Erasure And Immateriality

3 min readJul 22, 2021

By Art For Anarchists

William de Kooning was worth something. Even a throwaway sketch had value, both monetary and art historical — and for Rauschenberg, that was key. “It had to be something by someone who everybody agreed was great… 1964, New Yorker Magazine

Why erase a de Kooning?

Much can be attributed here to Marcel Duchamp’s influence over Rauschenberg . To engage the question: what is art? Duchamp insisted it is whatever he, the artist, intends! A controversial stance epitomized by a Porcelain Urinal titled “Fountain ‘’ representing an art object not made by the artist’s hands but readymade or as he called it an act of acheropoietoi.

Robert Rauschenberg sought the sketch for erasure to say the act of erasure is a transformative (creative) act — Rauschenberg made an erasure, the erasure is the act of creation. A definitively conceptual art that takes as its subject matter the idea of erasure and presents the present fact of what is missing by alluding to how it’s missing(ness) matters as art conceptually.

Why erase a Bored Ape? A Crypto Punk?

The meta-narrative which began with Rauschenberg’s radical assertion that erasure of one value system can establish a counter-positive value system is an early example of the concept of visual derivatives to an extreme. The erasure of the newly iconic Bored Ape & Crypto Punk extends this meta-narrative further by directly confronting the globally controversial dialog around the question: How can an immaterial art form such as NFT hold value.

Apes & Punks and the like gained their precedent of valuation from the history of collectibles: a valuation system which depends on presence of rarity. The concept of rarity is itself rooted in ideological pretexts of immaterialism: the closer a collectible is to zero made / to absence of being / is becoming then more rare by its ideological erasure from many to none. Where a Bored Ape falls on this spectrum of presences defines its value in said system.

There is a poetically logical conclusion to be had. The erasure of the ape/punk from its being embodied with digitally present immaterial thingness toward a greater absence of said thingness does exponentially activate the tangible qualities of being immaterial. This act of erasure amplifies the dialogical interrogation into the persistent absence of each Bored Ape or Crypto Punks “object” materiality.

To erase the immaterial makes what is left over a materialized phenomena. Here, as with Rauschenberg’s erasure of de Kooning, what isn’t left over, the very presence of profound absence (the missing ape / punk) establishes a new hierarchy of rarity.

WIlliam de Kooning sketch