Painting-The revelation of Erasion- Bill Dillion

https://www.tate.org.uk/tate-etc/issue-8-autumn-2006/revelation-erasure

This essay by Bill Dillion was about art’s relationship with erasion. He seems to compare examples of traditional art’s usage with modern arts usage of erasion but what i found interesting was the way he talks about the definition of erasion.

i found this essay interesting but difficult to read, allot of the vocabulary I had to look up and still I wouldn’t fully understand what he is saying , so if I’ve miss interpreted anything he writes i apologise.

In the first few paragraphs he begins to define erasion saying that it isn’t the same as rewinding or deletion, erasion implies a process that leaves a mark. Even using a rubber changes the surface of the paper, looking at the example of Stalin when he tried to “erase” the politicians who disagreed with his ideas that was process that left behind broken families and defined the worlds perspective of Stalin for years to come. I think erasion is about intent, Frenhofer’s piece that Dillion mentions of the women , if he approached it like “I’m going to add a shadow to this piece that goes up to her foot” I don’t know if i would define that as erasion. There is also levels of erasion. When he was showing the examples by aziz + cucher and Rodchnko, to me this made it clear that, just like with addition, subtraction also has a push and pull element where a balance can be found. With these pieces its clear to me that a face with no erasion warrants no disturbingness and a completely erased face warrants no disturbingness because what is terrifying is something in between those.

one thing that Dillion writes about at the end of the essay is the idea of a world without memory with the past having been erased in terms of art. Looking at art as a viewer sincerely is something that i think I’ve only done for maybe just over a year so its difficult for me to track how it has changed over time but with music that has many parallels to art i see that if you look at the blues that came out of slavery, where i doubt those slaves had much access to external music, its very simple melodies and i think that’s because they hadn’t been exposed to past music. So the music we have now builds on those past foundations, so without those foundations we would just be singing theblues or something similar. I think the same can be said for art.

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