Schiller - Marginalia

2007

Found pages from works by German romantic poet Friedrich von Schiller, rubber latex, graphite, charcoal on rice paper, 74 x 120 inches. Courtesy the artist.

Exhibited:

Monika Weiss - Marginalia, Galerie Samuel Lallouz, Montréal, Canada, 2008

Remy Toledo Projects: Monika Weiss & Federica Marangoni, Cornice Art Fair, in conjunction with La Bienale di Venecia, Venice, Italy, 2007

ARTIST STATEMENT

Since 2005 I have been working with found books by German authors published in Germany before 1945. This date marks not only the end of Second World War but also the transition from old German font to the new contemporary font used after 1945. In this series of works, in several installations the books are lying on the floor. I created an octagon of payers of the books. All are open. In the same cycle of works the drawings contain mounted on rice paper book pages, which become drawing surfaces. Onto that surface I mark the presence of a body.

Schiller-Marginalia is a large-scale work on paper that can be viewed on the wall or on the ground. The drawing invites the viewers to consider its surface as a fragment of a larger landscape or map. The way the book pages are organized suggests a center, which is where the lying body is placed. In many of my works in this series, I perform live by lying down on this bedding of open German books, many revered by the Nazis, others burned by them. With my eyes closed, I draw lines and stains around my body. In Schiller-Marginalia I draw the shape of the body directly onto the book pages, marking the books with another layer of meaning. The word “marginalia” evokes an act of making hand written notes on the margins of books. In this work the marks occupy its center. I am physically staining and marking German literature - especially Schiller and Goethe - two romantic poets whose works were considered by the Nazi regime as representing high European culture. This symbolic gesture of lying down and marking the bodies of books with my presence relates to historical trauma and European collective memory, but also to the physicality of the books, touched by many hands over many generations.

- Monika Weiss

Essay Excerpt

Born and educated in Poland, New York City based artist Monika Weiss steadfastly pursues representation of the body through mixed media. This endeavor comes to the for in her latest Montréal exhibition, Marginalia. Its enigmatic figures create a dialectical tension, a mystical vein akin to the concept of “aura” articulated by German cultural critic, Walter Benjamin.

- Norman F. Cornett, Monika Weiss, Marginalia, esse arts + opinions, n. 66, Disparition-Disappearance, 2009