War Without Victims: The Shooting Paintings

"In 1961 I shot at. daddy, all men, small men, large men, important men, fat men, men, my brother, society, the Church, the convent, the school, my family, my mother, all men, daddy, myself, men. I shot because it was fun and gave me a great feeling. I shot because I was fascinated to see the painting bleed and die. I shot for the sake ot this magical moment. It was a moment of scorpion-like truth. White purity. Victim. Ready! Take aim! Fire! Red, yellow, blue, the painting weeps, the painting is dead. I have killed the painting. It has been reborn. War without victims." (NdSP, in. Munich 1987, p. 52)

The early 1960s were years of upheaval, a breakaway into a wild utopia full of hope, with the possibility of a completely different and full life. In order to be able to find the new, the young art and the young generation generally had to free itself from a certain pressure of the old. The last great war was still not really history, wars in Asia and Africa were already distorting the field of view of the new generation. In art, the terror of the atom bomb and the knowledge of Auschwitz had been followed by the path into introspection. At the beginning of the decade, the domination of the abstract was still unbroken; beautiful, groomed and cultural peinture was the mark of the successful artistic world. This world of paintings contrasted the pure, the contemplative and cultivated introspection against the age, against the memory of mass destruction. Art withdrew from the world, from politics, from daily external reality. It was against this that young art rebelled.

Alongside all the personal and biographical reasons for the outbreak of artistic aggression in the young painter, it was also the mood of the age the political narrow-mindedness of America, the end of the colonial age in Europe, the wave of refusal of the old introspection in art and literature - that contributed to determining Niki de Saint Phalle's new voice and presence. France was still at war in Algeria when the first shooting pictures - the TIRS - were created in the Impasse Ronsin in Paris. Here, pictures were shot at publicly, in the heart of Paris. With such actions in public, with the presentation of - symbolic - violence, the general taboo of silence surrounding violence was broken. Precisely because she exercised violence publicly, turning violence against people and art into the topic of her art, the artist rapidly rocketed to fame thanks to the excessive reactions of the press and the media, and became known amongst the general public for her activities.

Much may have contributed to this: the striking eroticism of the slender female figure, the self-assuredness of the poses, the calculated aggression of the shooting process, the playing with a very different and new female role. At last a woman was visibly resisting everything that formed part of the male dominance and aggression, of male authority and exclusion of women, that had given the century two world wars. And this artist combined her offensive feminist presence with a clear insistence on her femininity. Niki de Saint Phalle's presence mixed relaxation and brutal rejection, echoes of the traditional role of the beautiful and available woman and her refusal, but with a weapon in her hand. At this time, the artist embodied in graphic art what was being symbolised in literature or in film by figures such as Emma Peel, Modesty Blaise or Bonny and Clyde: the equality women had already achieved in the modern fairy tale of the detective story or the foreign agent.

The sacrificial deaths of the paintings was perfected in the course of time. The shots at the very first tirs were shots at ironic variants of conventional paintings, at bags of paint, rice and spaghetti under white plaster, where the focus was on the paintings being maimed and injured.

This did not go far: What was the purpose of sacrificing the paintings if not to create a new frightful and beautiful painting? Significant objects and painting strategies made their way into the tirs. The "Shooting picture of Robert Rauschenberg" (1961) was not only "shot", and as such initiated by the latter. in addition Niki de Saint Phalle applied elements of Rauschenberg's combine painting pictorial composition in the creation of the work. Similarly, the "Shooting picture of Jasper Johns" (1961), shot by Jasper Johns, quoted elements from this artist's pictorial world. Alongside such personal dedications, there were also ironic and autobiographical assemblages ("My shoes" dated 1962). However, all of this was merely a preliminary stage, ultimately not the final statements of her view of the age, the statements for which the artist was fighting.

Thus as a next stage, wild, large, specifically planned undertakings were created in paintings, executions of the images of the guilty and the responsible.. of the patriarch, "The death of the patriarch, 1962", the politician, "The altar of the politician, 1962", the Church, "Altar of the dead cat, 1962",the monsters, "Tirdragon, 1962",women, "Thetornup woman, 1963 ". The artist appeared in a white trouser suit, carrying a revolver and a rifle. In vengeance for all the many injuries to herself, she stood before the artistically constructed altars and paintings, killing in effigy those who for her represented evil.

For the public, the form of the shooting perfomances, or the way the paintings were made, appeared to be less important than the fact that the artist shot at images of celebrities and politicians. Niki de Saint Phalle responded intensely and swiftly to contemporary events, expressing them in new artistic ways (often derived form artistic traditions) that were at odds with the establishment. In "Khrushchev-Kennedy" dated 1962, the artist bundled together a series of historical events. The downing of the U-2 spy plane over the Soviet Union in 1960 (the first serious confrontation between the two super-powers) was followed by the unsuccessful invasion of the Bay of Pigs in April 1961. Only two months later, in June, the two reprensentatives of the super-powers met for discussions in the US Embassy in Vienna. It was the photograph of the historic handshake between the two politicians, their hands touching in a warm arch ' that Saint Phalle used as the starting point for her shooting picture. It shows the faces of the two politicians, represented by carnival masks with life-sized portraits, integrated into a single head and a single body. Each head has its own hair and yet together they become a Janus-head of contrasts. The antithetical systems the two men represent are fused in a single form. Appearing as one body, the conflicts for which the politicians stand - capitalism vs. socialism, good vs. evil - are united. The antinomy of the heads is a threat to the whole body, which might stand for the entire world. The aggression, the military weapons forming the joint torso in which one weapon-bearing arm is directed against the other, become erotically grotesque in the light of the female lower body with its naked hairy vulva, G-string, torn stockings and boots. The artist here had recourse to the allegorical representation of war in the past and to the pictorial world of rationalist graphic art and political caricature since the 18th century. Her pictorial language is clear and unambiguous.. The male elements fighting against each other put the survival of the body as a whole - mother earth if you will - in danger. They risk destroying each other; and in the process all women and the rest of humankind. The artist opposes this life-threatening event, shooting from outside the picture at the politicians' masks, symbolically preventing the destruction of the world by one of its own arms and heads.

As early as 1968, Pierre Restany in his text " 'Nana' de Saint Phalle " spoke of the artist's glorification of contrasts in the light of her being characterised by "apparent paradoxes in her surroundings ... In Niki de Saint Phalle, Jeanne d'Arc and Mane Antoinette were given shape simultaneously. " (in: Catalogue Düsseldorf, Hanover, 1969, no page numbers). It is indeed the figure of the untainted rescuer, wearing the white of the virgin and of innocence, who in the actions of the shooting pictures contrasts antithetically with the maiming and destruction of the torn white surfaces, a mystical and innocent perpetrator who acts as if for her there was no problem of guilt. As in fairy tales, the artist appears as a representative of the good, like the heroines and heroes of childhood, encountering evil in all its manifestations in order to overcome it and to keep the images of these victories for all times.

As in the fairy tales, the multiple meanings of many of the paintings are not difficult to identify. From some of the destroyed surfaces, the defeated art of the age looks out at us, abstract expressionism overloaded with sentiment, or action painting. The entirely vertical courses of colour created by the dripping paint released onto these pictures can be explained by the action of shooting and by the resulting "liberty" of the course of the paint in a type of mechanised dripping that is due to the attraction of the earth. This was thus not only an Amazon's battle against men in their traditional sexual roles but also "an additional testimony to the death of art" (loc. cit.). The execution of New York academy painting was a parody on the "American style", without limits and pushed to the very edges of tastelessness. a powerful punch in the face of bourgeois taste. This was symbolised by the common nature of the materials used in these pictures, originating from society's waste heaps or from the depths of everyday tastelessness. The fineness of painting in the 1950s was contrasted in the painter's pictorial battles with the combination of objects in the form of toy soldiers, racing cars, masks of politicians, tanks and aircraft. And it was against the sensitivity of the pictorial surfaces of the Ecole de Paris that she set her lacerated painting skins.