Remaining

In the body of history and theories of Los Angeles, one of the most widespread myths about the city is that it is a town with no history. In the introduction to his book, The History of Forgetting. Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory, Norman Klein recalls that, in his role as a cultural theorist, he had a lifelong fascination for excavating "urban ruins." He turned this fascination into an urban archeological encounter with the urban around him . In those days, the nineteen-eighties, Klein was the first to take students on so-called "anti-tours," looking for empty places in the Southern Californian urban sprawl : the lots where buildings once stood, the gaps in the urban space. Some waited for new investors, while others were rebuilt overnight and disappeared once again. In his documentary fiction-short stories seamlessly composed of documentary, fictitious, and private materials-Klein re-tells a story about decay. His story does not really mourn the disappearance of architecturally valuable buildings and memorials; instead, it is a story about the loss of memory. The past was suppressed by absolute presence. New signs arose again and again to take over possession of surfaces. Present in the blind spots of developed space-in the foundations of formerly magnificent buildings, in ruins and empty warehouses-the past seemed to be essentially erased from public consciousness. For decades the legacies of these stories of decay were beneath notice, and they often remained undocumented. In today's Los Angeles, what is left are only a few traces of the massive interventions made in the urban space by the process of continuous destruction and construction. Some of these traces are turned into memorial sites, tourist locations. Most have gone down in history only in moving images.
Seen in different way, the things we perceive in the background of Hollywood productions-landscape, architecture, interiors and exteriors-form a disorderly archive of past structures, bygone eras, of the conditions under which landscape is used, and of the ways it actually is used. The depiction of landscape itself is always a political process. If we want to define the city in a way that is different from the some what dream-like illusionary urban theories that always see Los Angeles as merely the contemporary prototype of a dystopian urban future, then we have to see it as a place that produces images and also produces itself through images, while, at the same time, it takes the images of its imagined past and uses them to examine itself and its own elements. Through images of itself and in the pictures that comment on such images-the filmed and photographed means of transporting a self-image-Los Angeles proves itself to be an image-production studio, where presence and absence, past and present, are continually created and discarded. By taking copies of its many images of time to other places, this city leaves behind traces of itself in a way that no other city does.
Markus Willeke's paintings come from there. However, not a single one of them was made there.

Intersections

Made in his studio in Berlin, Willeke's paintings contain traces of it. Traces of processing, time changes, forms of appropriation, signs of use. Traces of presence and absence, of a present that can only be perceived when it is caught in the process of decay and that can only be fixated as a series of recalled moments that were actually still just happening.
With his visual models in his mind, Willeke paints from memory. His material is gleaned from magazines, but more often from films, by isolating screen shots from movies he has seen. Some of his paintings are based on photographs that Willeke took during a trip to the American West Coast-an image pool that he still draws from years later. The motifs in his water colors, acrylics, and more recent oil paintings are taken from a system of fixed signs that is both permanent and transient: an arrangement of things, separated from the place where it was created.
Through his choice of motifs and his analytical viewpoint, Willeke shows that he is intimately acquainted with the visual spheres upon which his work is based: he considers them as constantly recognizable visual material. This is a crucial distinction between his paintings and, for instance, Ed Ruscha's photo series, pictures of buildings, and liquid word paintings-despite their closely related concepts and visual language. In Ruscha's now iconographic paintings of what is to him an immediate space full of visual symbols, there is a kind of alienation projected into this all too familiar space. However, Willeke's paintings display a more distant sense of alienation, because the visual material is conveyed differently, from a distance. Objects from a specific order of signs transmit a decidedly touristic view: the gaze of a movie-goer looking at visual spaces brought to him via the media. If Willeke's pictures did not employ an artistic gesture and a particular color palette to make this evident, and to distort his fascination with what they depict, they would easily fall victim to this cliché and turn into mere reproductions of stereotypes..

Willeke cuts things out and mounts them, removes things, and adds them to his time- pieces: his paintings do not reproduce things, they are modeled after them. Willeke's work is clearly conscious of time, of itself, of what it depicts, and of the history of painting.
As allegories that can not totally refuse their mimetic character-their referentiality to a reality outside of the image-, and yet make it the subject of a critical treatment, Willeke's paintings refer to images and their origins, and thus to the ways that the perceptual framework surrounding each image is produced.
As manually produced products, Willeke's paintings reflect the conditions under which images are industrially produced. These conditions organize the process of creating images into one involving many stages, as well as the division of labor. He turns images into a unique creation of new images, based on old ones and organized into series, and not into an invention of illustrative images based in external reality. This method can be understood as a way of commenting on not only the routines of industrial production, but also on the process of creating something by hand.

Traces of their production are all too noticeable in Willeke's paintings. Colors that have run together, streaks, and spots are tracks left behind that demonstrate the materiality of each image, and beyond that, the process of working on them. They are signatures, trademarks, and references to the elements of the creative process that cannot be controlled, despite all of the strict calculations made in the conception of the image. These elements can be seen as a surplus, something which cannot be regarded as a note of individual craftsmanship or as a gesture of a deceptive liberation from the patterns of order dictated by painting by numbers. These scratches, spots, impurities, and holes in the polished surfaces of the models he has appropriated are signs of usage.
These marks are proof of work: the work that goes into the industrially produced products Willeke appropriates for his pictures of pictures and incorporates into his artistic vocabulary. It is the work that these industrial products try to erase when-as films, photographs, or images of the tourist imaginary-they pretend to be pure entertainment products, or when-as signs and buses-they purport to be merely functional, or when-as images from magazines-they ignore, page after page, the conditions under which they were produced. This kind of reflective composition, which simply shows us its own state of having been made or produced, is the glue that holds together the images, whose subjects are actually very different.

The pictures show more: for instance, things imagined, placeholders of the imaginary. As staged memories of images seen, they are visualizations of the process of appropriating one place to another, one time to another. Something imagined leaves behind traces of itself, and one can see what is left of this fantasy, which is reminiscent of images once seen, and which allows images that have never actually been seen to be painted. Small monuments to the past create the "collective memory of a society." Willeke uses painting to capture them. In snapshots-which, paradoxically, become enduring and fixed during the process of painting-he works on his part of a reproductive memory that cannot be considered a mere archive or storehouse of memories. Instead, it is a process of saving and erasing sections, the repeated and changeable re-appropriations of image and impression, of emotion and the process of giving meaning to objects.
In the artistic gesture Willeke uses to express the fleeting or the incomplete, there is something that betrays a distrust of finally establishing inside the viewer the impression left behind in the image of the image; and of course, the very first viewer is the painter himself. In the traces of corrosion, which are blind spots in the visuals of the work, this way of recycling visual memories reflects the unavoidably predictable absence of the image, as well as of the viewer. In Willeke's work, these paradoxes are enticing. They hurt, demonstrating that his pictures are irreconcilable in a world in which appropriation has long become a kind of second nature, which cannot be expressed in words such as simulation, reflection, or mimesis. Markus Willeke's paintings carry the traces of the history of decay, including a history yet to come. In discovering elemental traces of a history that is conceived through being written over and over, they confront one, in an irreconcilable way, with one's own way of seeing, and with the history of the decay of this way of seeing.

Translated from the German by Allison Plath-Mosley