Thoughts determine kinds of lives we lead. They locate the choices we make within the unlimited field of our so-called "way of life". In these terms, thoughts do not describe the individual function of an organ or a mental ability but rather address an experience, an experimentum, the object of which is the possible conditions of life and human intelligence.¹

In the myth of Orpheus,² his glance back into the kingdom of shadows became the decisive moment when he once again lost his dead Eurydice. At that moment, she banished Orpheus's ability to remember or experience things that were not physically present before him. By looking back, he tried to reassure himself of her presence but only became aware of his loss and ensured that Eurydice, in her journey back from death to life, could only ever be remembered as image. A metaphoric reading of Orpheus and Eurydice shows us that the production of such mental images, or imagination, is intimately connected to memory as it falls back on all its experiences, knowledge, awareness, fantasies and associations to form a basis for thinking. It is this imagination that creates a kind of rhizomatic structure from the multitude of individual images we receive, in turn determining the complex network we use to understand the world.

Rosemary Trockel's relatively unknown series of book-cover designs could be said to function in a similar way. They have been produced alongside her other work since the 1980s. The designs not only refer to the wealth of possible ways of formally visualising a book, but also refer to literary and philosophical ideas as well as motifs in Trockel's own work. The book designs could be said to provide her with a 'niche of thought' in which she can experiment with photos, drawings, patterns, words and scientific texts, using them in different combinations as cover images and book titles. They also serve as a think tank for her other works, generating a kind of freehand exploration of themes and ideas for later development. A recent example of this is her exhibition 'Spleen' at the Dia Center for the Arts in New York where she included a broad selection of the book covers alongside other works.

Starting with the idea of the draft, Trockel has developed a series of hypotheses and unrealised projects that have their own internal dynamic as well as serving to focus on the possibility to process thoughts for her other projects and concepts. In choosing to write about this kind of work, I have focused on a floor work from the series Leben heisst... (Living Means...), where book-cover designs are essential parts of the installation, and on two independent publications.

I

  Analogies, metaphors and symbols are the threads that connect our minds to the
  world, even if, absent-mindedly, we have lost contact with it. They ensure the
  unity of human experience.³

Living Means Not Good Enough (2002) is the fourth work in the series Leben heisst... It consists of a life-size photograph of a female figure spread out on a blanket. The woman appears preoccupied, reading books and magazines that are both photographically represented and present as real objects. All the female figures appearing in the series are photographed from overhead and, in order to emphasise their three dimensionality, the back of their heads are cut out and folded upwards - creating the illusion that the objects they look at are in front of their faces. This aspect of the work - the combination of the flat photographic surface and real objects - is lost in any reproduction but is very significant in reality. It is particularly apparent in the floor piece mentioned above because of the quantity of books surrounding the photograph of a dark-haired woman, naked apart from a flesh-coloured skirt. The woman reads a Madonna interview in a 2000 issue of The Face magazine. On close inspection, the scattered books register as designs by the artist herself. The titles are often combined with images and themes from other works, triggering memories or mental references and posing questions to the viewer.⁴ As Kant described it, 'they activate the ability to observe without the presence of the object'.⁵

At this point our exploration of the work might switch from the visual perception of the objects on the floor to the work's 'inner meaning', and therefore to the 'act of thinking' itself. This act of thinking is not the same process associated with classical Enlightenment, but is rather reflexive in nature, being focused on the subject at hand. Hannah Arendt phrased it succinctly in her essay about the life of the mind: 'All thought demands a pause.'⁶ This moment of absorption is also visible in the image of the woman who casually bends her knees upwards. It remains uncertain whether she is reading or daydreaming but what is clear is that her apparent absentmindedness is directed at the surrounding details, while her thoughts seem to be occupied elsewhere. The viewer's gaze meanwhile travels from the Madonna interview to some of the books placed to the right of the woman's thigh. The one on top is called Miss Madonna and has a two-part, black-and-white cover showing the star in profile with an empty speech bubble. The title of this design asks Wie kann ich den Tod gut finden? (How can I like death?), and the book is published by the mythical Wege Verlag in Opladen.

In Living Means Not Good Enough, Trockel uses visual shorthand to tap into the discourse around Madonna, the modern icon. She leads us from the star's representation in the media through a word play on the mad woman (mad donna) to the impossibility of answering the question posed in the title. She addresses questions of the self and its external perception, emphasising the ambivalence inherent in a public persona. The questions about public and private selves are not easily answered and here their complexity is drawn out by the references in the work and its title. Other celebrities, including Brigitte Bardot, also appear in Trockel's work for she is interested in the constantly changing discourse surrounding these public figures. For instance, the B.B./B.B. cover for Brecht's Mother Courage shows Bardot as a market seller with pistol in hand. It is part of a body of work called B.B./B.B. that mixes up references to both Brigitte Bardot and Bertolt Brecht.

These book works are often created digitally and draw on a variety of literary genres for inspiration, including the youth novel, the thriller, the textbook, the biography and the psychological novel. Often, however, the initial reference to a specific genre is undermined by Trockel's use of ambiguous cover imagery. For instance, in the work in question, a small paperback book on a pile to the right of the photograph combines the title Your difference with an image of a group of identical skyscrapers arranged one behind the other. A book placed just above the woman's head is called Schrecksekunden (Seconds of Terror) and shows the artist as a young girl standing in front of the famous Nazi Olympic stadium built in Berlin in 1936. Other titles consciously play on associations with existing or possible books. The title Türme des Schweigens (Towers of Silence) could point as much to a screenplay from the 1950s as to a novel written in the 80s. Some read like the CV of a sober citizen, such as the cover for Das verkannte Leben (The Unrecognised Life), showing a woman wearing winter clothes in front of a doorway next to a dirty façade. Others use an ironic inversion of the terminology of specific genres. Anleitung zum Unglücklichsein 3 (Guide to Unhappiness 3) is ring-bound in the top corner and illustrated with a woman lying on her back. As part of this multiple strategy, some of Trockel's designs refer to people that appear elsewhere in her work. For instance, the book Retrospektive depicts portraits of Marcel Duchamp and Agnes Martin.

The second part of the title, ...Not Good Enough, could also be read as an interpretation of the meaning of 'life'. In its positive sense the term can be traced back to the American psychoanalyst and child psychologist Donald W. Winnicott who coined the phrase the 'good-enough mother'.⁷ In his publications and lectures from the mid-1960s, Winnicott developed the concept of a sufficiently caring contact person who feels responsible for the child and supports its development. However, neglect or a lack of responsibility on the part of the carer will lead the child to develop an instable superego. A psychoanalytical reading of the title could therefore problematise neglect on both sides - the experience of being left alone as a child and an acknowledged lack of responsibility on the part of the mother.

Exploring the work further suggests yet more interpretations. The cover of a book to the left of the figure has the German title Nicht Gut Genug (Not Good Enough) and the design shows a chimney blown up and collapsed at an acute angle. This observation of an act of destruction feels like an ode to failure. In view of the vast amount of heterogeneous reading material on offer, so much so that the female body in the photo nearly disappears amongst the books, the title almost becomes a confession of personal fallibility. When the fictitious publications are combined with real titles, such as Susan Sontag's Illness as Metaphor, the net of references tightens.

As the wealth of topics and ideas contained in the piece is so extensive that it seems impossible that anyone could ever complete a full reading of the work. Living Means Not Good Enough therefore starts with the realisation of this likely failure. Such an understanding is reminiscent of Marguerite Duras novel Zerstören, sagt Sie (Destruction, she says), where the destruction is directed against one's own reservations, fears and modes of behaviour.⁸ In Trockel's work, the individual titles provide a framework for a similar internal critique in which the general picture is defined by doubts. The fact that the professionally designed covers transport tentative concepts and ideas onto the white sheets of paper between them creates an even more ambivalent impression of the work's overall title. On the one hand, the sketchy treatment of ideas and connections can be seen as programmatic in Trockel's book-design covers, while, on the other hand, the empty books appear as undecipherable simulacra that modify the meaning of Living Means Not Good Enough once more. They not only suggest that we (viewers) are inadequate, but that we are also each the wrong person altogether who cannot access what we see.

II

  Seething for fearful years, the Wupper, flowing through the vaults of my heart,
  is squeezed out from my darkest memory; an old and heavy medley of scripts; an
  evil workmen's tale that never took place, though its presence is fantastically
  moving.⁹

In 1988 Rosemarie Trockel began a book project called The Wupper Cuntry Club. It was initially planned as a series of drawings based on a photo of the artist walking along the banks of the Wupper. The drawings were going to be realised by friends and accompanied by excerpts from the stage directions of Else Lasker-Schüler's play Die Wupper written in the first years of the twentieth century. Eventually the title, three drawings and a sentence from the stage directions were realised. The drawings that are based on the photograph all have the same structure. The artist stands in profile on a meadow in front of the Wupper. She wears a short coat and skirt, her hands in her pockets, and looks directly at the viewer. A collaged speech bubble puts a text into her mouth in each of the three drawings while another speech bubble at the edge of each picture cites an invisible speaker who usually enunciates a single word. The pictures vary only by the slight difference of each person's technique and the contents of the speech bubble; the hand-drawn title and a sentence that sounds like a stage direction, '...walking in a row towards the muddy riverbank', point towards a cinematic or theatrical construction that isn't there. On the contrary, the identical structure of the drawings supports the serial presentation of the images.

The principle of juxtaposing ambivalent, heterogeneous or even contradictory aspects is visible mostly in the speech bubbles. One says, 'We knit what we see', transforming what might be a general cognitive insight into a specific context. The laconic comment coming from the 'black sunglasses' seems to doubt the basic conditions of what we see. Other speech-bubble texts are only loosely connected: different art forms are mentioned such as 'a radical performance' or 'Gesamtkunstwerk', but as these terms are not placed together and are combined with comments from other fields, they also suggest other readings. The title The Wupper Cuntry Club plays on the assonance between two words. On close observation, the rural club on the banks of the Wupper turns into a place of ambiguous sexual entertainment. This again relates to the remote and dark atmosphere of the play Die Wupper in which the characters are driven by compulsive behaviour and anxiety. These analogies are much more atmospheric than content related - the mood being conveyed in the dominant motif of the muddy riverbank and the green, sluggish water of the river. In the drawings themselves, the artist distances herself by repeating the same motif and asking other people to do the drawings. The same landscape develops a structural life of its own in the different drawings, creating an ideal backdrop for odd confrontations in text and composition.

III

  Impasse de Bon Secour. Again I am walking down to the end of the street. It is
  towards evening and the street is lined with empty houses, their shutters
  rotting. [...] I walk up and down undisturbed, stubbing out glowing cigarette
  butts on the floor as if I were waiting for someone to emerge from one of the
  closed doors before the streetlights come out. [...] Initially I stopped at the
  bars, joyfully excited and curious to play the role of an unwanted spectator
  glimpsing the hidden life of the Trouville bourgeoisie. [...] That sudden
  glimpse, even if blurred, comes back to me later as I lie in bed - the child
  with the white face and the empty gaze, the calm globe barely revealing its
  lines of latitude or the shapes of its continents and oceans.¹⁰

Playgrounds, a series of photomontages showing a journey though Germany, was planned as a book to be published in 1993. It did not appear but the existing cover designs show the schematic, tightly measured ground plan of a playground. Of the six montages that have been realised, they all show the same motif displaced to different cities - a playground populated with children as a refuge for improvised and self-absorbed activities. The works are made using black-and-white photographic material from the 1950s-70s depicting the happy bustle of children playing. To each, the artist has added a foreground figure of a young or old male voyeur. He is mostly positioned on the right or left edge of the picture and plays an ambiguous role. He exposes the unsuspecting children to the gaze of the spectator and allows our view - so far undetected - to move into the picture plane. The open gaze turns a place of children's innocent activity, like a locus amoeni, into an unprotected scene.

Although their compositions vary, all the photomontages reveal different aspects of the voyeuristic gaze. In Duisburg an absent-minded young man watches a group of naked children playing in water fountains. He does not remain unnoticed but stands with his back to us outside of the scene, the closest point to identify with the position of the viewer. The situation in Krefeld is different. An older man in a suit stands underneath a tree in front of a large playground, his gaze fixed on a scene outside of the frame. This exemplifies two seemingly contradictory criteria of the voyeur; the immediate proximity to the action while assuming to be unobserved and the oblivious act of looking. In Oberhausen, the older man with white sports cap hides next to a maple tree. The montage technique returns the gaze directed at a girl sitting on a bench and turns it into an element disturbing the fragile freedom of the playground. In another montage, a group of boys testing a climbing frame in Cologne is the desired image for a man in a suit and hat who remains in the background. In each of these playground scenes the lone figure appears like a foreign entity, an intensifying chimera of fear that parents warn their children against. The role of the person in the background is always ambiguous however. On the one hand he is the personification of someone who takes innocence and changes the rules of play by instrumentalising them for his own purposes. On the other hand he is a representative of an alternative reality, a grown-up who, with his passive, dissecting gaze, becomes the alter ego of the viewer and his or her gaze.

This gaze of the viewer is coded in a similar way to Margarite Duras's description in a conversation with Xavier Gauthier about the movie La Femme du Gange: 'The generalised gaze... one looks and then one sees what one is looking at... it is as if one could see the work of the camera through the eyes. One doesn't see what is being seen.'¹¹ This could be translated into the double gaze in Trockel's photo montages. The viewer's gaze can identify with that of the voyeur but only in the same activity, he or she does not see what the person in the picture absent-mindedly experiences with the help of his imagination.

The sketchy book designs of playgrounds emphasise their quality as ideas or fragments that allude to the general principle and structure of publications. They return us to the concept of Agamben's experimentum of an imagination and thinking that it is aware of its limits, as demonstrated in Living Means Not Good Enough. Bergson too understood thinking as a makeshift solution for our not unlimited perception. He also saw it as an extension of what we see in contrast to the myth of Orpheus, where sight alone created or destroyed the object of its gaze. For Orpheus there is no room for thinking in daily life, yet it is exactly this drifting away from ordinary things that informs Rosemary Trockel's designs. Her work tries to create the space to be lost in thought and to follow one's own imagination.

Translated by Charles Esche and Silke Otto-Knapp

— Lilian Haberer