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,