which an infamous 1866 work by Gustave Courbet is popularly known – a depiction in a closely-cropped frame of a view of the female genitals sprawled on a bed. Reproductions of Courbet’s work feature in Trockel’s collages Gossip (2007) and Replace Me (2010); in some sense, it answering the demand to appreciate the mother nude, superficially celebrating female sexuality as ultimate origins. Yet as a portrait of maternity, it hardly satisfies, and it is hard not to read Trockel’s Origin… as a riposte. She presents the mother nude, not merely free from clothing but fundamentally bare – of voyeurism, of objectification, of opticality, even. Disappearance as a precondition for seeing. If you think you’ve seen it, you haven’t really seen it.

Skirt sideways in Trockel’s oeuvre and you come to another reference to the origin of the world — not Courbet’s this time, but the Biblical account. And SHE Saw That It Was Bad (2008) adapts its title from the repeating refrain in the first verses of the book of Genesis: ‘And God saw the light, that it was good. And God divided the light from the darkness’. On one level, Trockel’s re-wording is just a funny instance of her feel for the “tragicomedy of inversion”.¹² But it also invites a question: what does SHE see as not-good about this world? The results of her inferior creative powers? Or does she see the world as it is, with horror?

¹² Doherty, 2014, p.35

If she, the female god, found the world bad, would she still have created the light? And if not, what then would she see? Something, I hazard, like Trockel’s collage. A horizon, before light and dark are separated. All creation stripped to the bone. And something grinning amidst the blur.