Erika Marquardt and Susan Erony:
The Same Canvas
(9/17/96)
for a Zeitgesit journal
for a Zeitgesit journal
Erika Marquardt and Susan Erony have been working on
canvases together for a year, after deliberating on the best way to collaborate.
Their work will show at the Zeitgeist Gallery in the fall of 1996
HB: You, Susan,
are a Jewish artist; you, Erika, a German. What brings you together incollaboration?
SE: We had both
started working in 1989 on themes of World War II, the Holocaust, and the Third
Reich. Charles Guliano, the art critic, brought us together to show our work.
EM: It wasn't as
if we had been friends who paint more or less the same; that the was the first
time we ever met.
SE: I had never
thought of collaborating with anyone -- except writers, using their writing in
mywork.
HB: Your artistic
styles, are different, almost opposite. Susan is restrained; there's a
quietness to her style and a limited palette. She draws you in using the tricks
of perspective. Your style, Erika, is the opposite -- noisy and colorful,.
SE: So how could
we possibly work together? I was totally surprised that our pieces worked in
the same space. Maybe it's because they're so opposite. They seemed to
complement each other.
EM: That is the
strength. Otherwise it wouldn't work for us to paint on the same canvas. If our
styles were more or less the same, then collaboration wouldn't make sense; the
same artist could do it.
AN: Are you
saying Erika's work is more emotional, Harvey?
HB: I think it's
more overtly emotional. It's certainly more expressionist, it's got more color.
It explodes, whereas Susan's implodes.
Susan's is about absence, about the absence of Jews, not
about an experience she remembers as such. The Holocaust didn't happen to her
in person. There's some way of evoking disappearance, vanishing, that I think
her work accomplishes. Erika's has to do with personal memory of nightmare and
trauma in a Berlin being bombed to rubble.
EM: But it could
have happened to her! She could be dead. It was Jews who were killed and she,
in another time, another place, would have been one of them. So you feel it was
you, at the same time, even though you didn't live during this time. But it
could have been you.
SE: That's one of
the things that got me into being obsessed with the Holocaust. I was sixteen in
1965. Twenty-five years before, if I had been alive in Germany, I probably
wouldn't have made it. It made no sense to me.
I still think it has to be different for you to have lived
through the experience, and that there's an immediacy you bring to your work I
can't possibly bring to mine.
EM: Maybe you
have more time to think because it didn't happen to you directly. A loud noise
-- it could be a shot, a bomb, a disaster. I don't have time to screen it.
SE: If you hear a
firecracker, for a time, emotionally, for you it is a bomb. Whereas I think,
what would it have been like if I had been in Auschwitz in the winter and had
only rags to wear?
EM: For example,
hunger. Today maybe we didn't have breakfast so maybe we are hungry, but it's
not the hunger of a person who hasn't eaten enough in two weeks. The word has
different meanings.
HB: And that's a
hunger you remember.
EM: That is a
hunger I remember -- not to have anything to eat. But there are memories you
don't have to live through. Susan knows enough about it -- it could have
happened to her.
SE: Your
understanding of that is wonderful, and maybe that's one of the reasons we work
together so well. I spend hours thinking about what you must have felt like as
a little girl in Berlin, getting bombed or not having enough to eat.
HB: Erika, how
did Jews figure in your mind or in your work before you and Susan began to work
together?
EM: I had to
defend myself, to come up with my first husband being Jewish and my kids being
half-Jewish. I have to defend my kids, too. If something would happen, they
would be on the train to Auschwitz. So it's very personal. But we try to
separate it out, to say, Jewishness is yours, the bad Nazi, that's me. And
maybe it's better to divide it. If I get too deeply into Judaism that isn't
really the purpose of why we do what we are doing.
SE: That's really
interesting, Erika!
EM: You know, my
ex-husband's grandfather was the first rabbi in Vermont. Very interesting. But
that doesn't prove my father was not a Nazi. That side is more interesting to bring
in what we paint. Susan was really shit-scared to go to Germany and talk to
Germans. I think it's very brave to go to the concentration camps and the Krupp
steel mills. And people aren't always friendly to Jews now, either.
We had a show in Leipzig last year with some German women.
Susan came with her stories of how she felt as a Jew, with her dark solemn
colors, her paintings of grave stones and grief -- full of grief that people
didn't realize.
SE: We were
showing as a unit. It wasn't just me coming in with my art about the Holocaust;
it was you coming in with me.
HB: So showing
together was the beginning of a collaboration.
SE: I think it
was. Being in Germany together was the real beginning -- even more than the
show itself it mattered that we were in Germany responding to things in each
other's presence.
SE: We were
walking in Potsdam.
EM: And Susan
said . . .
SE: What do you
think of working on the same canvases? And Erika said, "Hmmm, that's a
thought. Why not try it?"
HB: There's enough
trust so you can talk about where there's still distrust, or difference.
EM: Difference.
We had an opening last Thursday at the University of Connecticut. After the
show a young man, Jewish, and overwhelmed about what he had seen, talked about
how his grandmother was on a death march from Poland, with all the Jews dying.
I wanted to talk about my friend Otto, who and writes poetry and is German, and
how he had to walk from way up in Poland to Germany. And Susan said, it's not
the same.
SE: I said it's
not a death march.
EM: And it isn't.
SE: After that I
felt terrible in some way. Not because a death march and a forced march away
from an advancing army are the same, but because it's not right to negate the
fact that Otto was a starving child whose father was a prisoner of war in the
Soviet Union.
HB: How does the
collaboration work?
SE: As Erika
said, if our styles were not so different, there might not be a point to our
working together. Although one of our goals is to have the different sorts of
imagery work together, there's a tension in the paintings that makes the work
interesting.
EM: We are happy
that we can do it together. When you say, this picture is finished, for
example, what does finished mean? Sometimes something really emotional might
have happened. So it's not finished in a slick way; it's very disturbing, and
maybe one shouldn't leave it like this. Or we say, let's leave it, it really
makes a statement. It catches our feelings, what we really want to say.
AN: You both use
found objects, too, don't you, letters, for example.
SE: That's one of
the things that makes it easy to put together. And there are two rules.
Whatever we do is OK. And it's OK to paint on the other's work.
HB: Those rules
are a little contradictory.
SE: But both are
necessary. I don't know how long it took us before we could touch each other's
areas.
AN: To do
graffiti on each other's stuff.
HB: But now you
are comfortable drawing mustaches on each other's Mona Lisas?
EM: Yes, and it's
nice, too, when I get stuck somewhere, that I can say, hey, let Susan deal with
it.
HB: Collaborations
of this kind are not common. It's unusual to break down the whole business of
the individual, the creator, and his or her canvas.
SE: I think of
Gilbert and George, the two British artists.
HB: Komar and
Melamud.
EM: Basquiat and
Warhol, but you can tell exactly who did what.
SE: Klegg and
Gutman, who do installations. But my sense is they conceive the work together.
AN: Part of this
collaboration has to do with what's going on in the public sphere around this
issue, too, all the controversy, the books being written. People get involved
when you have a show.
EM: We want to
get away from it being just a historical thing -- the Holocaust and fifty years
ago. It's also about things going on now.
SE: Because it is
so public, so much in contemporary discourse, there are things we struggle
with. Is it OK to bring in imagery about something other than World War II and
the Holocaust? Can we bring in imagery about Bosnia or Rwanda? Does that dilute
what we're doing or do we feel an obligation to do it? There are very different
reactions to generalizing the Holocaust.
HB: One danger is
that the Holocaust loses its meaning because it's so universalized. The other
danger is that it loses meaning because it becomes so special and ghettoized
that it doesn't help you understand other acts of genocide .
SE: We look at
that conflict in our work.
HB: What do you
like most about collaboration?
SE: I've never
had so much fun making art in my life. As Erika says, If we get stuck on a
piece we don't have to stay with it; we can just give it to the other one.
That's an incredible relief.
EM: As an artist
you really want to have your own speed and your own space to do whatever you
want to do. Then we get together and we trade our canvases. So we have both
sides, we're not alone and we are alone.
SE: Erika works
so much faster than I do. She's in her studio 6 o'clock every morning. I'm
slogging along and finally get started at 2. She's all done for the day, and
I'm just starting. Working with her has really pushed me to speed up, and be
more spontaneous.
EM: But what you
do takes long; it's so fine.
HB: Maybe you're
not competitive because you're so different. There's less chance of clashing.
EM: I appreciate
Susan for the things I don't have. She really is well read and knows history
and art, and I don't really know that stuff. She can explain much better where
it comes from for both of us. I feel safe with her, too.
SE: But Erika,
you're so much better than I am about getting the work out. Left to my own
devices, I would just stay in studio and paint.
EM: Let's go to
Zeitgeist today! Does Alan want this or not!
HB: I know
something about Susan's work habits -- her pacing the formalism of her
painting, the kind of perfectionism that goes into it. What are your work
habits like, Erika?
EM: I don't
really know, it just comes. The other day when we talked and you said there's a
certain humor to what we're doing, that just comes out, too, because we don't
plan; we do it. If it doesn't work, too bad. It's intuitive for both of us.
HB: I'm not sure
you intend humor but if both of you allow yourselves to disgorge the most
horrific imagery, then it's almost like a poker game: OK, I've got five skulls.
I'll see you and raise you two dripping large intestines. It's grand guignol,
gallows humor. It's peculiar that this serious material curves around to humor.
I compare it to the creation of gargoyles, which may have been meant to defend
and warn against evil, but have a humorous quality to them. Maybe they were
simply terrifying to someone in the 14th century. But for us they're also
figures of humor.
SE: Is it OK to
poke fun at the sanctification of this history? What does it mean to push the
edges of all of the work that's come out about the Holocaust and Nazism, and to
push the symbols and images used in those discussions and depictions? I think
that's one of the places this work has been taking me. I believe if we can't
get away from romanticizing victims and treating the events as holy, then we're
in trouble; we'll never get down to the fact that real people are involved, and
the issues are complex.
HB: If and when
this collaboration is over, can you ever use that imagery again? Aren't you
using it up as you use it?
SE: I don't know
if we can know that. That may be why we're talking about the images as metaphor
at this point, and have no idea where the work will take us.
Even though we allow ourselves complete freedom to paint
whatever we want, we also edit a lot. We need to be able to paint over each
other's work because we need to edit each other. We always look at the pieces
together. When we think the pieces are close to being done, that's when we come
together and discuss them. That stage is not spontaneous; we decide how rough
to leave the piece.
HB: How do you
decide if it's done?
SE: If I look at
it and don't have an anxiety attack, it's done.
EM: We edit with
our heart and emotions. What is this? It doesn't work, and we both know it. We
cannot explain it but we both know.
HB: You have a
series of small paintings, crowded with imagery. In the bigger paintings, it
seems the collaboration brings out something neither of you could have done
alone. I'm not sure that always happens, or even that you want it to. But
sometimes it feels like there's a combined sensibility coming through, one
mind.
SE: That's
probably when we feel the best, when we sense that too. But the little pieces
have inspired the big pieces and influenced them a lot.
EM: To be freer.
SE: And richer.
It has to do with the amount of stuff we put into them. They were a real
breakthrough. We can look at them and figure out where to go with the bigger
work. I don't think we could have gotten where we got in the bigger work if we
didn't do the little pieces.
HB: Is there a
difference in the way you use found objects?
SE: There's one
thing I do I can't think of you doing; I use collage objects like paint. I
don't use them as much for what they are as to make a surface or an image. I'll
tear up paper a lot, or use tiny pieces of burnt paper like mosaics. I don't
think you do that, do you? When you use found objects you usually use them for
what they are.
EM: Right.
Something new happens through them. A different shape appears.
HB: You use bits
of the Berlin Wall, yes?
EM: Yes. I
started to paint when the Berlin Wall came down. I started to ask, if I lived
there, what would my life be like? If the Wall had always been down, I wouldn't
have had to come to this country. So I think sometimes what we do too is try to
figure that out, layers on layer.
HB: You both use
maps, photographs, texts.
EM: Here for
instance [displaying a photo of a work], is a letter I found from a German
soldier who was in Russia. He writes, "Dear Mom, when you get this letter
I'll be dead because everybody will die tomorrow. The war is terrible. I suffer
and am unhappy." Susan found another letter.
SE: This is, for
me, the most difficult piece I did with Erika, because it is the one where so much
anger came out. Erika gave me this piece with a letter from the Russian front
by a German soldier and called it "Feldpost," which means letters
from the front. This goes back to the topic of incommensurable sufferings. I
just could not stand thinking about this German soldier on the Russian front as
in a truly horrible situation.
EM: You thought,
it serves him right.
SE: I did, and
wanted to answer with another letter. I found a letter written by a
Polish-Jewish mother who was about to be deported and wrote her last letter to
her child.
HB: Do you still
do work outside the collaboration?
SE: Not lately.
HB: So my
question of how it effects your own work is one you can't answer.
SE: I can
actually. My last two pieces, which I finished after Erika and I started
collaborating, are the strongest I've ever done. I think work with Erika has
loosened me up and given me more courage to put stuff on canvas and not treat
it so preciously, and not worry it so much.
Also because Erika's surfaces are so rich-- there's
something about your surfaces that has effected me, pushed me in my own work.
HB: Erika, is it
too soon for you to say how this will effect your own work outside the
collaboration?
EM: Sometimes I
think, my god, how can she suffer this much, how can she have done this? Then I
feel inside that I dig a little bit deeper and come up with something that may
have the right feeling. Because I know it hurt Susan to do it, and I feel
responsible. Not, "Oh, well, another skull. Up it goes." But really
to grip it from deep down. In the future, I will be more respectful of my own
work, and more responsible.
HB: Alan, what do
you like about this work? Why do you think it belongs at Zeitgeist?
AN: It's alive
and fresh and it's important that people respond to it. .
HB: I think the
strongest work you've had here -- Steve Frederick's, Jeff Mak's -- is work
that's over the edge, that most gallery's wouldn't even know how to talk about.
AN: We've had
some confrontational work.
SE: That
certainly drew us here. We said, if we could show in the Boston area, where
would we want to show, and we just kept coming back to this place.
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