Richard Burkhart

 

Ideological rub. 

 

In the winter of 1985 while visiting Germany, I filled a sketchbook with rubbings made against the western side of the then still standing Berlin wall. As I had intimately come to know what it stood for the wall was much more than an ideological barrier, it was, in the most beloved material of modern architectural technology: molded ferro-concrete, the keystone monument to the utter moral and intellectual failure of our so called civilized society.

At the time there was little hope that that foremost manifestation of that stunted testosterone thinking – the blunt ideological boundaries cast in the wall – would ever be given up , it was necessary to interact. Pissing on it, as requested by a drinking buddy in Ghent,  was not enough. Physical evidence was necessary. A form of possession that would allow me to dominate, or at least maybe distinguish my own humiliation from that horrific comedy.   Joseph Beuys was not only referring to medieval aesthetics when he condemned this paranoid masculinity as 2 cm too short.  Lacking Beuys’ elegance, making archaeological evidence to carry into the future, a real signature of this pathetic reality, was the least I could do.

 

 

 

 

Ideological rub.  1985. (Frottage of the western side of the Berlin wall.) Graphite on paper.  (5 of 36).  Each page 24x32cm.