An important distinction can be drawn in the recent graphic works of Nita Tandon, between the practice of abstraction or representation and that of non-representation. Whilst the former rely on the establishment of a relation to that which exists elsewhere – this signification of an other – and the referencing of something that existed previously, the practice of non-representation posits the construction of that which did not exist before, of something that represents no other thing.
Tandon’s recent drawings are made through application of lines with both bitumen and marker pens on the reverse side of discarded repro-film which is then laid over sheets of discarded printer paper. That some of these materials are found objects bears no greater significance upon the works other than to assist in the delimitation of choice in its production. However, the very construction does pose a number of possibilities in relation to their interpretation.
A striking element of these works is that we have no access to the tactile nature of their construction. Whilst the marks of bitumen, marker pen and printed paper at once visible, their material nature is cloaked behind the screen of a transparent mask; the only surface visible to us is that of celluloid. Interestingly, this masking contradicts the tradition of overpainting where the traces of the surface, the layers of material, record the temporal process of obliteration. Rather – layered in reverse and masked by the sheen of the film – Tandon’s drawings deny the inscription of linear history of their making and absent temporality, ending the interval between signifier and signified, scorning logical time. They are not descriptive.
In this condition each drawing becomes a set of moments – sort of stroboscopic flashes – suggestive of things already existent but with it refuses to synchronise. Images emerge – such as film stills; television screens; suggestions of texts, etc. – which can act as a temporary anchor in our reading but which are continualy subverted by the refusal of the work to be contained within a representative framework. The multiplicity of its suggestions is continually subverted by the surface refusing a fixed attribution.
This reassertion of non-representationality is itself a kind of obtuse relation to meaning. That is to say that the presence of the work situates it within a discourse of difference in respect to other objects. For whilst the drawing keeps proposing and undermining its suggestions, the interpretational flux that this engenders throws up a shifting network of meanings which display no fixed centre and within which viewer, work and context come into an arena of free play. While avoiding the closure of ascribing a final certainty to the work it avoids that conclusive act of naming which immobilises imagination and projection.
Excerpt from:
A SUBLIME REALITY CHECK
Nita Tandon’s Allusive Appropriations of Space
Patricia Grzonka in the catalogue Dimensions oft he Surface, p. 110 – 120
II. The Passion for the Real
The suggestion of a function-bound reality, which the Disclosures already demonstrate as furnishing-like pieces, is part of a new, ‘ephemeral’ quality that emerges in the works completed since the end of the 1990s, while these wall installations are still durable and intended for posterity by virtue of the selection of solid materials, like concrete or marble. In this they clearly differ from works made from far lighter and more maleable materials (like modelling clay – for instance, Plasticine). It is this entirely deliberate break with things that had gone before:
I wasn’t thinking so much about posterity with this connection with concrete. I wanted to break with my reputation as a ‘concrete artist’ even though it continued to fascinate me as a raw material.
Exemplary for this is a series of works on paper entitled Flux (pp. 148–150), where Tandon makes an ornmental geometric arrangement of stripes and lines with coloured marker pen and bitumen. Here she uses bitumen, an organic raw material distilled from crude oil that takes on a deep black colouring absorbing a hint of brown (‘earth pitch’). She experiments here with a raw material that had not previously been used for fine art. Subjects recognisable as found footage are partially covered over in the process of painting. Schematic faces can be made out in the background of some of these works on paper – an incursion from the world outside that becomes visible in this new phase of production. This quality is especially tangible in a series of Fire Paintings (The Painted Flame, pp. 68/69): My question was: How far can I thematise the act of painting itself? The Fire Paintings were the result of making the act of burning and extinguishing the subject. The candle flame left its own image.
The impressions of elemental forces were described by Yves Klein as ephemeral ‘traces of the moment’.5 Alongside the familiar body imprints – essentially female models who, according to Klein, could first be brought to express their full content through the colour blue – the French artist also took imprints and ‘impregnations’ 6 as well as natural surfaces or forces of nature, like fire, for the production of paintings. Nita Tandon’s own spiritual approach bears some similarities to Klein’s philosophically anchored elementarism: a concept of transformation is expressed in the performative ritual character of creating paintings, in the course of which archaic principles of cessation, of negation, and of death are replaced by principles of starting afresh and creation.
A ‘cult of the ephemeral’ 7 and the transient that results from a performance of the moment is also to be found in a work like Fingerprint – Die Rückseite der Vorderseite ([The Back of the Front], 2011, pp. 18–22): a set of the artist’s digitised fingerprints are displayed as an oversized pixelated image comprised of individual fingerprints in Plasticine on a pane of glass in an exhibition space. ‘The process is a game of definitions played with the viewer in which they are forced to choose between analogue/digital, two-dimensional/three-dimensional, front/back. … Epitomised as a determinant of identity, the fingerprint becomes the object of questions concerning originality and seriality.’ 8 At the end there is a performative step in the demontage of the image, however, that leads to the fingerprint becoming a Fingerprint Erased (video, 2012, pp. 23–27).
How thin the line between creation and extinguishing is, is shown in particular by the Fire Paintings, for which the artist runs a burning match so close to a sheet of paper that the soot from the flame leaves dark scald marks. If the flame is held against the paper for too long the image (and the paper) is destroyed.
Alongside such elementary, archaic – and ultimately dark – themes are, however, frequently also lighter approaches to be appreciated, expressed for instance in playful text works that identify Tandon as an ironic child of her (postmodern) times: a wobbly, coloured line (in The Jolly Line, pp. 162–169, or Barrier II, pp. 158/159) reminds the viewer of the futility of attempts to impose rigid notions of organistation as they are addressed in the modern grid – reflections on which are also similarly visible in works by an artist like Günther Förg. The humour and the wealth of allusions in a word installation at Karlsplatz underground station in Vienna – Reason Grows (which reads in German as riesengroß = lit. giant-sized) and Future Weird Sign (which reads in German as Future wird sein = lit. the future will be) – wryly echoes the artistic setting of Vienna, a city that has never been averse to profound wordplay.9
The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek says of the ‘passion for the Real’, ‘The authentic twentieth-century
passion for penetrating the Real Thing … through the cobweb of semblences which constitutes our reality thus culminates in the thrill of the Real as the ultimate “effect”, sought after from digitalized special effects, through [for instance] reality TV’.10
Tandon’s path led from an exhaustive engagement with conceptual avant-garde and neo-avant-garde approaches to painting to an engagement with the ‘real’ manifested as real experience subtly encoded in the artistic implementation as archaising, ritual elements, processes (burning, imprints), and raw materials.
Finally, one work of hers can be read as a reflection on the significance of painting in the age of mass information: Departure of the Fleet (after William Turner) (2005, pp. 140/141). Reflected light from the flickering glow of nightlights projects onto a blue Perspex wall, creating a fleeting ‘shadow image’. The image is only a distant gleam of a once viable and reliable statement. In its temporariness – eventually the candles go out – it is a symbol of transience, an apparition of a reality from elsewhere. In this Daedalean metaphor – not by coincidence calling to mind Plato’s allegory of the cave, the allegory in which the notion of a convergence of appearance and reality appears for the first time – Nita Tandon transforms the appearance of reality, the ‘effect’ of the light source in a captivating image of reality.
Art is a place where curious things can happen anytime. A door is a door that does not open. A Plasticine fingerprint. A shadow image.
5 Camille Morineau, ‘Körper, Farbe, Immaterialität’, in Yves Klein, exh. cat. Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, (Vienna and New York: Springer, 2007), 12.
6 Camille Morineau, ‘Von der Imprägnation zum Abdruck, vom Künstler zum Modell, von der Farbe zu ihrer Inkarnation’, in Yves Klein, 119.
7 Morineau, ‘Körper, Farbe, Immaterialität’, 13.
8 Daniel Wisser, in this book, p. 22.
9 In these circles there is a whole generation of Nita Tandon’s contemporaries, of whom a few for singling out here are Gerwald Rockenschaub, Heimo Zobernig, Heinrich Dunst, and Walter Obholzer.
10 Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real (London and New York: Verso, 2002), 12.
LINK: tandon_grzonka_reality_2014.pdf
Excerpt from the foreword to the catalogue Dimensions of the Surface:
Dimensions: Associations with the Work of Nita Tandon
[…] The visual arts are literally about the visual, but also about educating. ‘Artist, fashion! Talk not long!’ was Goethe’s invocation to poets. We can also simply take it as an instruction to work in an appropriate fashion with the language, the material of poetry, in other words on no account opulently. In this respect the brittle aspect of Nita Tandon’s works is a mark of quality. Her works do not proffer themselves to the viewer in a dazzling display of splendour or gimmickry. The old [German] word bilden [to build, but also to establish, to educate] refers to the artistic work, the bringing forth of an artefact, and Tandon’s way of bringing forth is planned and constructive, in other words not intuitive or, in the trivial sense, ‘artistic’ – that is, consciously uncontrolled. These works also highlight the question of what role the act of thinking plays in artistic works, whether, for instance, it is there before the art object or whether it only emerges and forms itself through its existence. It was to do with this act of thinking that Nita Tandon (who studied under Maria Lassnig at the University of Applied Arts Vienna) opted not to paint any pictures – any pictures that represented ‘something’. With Tandon, opting to turn away from the mimetic is a well-thought-out process, one which has resulted in the consequences previously discussed: if no picture, then no colours either, nothing painted by hand. The colour comes from the material and is therefore not applied by the artist.
Indeed, that is the lesson the visual arts teach us. For the visual arts the surface is essential, and the metaphor of ‘superficiality’ inspired by the surface is belied by the visual arts. In keeping with the ‘dimensions of the surface’, Nita Tandon’s work is not least about these questions: What makes an image an image? How does it define itself within the space from which it stands out? But a space with which it must also co-operate in order to be seen as an image in the first place? Questions such as these are not academic; rather, they are stored in our perception, and when I see Nita Tandon’s art, I have a dual experience of art: on the one hand, through Tandon’s detachment from the immediacy with which she does not allow ‘the image’ to be predetermined in its function; on the other, this very detachment creates a new type of immediacy, one that captivates and delights me as a viewer.
There are moments in which our disposition to observe and our sense of perception are so keen that we are easily mistaken or deceived. Sometimes the horizons of a surface crack, upsetting the balance, the proportions of a construction become uncertain, lines and spaces recoil from their logical functions to become elements of a fiction. Nita Tandon’s works transcend all laws, they do not result from any absolute ideas nor do they provide any absolute certainties. They are rather a challenge to reality, seductions triggering inner upheavals that become visible. Therefore total freedom is given to the onlooker: the agility with which the eye glides over the surface should be reflected in the thoughts triggered.
The expressive power of these works stems from a basically illusionary movement. Their construction is mainly based on the relation between simple formal elements and different materials. The artist’s language is sober, basic, solid but at the same time flexible in terms of implications. It is almost provocatively reduced to the essential, but at the same time governed by mastery and moderation.
The main theme of Nita Tandon’s art is analysis of the medium: the versatility of the media she uses helps her to develop new arguments. Meditation and experimentation on this subject in the work situated somewhere between painting and sculpture. The simple forms that jut out from the two-dimensional surface of the wall like a relief are also unmistakably architectural. Several elements coexist in one work: this is the essence of poetical theory, which becomes concrete through artistic procedures, materials and architectural space. Working with great precision but without force the artist defines her pieces by the way she juxtaposes canvas and concrete.
The exact delineation of surfaces reflects the profound knowledge of materials: the artist knows how to select them, how to discover their potential and properties. Canvas and concrete also have an artistic value as they play a key role in the artist’s considerations on which her works are based. Both materials have their specific function; one cannot be taken for the other.
The canvas is used to allude to traditional painting and has two different functions within these well-structured works: one, to provide colour and two, to serve as a boundary. The canvas has a homogeneous texture, asserting its own natural colour, without even the slightest intervention of the painter. The absence of pigments corresponds so well to the monochromatic material background of the pieces that colour and background become intermingled. Tandon’s approach could be seen as “anti-pictorial” because of her “non-interventional” attitude, also up until 1986 her works showed traces of oil painting bordered by thin lines. Later on, the artist began to reflect on pictorial intervention and especially on its relations and partiality. Thus the thin line painted on canvas is but the last gesture of an art that has very little to do with gesture. It is particularly significant that the canvas exists in its own right as something separate from painting. The resulting language is sober, based on the chromatic scale of wall painting on the one hand and on sculptural scansion with clear architectural implications on the other. Various forms are arranged next to each other, united in one body formed by closely related elements. This network of correspondences includes the concrete structures with their sharp contours, their finished, balanced shapes that always interact with the wall. Measured, restrained modulations, the result of a never-ending artistic process, reveal clear reverberations and traces. The concrete is used to construct the material background of the works; Tandon works with great mastery and precision. She knows the working times and conforms to them almost unconditionally. She merely forms works, eliminates unwanted parts, produces textures through the wood of the mould or plastic sheets. After it has rested for twenty-four hours the concrete has set and looks alive, because of a particular brightness or meaningful marks on its surface: it is covered with silvery veins to imitate wood or looks speckled and vibrant. By juxtaposing materials and shapes – which all look alive – a compact, measured and self-contained structure is created. Each element has its own meaning, but is also a meaningful part of the whole structure. The perfection of each structure lies in perfect harmony: anything excessive would alter all relations and correspondences. The resulting architecture is therefore essential and non-functional: it is an architecture connected with dreams, desire and memories.
“Many have come – a little too hastily – to the conclusion that the analysis and the will and efforts to attain precision that our mind requires from our spirit cannot accord with the inborn freshness, the redundance of images, the grace and imagination characterising poetry which makes it recognisable as such from the very first line on. (…) There may be some truth in this. This I doubt, however, it being so simple, it must be of scholastic origin.” Paul Valery’s ideas can heölp us approach Nita Tandon’s works, which seem to reflect rational structures with their detached, almost cold, appearance. The poetic dimension of these works lies in the continuous exchange between the works themselves and the surrounding environment, between construed shapes and real space. Tandon’s geometrical, primary structures, characterised by clear-cut shapes and a high degree of rationality, are better defined by the way they relate to the surrounding architecture. What makes them exceptional is the illusionary perspective, the virtual figures on a concrete surface: everything seems to become alive and transformed on the wall where enchantment can become disenchantment.
The very construction of these surfaces is based on illusion: division, union, decomposition are all essential elements of these works whose meaning is never obvious or univocal.
On the perceptive level: Nita Tandon’s works have a disconcerting effect, triggering ever-changing emotional and sensorial experiences. Some works reveal an obsessive search for a paradox in the union of canvas and concrete, the former striving for heaviness, while the latter aims at the highest lightness: the idea on which the artist’s vision is based fluctuates between different illusions. The surfaces lose their balance in the surrounding space and vice versa: is the work a part of architecture or is rather architecture a part of the work? Ambiguity is averse to certainties, just as Nita Tandon is averse to anything that is fixed – both in perception as well as in interpretation.