Schiller-Marginalia, 2007 73.5 x 119 inches. Charcoal, graphite, dry pigment, rubber latex, pages from Schiller's selection of plays published in Germany in 1881, on rice paper.
Courtesy the artist and Remy Toledo Art Projects, New York.
Schiller-Marginalia, 2007
Schiller-Marginalia continues a group of works where the act of making notes on the margins of books ("marginalia") becomes instead a trace of embodied presence drawn across multiple pages, both destroying and rebuilding their
(con) textual meaning. Schiller-Marginalia is a collage on rice paper incorporating pages from several plays by Friedrich Schiller, published in Germany in 1881, with sheer sheets of rubber latex surfaces, and charcoal/graphite
drawing of a female silhouette. The work confronts vertical and horizontal views, as if suspending the drawn figure between flight and fall. The hand-drawn outline of the body was executed on the surfaces of the book pages.
These historical texts are written in language that I do not speak. Schiller was one of the Nazis' favorite German poets. We are able to recall Schiller's verses, their formal and ethical beauty, without or in spite of this
particular historical connotation. Translated into hundreds of languages throughout the world, the work of this 18th-century poet and philosopher remains part of our fragile European cultural heritage, however overwhelmed
if not altered by this very culture's ability to produce systems of mass genocide.
