Rosemarie Trockel's Untitled (Painting Machine) had been made and used and first shown by June 1990. The piece was put on view alongside its ostensible painterly products, the wall piece called 56 Brushstrokes, in Cologne. This context needs looking at, yet title and date alone already offer information enough, from an art-world perspective, to put us in immediate touch with the work's main issues and themes. Here is a piece that addresses both authorship and artistic identity as 'mechanical' constructs: it draws its fuel straight from a high-octane postmodern tank.

Or so it seems, until we take a second look. For once a single run of images had been made - a set of seven sheets of straggling parallel lines - and its uniqueness guaranteed (each is numbered 1/1), the artist herself pulled and cut its plug, as if in anticipation of the fact that soon enough the motor of this particular object would strike its viewers as outmoded - all too difficult, even impossible, to fire up. It was belated from the beginning, in other words: assertively so. Belated, yet not quite obsolescent. When I look at the machine's now quiet carcass, I cannot imagine that the scrap heap calls. Remember that appliances are often delivered without their plugs; it's the work of a moment to get wired, and be off and away. Away towards an account of authorship that aims both to admit, as well as to question, its endless mystique. I think that Trockel does this in quite unfamiliar ways - unfamiliar above all to any audience that expects ambitious artworks to manifest their concern with authorship and production via an absolute intimacy, a deep and literal inwardness with the ways and means of the modern art and image worlds. Think for example of pieces characteristic of Cindy Sherman or Sherrie Levine: Levine working throughout the 1980s and 90s after the great modernist photographers, plus Monet, Cézanne, Duchamp and the like; Sherman consistently staging and restaging a version of the filmic primal scene. They were both operating within the now-familiar strategy of appropriation. 'Within' puts the case mildly: their signature works depend upon an all-but-seamless doubling or matching of work with source. Such imitation, we have by now been often instructed, is what gives analysis and meaning their starting point. For to cite a recent commentator on Levine, 'through its strategies of appropriation and the readymade, [her work in particular] raises questions about the artist as the sole and private source of his art and about the unique and autonomous work of art that is made in the artist's image.' ¹

With such imitative deadpan, Trockel's characteristic objects are formally at odds: they take explicit and material exception to the appropriationist's main rules and concerns. She quite literally stretches and embroiders the commodity and readymade: her knitted stockings would fit a long-legged fairy-tale giantess; her dresses place trademarks strategically, where else other than atop each breast as if to target and disauthenticate what lies below. And when she makes rulers, à la Duchamp, as she did in 1989 - the reference is to his Three Standard Stoppages of 1913-14, yardsticks that take their dimensions from three dropped threads, so as to fix and be ruled by the workings of chance - hers aim to measure the operations of the dream. Though not to be fooled by it: she called her work Illusion , as if in admission that trying to measure the dreamwork can bring deception in its wake. Alongside such ironies, the Painting Machine seems right at home. In all these contexts expression is objectified and made physical, even mechanical; it is pushed and pulled, made rote and repetitive, in pursuit of a particular interest in sites and systems of meaning, and how they might be given a literal, even lexical form in objects, and so be revalued or laid to rest. Hence the Painting Machine . One way of stating the aims of this essay is to say that what follows tracks the odd intersection of the literal and the expressive in Trockel's art: they meet in her physical objects, and they are likewise to be found in what is potentially the most expressive and objective element in the artistic lexicon, as well as the most disembodied - I mean the brushed-in line. 'What's in a line?' My query echoes an echo: this is the same question that Briony Fer posed - again the year was 1990 - as a means to speak of gender within modernist abstraction, when it is women who produce the lines. In particular she considered Liubov Popova, that archetypal 'producer', Soviet-style, who herself aimed to turn her art to the machine and factory, albeit with limited success. ² It might be helpful in this context to cite Walter Benjamin, tersely predicting in 1936 that transformed conditions of production would impact the superstructure so as to 'brush aside a number of outmoded concepts such as creativity and genius, eternal values and mystery'. ³ In 1990 that day had still not yet securely arrived. For line we might once again read name, so as to summon the pervasive 1980s reassertion, rather than refusal, of 'signature style'. Trockel's machine may be mechanical but it is also feminist and critical, above all about lines and names.

The first exhibition of Untitled (Painting Machine) was strategic. Trockel's work was on view in AR Penck's gallery, while he showed in hers. A simple tactic: it aims to point to gender and artistic identity, and to mine viewers' expectations of both. In the words of Isabelle Graw, who reviewed the show, 'to make this one-time switch of dealers can only imply a different series of conditions of production, different techniques for the selling of the work, a different mode of advertising, and different mechanisms of mediation with respect to a different public'. ⁴ Different, indeed: together the two artists posed kissing for a poster, wearing costumes - for her a mac and kerchief, for him denim and soft felt hat - that suggests a performance of class. Here is a labouring couple: Benjamin's producers, perhaps, in a performance that would have made him squirm.

Yet the main illusion of the Painting Machine concerns its products, the seven panels that are shown with it as a kind of evidence or proof. Fifty-six brushstrokes, eight per panel: eight tracks of India ink that skitter across Japan paper that was then laid down on a canvas support. ⁵ If this is a painting machine, then it has given us 'painting' in a large or liberal - or perhaps just modernist - reading of the term. For it seems that much that matters in the work hangs directly on the nature of the brushstroke and what we might be tempted to conclude from the look of the many drawn (yet hardly calligraphic) lines. To their look - their expression - we will soon and often return.

Trockel's machine has an open iron framework that conjures both loom and printing press. It could not be simpler both structurally and in what it claims to do. The object was to mark a paper placed flat beneath the frame: on a flatbed, hard and tolerant as a workbench, as Leo Steinberg described it in the case of Robert Rauschenberg, and thus (Steinberg wrote) 'able to lend itself to any content that does not evoke a prior optical event'. ⁶ I think that formula says something about the bluntly physical look of Trockel's hiccupping lines. Yet the result of the flatbed is also painting on the horizontal, not on the easel - since Pollock even more than Rauschenberg, its newly necessary site. It was Pollock, according to Rosalind Krauss, who made this horizontality an independent and manipulable modernist medium - as Trockel remembers, and her machine evokes. ⁷ As do its brushes, come to that. There are eight of them hanging from each of seven cross bars; these, we are meant to think, have generated the slew of skittish lines. None of the brushes is an off-the shelf item; each was made to order - the manufacturer was a Japanese firm called, as luck or art would have it, Da Vinci (I kid you not) - each was made to order from a lock of artists' hair. Hence the difference among the various brush-heads - soft, curly, blonde, bristly - and hence the differences among the marks they (apparently) make.

Not, however, that while looking we have any easy way to tie marks back to brushes, even though the brushes themselves are keyed by gold-lettered names to the cast of characters who proved willing to snip the hair from their heads. We have to read the fine print: Sophie Calle, Vito Acconci, Georg Baselitz, Sigmar Polke, Barbara Kruger - the list acts like an up-to-date art index to a 1990s Who's Who. These are artist's artists, in an almost literal sense of that familiar term: they stand close enough to Trockel to have sent her a bodily talisman at the drop of a hat. Or following a phone call, perhaps. The sense of closeness is only deepened when we note that Trockel's friends are included; she even has her own brush, dangling companionably with the others on rack two. All friendly enough. Yet there is also something Victorian and morbid about this process: the brushes are oddly like memorials, as if in making them, Trockel has killed off a whole generation, at one fell swoop. All that remains is the array of bristles; it is as if the locks of hair pour or spurt out from the brushes like marks themselves. (These verbs are coded, but I suspect they are the ones Trockel herself would like to see used - I'll soon say why.) Yet at the same time their sheer cleanness, the lack of inky blackness, makes one suspect that for all their purported indexicality - for we are asked to believe that each hairy talisman carried a charge of ink, and left its own dark blots - none of these brushes has ever been used. Or were they used then carefully washed? Such inevitable questions start us wondering just how authentically expressive is the process of snipping and dipping, marking and dragging, that this machine implies. Did the painting sequence ever happen in quite those terms?

How authentic is the process Trockel's machine implies? I take this question as something like the juice, the energy of the work, even more than the electricity from which it has been so abruptly weaned. What are we to believe about the look and veracity of any individual mark? Each brush is labelled, its human source signalled: no way to make the artist's tool be more bodily, unless the brush were to cede its place, regressively, to the artist's bare hand. Yet Trockel means us to be suspicious about what follows from this fact. We can eventually learn which stroke any one cluster of bristles has made. But having learned it, what exactly would we then know about artists and the characteristic qualities of their marks? Bodies make marks, yet in this particular instance, the bodily mark is far from forming a signature stroke. Trockel is being singularly suspicious about the individualised qualities of any one line. Each is different, certainly, but all are taciturn; we cannot tell Calle from Kruger, and as for Polke and Baselitz, eminences both, they hardly stand out. And it could only be embarrassing to wax poetic about any single touch, or even a grouping of eight. Who would not be ready to greet such a critical effort with a charge of reading in? Each mark is concrete and visible, certainly, but expressive it is not.

Trockel's strictures on expression depend on expectations and perceptions her machine wishes to conjure and aims to defeat. Let us name them, with a nod to Ernst Gombrich, 'physiognomic' in their content and force: for him the term is expression's synonym - he is labelling the pervasive penchant to see human character and qualities in any and every sign. This reflex too is part of the 'painting machine', broadly speaking: part, that is, not just of Trockel's work, but also conjured more largely by the machine of Painting, capital P, when it is viewed, to paraphrase my dictionary, as 'an apparatus consisting of interrelated parts with separate functions, used in the performance of some kind of work'. Work, by Althusserian lights, includes the tasks of culture and communication as carried out by the apparatus's component parts. In a recent essay Mario Carpo has even spoken of the alphabet under a similar rubric: a machine for the recording of spoken words, it allows, wherever it is available, the reproduction and reuse of those words, even with differences in accent, interpretation, and other readerly skills. ⁸

According to Gombrich, physiognomic perception is the simplest, the most elementary element of expression; he thinks there may well be a characteristic human penchant for reading personality into the smallest of bodily signs. All this is to be confidently expected and tolerated, says Gombrich, except when misused: think of Lavater, and his noxious attentions to the slope of foreheads and the depth and cast of eyes. And what of nose and mouth? 'I have never yet,' declares Lavater, 'seen a nose with a broad back, whether arched or rectilinear, that did not appertain to an extraordinary man.'⁹ Or elsewhere: 'As are the lips, so is the character. Firm lips, firm character; weak lips and quick in motion, weak and wavering character.'¹⁰ And so on and on into the 19th century and well beyond, through Galton, Lombroso, Bertillon and their many heirs. Not that Gombrich, whose focus is on what he terms the 'physiognomic fallacy' in art criticism, follows that course. He simply dismisses such physiognomics directly, at their source. I quote Gombrich: 'The reason why Lavater's method of physiognomic results in nonsense is not that he explores his own response, but that he treats it like an infallible oracle that is in no need of corroboration.'¹¹ Hence his dry warning to people like me: 'The intensity of personal intuition,' writes Gombrich succinctly, 'is no measure of its correctness.'¹²

We might count Gombrich's few words on Lavater as one of the most breathtaking and tactical evasions in the recent history of art. For this Jewish intellectual, who left Vienna for London in 1936, mostly ends up deploying the 18th-century scientist, Georg Lichtenberg, to launch the main thrust of his own anti-physiognomic attack on a tradition with such real consequences for Jews. Lichtenberg's weapon is satire: a close 'physiognomic' reading of the German student's characteristic pigtail, as if it too was a telling body part. Which part is obvious, as are the traits thus indexed: there is no one here who could not say how what is stiff and sturdy, or kinked and thinnish, translates into a trait of character of variously virile 18th-century university males. Do not imagine for a moment that Gombrich himself failed to get the joke.

Lichtenberg and Gombrich have a role in this argument not least because their scepticism is of a kind Trockel shares. Her brushes, those quasi-pigtails, make the relationship clear. Some are stiff, some sturdy, some curly some straight; yet nothing suggests that any of these snippets, even given their physical differences, carry the marks of character. Nor are they gendered in any lexical way. And the marks they make (or attempt) evade the same sort of coding: so much is clear. If the point still needs stressing, years after Gombrich, it is because what is phallic in painting has persisted even longer than physiognomics. Or so Trockel asks us to grasp, via the pseudo-physiognomics of her chosen means. Consider one of her drawings, a cut-paper work of 1986. It harks back directly, knowingly, to Lavater and his own uses of flattened profiles and crisply tailored silhouettes. Even her work's title, which it bears as a label on the verso, has something of an 18th-century ring: Jede Nacht besucht uns ein Traum.¹³ Here is a week of such nocturnal encounters: seven profiles duly numbered, all in rows. These are, I think, the us who pronounce the title; 'they' are pieces of paper rather than people, evidently, with corners and edges in lieu of limbs. These male papers are the ones who are animated and enlivened, however differently, by their nightly dreams.

The Painting Machine works differently, of course. The piece itself is not a painting or a drawing, but an object; this is objectively, demonstrably true. For it, gendered performance is clearly a thing of the past. In its very objecthood, it still addresses vision and gender, identity and painting, in ways that quite prosaically suggest that these are mechanical operations that have been cut off from their juice.

In lieu of painting, what? No one needs reminding that Trockel is also the designer - not the 'producer' - of painting-like objects that were entirely and declaratively machined. These are her knitted 'paintings', in quotes, works that do quote the heroic dimensions of post-war painting, and dominate the wall. And they are unique images - very much one of a kind. But the likeness stops here: where paint should be, find yards and yards of industrially knitted wool. Anyone who has worn a sweater, however it was made, knows that such tight regularity and unvaried tension can only be due to absolute insentience: they must be machined. Here then are works that doubly trope the work of the hand, which in this group of objects, neither knits nor paints. On the one hand, so Trockel claims, she was concerned with 'the signifiers of the feminine - culturally inferior materials and skills such as wool and knitting', and wanted to find out 'whether it is possible to overcome the negative cliché by eliminating the handicraft aspect from the whole complex'.¹⁴ On the other hand - it now seems clear that this second hand is rhetorically male - the handmade aspect of painting, as customarily practiced, is likewise excluded by these same means. The neither-nor comes together almost effortlessly in one particular object, the knitted painting (Untitled (Speckled), 1988) that apes a group of Pollock-derived paint splatters, over and over again. Splatter as logo, then: what measure of authenticity does it now guarantee? Whose practice does it name? Trockel's or Pollock's or both? The work finds a partner and parallel conundrum in another of the knitted objects from 1988, across which wanders a time-honoured assertion of subjective being, its script now ventriloquised by a machine: Cogito ergo sum. Below the borrowed proposal broods a black square. No, the Black Square. Another negation knit large. Trockel's Cogito clearly asks us to think of identity - even her own artistic identity - in terms that embrace and take their distance from this founding declaration of the independent western self.

Trockel, ergo sum. I want to close this essay by trying to take one further step in spelling out Trockel's approach to the issue of the artist's mark and self. To do so I need to enlist one further piece of evidence - one where her obliquities apparently yield to direct claim and statement: or so it first seems as we begin to read. Trockel: so much is clear. The work in question is an artist's book in which a model, wearing a sweater of Trockel's design, poses under her printed name and in front of a whole series of works of art: a Baselitz, a Warhol, a Pistoletto, and as here, a Gerhard Richter; in this case she stands before the latter's celebrated nude walking downstairs - itself an homage and claim to descent down Duchamp's stair.¹⁵ As so often in Trockel's production, the past is trumped and claimed. And so it is in other ways as well. For her brunette model (and surrogate) mirrors the stance of the willowy blonde clothes horse who long ago stood with such elegant artifice before the screen of Pollock's signature pours - posed there famously by Cecil Beaton, with masterly aplomb.¹⁶ The new performance is not identical - it needs its reversals - yet it is close enough to bring the ghost of Pollock's painting back to life. It hovers there somewhere in the space behind the model, between Baselitz's image and Trockel's name, even while the sweatered modern woman reminds the conjured spectre, oh so gently, that more than dress styles have changed since 1951. There are no more drips and pours, she murmurs, or if there are, we owe them to the intermittent efforts of brushes programmed to stick and sputter in their narrow parallels.

Whispers like these send us back to Trockel's knitted pours and inky brushstrokes for one final look. It may even be time to hold them up to the mirror they imply: to conjure a mental image of a Pollock next to its knitted alter ego, that is, and match a Morris Louis, to choose only one example, with one of Trockel's black-and-white panels, so as to parallel their lines. I don't think the gesture is simply gratuitous; in fact I think it is summoned, like the ghost of Pollock, by Trockel's pieces themselves. The result is not just that we look at Trockel as not-Louis, not-Pollock, but also that we have a brief moment, thanks to Trockel's efforts, in which we can look at both Pollock and Louis anew. The comparison allows us to gauge our expectations - as to hand and touch, velocity and guiding vision - against what we actually find. Louis starts looking considerably less, rather than more handmade: the space is opened to consider just how much his work makes regularity its hard-won code. And to look again at Pollock is to be reminded of just how difficult it is to make a blob or a blotch repeat itself - let alone to give it character and tone. It cannot happen in the making, so much is clear. Think back to Leo Steinberg, in this context, with his assertion about the flatbed, that it is 'able to lend itself to any content that does not evoke a prior optical event'. The same must be said for all these drips and pours, including all that is aggressively anti-optical in Trockel's own performance of 'the mark'.

Trockel, ergo sum. The phrase is my own hybridised statement, I hasten say; it has never been spoken or written by the artist who stands behind the name. Nor am I assigning it to the artist/woman/person, but to her work's claims and tone. Such a construct or claim for identity speaks quite specially of the artist's role. 'Trockel' stands in that phrase as mimic and double, as self and other both; or perhaps better stated, aiming to find a vantage point somewhere in between. Little wonder, given such insistences, that she is the author of a knitted sculpture-cum-performance-cum-montage, which is dubbed the Schizo-Pullover. The knitted garment yokes two bodies together (the artist's and a female collaborator) to make them, awkwardly, one. But which one? The practical point of the sweater is social; but when it is viewed, fully loaded, together with the montaged version of a single, doubled wearer, the piece ends up insisting that there are fabrics that bind self and other, and make them hard to tell apart. Something of the same impulse guides another choice of alter ego, which Trockel finds in the visage of the ape. She has drawn these kindred creatures in a series of ten ink-brushed portraits - the collection is called Hope - that ask us to look each 'sitter', in quotes, directly in the eye.¹⁷ Initially each element in the series was further labelled with its own quite human emotion, this although it is hard to look at any image and confidently see anger, say, spelled out in the visage one confronts. These works are not the physiognomist's 'expressive' heads. Instead they forge an encounter that has all the immediacy of a social interaction; the looks the apes proffer, and we reciprocate, are full enough of interrogatives and uncertainty that we might say the exchange is staged to make us apes. At any rate it is not quite clear who is miming who.¹⁸

Trockel as mirror then; when doubling is the means to connect a whole variety of others and selves. Little wonder, given such a purpose, that she has produced a piece that literally is a mirror; how could she not have made such a thing? Or so it seems on first glance: silver handle, reflective surface, a fleeting likeness of the viewer as she looks. Look again from another angle, however, and all has changed. The glass goes grey and smokily transparent; in lieu of a silvery reflection, now you see right through. The trickery should be enough to send anyone scrambling for a title. And Trockel has obliged. Profumo. Title as time machine: rocket back to one of the great scandals of Britain in the swinging (vs. radical) 1960s, when John Profumo, Minister of War, met his downfall for having sex with Christine Keeler, who was also having sex with a Russian naval attaché.¹⁹ The charge as levelled (and denied) was that secrets, as well as sex, were being exchanged. Sex or politics, in other words. Not an irrelevant question for a tricky two-faced mirror, one made by a woman, to take as its own. Is the artwork itself a mirror or window? Is it sex or politics? Is it given a male name because it looks alternately smoky and transparent, then reflective and opaque? The answer, of course, depends on your point of view.

This statement returns us to Sherrie Levine, in particular, to a little-known aspect of her recent work: note that she has published Flaubert's Un Coeur Simple as an artist's book, its French text set on cream paper like a Gallimard novel, the typeface and glasein cover lovingly echoing their source. The text tells the life story of a faithful servant, who tends her mistress well and doggedly, sharing even the task of mourning the dear daughter of the house, who has died while still a girl. The years pass, the mistress dies, and in her loneliness, Felicité, the servant, acquires a parrot, whom she loves. When it dies, she has it stuffed. And when she herself is on her deathbed the grotesque artefact, now moth-eaten, becomes her final offering to the parish church; with her last breath, she seems to see the bird take wing above her deathbed like the Holy Ghost. Perhaps it was. Or not.

I take Levine's recourse to Flaubert's novella as a statement of artistic vision, if not quite intention, one as close to autobiography as a borrowed text could come. Hers is an art that, in its utter identification with Flaubert's parrot, courts the possibility (always uncertain, always contested) that artistic transcendence may somehow, even if only in extremis, come to pass. Levine as parrot then, whose aesthetic wager is staked visually, not simply on image, but on surface, and on the pleasures of choices there entailed. Trockel, by contrast, would never lay such a bet. Her mimicry never recovers visual pleasure. And it imagines no evanescent transcendence, no undecidable final truth; this refusal is her work's intransigence - its politics, if you will. The stance does not make it better than Levine's, or worse - only different. Like the Profumo mirror, her objects seem both to provide a certain confirming vision, and to go smokily transparent, depending on how the viewer takes them up. What they do not do is return to the visual energies of painting. From that aesthetic she is definitely unplugged. And this departure is a function of her object choice, which is dedicated, in its sheer physicality, to a productive acting out.

This text was previously published in German as 'Trockel-Objekte oder die Malmaschine', in Rosemarie Trockel (exh. cat.), Stuttgart: Institut fur Auslandsbeziehungen and Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2003, pp.6-21

— Anne Wagner