The Eraser

The eraser is commonly thought of as a means of destruction and of removal, but can the act of erasing ever be creative?

I first thought about this in my Contemporary Art History class when my professor brought up Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing. Rauschenberg and Willem de Kooning were apparently friends in the time Abstract Expressionism was giving way to Pop Art and neo-Dada. I don’t know whether Rauschenberg asked de Kooning for a pencil drawing or whether it was given to him as a gift, but in 1953 he erased the entire drawing and displayed it as his own work in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art where today it’s part of the permanent collection.

So at what point does the drawing cease to be de Kooning’s and become Rauschenberg’s? You’d have to ask Foucault that. You could say that because he altered the work, it’s not much different from the image of Marilyn Monroe being altered by Andy Warhol, but this is an original and as far as I know, he’s not making a statement on mass production of images. So did Rauschenberg really create something new by returning the paper to its original state or was it merely a publicity stunt, as several have believed?

When I read about the erased drawing, I immediately thought of garfieldminusgarfield.com. It’s a site that takes stripes of Jim Davis’ Garfield and erasing any and all traces of the main character. Even as a kid, I used to wonder about Garfield’s relationship to his owner, Jon Arbuckle, since every human in the comic communicates through speech bubbles but Garfield uses thought bubbles. In the earlier books, they couldn’t communicate but as time went on they were clearly talking to one another. I haven’t read many recently, but Garfield seemed only to communicate with Jon and other animals and I wondered whether Garfield was really just a comic about a lonely, socially inept man who talks to his cat.

By taking Garfield out of Garfield, this website does just that. Most of the comics are a series of blank panels and then Jon runs by in a chicken outfit completely out of the blue. Other times he’s arguing with a blank space. I even remember some of the comics and what Garfield says and does and now every time I’ve come across a Garfield comic, I read it over the regular way and then imagine Garfield and all his dialogue erased. Surprisingly, it’s a lot funnier and a lot more interesting than the original comic. Jim Davis seems to think so, too, because instead of filing a lawsuit, he allowed the creators of the website to publish a book.

It’s similar to Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing but I think garfieldminusgarfield.com is much more creative due to its selective erasing. In taking Garfield out of his own comic strip, the site adds something else. It raises the question not only of the cat and the owner’s relationship, but of Jon Arbuckle’s sanity.

Recently, this happened in a more literary format when Jonathan Safran Foer (the author of Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close) went through Bruno Schulz’s Street of Crocodiles and cut thousands of words until he had formed an entirely new story titled Tree of Codes. The book itself looks like a hundred slices of Swiss cheese. (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-safran-foer/tree-of-codes_b_782873.html#s181503&title=undefined) Even though all the words were chosen for Foer, the fact that he went through the novel and selected bits and pieces of it to form a new story, I think, constitutes a creative act. It’s like taking individual notes from an opera in the order they were written and combining them to create a new song. It may not be the most authentic way of writing a song or of writing a book, but Tree of Codes is certainly Foer’s intellectual property.

Doug Walker’s web phenomenon “5 Second Movies” on thatguywiththeglasses.com takes the selective erasing into video by hyperediting full-length movies down to mere seconds (yes, we already know they’re often longer than five seconds). The results are hysterical. While Walker sometimes adds scenes from other movies (like Neo’s “Whoa!” at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey), by selecting the scenes he does, he’s adding another level to it.

As an artist (especially in writing and film), there are times when you have to ax a lot of the fat from a story – pointless storylines, unnecessary dialogue, etc. – or erase a scene so that you can do it over better. (On a side note, I usually always prefer the cinematic release of a movie over the director’s cut). But can erasing be a creative act in itself? I’m not so sure about Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing, which takes away everything that makes it a drawing, but when abridging a work and editing it down to something completely different than the original like Tree of Codes or the “5 Second Movies,” you definitely come up with something new. It may not be one hundred percent original, but it definitely is a means of creation.

Any of you deconstructionists have any thoughts on this? Drop me a line.