On Pleather: Michaela Eichwald's Inelegant Surfaces

‘On warm leatherette, join the car crash set’ intoned Daniel Miller dryly on the 1978 single Warm Leatherette, the lyrics of which were inspired by J.G. Ballard’s novel Crash. Repeated over and over again throughout the song, leatherette becomes a surface charged with suggestions of lust, sex, violence, and disaster. Straddling the line between pain and pleasure, synthetic leather brings to mind BDSM, cosplay as well as amateurly upholstered backseats of taxis and karaoke lounges. Cheap and decidedly more ‘low’ rather than ‘high’ class, artificial leather clads spaces typically defined by fleeting pleasures than lasting encounters. Yet, what happens when pleather becomes a surface for a painting, as it often does for Michaela Eichwald? What associations does it spur, what histories does it bring with?

Whether speaking of pleather, fake leather, polyvinyl chloride (PVC) fabric, or leatherette – the primary use has always been tied to the body and clothing. While the range of references at play for fashion designers runs the gamut, chief among them has always been a fantasy of the future. As Pierre Cardin, one of the first designers to work with PVC, remarked: ‘my favorite garment is the one I invent for a life that does not yet exist, the world of tomorrow’¹. In the 1960s, their imaginations seized by the promise of the Space Age, designers such as Cardin, André Courrèges, Mary Quant, and Paco Rabanne began using plastic to create geometric raincoats, accessories, and dresses. Their eye was decidedly on the horizon of the future – in 1963, Quant unveiled the brightly colored plastic-coated cotton items of the Wet Collection; in 1964 Cardin premiered the Cosmos series; while in 1966, Rabanne presented Twelve Unwearable Dresses in Contemporary Materials, made with plastics, sheet metal, rubber, and cardboard. Pioneering new materials and production techniques, these designers were experimenting with bright swatches of color and reflective metallic surfaces to imagine a futuristic world. The 1990s brought a renewed embrace of artificial leather within the fashion industry – Versace’s 1994 Fall/Winter Season Collection can be read as an homage to the shiny primary colors of the ’60s designs of Quant and Cardin. While the ’60s had Jane Fonda swanking about in Rabanne’s figure-hugging costumes in Barbarella (1968), the ’90s had no shortage of squeaky PVC outfits that would send an ASMR connoisseur berserk. After all, it was the decade of the sleek PVC clad heroes of The Fifth Element (1997) (with costumes by Jean-Paul Gaultier), The Matrix (1999), and, perhaps most memorably, Michelle Pfeiffer sauntering about as Selina Kyle / Catwoman in Batman Returns (1992). Even music videos were not immune, packed with singers away on interstellar adventures, with Michael and Janet Jackson springing about on a spaceship in Scream (1995) and the Spice Girls zapping ray guns in the desert in Say You’ll Be There (1996). Highly pliable and easy to mould to the human form, the material took on new associations in the 1970s, becoming synonymous with fetish clothing and BDSM. Artificial leather turned from the cosmic to restrictive, morphing from flowing sculptural arrangements and dazzling Op Art inspired outfits to constricting catsuits, high boots, corsets, and bondage trousers. The material became a subcultural signifier for all manners of fetish and kinks, finding its reflection in Allen Jones’ contorted sculptures, the genderless bondage suits of Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren, as well as the outlandish costumes of Leigh Bowery’s persona Mrs. Peanut. The punk rockers (The Sex Pistols, Ramones, Dead Kennedys etc) shared a proclivity for, typically, leather jackets, but PVC remained popular, especially with the soon burgeoning cyberpunk and cybergoth scene. Their uniforms leaned into the cyborgian, combining ‘typical undead goth attire with futuristic elements, like PVC armbands outfitted with circuit boards or steel plates, making it appear as if the wearer is part machine’². The enamourment with artificial leather has continued to thrive, with several designers including Karl Lagerfeld, Rick Owens, and Raf Simons employing the material in their recent collections. While their eye is still on the future, they picture less an industrial wasteland (perhaps we’re there already?) and more an ecologically-minded sustainable alternative. Spurred by consumer demand and the urging of animal rights groups, each designer has turned away from plastics towards ethical vegan alternatives, such as piñatex, made from pineapple leaf fibres.

What then to make of the use of pleather in painting? How might meanings typically ascribed to the material resonate given the medium’s history? While not the only living artist working with pleather³, Eichwald is however its most ardent and faithful user. Describing the material, she has said: ‘[it is] repulsive, inelegant, something that cannot be easily classified. And it doesn’t suck’⁴. Eichwald’s droll comment denotes pleather as somehow clumsy and embarrassing, the cheap cousin to the noble linen and cloth canvas. Its tawdry character firmly emphasises that painting is quite simply ordinary. Just as sculpture was (literally) knocked off its pedestal at the start of the 20^th century⁵, so too was painting debased and degraded. Scorred (Lucio Fontana), scorched (Alberto Burri), shot (Niki de Saint Phalle, Shozo Shimamoto), or corroded (Gustav Metzger), paintings bore witness to actions, becoming, in Harold Rosenberg’s terms, ‘arenas in which to act’⁶. Through abstraction – Eichwald’s favored language – the medium embraced chance, becoming a tabula rasa for the body’s gestures, traces, and even excretions, as in Hermann Nitsch’s bloodied Blutbilder (1962-) or Andy Warhol’s oxidation paintings (1977-78). While Eichwald doesn’t wage war on her painterly surfaces (they are never torn nor torched, scratched at most), her use of pleather – a proxy for clothing – inevitably heightens the reference to the body. Her own traces appear: in Dienst am Alien (2013) we see an imprint of a bare foot and paint hurriedly smeared with fingers; while the lacquer surface of Die Unsrigen sind fortgezogen (2014) is imprinted with shoe marks. Yet these are the result of working directly on the floor and moving swiftly between many paintings in progress at once. Some – with Yves Klein, Annette Lemieux, or Kazuo Shiraga in mind – might be tempted to seek ‘performative traces’ here, but I wager that Eichwald would bristle at such a suggestion. Happenstance, nothing more. The scatological associations strike closer, though, again, somewhat mutely. While her palette undeniably embraces piss stain yellows and shitty browns, so too do we find iridescent pinks, neon greens, and, even, glitter. The body most clearly appears as a motif, although an elusive one. Her paintings are populated by bits of fleshy stuff: limbs, bones, swollen organs, skin, and tissue, yet never fully manifested, always blurring into abstraction, morphing with other forms, to speak not of embodiment, but larger issues at stake, namely a concern with philosophy, language, and literature. Eichwald’s paintings rarely point squarely at the human body. Among her oeuvre, Lump (2014) is a rare exception: a tangled, knotted mess of densely applied acrylic, oil, and lacquer that – while not outright depicting the body – spells out the work’s title, conjuring in the mind’s eye a tumorous growth. While the use of pleather may enhance these corporeal associations, something else is at stake – its place in art history.

It is impossible to speak of Eichwald’s preference for pleather without mentioning Sigmar Polke, a key figure of a preceding generation, whose presence towered over the Cologne art scene, which Eichwald was a part of between 1987 and 2008, before she moved to Berlin. The two have much in common – wry humor, prevalent use of irony, engagement with German national and literary histories – and share a deep sense of material promiscuity and adventurousness, embracing often unusual substances and surfaces. Polke frequently used patterned fabrics as supports as well thin polyester fibre scrims, through which the painting’s stretcher and supporting wall would be visible. While for Polke, the transparent polyester surfaces offered a means to consider the interplay between foreground and background, and light and shadow; Eichwald’s pleathers become witness to layered accretions, often resultant of working and reworking, with marks made, then removed, and made again. While Eichwald typically uses monochromatic PVC sheets, some paintings are on patterned pleather, their surfaces mimicking tufted upholstered sofa seats or floral wallpapers. These also rhyme with Polke, who appropriated patterned backgrounds as well as emulated these in his painstaking polka dot paintings. Both artists can be described as alchemists: Polke used unorthodox substances such as meteorite dust, silver oxide, powdered arsenic; while Eichwald turns to acrylic, oil, tempera, spray paint, mordant, graphite varnish, often trapping these beneath slicks of lacquer and resin. Viscous streaks trickle across both artists’ works: in Polke’s we often see swirls of pigment similar to the spills of thick lacquer at the center of Eichwald’s Gebet, so wird Euch genommen (2019). Polke’s multiple DAS KANN DOCH KEIN MOTIV SEIN (2000) is a stamp which bears the titular sentence and an amoebic blotch. The wry title holds double meaning – ‘this can’t be a motif/motive’ – and can be read as an acknowledgement of how a painterly gesture crystallizes as a signature, and a warning to not fall into the trap of repetition, however successful the work becomes. In the large-scale collage Beziehungswahn (2013), Eichwald appropriates Polke’s multiple, tucking it among newspaper clippings, as well as reproductions of her own paintings and sculptures, ruminating on how far the work has come and where it’s heading. In wrestling with these problems, both Eichwald and Polke are asking: ‘how can you make a painting that doesn’t suck?’

Though traversing the realms of haute couture and the dive bar booth, pleather is, in Eichwald’s words, ‘inelegant’. The material urges us to consider issues of taste, which ultimately justify pronouncements of what makes a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ artwork. There is a knowing irony permeating Eichwald’s material preference, which subverts hierarchies of value we typically deem so unshakeable. The relevance of Cologne cannot go unmentioned here either and in particular the legacy of ‘bad painting’, embodied in the late ’70s/early ’80s works of artists Georg Herold, Martin Kippenberger and, especially, Albert Oehlen. Purposefully and overtly garish, repulsive, ugly, ironic, and kitschy, their works challenged the possibilities of the image, as well as the art world machinations by which a painting would be displayed, owned, circulated, and, ultimately, judged. Eichwald’s paintings share a common disavowal of convention, though differ in that they never delved into the inward contemplations that the (often mock-heroic) self-portraits of her (largely male) peers did. Reflecting on this period, Oehlen said: ‘I like [to] do things that seem forbidden and impossible, like a test of courage’⁷. Eichwald’s use of pleather suggests a similar prodding at the limits of permissibility, she is asking: ‘how much can I get away with?’ ‘Dare I fail?’ ‘What limits can painting transcend?’ Tacky, stretchy, and bumpy, pleather eschews classification, offering a maverick means by which to unpick whatever rules of painting remain. Abstraction is Eichwald’s co-conspirator in her bid to challenge the value of painting. She draws fully on its history, tropes, and styles, yet resolutely affirms her own language, one which instead churns through, reworks, agitates and, at times, satirizes, the medium’s history and concomitant power structures.

The invitation to Eichwald’s 2019 exhibition at the Brussels gallery dépendance included a snapshot of the artist’s balcony, over which she had slung the painting Bitte (2019), which spells out ‘bitte abholen und wegbringen’ [‘please pick up and take away’]. Occasionally rained or snowed on, left to dry on clothes racks, stapled to the wall or unrolled on the floor, Eichwald’s paintings are made intermittently, sharing space with other activities – reading, writing, eating, looking, thinking, listening. These works are not subject to elaborate planning or made with the help of several studio assistants. While wholeheartedly committed to pushing the material, formal, and conceptual possibilities of painting, Eichwald’s pleathers nonetheless smirk at modernist conceits of dogma and purity – it’s painting gone awry. They fly in the face of Ad Reinhardt’s conviction that ‘the one thing to say about art and life is that art is not life and life is not art’⁸. Pleather offers Eichwald a queasy and inelegant ally in a practice that powerfully upturns assumptions of value, skill, style, and meaning.

NOTES

1. Cardin quoted in ‘Pierre Cardin: The 97-year-old fashion designer with visions for 2069’, CNN Style, September 5, 2019
2. Micah Issitt (2011) Goths: A Guide to American Subculture. ABC Clio, p. 41
3. Other artists include Olga Balema, Dario Guccio, Anne-Marie Van Kerckhoven, Sandra Mujinga, Cezary Poniatowski, Erin Trefry, and Nina Saunders.
4. The artist quoted in the introductory text to the exhibition Michaela Eichwald, Walker Art Center, November 14, 2020 – May 16, 2021.
5. Rosalind Krauss summarizes this point: ‘Through its fetishization of the base, the sculpture reaches downward to absorb the pedestal into itself and away from actual place; and through the representation of its own materials or the process of its construction, the sculpture depicts its own autonomy. Brancusi’s art is an extraordinary instance of the way this happens.’, see Rosalind Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’ in October, vol. 8 (Spring 1979), p. 34.
6. See Harold Rosenberg, “The American Action Painter”, Art News, December 1952, p. 22
7. Albert Oehlen in conversation with Christopher Wool and Glenn O’Brien, Interview, April 24, 2009
8. Ad Reinhardt, “Art-As-Art”, Art International, VI/10, December 20, 1962, reprinted in Barbara Rose (ed.) (1991) Art-as-Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt, Berkeley and Los Angeles, p.54