Rosmarie Burger is a painter living in a village near by Marburg. Apart form her considerably work, Rosmarie Burger has a particularly conception how to make living her paintings: she send her paintings on a trip, she makes traveling her paintings by lending them to peoples who feel drawn by it.

If someone try to describe the acrylic-paintings of Rosmarie Burger he will be in the same bad position as all writers trying to describe what they perceive. Language cannot paint lines and has no color. Language can only evoke colors and lines which are already present in the mind of the other. Nevertheless we try a short description for those who are not able to see her paintings with theirs own eyes.

In the foreground are three figures of women, naked, by the way like all figures in the painting of Rosmarie Burger. All figures are kept in a deep and cold blue. The background is still darker, a blue without an end and a horizon. You can’t expect an echo when you try to cry in this picture. The figure in the middle has her eyes closed, she don’t looks directly in your eyes, she looks something beside you. Her lips are thick and pale. Two little round bosoms. On the left side is a figure of woman who appears taller than the other, her bosoms go sharply to a point and her head lies down her neck, while her left elbow lean on the shoulder of the middle-figure. The middle-figure and the right figure are kept in a warmer blue, they seem to be fulfilled of a kind of magic vegetal life. But the right figure is an exception. She lean her head on the shoulder of the middle figure and also her right arm is floating over the shoulder and the breast of the middle-figure until the knee and she touches gently her hand.   Exceptionally is the icy blue of the right figure whose white contours separate it from the rest. This is not only a contrast but a sharp limit with the effect that that right figure looks like a brutal cut from the background.

The title of this painting is “ausgeräumte Sprache”, the cleared (out) language or we can understand it too as language without space. It is always the never-ending task of comments to link the title of a painting to the painting itself. Sometimes the title is a hopefully support to apply the “right” look, the good intention and attention to an object like a dirty bath in hall (see Beuys). If you have no idea that the object is not a common thing you pass away, so some artistic objects need identification that they are hidden in a common appearance. But what is the difference between a dirty bath and a dirty bath as art object? It is the fact that the object is shown out of its context, without its normal frame. The title of an art object, often only one word or a short proposition, invites the spectator to forget the “normal” frame of this object, its banal existence in its usual world.

What does Rosmarie Burger intent with the title “ausgeräumte Sprache”? There is no language (a part the title) in this acrylic-painting? Of course there is no language because it’s a painting composed by colors and lines. Is this a joke of the artist to mislead the intelligent spectators who try to find a narrative approach to the painting in front of him, like the philosopher who feels always embarrassed when he is face to face with an idiotic or banal situation and he feels the constraint to propose a minimal intelligent solution? It remains the idea that the translation or interpretation of the title (there is no space for language) means that there is no place between this three women where words could be: “Nothing to say!” or the version of the cleared language: “All is said! No words more!” We can understand it also like an order: clear the language when you look or don’t compare it with something you know and don’t judge too fast, let your impression be your first impression and think that these three women are only for you there with an enigmatic message destined only for your eyes. What we have to keep in mind is not the title because the title is only an approach, an element of its environment and history. All this surrounding elements legislate finally, in a Derridean term, by fixing the limit (on légifère en marquant la limite) the painting. Derrida attributes to the background, to the surrounding elements more attention than to the painting itself. The painting is the center of gravitation, which organizes the background, and when we look to the painting we see more than colors, we find: frame, title, signature, the museum and the discourse around the painting and the artist. The negation of the painting or the act of fixing the limit of the painting expands the range of perception of the watching subject. For Derrida the context of a painting (frame, museum, discourse, title, signature etc.) determines how we see the painting, even the spectrum of the colors.

The lost object. (L’objet perdu).

I was troubled when Rosmarie explained me that she likes it if her paintings travel like a human being, to form its own history. Not because of her suggestion but of my consciousness that art objects normally depending of its context – the museum or a special place arranged for the object.  But what is a museum? To create a museum is not very difficult. You need a room, you open it for public and you write over the door “Museum”. A good example for the transformation of objects into art-objects is the „museum of things“ (http://www.museumderdinge.de) in Berlin. You can find in this museum banal things as a watering can, an old television or a box for cookies. In a simple household these things would be in the cellar or lost in a functional kitchen. So how the museum transforms these objects in art objects? How does a museum function? The answer is in the concept of museum: the museum is a place, which is not determined by the objects in it, but it is a place, which gives the possibility to appear out of context. The concept of the museum is the normative definition for the spectator to untie the thing from the context. It is a kind of step out of reality to look back to reality. A movement that Hegel called “negation”. So in the “museum of things” a banal thing as a trashcan turns into another thing because he loose completely his function in this place. The thing as such is “negated” by the emptiness of the museum, which surrounds the object. The emptiness surrounding the object is exactly the place where thinking tries now to fill the empty space; the act of linking the empty space with the object is called “symbolization”.

So we can say that a museum or art in a more general sense create gaps in the symbolic representation of reality, in which thinking can happen. If we had a perfect connection between reality and symbolic representation there would be only the continuity relation between the things and the thinking subject, in other words things would be because the subject thinks these things. The disappearing gap between subject and reality is normally something that we attribute to the concept of “god”.

Of course the thinking subject is always separated from the things surrounding him. The subject itself „interprets“ in its discourse the world in which it lives – and what the subject will find as a “gap” or “lack” in the represented object is his own act of interpretation. Or in hegelian terms, the negative work of the subject.

The museum doesn’t emphasize the object but the negating act of the subject. When you enter in a museum, you pay for seeing objects, but in a first implicit meaning you pay for your own faculty to link emptiness with an object, you pay for the graceful fact that you are the “subject” which find itself in the emptiness of a museum.

Another consequence is that a museum is not only a place which deliberates the intellectual act of subjects but also a market place, a place of recognition and the institutional administration of empty public or private places. How an empty place can be precious? This is the paradox of laws of competition: places are precious when a lot of people want to live (or use it otherwise) there. For example: the center of Paris. To live in a precious place in the middle of the town or to do business in an expensive area costs a lot of money, but to keep an empty space in a precious area modifies also the empty space, and the object becomes a market-object, which is “infected” by the expensive emptiness. Even if the place is not the only determining factor of the value of an object, it is an important fact of recognition in the art business and the art world. The paradox in this story is that emptiness in a place, which is desired by a lot of people are able to product valuable objects only by being exposed at this special place. We can observe this in an analogue way when a famous person says something really stupid, like the president of the United States or the German chancellor, we always search a deeper sense in it or we argue that he has to say it for political reasons or the worst case is, we appreciate it. The fact that the person is famous, hides not only his stupid arguments, it transforms the stupid argument in an appearance of intelligence. We believe in the person, so we believe in his speech. In the same way we trust in the “museum” as a place where objects are precious even if there is only a dirty bath. This is the market-place interpretation of art objects.

The museum as a surrounding element of the object as the artist, the signature, the frame or the discourse is one of the elements, which transforms a thing in an art object.

In the art-conception of Rosmarie Burger the artist organize, like all artists, expositions in ordinary museums and galleries. The painting goes out of the manufacturing context of the artist to the white walls of a museum. Furthermore Rosmarie Burger modified the concept of museum. She lends her paintings to friends and peoples who like it. The museum as a place of “out-of-context” becomes a place with “modified context”. We have to imagine that the paintings of Rosmarie Burger  are dispersed all over the world, in kitchens, smoking-salons, bars, in bedrooms, in the office of huge trusts and in the back office of a lavatory. If you look at a painting of Rosmarie Burger, you can be sure that this painting has already traveled and you are only a stop on the way, like one of the stations of Ulysses.

In the museum of Rosmarie Burger the painting is not visited by spectators who stroll along the halls of a museum of modern art, her paintings come to you, they penetrate in your intimate space. So when the spectator in a museum looks to a painting, he is always looking to an ensemble of determining elements; in the museum of Rosmarie Burger the painting is looking to you. The space surrounding the painting is your context, it is your style, your furniture etc. and the painting is a disconcerting and alienating thing, which penetrates in your space. Instead of the emptiness of a museum and the act of the negation of the subject, Rosmarie Burgers museum is your home; it is the negation of your intimate space, which is infiltrated by her painting. The fact that Rosmarie Burger suggests to lend her painting to you, is the timid act of an artist to break into the space of the other. Where normally is the “Entry” of a museum, there is an innocent question. But be careful, you will find out that the painting of Rosmarie Burger will never be assimilated in your private intimate living-space, it will always be the point of “exceeding the limit” between you and the public space, her suggestion contains the concept of a moving museum which remind us of the Orwell phrase: “big brother is watching you”. But in the case of Rosmarie Burger you have the choice, when you accept, she is glad to know that you will be observed and accompanied for one year. Even if you don’t look every day on the painting, be sure, you will be watched and you will feel alone the day when the painting will leave you.
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