Formulated as a direct address to the viewer, Nicola Ginzel’s project, How Do You Restructure Form? introduces a question and prompts other inquiries. Is restructuring the same as reconstructing, or, rather differently, does it bring about the undoing of form? Is it a translation of something into another material? Is it about the layered connections of process and materials, matter and memory? And, maybe most importantly, what is the form that needs restructuring and why?
Groundwork
In spring 2020, the Brooklyn-based artist traveled for a residency to Vienna, where her father grew up. A homecoming of sorts marked by recurrent pandemic lockdowns and forced solitude, Ginzel’s stay evolved into a four-month-long daily rubbing of the exterior footprint of the Palais Equitable in the city’s historic center. By using red carbon paper, she recorded the base of the building and the adjacent ground thus transcribing the construction that also houses a 15th century tree trunk riddled with nails. The nail-tree talisman, known as the Stock-im-Eisen, is one of the rare surviving examples of the medieval practice of pounding nails into a tree for healing, good luck and protection. Encased in a glass case like a relic, the talisman is placed in a niche on the corner of the Palais Equitable that was built in 1891 as the European headquarter of the New York-based Equitable Life Assurance Society.
An early monument of global capitalism and its myth of perpetual market growth, the edifice is a modern landmark of the imperial city, and by the enclosure of the nail-tree, it is also a vessel of pre-modern rituals of spirituality. The life insurance company and the nail-tree both address the human need for protection and security, but Ginzel’s daily work was not only rooted in their shared affinity. The building, where her grandfather once had his office, was promised, but failed to become Ginzel’s paternal inheritance, and thus, it is part of her personal history. The Palais Equitable, a site of old and new belief systems, sacred and profane rituals, personal hopes and collective aspirations is a lieu de mémoire—as the French historian Pierre Nora calls locations that are “no longer milieux de mémoire, environments of memory (1)." For Ginzel, the Viennese building became a workplace and a site to remember broken promises and paternal ancestries.
Crouching on the sidewalk in the early morning hours to perform what was both a physical activity and spiritual labor, Ginzel rubbed stones, corners, sidewalks, and ornamental metal grilles. Her daily work was repetitive, laborious and meditative—akin to ancestral clearing, a frequent theme in the artist’s oeuvre. As she wrote in spring 2023, “trained as a printmaker and working in mixed media, my artworks are based in ritual and process. (...) I often
see myself as an ‘artist as shaman’ attempting to change the trajectory or energy of the thing that I materially transform (2)." How Do You Restructure Form? is rooted in the ritual labor of architectural rubbing and in the process of frottage, the subsequent transformation of nearly two hundred sheets of red carbon marked paper of varying size, weight and texture with multiple materials and through extended time.
In her Vienna studio, and later on the Bowery, in a former clinic of osteopathic medicine in New York’s Chinatown, Ginzel worked on the dated and carefully ordered rubbed papers with a wide array of materials. She cut and rearranged them; marked them with graphite, pastel and gel medium; stained and painted them with espresso, gum arabic, beet juice, Shout stain remover, turmeric, acrylic, watercolor, gouache, iodine mixed with dry pigment and ink; stitched them with wool threads; scraped, shaved and sliced them; washed and ironed them, and occasionally superimposed them with the dyed and painted remains of her late father’s pajama. By treating the surface of the papers as walls and palimpsests, and by combining and sequencing them as building blocks or construction materials, she created a large and strictly structured series that consists of about sixty-five works of varying size.
Like a book
An epic work composed of multiple sections, How Do You Restructure Form?is divided into chapters. The chapter-based structure suggests a narrative that unfolds through Ginzel’s strictly ordered rubbings of the Palais Equitable’s footprint, while also pointing to the affinity between the project and an unbound book. Named after the paper, the works’ support, Ginzel’s project is sectioned into Silberburg, Hahnemühle, Shoji, Masa and Kitakata chapters.
The five chapters of How Do You Restructure Form? demonstrate the disappearance or subsistence of ornamental and architectural forms. Like fractals, the chapters and individual works reiterate and modify, expose and erase their base structure, the linear network of red carbon rubbings. In some works, the Palais Equitable remains visible, in others, it is buried under a dense web of multiple modifications. Ginzel records, then both repeats and erases the archival trace of the building, while she does the same to the paper itself. Working on both sides of the sheet, she handles and mistreats the papers as objects.
The thick and textured pieces of hand-made paper in the Silberburg-chapter which consists of fifteen works visibly show the red carbon rubbings of the building as if they were fragments of a map or a blueprint. The carmine red tracing is occasionally overlaid by lime yellow, citrine colored stains that introduce a floating and formless surface to intercept the architectural description of space.
In other works, varied marks of acrylic, gum arabic, ink, espresso or pencil conceal the rubbings, while rows of tiny holes, leftover marks of embroidered and stitched lines, create a ghost drawing. This section, similar to the three large sheets of papers in the Hannemühle- chapter, also includes works that were sliced and later reassembled.
The twenty works in the Shoji-chapter uses a fiber-based paper whose origin, like that of Ginzel’s drawings, points to architecture and interior design. Traditionally used for the construction of screens, in Ginzel’s hand the delicate and translucent Shoji sheets become workfields, terrains of continuous structural transformation. The mechanics of rubbing is counteracted by loosely applied stains and gestural marks that invite and taunt accidents, and emphasize the contingency of Ginzel’s process and materials.
Despite their radical and often destructive alterations, the twenty medium-sized works in the Shoji-chapter are still characterized by dynamic luminosity. Due to the paper’s ability to refract and diffuse light, they shift and respond to the atmospheric conditions of their surrounding space.
The two closing chapters of How Do You Restructure Form?—Masa and Kitakata—are composed of smaller sheets of rice paper. While in the heavily worked on Masa-chapter the primary traces of the building are almost fully eradicated, the small and ethereal Kitakata works reintroduce Ginzel’s architectural rubbings with a twist.
As in the previous chapters, in the Masa works thin sheets of paper are marked, stained and covered with pasted and sewn pieces of paper and textile scraps. The topological continuity of the paper, both as a ground and a surface, is destroyed and then reconstituted. From the nebulous citrine halo that occupies the center in some of the works to the formless pours of espresso that darkens and ages the paper, Ginzel’s works feature an inventory of gestural
markings and material interventions that share the legacy of various 20th century artistic movements, but also reminds us of household activities. She stains, washes, irones, stitches andglues the papers, then undoes half of these interventions to leave us with only their traces. The spliced, scraped, then tainted and collaged pieces often include multiple rubbings and since they are also worked on their verso, they act as tortured archival containers.
Ginzel’s final sequence, the Kitakata-chapter, brings a finale to the project. Some of the works were made by rubbing the Palais Equitable in Vienna, others in her Chinatown studio where she practiced a secondary frottage by rubbing the stitched footprint lines from other works with blue pastels and then applied washes of iodine and ink. How Do You Restructure Form? ends in blue, a color of dreams, hearts and timelessness as Derek Jarman wrote in the script of his last film.
meditative, visionary, hallucinatory
The mythic origin story of frottage in Western art begins on a rainy day in August 1925, in a hotel room on France’s Atlantic coast where Max Ernst placed a sheet of paper on the well-worn floorboards and rubbed them with graphite. A tactile intervention and a new form of drawing, the nascent practice of frottage was described ten years later in Ernst’s book, Beyond Painting, by an overuse of otherworldly adjectives— meditative, visionary, and hallucinatory are only some of them (3).
Frottage is a radical drawing practice which consists of an amalgam of rubbings on a single sheet of paper to transfer the surface, texture, and pattern of natural elements and found objects. Ginzel’s process and works share these qualities yet they also evoke another historical lineage. Rubbing, a reproductive mode of mark-making, has been practiced in China over two thousands years to copy and record carved stone and bronze monuments and calligraphic inscriptions (4). Similar to the Chinese carved stone rubbings, Ginzel’s frottage practice engages with stone and metal surfaces that are rubbed for record keeping purposes and thus it participates in the long history of architectural rubbing.
Frottage, as Margaret Iversen reminds us, is a “play on the ambivalence of the indexcaught up in the dialectics of plenitude and loss, presence and absence, location anddislocation (5)." The desire to make imprints of the built environment in public space or record one’s intimate surroundings in an interior became a mode of drawing present in Sari Dienes’s 1950s side-walk rubbings of the manhole covers on New York streets, in Masao Okabe’s 1979
monumental frottage series of Paris streets, in Robert Overby’s 1970s chalk rubbings of apartment interiors, and in Michelle Stuart’s graphite earth rubbings, or as she calls them “trace memories.”
Overby, Stuart, and Okabe turned to rubbing and frottage as a method in the 1970s, in the wake of the modernist painting’s exhaustion. Ginzel works with the indexical process of frottage today, in a period when data-based images of digital photography are feverishly overproduced. Marked by a resistance to readily available forms of picturing, Ginzel’s work is in dialogue with the rubbings of such contemporary artists as Doh Ho Suh, Anne Barriball, Mona Hatoum and Gabriel Orozco who all recorded the interiors and objects of their living spaces or, in the case of Orozco, the tiled walls of a Paris metro station.
Like Ginzel, each of these artists is investigating the relationship between space, surface and memory in physically engaged and time consuming labor. Yet in contrast to their works, How Do You Restructure Form? is neither a record nor an image of its object and model, the Palais Equitable. Ginzel traces, dissects, reconstructs, and transforms the fragmented imagery of the building and doing so, she reanimates long-gone rituals of the Viennese nail-tree to transcend the history of a place and her family.
Unbuilding / Healing
Similar to the artist’s earlier work that includes cast body parts such as knee caps and modified ordinary objects often laden with intimate significance, How Do You Restructure Form? also claims and, literally, handles, the Palais Equitable as a personal object. Archived and destroyed, recorded and erased, the building, her promised but unrealized paternal inheritance is treated and approached as a fetish that is first remembered by rubbing and then destroyed. Her work relates to such concepts of Freudian psychoanalytic theory as melancholy, acting-out,
working-through and fetishism that respond to experiences of trauma and relate to a lost object.
In Ginzel’s work, the majestic building of the Palais Equitable, a symbol of loss and grief, is a paternal object to be destroyed and then to be mended. Like the medieval nail-tree talisman enclosed in the building’s corner that once served as a device of healing and energetic transference, How Do You Restructure Form? is a multi-part talismanic object. As John Yau wrote about Ginzel’s earlier work:
She chooses her substrates—such as a wrapper from a meal shared with someone—based on the particular meaning they have for her, but then turns that initial set of associations into something devoid of the anecdotal. Using materials such as thread, ink, oil paint, graphite, and gold leaf, Ginzel transforms her superfluous things into talismans.(6)
Talismans or amulets like the Stock-in-Eisen are believed to possess transformative powers as art does in Western society. Similar to the Viennese nail-tree, Ginzel’s objects and drawings are apotropaic entities that have agency and power—they are therapeutic devices that prompt processes of transference and transcendence between past and present, and tools of ancestral clearing that mend broken family bonds and unkept paternal promises.
Interested in the process of energy transference, non-western healing and creative practices, including Tantric art, Ginzel uses symbolically charged colors and materials. The color choices reflect her quest for physical and spiritual connections across cultures. In How Do You Restructure Form? she used a tripartite palette that was informed by Tantric color symbolism that also corresponds to the primary colors of Western painting. Blood red was applied for the root chakra at the base of the spine, citrine yellow for the solar plexus chakra in the upper abdomen, and blue for the throat chakra. Like the chromatically coded mystical diagrams in Tantric drawings, the emergent colors and forms in each chapter of How do you restructure form? refer to the body of their maker, while they also designate the paper support as another body.
A transitive and fluid practice situated on the threshold of other media, frottage is rooted in a pronounced physical contact between a surface, a support, and the body. The drawings in Ginzel’s How Do You Restructure Form? are performance residues and material traces of a four-year-long process that is part meditation part physical labor. By rubbing the Palais Equitable’s footprint Ginzel recorded the surface of architecture and by her subsequent indexical and corporeal trace-making she transformed the building’s surface by reincorporating into the paper.
In How Do You Restructure Form? Ginzel asks how a building can be memorialized and scaled to human experience, and explores how the surface of the drawing support can be undone, embodied, and reinvented. The sheets of paper in How Do You Restructure Form? and the Palais Equitable in Vienna both possess corporeal qualities—they are vessels capable of containing other things, whether liquids or solids, as bodies are. Ordered into chapters to reflect the size and weight of their paper support like bodies, Ginzel’s drawings are like ruined bodies, fossilized beings.
How Do You Restructure Form? is also proof of the resilience of paper, and by extension, that of the body. Despite their seeming fragility, Ginzel’s works had been subjugated to torturous interventions and their surfaces attest to the manual violence they suffered forming a narrative of their making. As opposed to stone which, as Lewis Mumford wrote, “gives a false sense of continuity, a deceptive assurance of life,” Ginzel’s paper-based works are not only part of life but have a precarious life on their own (7). Animated, embodied and resilient like leather, Ginzel’s paper supports are reminiscent of lacerated skins that were violated and repaired, stained and cleaned, torn and stitched. The works in How Do You Restructure Form? are cut and sutured as bodies are. Ginzel’s ritual and meditative procedures, frequently recalling gendered choirs of domestic labor, are both works of care and acts of durational exercise. The meditative labor of rubbing and recording the Palais Equitable, the violence of destroying the traces and then mending and repairing the tortured sheets of paper evokes the Japanese restoration technique of kintsugi which, by using gold to repair broken vessels, preserves and emphasizes the traces of the damage the object suffered. Ginzel’s frottages are talismanic and embodied objects and their maker, like the Marquise de Merteuil in Heiner Müller’s Quartett, could also declare that “it’s my skin that remembers (8)."
Memory Matters
Ginzel's work defies the customary practices and vocabularies of art, craft and design. She moves freely among procedures such as drawing, collage, frottage, painting, printing, sculpture, and performance to reverse the relationship between support and surface, and cancels the description of the Viennese building to introduce a set of symbolic inscriptions and constructs a new ground and a broken body.
By recording and deconstructing the Palais Equitable’s ornamental cast-iron details and carved marble surfaces, and then by restructuring them as ruins, Ginzel performed a memory work by the indexical traces of her hand. How Do You Restructure Form? is a memorial and a monument that could also be described as a “composite fragment,” a phrase that appeared in the title of one of Ginzel’s late 2010s work (9). The indexical procedures of the project are akin to the interweaving of various layers of time and memory.
By turning the Palais Equitable, her paternal object and a site of transgenerational haunting into shreds, Ginzel also made a work that defies the rules that govern prevailing conditions of display in contemporary exhibition spaces. How can one see and show an artwork that consists of over sixty pieces of paper marked on both sides? And what do we see when encountering these works in a space with only available light? The artist prefers showing How Do You Restructure Form? in spaces without an overload of artificial light to emphasize her works' material supports and sculptural qualities. Seen in muted light or in half darkness, the frottages reveal their relief-life texture and their history more markedly, while reminding the viewer of their haptic origins. By displaying How Do You Restructure Form? on walls and suspended in space with only ambient light, Ginzel presents her works not as images but as the residual objects of her extended and materially grounded performance, labor and memory work.
From sheet to sheet, the rubbings of Palais Equitable’s footprint appear and disappear like ghosts or phantoms. The transience and the ephemerality of the fragmented imagery that records the building is complemented by the fugitive nature of Ginzel’s fragile materials and water-based substances that are often associated with healing and medicinal properties. Her stains and washes made with espresso, beet juice and turmeric, the soft blue lines and blots she traced and blotted with iodine are meant to deteriorate, fade and disappear in time. The strategic use of unstable materials is part of Ginzel’s desire to animate and embody the work. By taking time as a collaborator and prompting processes of evanescence and decay that living organisms unavoidably suffer and experience, she subjugates the work to processes of entropy. A celebration of the irrevocability of time and its impact on matter, uncertainty, structural change, and molecular shifts of energy, How Do You Restructure Form?speaks both about matter and mind, bodies and spirits.
Broken diagrams, phantom maps, and fragmented palimpsests, How Do You Restructure Form?, like the Freudian Wunderblock, is about remembering and erasing the past and the presence of its maker. An orchestrated multi-part work, it brings into play the ambiguities of memory work, the issues of locational identity, and the tension of the elective affinities in familial relations that form and deform human beings. How Do You Restructure Form? grapples a question that despite its specificity can resonate with anyone who ever pondered how objects continue to exist over time and how humans survive being alive.
Dr. Ágnes Berecz, PhD
teaches History of Art and Design, Pratt Institute, focusing on transnational exchanges and collaborative, multimedia practices in postwar and contemporary art
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(1) Nora, Pierre. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire.” Representations 1 April 1989, 26 7–24. doi:
https://doi.org/10.2307/2928520
(2) Ginzel, Nicola. “Psyche and Commerce: The Realignment of the Nail-Tree Talisman,” (March 2023), unpublished.
(3) Ernst, Max. Beyond Painting and Other Writings by the Artist and His Friends, Robert Motherhwel, editor. Wittenborn, Schulz, 1948. Quoted by Jones, Leslie. “Tracing Dreams: Surrealist Drawing 1915-1950.” DrawingSurrealism. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2012, 32.
(4) Pesenti, Allegra. Apparitions : Frottages and Rubbings from 1860 to Now. The Menil Collection, Hammer Museum, 2015; Chinese Rubbings from the Field Museum. Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, 2008. http://archive.fieldmuseum.org/chineserubbings/index.html
(5) Iversen, Margaret. “Indexical Drawing: On Frottage.” A Companion to Contemporary Drawing. Kelly Chorpening, Rebecca Fortnum, editors. Wiley Blackwell Companions to Art, 2020, 261. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119194583.ch14
(6) Yau, John. “An Artist Who Turns Detritus into Talismans.” hyperallergic, June 17, 2018 https://hyperallergic.com/446963/an-artist-who-turns-detritus-into-talismans/
(7) Mumford, Lewis. The Culture of Cities. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1938, 434.
(8) Müller, Heiner, and Carl Weber. Hamletmachine and Other Texts for the Stage. Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1984.
(9) Cf. https://www.nicolaginzel.com/archive-selected-flatwork
Nicola Ginzel offers us a question: How Do You Restructure Form?
Upon a paper substrate appearing deceptively fragile yet remarkably robust Form is generated through Structure recorded and absorbed by the willful How of haptic labor in intense frottage. Ethereal traces of architecture forged in history accumulate in complex palimpsests. Myriad oxide embossments compound into image. There is an evocation of the Shroud of Turin or Veil of Veronica. Ultimately an apparition arises that presents the potential as portal into another consciousness. At times an elaborate amalgam of materiality and content, at other times a lean vector with ovum/egg poised as in a tantric reveal. Manifested is a profound synthesis of intention and intuition, seemingly ordained rather than simply wrought.
Andrew Ginzel (Indefinitely related)
Nicola Ginzel sees significance—aesthetic and otherwise—in bits and pieces that others overlook or matter-of-factly discard. And while she is certainly not the only artist who pounces on found objects and re-cycles them, her interpretations and responses are more autobiographical than most, the works invested with idiosyncratic, diaristic, even talismanic import. It’s also a rescue mission “to extend the life of things on their way to being destroyed,” she said. Or more accurately, Ginzel wants to focus awareness on the things that comprise daily life and experience; she wants a “slowing down,” so we are more present and in the present. “People tell me,” she said, “that after they see my work, they look at ordinary things differently.”
Thus, she randomly collects the detritus of our urban existence in her daily comings and goings: wrappers, plastic bags, boxes, even food, shards of soap, and much more. She also saves receipts, her own and others, a custom form, phone cards, a swatch of fabric, but nothing intrinsically valuable. It’s up to her to give them value. From the mass-produced and damaged, from the ephemeral, Ginzel—who thinks of herself as a mixed media artist but whom I think of as a mixed media poet or just simply a sorceress—creates delicate, hand-made and very beautiful objects that suggest reliquaries, amulets and archeological fragments, distillates of memories and feelings.
What catches Ginzel’s eye could be anything: an ordinary plastic shopping bag, for instance, that she gilded with 23k gold, resplendently transformed as if by the mythic touch of King Midas. Or a Wendy’s chicken wrapper—if you can believe that’s what it is. Ginzel applied a first layer of gold leaf to the wrapper, then carefully embroidered it until it resembled richly textured brocade, a remnant of a medieval tapestry perhaps, framed, floating in a white field. It is this kind of transformation that she is after, that changes the commonplace into something ravishing.
The earliest series that she showed me in her Williamsburg studio in December was a line of little objects hung on the wall, called, appropriately enough, “Gold Line.” The tiny sculptures—charming, improvised—are impossible to identity, their original semblance gently overwhelmed by Ginzel’s magic, by her solicitude. Spoiler alert: one little jewel of a piece is half a lemon rind, the interior scooped out, dried and dipped in wax.
Ginzel labors intensively over her miniatures, stitching, painting, frottaging, collaging, applying pastels, pencil and so on, whatever the work might require, all techniques that deliberately avoid new technologies. Her very intuitive practice requires great attentiveness, an unmediated collaboration between mind, hand and material. The constant solacing repetition of touch also bespeaks of love and healing, warming the work with their invisible presence.
The recent series are flat, a form of relief. She still thinks of them as objects, as sculptures and makes them in series, even if they are intended to be individual works when completed, repeating the essential motif. That motif, that found object, is less hidden in the current work, although clues were always present as to content. But in the end, it never really mattered to Ginzel if the identity of her materials were ambiguous or if it was easily decoded. One sequence was inspired by a small soap box which she flattened, embroidered, and used as a template to make rubbings from. Afterwards, she re-embroidered them, altering the composition, adding more layers of meaning, adding energy. Essentially, her work is based on the human factor, in some ways a branch of “philosophical anthropology,” or equivalent to a “shamanistic” ritual, Ginzel explained, its visual language both rare and ecumenical, her offerings something to be shared.
Lilly Wei is a New York-based art critic and independent curator who focuses on contemporary art.