VK: I built this canvas in 1991, stitching together African cinnamon burlap sacks I’d gotten from a spice warehouse in Brooklyn and then backing them with Polish linen that is now impossible to get in New York. As always, I first stretched taut and sized the linen lining, stretching the unwieldy stitched burlap piece over this, which is hard to do, afterwards sizing this layer too, which process goes the distance to flatten an otherwise uneven, resistant surface. Over decades, I became a glue expert!

For two years this canvas was a completed painting, once exhibited, covered in an organic ground of nasturtium flowers, a strewn field-map painting in muted earth colors with the green and bright orange-red of the flowers. I’m no longer certain of the title as it was then. If it was SPIRIT OF THE LAWS, this would have somewhat cryptically referred to what was present in the painting only by emphasizing its absence, referring to an actual 18th C text the pages of which I’d first used in 1989 in my paintings.

But in 1993, I’d foraged this once-finished painting in order to achieve a more complex work which is otherwise even harder to do, and it became one of a body of 100 German military WW1 map paintings. Each piece in this group described a WW1 German battle position in 1916, a terrain in Europe or North Africa, when the German army was still victorious in their colonial land grabs, before the tide turned definitively against them. This painting, …The Battle of Łódź … is bigger, prioritized, since this map had as its centerpoint the Polish city of Łódź, where my mother was born, and which she had to flee in September,1939, at the start of the second German occupation of this city, and WW2.

The canvas was over-painted with a lead white oil glaze and flipped to a vertical from its former horizontal sense, to better accommodate the crude 1916 graphic which I faithfully reproduced in umber oil paint, together with the place names and markings in the “original” typeface over the ground of flowers, paper and tape. At the time, I remember it was significant to me that I cut only the edges of bookleaves, the textless tabs of the pages, pasted over the ground with glue and masking tape, the content rendered meaningless.

In the Beginning…there are signs, symbols, representations, references, narratives and patterns in painting, a cipher for impetus and meaning which become evident only when a whole practice is revealed. For five years before making this painting I’d been absorbed in a before-and-after concept of history and events, while working through the violent upheaveals of the 20thC.
I see now, in the 21st century, and echoing at an unbearable pitch, that many wars and occupations happen repeatedly upon the selfsame decimated and scarred terrain, like the nightmare made plastic in Ed Kienholz’s THE STATE HOSPITAL 1964 – 66, and which, like the city of Łódź, Damascus or Mariupol, can be equally described as a “…relentlessly depressing story of the systematic destruction of a vibrant community…” in the words of Robert Jan van Pelt in his Łódź and Ghetto Litzmannstadt: Promised Land and Croaking Hole [KREPIERWINKEL] of Europe, 2007. [C.f. Thomas Bernhard “…die Latrine Europas…”, the latrine of Europe, by which he meant his native Austria, a clear reference to the Nazi history I note].
VAK, New York, August 14, 2022