Francis Picabia, Rosemarie Trockel, and the Idée Fixe

Rosemarie Trockel - Material - Sprüth Magers - May 8 - August 1, 2025
Rosemarie Trockel - The Kiss - Gladstone - May 7 - August 1, 2025
Francis Picabia - Eternal Beginning - Hauser & Wirth - May 1 - August 1, 2025

When I read this line a few weeks ago I thought it would be a relevant frame for what I want to address in this essay, namely the problem of enigmatic art and the inevitable but fraught urge to interpret that enigma. Since then I've seen some limitations, which is not to say that it's a useless quote. The irony of enigmatic art is that art becomes enigmatic precisely to resist interpretation, which is done in earnest because artists almost always hate being interpreted, because interpreting and creating are almost diametrically opposed activities; if interpreters have to come to terms with lagging behind art, that lag often makes artists phobic of interpretation in general. Nevertheless, like a moth to a flame, (decent) writers on art can't smother their desire to explain that which is unexplainable by design. Contrary to popular belief, this isn't motivated by the writer/critic's boorish insensitivity to how the artist feels or the nature of the work. Rather, the desire to interpret art is sustained in the first place precisely by what there is in art that refuses to be interpreted. There are many kinds of art that are open to interpretation on symbolic, historical, political, or formal levels, etc., but those means never reach the heart of the matter, and never could. No artist worth their salt has ever had their work explained to the point of exhaustion and, on the contrary, art only becomes less explicable the more it's pored over. One might know more about Manet or da Vinci as they read more about those artists, but an accumulation of information only frames more precisely what remains inexplicable when faced with their work. Similarly, obscure art, far from obscuring art's content, emphasizes the inalienable remainder in art that is its content by rejecting interpretive frames as illusory or beside the point. As such, the art writer wants to grapple with the undefinable because that is (or should be) what interpreting art actually is; art that refuses any semantic interpretation begs the question of the enigmatic all the more. This is more or less the dynamic implicated in Adorno's quote and that essay as a whole.

For our purposes, the problem with the quote is that enigmatic narrative art is of a different nature from enigmatic visual art. Literature and drama operates by the means of semantic language and narrative, which makes it capable of reflexively staging the depiction of its own enigma, but literature is also more grounded by semantic coherence than visual art is. Premodern painting may have dealt in a relatively straightforward depiction of reality/history/mythology that was akin to literary narrative, but it shed that baggage in modernity more easily than literature did. The enigmatic in literature is sustained on a tightrope walk between sense and senselessness by, for example, problematizing memory and subjectivity in Proust, or the disjunction between language and meaning in Joyce, or Kafka's mixture of the mundane and the surreal, or the literalized staging of "the unnameable" in the case of Beckett. Having to resort to such canonical examples already proves the greater difficulty of sustained ambiguity in literature, as very few writers have managed it successfully and lesser modernist works often descend into mires like stream-of-consciousness gibberish or overwrought pretension. Visual art, by contrast, has inhabited its own indeterminacy with relative ease since the early avant-gardes, and rather than carefully retaining its sense amidst ambiguity, it struggles to preserve a space that resists sense and remains ambiguous. Only brief moments in modernism were capable of achieving a contingent impenetrability that reconfigured the terms of art, like the early peaks of Cubism or Pollock's drip paintings, before quickly becoming identifiable genres that other artists could then copy. Pollock's drips were themselves an attempt to get out from under the influence of Cubist painting that had been a thunderbolt to a generation of young painters, and Pollock in his turn was a thunderbolt to the next generation of young painters. The initial gesture loses much of its enigmatic character once the idea of it circulates and becomes a codified stylistic signifier, which means it becomes comprehensible as a reference, if not illegitimate as a method. More pithily, in the words of Thelonious Monk, "Weird means something you never heard before. It's weird until people get around to it. Then it ceases to be weird." On some level this difference between art and literature might be the impracticality of adopting another's literary form versus the relative ease of adopting formal methods of artmaking; Ulysses is objectively a more demanding model to follow than Pollock's Number 1A, 1948. Or, more technically, literature always depicts lived experience by the nature of narrative and has to embed the enigma of being into that depiction, while visual art is enigmatic in itself by the nature of being a thing. Visual art has a stronger alterity than literary art because a mimetic representation of human life, however abstracted, is necessary to sustain a written narrative. An artwork operates on the terms of art's own sphere, which is more distant from lived reality than narrative, but that distance makes it more reducible to stylistic signifiers, as in music. So, in this rough schema, the literary has to fight to preserve its coherence against the threat of meaninglessness while introducing ambiguity into its linguistic form, but accomplishment in visual art consists in defending its internal ambiguity against clichés and conventions. These are only differing tendencies; art can also descend into incoherent slop and literature also has to navigate conventions, but those problem are less immediate to their form.

If we can accept that the enigmatic is at least in some way valuable to artistic accomplishment, then we begin attempting to address what that enigma is. The two questions here are, first, what it is that artists pursue in their resistance to interpretation, and second, by what means do they resist interpretation. The answer to the first is, unsurprisingly, enigmatic. No artist knows precisely what they're doing because artistic decisions are imprecise and instinctual, driven by a prelinguistic impulse that's present in all but the laziest and most cynically instrumentalized artworks. It's possible to give that impulse a name, however, which we can call the idée fixe. This is not just obsessiveness, but a specific investment in one's artistic practice that takes the artist beyond the idée reçue, the established, conventional idea of art that characterizes contrived or otherwise uninspired forms of art. It isn't creativity, or inspiration, or self-expression, or individual "genius", although it isn't entirely unrelated to any of those concepts. A sense of personal style is a sort of analogue, as is morality. Perhaps the closest comparison would be the muse if considered as the abstract force implied by the concept, removed of any romantic or mythological connotations. More loftily, it's a term for what drives dialectical self-criticism, an outside influence that generates the artistic subject. The fundamental quality of the idée fixe that makes other terms inadequate is that it is outside of the artist and precedes them. It functions as a precursor, an intuition of something larger than oneself that leads the artist to mold their subjectivity and way of life to accommodate the possibility of realizing works of art. Naturally, it's impossible to disentangle the contingent assemblage of coincidental influences, inherited traits, and practical considerations that go into an artist's development, but the drive to be devoted to art's internal logic as something immanent to itself and beyond (but not necessarily in direct opposition to) the desire for fame, money, or posterity is fueled by this preexisting force that can't be cogently taught or acquired but also isn't inherent to the individual. If the idée reçue delimits the space of contrived, normative, known, and/or careerist art, the idée fixe is the force that keeps artists of talent within the sphere of the enigmatic, unreconciled to the familiar and dedicated to art's own nature.

For the second question, how artists pursue the idée fixe, we can begin to turn to our examples of Francis Picabia and Rosemarie Trockel. As Clark argues, avant-gardism has been a career move since its very beginnings, which is not to discredit the concept as a whole since he sets apart a real, second-order avant-garde. Rather, what his quote articulates is that the historical avant-garde is not the true source of radicality in art but its popular semblance; the real substance is prioritizing the idée fixe, which is a process that is historically contingent and endlessly variable. Courbet painted in open defiance of the artistic norms that prevailed in mid-19th century France, which is essential to his pivotal status in the history of art, but that social and political situation was so singularly distinctive that he can hardly serve as a useful model for artists today. This is a characteristic example of how modernist vanguardism has become a paralyzing burden on contemporary art, where the established history of artistic progress has equated the specificities of certain important artists in their own context with the highest possible achievement. The anxiety of needing to invent a historical masterpiece leaves artists to sit on their hands, wishing they could come up with their own Olympia, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Fountain, Flag, or to be the next Kippenberger or Krebber, and so on. Such a perspective confuses context for content, conflating what was groundbreaking at a particular time with the amorphous outside force that leads an artist to have an idea in the first place, the idée fixe. Ideas come to artists that are ready to receive them, and the towering moments of revolutionary modernism are behind us; hoping to land on another epochal innovation is not only counterproductive but ahistorical and deluded. Thus we come to Picabia and Trockel as useful models of radical artmaking in a post-vanguard context, working against movements and conventional social frames to better preserve the autonomous sphere of their art. No one can be entirely free from their circumstances, but strategies of avoiding the dependence on historical specificity have outlived the popular model of the avant-garde. In Clark's terms, where Picabia bypassed, ignored, and rejected his era's movements, Trockel has always operated by means of secrecy, isolation, and escape.

Picabia is immediately notable for adopting and abandoning just about every avant-garde movement he came across. He ran through Impressionism, Cubism, Dada, and Surrealism at an unprecedented rate, and by the end of his life had even left behind even his own tongue-in-cheek appropriations of photos from erotic magazines. Having rejected all of the radical currents in art, he called the vanguard's bluff by returning to the nude as a radical gesture and then subverted his own subversion with his final works, which will be our focus. We can call this mercurial practice a sort of pre-postmodernism, which does something to explain the growth in Picabia appreciation over the last few decades. Aside from pulling off a preemption of the late 20th century, he's also perhaps the foremost artist that had his modernist cake and ate it too, holding a place in the canonical narrative while being too volatile to neatly conform to it. Even though his brother in arms, Duchamp, may have been the greater artist of the two, the bombs Duchamp laid in the foundations of art brought modernism to its knees by its own aporetic force, which was a graceful deconstruction of modernism on its own terms that's far more classically modernist than Picabia's exuberant violation of its tenets. Duchamp wasn't insolent enough to contradict himself and go back to painting as an ironic provocation, and that tactful management of the arc of his career is part of what makes him one of the ur-modernists. Picabia's decision to transgress against modernism tarnished his reputation for about half a century, until his antics suddenly aged like a fine wine. What could be the most exceptional fact of his outstanding Hauser & Wirth show, consisting only of his last works made after World War II, is that they may never have looked so outstanding as they do in 2025. This isn't the place to address the reasons behind the oddly denuded contemporary relationship of art and history, but it's very difficult as a contemporary viewer to grasp why these works have been so neglected until now.¹ Most of the writing done on Picabia's "late" works has focused on his nudes, monsters, and transparencies from before 1945, at most glossing over his last period in a sentence or two. Benjamin Buchloh has derided all of Picabia's post-Dada figurative work as reactionary for decades, which is predictable considering how rigid his historical materialism is, but I haven't seen him acknowledge Picabia's final return to abstraction. By and large, his very late work seems to have been simply ignored, but the Hauser exhibition also seems to be their first substantial presentation since the work was new. Regardless, it's hard to see their treatment as anything less than a significant historical oversight.

These works were made during a series of declines: of fame (he was out of fashion and had been accused of being a collaborator during the Occupation), of health (his first stroke was in 1944), of financial security (the Picabias' savings took a serious blow after a burglary); some of the works were made in a rush for upcoming exhibitions, more motivated by practical pressures than inspiration. No part of this is suggested by the paintings themselves. They are bewilderingly varied, aleatoric without an air of randomness, modern without chasing after novelty, historically-informed without nostalgia, minimal without austerity. These are the only works of his career that betray a sensitivity to the material qualities of paint, utilizing raised impastos or glossy finishes, more than a few of which are now badly cracked, playing with alternating degrees of transparency and opacity from one to the next. He had ample opportunity to experiment with the last effect, as much of the late work is painted over other paintings, but, unlike Asger Jorn and Per Kirkeby's games with found canvases, Picabia used his own work and his attitude towards the underpainting is considerably more ambiguous and understated. One untitled abstraction from 1946-47 just barely retains the faint outlines of a female face from an earlier figurative painting, others develop existing motifs, others leave them in as traces or ignore them arbitrarily. One of the essays in the Hauser & Wirth catalogue covers this overpainting technique and the other deals with his source material, but both are only preliminary suggestions for further research, culling a small set of examples where the sequence of overpainting can be understood by studying photographs of his studio where earlier versions of a painting can be found, or others where his sources have been identified. At a glance it's clear that many of the paintings have an archaic, anthropological character, but, again, his appropriations from Salomon Reinach's Répertoire de l'art quaternaire and Museo de la Ciudadela: Catálogo de la sección de Arte Románico by Joaquín Folch y Torres are both more direct and more oblique than the famed influence of African art on Picasso. Picabia copies patterns and figures more or less faithfully, but they almost always serve as partial elements in a composition that remains his own even as he borrows their connotations of the remote past. Importantly, many other paintings retain that primordial atmosphere without necessarily relying on the source material to provide it, most obviously in his near-monochrome "dot" paintings, but also in abstractions composed of lines that appear too simple or too chaotic to have been borrowed. This is a more or less literal description of the paintings, which is simple enough. What it is that makes them so captivating, and why they exemplify the idée fixe is more complicated.

Saint-Beuve's characterization of Baudelaire is emblematic of where the idée fixe can take an artist, or at least could in the early days of modernity. A building is a useful metaphor for the construction of the artistic subject in general, but what seemed like an extreme, quixotic venture in 1862 was actually the foundation of modern poetry. Baudelaire may as well have been in Kamchatka to his contemporaries, but Mallarmé, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Huysmans, Eliot, and Pound also settled down nearby and made his folly less singular. The tradition of the avant-garde comes into conflict with itself by being a tradition, the conformism of nonconformity already mentioned by Clark. What Picabia accomplished in his last works was a preemption of the exhausted vanguard by arriving at a method that is of the avant-garde but apart from it. To quote my own preliminary review of his show: "In spite of all his devil-may-care insouciance, these late works are fully dedicated to a pure form of painting that trumps all of modernism's self-imposed traps, negations, and exhaustions of painting. These works come on like a revived Cubism with an expanded palette, inhabiting that space where representation is sufficiently dilated as to foreground mark-making as the wellspring of painting while resisting the endgame logic that cornered so many of painting's postwar currents." A revived Cubism with an expanded palette, by different means, is the essential point. The central achievement of Cubism is completely different from the popular explanation of an object being depicted from multiple angles; that was an explanation provided by commentators after the fact to rationalize away the manifest incomprehensibility of the images. Rather, the diminution of subject matter to banal subjects combined with the proliferation of shapes and surfaces introduced a material self-consciousness of the fact of painting as an artificial illusion sustained by mark-making into the paintings themselves. That reflexivity was Cubism's achievement and challenge to painting. Picasso and Braque, "like mountain climbers tied together," ventured to the outer limits of painting before the first World War, but even they had to later descend from that peak and deal with the problem they had created. It would be an overstatement or a meaningless distinction to declare late Picabia as being superior to Cubism, but it seems that Picabia's accomplishment is more relevant for today's art. Cubism occasioned a rupture in the apparently stable edifice of the rules of painting that was only possible at that period in the development of modern art, building on Cézanne's insights and the exposure to African sculpture, in a modernizing Parisian context that had supportive, if not necessarily comprehending, dealers and collectors. By contrast, late Picabia is singularly arbitrary, imperious in its disdain for context. The inveterate flippancy that he exercised in the world throughout his life finally came home to roost in the paintings themselves, as if he had molted every possible style and arrived at a final sphere of his own. But this sphere isn't some self-realizing individuality but a negation of modernism's negating painterly practice, and therefore of modernist historicity, by the sheer force of complete offhandedness. Which is not to imply that the paintings themselves are composed at random or slapdash, quite the opposite. The result of this double negation is a kind of "pure" self-reflexive painting, like Cubism, but freed from historical necessity instead of ensconced within it. Appropriated imagery, overpainting, and abstract dots aren't particularly radical strategies, but he employed and combined his methods with such nonchalance that the paintings become radical. By rejecting every stylistic continuum he did away with style through style, so that he could paint whatever he wanted. What Picabia wanted wasn't infinite, of course, but these paintings are uniquely unfettered by rules of taste or conventions of style and technique. Their appeal today speaks for itself, I think, but what we see in them seems to be the same thing that made people ignore them for the last 70 years, which is why they're so important. The historical narrative of modernist progress has been an orthodox lens for comprehending art, which had and still has its uses. But the teleological assumption that historical importance is equivalent to artistic value is a dangerous one, particularly now that the narrative has fizzled. The givenness of the system leaves open a wide berth for the conflation of importance and quality, not only neglecting "lesser" art but also the canon itself by treating it as established and sacrosanct, in the sense that the accomplishments of Cubism are usually spoken of in terms of their historical significance rather than appreciating them as artworks. To some degree this is simply a Mona Lisa effect, where the work's stature precedes our ability to actually look at it, but to a larger degree this general attitude of context outweighing the thing itself is the dominant approach to art and corrodes the possibility of apprehending the artistic value that creates their historicity in the first place. It's exceedingly simple for anyone paying attention to adopt the prevailing normative positions on art, and thus to confuse the recognition that one is supposed to like something with a personal sense of taste. Late Picabia, then, is not only under-historicized and therefore open to our apprehension, but also refuses that same historicizing tendency in its own substance. Conventionalized opinions on art are not synonymous with the historical arc of modernism, of course, and it's far from unconventional to champion Picabia today. My only suggestion is that the reason the works were neglected by modernism was their independence from the terms of modernism, which is exactly why we find them beguiling now.

The contemporary condition may appear to be posthistorical, but in fact our uniquely relative attitude towards historical art comes from a new ease of access to the historical through the internet, and therefore a greater awareness of its weight. Consciously or not, Picabia's insight into the falsehood of modernity was that a belief in the intrinsic significance of the present moment is as illusory as believing in the objectivity of any -ism movement in art. History always makes the new into the old, and few manage that transition without hindsight saddling them with at least some embarrassment. This is, to be sure, a frightening revelation about the nature of progress, but it's also an apt diagnosis for our current condition. We want revolution in art, in politics, in society, but we're paralyzed with the self-awareness of our own relativity since we are faced with the relativity of everything that has already happened. Every attempt to start a new movement feels like an imitation because it already is, because our consciousness of the past floods our ability to see the present. Our dilated perception of every norm as contingency erodes the edifices that sustained normativity in premodern society even while we instinctively long for the security of traditions and cultural stability, as ostensibly liberating developments only recoil into further complacency, corruption, and thoughtlessness. This isn't a doomed argument, however. What remains in the example of Picabia, or Baudelaire, or Trockel, is the possibility of the idée fixe as an alternative, a force that can preserve moral fiber and ideals in a dispersed society that only encourages cynicism and opportunism. Lest we forget, life has always been brutal and exploitative; tradition was simply better at papering that over. The idée fixe holds in it the possibility of perceiving the world against the influence of ideological and historical frameworks, a comprehension of relativity that does not throw its hands up in despair but differentiates good from bad within a "metacultural" framework that makes viable a truly plural understanding. It's possible now to grasp Cubism, Picabia, the Renaissance, Rococo, Minimalism, Conceptualism and so on, all art for its specific qualities outside of its historical significance, not because history has been rendered irrelevant but because we can grasp the relativity of those conditions. That self-evident relativity prevents the possibility of epochal innovations in our own time. In other words, judgment is what still exists as the sense that can still navigate the world when we can no longer sustain a faith in culture to establish our views for us. This is only possible if a critique of the world becomes also a self-criticism, an unflinching and contingent development of our ability to judge the world, including ourselves and our positions within it.

Rosemarie Trockel's work is grounded in exactly this aversion to normativity, a refusal to be located and pinned down. In some ways her work is harder to address than Picabia's by being idiomatically postconceptual and resistant from meaning from the first, but she's also the more historically localizable of the two. Like Lutz Bacher, Cady Noland, or Trisha Donnelly, her work is characteristic of a type of oblique installation art, but she takes their shared enigmatic quality further than those other artists by resisting the more obvious signifiers of sensibility. Trockel has a sensibility, of course, but her work seems to somehow reside in an impersonal ambiguity as its own content instead of functioning as an opaque reflection of the artist's sense of style. Even though Bacher, Noland, and Donnelly are all classic examples of elusive artists that have resisted the machinations of the art world (each gets a chapter in Martin Herbert's Tell Them I Said No, Trockel does not), their art is aesthetically forthright and relatively consistent even while being enigmatic and unpredictable. That's not to denigrate their practices or to claim that Trockel is definitively the superior artist, but Trockel's work remains difficult and elusive even when one has a stable grasp of outwardly similar artists. It's relevant that in the above interview she makes multiple references to her agoraphobia, an aversion to being perceived by the world in life that mirrors the opacity of her artworks. This is already a refusal of style in its conventional form inasmuch that style is a process of self-identification for the sake of presentation, a means of signifying one's subjectivity to others. Ironically, the element that makes Trockel's work more ambiguous is the way her work deals with signifiers as signifiers, symbols, materials, images that retain their referentiality in their use, which makes the works appear to be "about" those signifiers, although they aren't. Bacher's appropriations, for instance, are always neutralized and subsumed within the artist's sense of wit, style, and playfulness with the objects, becoming signifiers of "Lutz" first and foremost, a subjectivizing that is the opposite of Trockel's vigilant self-distancing. If the idée fixe is akin to style, it's only in a specifically delimited sense that mirrors what Trockel refers to above as staying centered. The value of style in this framing is not the assertion of subjectivity as such but the mediation of one's relationship to the public sphere in a way that allows for some degree of independence, which is to say the idée fixe is not primarily individual or social but the dialectical force that negotiates the interpenetration of the two. Style is not "expressing your inherent uniqueness in opposition to normative society" because the social always already determines the content and signification of one's opposition or conformity. Rather, it is a navigation of social terms in a way that articulates a self-conscious awareness of those terms. It becomes a form of tact or eloquence, which is not a conservative claim if one considers that even the most transgressive art has to perform its rebellion in a precise relation to the norm to transgress successfully.² To the degree that Trockel's art is "about" anything, it is about this endless mediating process itself, a game of cat-and-mouse, red herrings, presence and absence, withholding and generosity. This leads to an almost rampant tendency to misinterpret her work. To ground what follows, we can use a few (more) quotations as a basis:

After reading a fair amount of writing on Trockel, I've found her own comments on her work to be by far the most cogent and useful. Ashton's brief collection of notes on her is almost the only piece of writing I've found with worthwhile observations; the vast majority of the rest range from inadequate to awful. Some writers manage to discuss her approach accurately, if not insightfully, in terms like "a cosmos" or the wunderkammer that are compatible with the dynamics I've been gesturing towards, but the most common tendency is to interpret her work in terms of symbolism, trying to explain or dwell on her references in ways that strike me as absolutely unfaithful to the content of her work. Usually this is done using feminist rhetoric. I've included the Drier quote as a case in point: what she avers is the exact opposite of Trockel's aim. Rather than trying to bring women into the realm of subjectivity, which in the first place is a gross overstatement of art's power to change the world, her work fosters the strength in weakness and withdrawal, the positive value of imperceptibility and not being represented. To interpret her signifiers of femininity, stoves, wool, clothing, etc., as symbols used for concretely feminist actions is to deny the excluded and absent as forces on their own terms. Her work embraces this indeterminacy; to turn it around into a desire for representation is to slap it with a comprehensible interpretation that violates the work's own basis. This is to say her work has conventionally "feminine", and indeed feminist, values, but the rhetoric of feminist art writing chafes against the spirit of her work. Like Picabia's resistance to modernist historicizing, Trockel resists the postmodern compulsion to impose interpretive meaning. Schizogenesis: The Art of Rosemarie Trockel by Katherine Guinness is the most egregious example of this that I've come across, which may be due to the unavoidable practicalities of attempting a book-length study of Trockel, but the problems of her approach are far more interesting than anything she writes about the artist.³ Guinness approaches Trockel's work through a feminist and Deleuzo-Guattarian lens, and the three middle chapters each address a single work or series of works. Her mode of inquiry runs into problems almost immediately, as in the opening pages she observes that Trockel herself rejects the label of feminist art and, rather than taking that as a challenge to her framing, asserts that such a claim is what makes her such an exemplary feminist artist. This isn't even necessarily an incorrect interpretation, but the problem of why it is that she would reject the label when her work is so overtly concerned with feminist themes is left unaddressed. The reason, obviously, is that Trockel would prefer to not be labeled, but the academic reflex (which is what may be unavoidable when writing a book) is to give her some label so that the work can be talked about. This turns out to be self-defeating, which if nothing else is a penetrating testament to the difficulty of addressing art in language. The ironic contradiction of applying academic feminism and Deleuzian rhetoric to art is that both modes of thought emphasize the ambiguous and inexpressible, which should be apposite to addressing Trockel, except that these lenses smother the actual ambiguity of her art by identifying and categorizing the ambiguity as signifiers of that rhetoric. The immediate effect of that identification is a centrifugal movement away from the art and the prelinguistic experience of it into theory, reference, and discourse that quickly leaves the art behind as if it were only a pretext to discuss something else. The same is true of Guinness's chapters on specific works, as the references in her works are inevitably addressed in more detail than the works themselves, like the section on her BB series that plays on the shared initials of Brigitte Bardot and Bertolt Brecht, that focuses far more on the BBs than the art. Guinness's handling may not be as flat-footed as Drier's attempt to read Trockel's balaclavas as being a comment on the muteness of women, but her failure only proves that approaching her work in this manner is inane. To take a work as kaleidoscopically playful and simply enjoyable as Yvonne and attempt to reduce it to being "about" something, as if that does justice to the content of the work, is deadening. The wit and fun of the construction itself, the creation of that oblique presentation, is the immanent content. The imagery and materials are the means for constructing, which should not be confused with the ends.

Ashton's association of Trockel with Magritte's pipe that "says it all" is a valuable observation, but I would argue the stronger comparison is, almost inevitably, Duchamp. "There is no model for how to deal with a model" is a top-shelf Duchampian idea, and the consideration of Trockel's work in terms of models seems precisely the way to handle her work without turning it to dust in one's hands. If sex is a perennial interest in Duchamp's work, it assumes its place as a model, a pun or a joke, an offhand pretext that motivates the artwork. That approach is approximate to Trockel's use of the feminine, where the gendered association inherent to her materials may play a role without assuming the content of a feminist commentary; indeed, the above quote about her wool works seems to imply she intended precisely to subvert the tendency of feminist commentary art. The goal is instead to draw attention to the signification implied in the objects themselves, which is left to sit ambivalently with the viewer. Like Beckett, the facticity of the artworks call for interpretation while rejecting it, which is alienating. We are presented with her art as if we should make sense of it, but it is adamant that we shouldn't and in any case can't, so our experience pulls up short. The first impulse is to think that we're being pranked or snubbed, but if one stays with the works long enough to accept these terms their inscrutability becomes magnanimous, expansive in their refusal to explain themselves. As Ashton says, Trockel is not ironic, and neither is Duchamp. There's no sarcasm behind these works, they are completely serious even if the artist has a good sense of humor. This confrontation with the artwork is exactly that of the readymades, only Duchamp's have more historical baggage. The purpose of Trockel's unsignifying use of signifiers is, ultimately, to employ meaning as a sleight of hand, a way to avoid or negate the modernist, formalist purity of non-meaning that is itself a history of meaning. Abstract paintings "mean" a history of a certain mode of making art, exhibiting abstract paintings made by an orangutan, as Trockel has done, neutralizes that history. As such the avoidance becomes a motivating force, a way of moving without being identified, tracing a sphere of independence where the idée fixe can be followed while keeping outside forces at arm's length. Her work is something of a virtuosic exercise in this resistance to meaning, a refusal to being read, if not to being historicized. Although her work is great and her feat of self-positioning is an achievement that deserves more attention, she is also an idiomatic postmodern installation artist of the sort that is of its era, which is no longer ours. Certainly Picabia is no easy model for younger artists any more than Trockel, but the semiotic content of her work feels bounded by the conditions of art that were in play in the '80s, which may only mean that those methods are not yet archaic enough to be appropriated by younger artists in the present. It is only in this sense that Picabia's may be the more compelling example, with an atemporal quality that suggests a more attainable evasion into a free space.

The goal of this essay has been to delineate a loose conception of artistic value that is not bound to modernist (historical) or postmodernist (interpretive) norms of significance, by using the examples of two particularly intransigent artists. Since we are definitively beyond both those eras, in a phase that has scarcely been defined, it seems worthwhile to posit an idea of art that isn't yet obsolete. The great difficulty of conceiving of art in the present is identified in the above quote from Valéry, if one gives the screw of that thought a few more turns. Self-seriously bequeathing a work to posterity is no longer a conceivable sentiment, which is dour enough already, but this is further complicated by our inalienable knowledge that a work will always look different before one even sets to work on it. Understanding the relativity of one's own perspective is to sacrifice the possibility of knowing what one is doing, which is a terribly high price to pay for an artist, but the check has been cashed on our state of affairs. We see that whatever certainty past culture once offered was an illusion, which is deeply uncomfortable but also our great consolation. Every premodern masterpiece was, in part, a reification of deluded ideology, and every modern masterpiece consisted of picking over those delusions, which were also our edifices, as they crumbled. Maybe the ruins of civilization have given up their last bits of gold, or, more likely, ideology no longer needs art to do its reifying so living culture has been thrown by the wayside. Our surveilled, virtualized culture industry is so efficient that cultural production proceeds on autopilot, ineptly but so easily and abundantly that it overwhelms us anyway. We see this plainly and want to resist, but we lack the means. This is the inverse of a case like Velázquez, whose talent so far outstripped his official duty of promoting Philip IV that we hardly care to think of the burdens and compromises intrinsic to court painting. Contemporary reification feels totalizing and suffocating but, perhaps, this is just an appearance. What the idée fixe posits is a means of supplanting the ideological, at least on the part of the artist, a social critique that is not merely activism or dogma but real, a utopianism that rejects the banality of slogans for the insistence that art must affirm the radicality inherent to reality, the earth, the open sky, the immensity of being. Utopia is an existing fragment of lived experience, and the purpose of art is to reflect and nurture our apprehension of that. It is not up to art to change the world in the sense of reform, but it is in the world and a mediation of it, and by the reflexivity of its representation of the world it leaves open the space for the possibility of experience that is, if not completely transcendent and unbounded, at least not beholden to the stupidity of what surrounds us. Following the idée fixe is precisely the aspiration towards this possibility, by whatever means and in spite of everything. This is an isolating pursuit, particularly in a society so ill-equipped to appreciate art on its own terms, but that is nothing new. Baudelaire may have been somewhat cold and alone in his Kamchatka, but Picabia had Duchamp, Picasso had Braque, Trockel had Sprüth. Solitude, if one has the stomach for it, is what is needed to stay aloof from the degrading influence of society, and two solitary figures sometimes manage to create a society of two. This takes us to the point of a truism, that the only artists are the ones who have no other choice, who can't avoid being artists. Only they possess the idée fixe, or are possessed by it, and they know it without needing to have it explained. If there's anything to fear for the future of art itself, it's that the very emergence of intransigent persons that resist the given state of things may only be produced by social conditions that keep that idea of intransigence alive. It may feel at times that today's society comes as close to smothering that idea as has ever been done, but the past traces of those who have given themselves over to the idée fixe will always be easy enough to find for anyone who goes looking.

^{1 It seems that our way of looking at art from the past has never been so disconnected from its history as it is now; multiple friends of mine said they couldn't believe that Gottlieb and Rothko gave up figuration when they were that good at it after seeing their early paintings at 125 Newbury. It is a shock, but only because the old idée reçues of traditional art are so remote from us now that we can no longer fathom why realist painting felt stifling in the '30s. The example of Gottlieb and Rothko as budding vanguardists is also a good foil to contextualize why Picabia's return to figuration at the same time was such a provocative move against the prevailing tides.↩
2 This is why Cologne artists like Kippenberger ("a magnificent strategist" according to Trockel) were exciting; they performed and lived a canny masquerade of masculine artistic genius and competition in a way that generated friction and productivity in the art world at the time. Would-be bad boy artists today are usually only thoughtless and obnoxious.↩
3 Unfortunately I disliked the book so much that I sold it, so I can only speak from my memory of flipping through it a few months ago.↩}

Back