COPENHAGEN.- What’s in a name? Or rather, a signature? More than just a signifier of an individuated being, of an identity, of an I, of a you, of a he/she/them, it is a marker of authenticity, a means of authentication, a legally binding proof of integrity. Like the act of anointing, it bestows value, gives realness. Remove the artist’s signature from a painting and it becomes worthless; it returns to its original status as a piece of cloth. But what if this accoutrement is simply part of a bigger coterie of ‘incidental traps’ that the artist – or painter – deliberately chooses to employ as a means of fooling the unsuspecting public or the earnestly enthusiastic connoisseur?[1]
Rebecca Lindsmyr makes trappings of her own past and present selves, discarding and liberally sprinkling them across her new set of paintings and works on paper. Hung low and wearing the colours of a synthetic body, the six paintings on view mimic the average dimensions of a bed, a door, or a full body mirror – a scale appropriate to contain a body within, on or in it – and are built from a repeated layering of fragments of the artist’s name taken from different periods in her life, namely childhood and adolescence. Gestural smudges that are screen-printed directly on to the canvas, by performing ‘Rebecca Lindsmyr’ ad infinitum, turning her name into a feedback loop, this mechanised signature gradually becomes null and void. Emo kid meets automaton. Except that while this abdication means that the works play on relinquishing any claim to so-called authenticity and capital, they simultaneously revert to a fleshiness, to a memory of epidermal layers that secrete sweat and ooze spit.
A name is always in need of a mouth to enunciate it, to turn the guttural sound that rises from the interior depths of a sack of flesh and bones into meaning, into something solid, something that carries weight. This weight finds itself transcribed in small, easy to miss details playing peek-a-boo: squiggles that could easily be the result of a painterly accident, but which are in fact photographic screen-prints of used chewing gum, hiding in plain sight. ‘The body is a text: every time we define ourselves, we choose definitions – names – that reduce the ways our bodies can be read… What is a body without a name? An error.’[2] Stick a chewing gum in your mouth and the act of chewing, of salivating, can impede speech. An empty nourishment, it fills the stomach with air, before being spat out, another unnecessary, unneeded material layer refusing to unstick itself from this scorched earth. The oral equivalent of a fingerprint rejected from its matrix, l’informe with a faint waft of artificial strawberry pink.
Viewed through perforated steel cladding that lines some of the walls, Rebecca Lindsmyr’s works give up their image-ness to become a flattened, layered mass, bulldozered over by the psychological pressure of being some body, any body. Are inferior lips naturally born with an inferiority complex? Like a Josh Smith painting that feature the artist’s name as their subject, in which the letters become a figurative form on the verge of dissolving, or the layers of accumulation and erasure that define Christopher Wool’s approach to uncertainty and randomness, here everything – print, language, subjecthood – are in the process of falling apart. Caught in the act of looking, we are Peeping Toms, here to catch the flakes and strips of whatever meaning remains.
Text by Anya Harrison
[1] ‘Incidental traps for collectors’ is how artist Merlin Carpenter describes the ‘drips, brushy handwriting, or stylistic haptic events’ in his work, as consciously (re)creating the style of a romantic in a necessary ploy to adapt to the cliché of what art and painting should be for them to be successful commodity items. In Isabelle Graw, “Painting as a Cover Story. A Conversation with Merlin Carpenter”, The Love of Painting: Genealogy of a Success Medium (Sternberg Press, 2018), p. 191
[2] Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism. A Manifesto (Verso, 2020), p. 73 and p. 75
