“I wouldn’t know where to say intervention stops and destruction begins.” – Rudolf Stingel

Rudolf Stingel’s work is characterized by his interrogation of the medium of painting – redefining and pushing its boundaries. Stingel refers to his work as ‘painting’ regardless of the materials he uses, which have ranged from carpet to Styrofoam across his extensive oeuvre. Untitled, from 2012, is no exception, despite consisting of copper, the work takes on the feeling of a painted work particularly, in the surface texture. This work epitomises Stingel’s highly visual yet conceptual approach to art, bringing together aesthetic qualities of the surface with postmodern concerns regarding the status of painting.

Born in 1956 in Merano, Italy, Stingel initially worked in a photorealist style as a commercial portrait artist until the 1980s when he began to work in a neo-expressionist manner. In 1987 he moved to New York, where he is still currently based, and his work transformed again as he turned toward his current preoccupations of redefining painting and its relationship to space and audience.

Untitled derives from his mid-career retrospective exhibition held at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and The Whitney Museum, New York in 2007. For this exhibition Stingel created a unique participatory space, transforming the traditionally neutral, ‘white cube’ museum into an interactive space. He covered the walls with a layer of reflective aluminium-faced insulation material – a material he chose deliberately for its fragility. Visitors were left free to scratch, inscribe and transform the metallic surface in any way they wished, resulting in an array of graffiti-like gestures. Stingel then cast fragments of these incised surfaces into copper, thus capturing and reproducing in exact detail, and permanently recording, the work of the visitors in this seminal exhibition. The result of this casting process is a visually opulent work. The visual intricacy and seductive material are somewhat contradicted by the banality of the graffiti-like marks. The aggressive physicality of incising the original material is aptly translated into the copper surface, as it appears that the smooth, seamless metallic surface has been defaced by acts of destruction, thus blurring the lines between art and vandalism. This apparent dichotomy is further complicated: by casting the graffiti in copper the marks are glorified and transformed into a permanent monument to the destructive acts of members of the public. Whilst artists including Tàpies and Dubuffet have similarly explored the relationship between art and graffiti, and fine art and the un-trained artist, they have not relinquished artistic control in the same manner that Stingel does in this piece. The destruction of the surface also recalls the work of Yves Klein, John Latham and Robert Rauschenberg who similarly played with the destruction versus creation paradigm.

Through inviting the public to create rather than to simply observe, Stingel democratises the act of painting, thus distancing himself from the mythology of the artist-genius. There seems to be a touch of irony in his commentary on the process of art making, as demonstrated by his publication Instructions (1989) which was an illustrated guide to creating a contemporary painting. Stingel’s use of mundane materials further demonstrates his challenge of traditional notions of hierarchy of painting. In this sense, his art as been linked to Italian Arte Povera but inflected with the influence of American abstraction: a testament to his personal relationships to both countries.

Stingel thus broke the perceived ‘aura’ of the painting and the museum for his 2007 retrospective, transforming the visitor from observer to collaborator in the act of creation. The artist commented on this breakdown of conventional protocol: “The abstract shell appeared to be perfect in a provocative way and apparently invited [each individual] to manifest [his impulse]. Numerous motives appear to have led to this behaviour; the neutrality of the installation paired with the anonymity of the visitors certainly plays a role.” By inviting such visceral engagement with the work, Stingel encouraged the visitor to reconsider the fundamental qualities of painting - surface and material - rather than to consider it in purely visual terms.

The relationship between painting and museum or gallery was also transformed – the foiled insulation material was created as a seamless extension of the architectural space, thus merging architecture and painting in a unique manner. By doing so, Stingel questions the autonomous status of painting as it is reliant upon the walls of the museum. The aluminium foil surfaces therefore become akin to wallpaper rather than painting through the interdependent relationship between painting and architecture. Stingel explored this relationship in his 2013 installation at the Palazzo Grassi for the Venice Biennale. Here Stingel used carpet to create an immersive space which merged physical space and fine art in a unique way. This copper cast renders time palpable – the painting becomes a living, rather than a static object. Time is evoked through both the marks themselves, which record the physical interaction between museum-goers and the work and the historical event in which this piece was created. The intrinsically temporal nature of the work again demonstrates the potential of painting to represent a dimension beyond the purely visual.

Untitled is therefore a monument for the breakdown of the seemingly sacred status of the art museum and championing the freedom of the public to express themselves. The anonymous doodles, signatures and words, ‘CONFIDENCE’ inscribed clearly down the centre, epitomize Stingel’s attitude to painting: “One could say, I allow painting, but not by my assistants who carry out my concept but by a public that inscribes its own individual response in a material way into the work.” (Rainer Zittl, The Trickster, Bonami, p.35). Stingel’s fresh perspective on painting demonstrates the endlessly radical possibilities of the medium.