Martin Breindl - The Body and Its Appropriation of the Environment

Lecture for 6x6 Fragments of European Photography, Lodz 2009. By Martin Breindl

It is a wide-spread opinion that the occupation with “the body” – and here especially with the artist's own body – is typical for the Austrian art of the 20th century. We could go back to the very beginnings when protagonists like Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele or Richard Gerstl exploited their own or their models' body. Their approach often is interpreted to be the “artistic side” of the “Viennese” coin – the other the scientific side to be the then newly defined psycho-analysis, explored and developed by Sigmund Freud, at exactly the same time.

But lets travel back only to the 1960ies when a bunch of wild experimenting artists invented the so called “Wiener Aktionismus” (Viennese Actionism), which maybe is the only original Austrian art movement known and famous on world-wide. The five leading artists of this movement (Rudolf Schwarzkogler, Otto Muehl, Günter Brus and Hermann Nitsch) and the people supporting them explored the borderlines of bodily experiences, how far one can possibly go, in actions and performances. Often very controversial, sometimes hard on the edge of legality, sometimes beyond. Performances included nude bodies being exposed to paint, food, meat, blood, included torture and self-mutilation and psychological experiments. Performances and actions could be very intimate (e.g. Schwarzkogler's and Brus', who often just posed in small rooms, sometimes without audience), could lead to big theatrical scored orchestration, often for many days (Nitsch) or lead to life-experiments, like communes (Muehl). What is very typical for all is that the artists themselves and also their interpreters and theoreticians always relate these actions to psycho-analysis, too. It seems that Freud and his followers had a big influence in Austrian art tradition. Of course the Viennese Actionism was somehow an upraise of the “real body” against the post-fascist catholic smell in Austria where everything that was related to bodily functions was tabooed. It seems that the occupation with the body and its psychology was crucial to free the people from their self-inflicted boundaries.

What's not so well known on Austrian art is the fact, that parallel to these very violent very basic, very direct very male actions, there was also a strong intellectual, conceptual or structural approach to art. In this tradition the body also played a central role, but not so much in its self-expression or exploitation, but more in its role as a medium or a tool to appropriate, conquer or deal with its environment. And this in a variety of significations: the social, the political or the gender-determined space among others.

This artistic tradition often is denied or not so respected in public (which might have something to do with the fact that the typical Austrian tends to disrelish intellectual approaches) but also has its roots in the beginning of the 20th century. Its basic ideas derive ie from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language, or from the so called Vienna Circle, a group of philosophers who shared a great emphasis on logical analysis and aimed at a unified science (Kurt Goedel, Otto Neurath, Hans Hahn ao).

This is not the place to present you a full art history of Austrian art, so I only want to draw your attention to some pieces by one artist – just to give you an idea what I mean. The artist is Valie EXPORT, was loosely asserted to the Actionists and at least as radical as her male colleagues were:

EXPORT’s early guerrilla performances have attained an iconic status in feminist art history. Tapp- und Tast-Kino (“Tap and Touch Cinema“) was performed in ten European cities in 1968-1971. In this avowedly revolutionary work, EXPORT wore a tiny “movie theatre” around her naked upper body, so that her body could not be seen but could be touched by anyone reaching through the curtained front of the “theatre.” She then went into the street and invited men, women, and children to come and touch her.

In her 1969 performance Aktionshose:Genitalpanik (“Action Pants: Genital Panic”), EXPORT entered a porn cinema in Munich with her hair in disarray, wearing crotchless pants, and carrying a machine gun. Striding up and down the rows of theatregoers, she brandished the weapon and challenged the male audience to engage with a “real woman” instead of images on a screen. Through these acts of artistic daring, EXPORT challenged the objectification of the female form by confronting voyeurs with a body that returned the gaze.

Also in 1968 she performed Aus der Mappe der Hundigkeit (“From the Portfolio The Dog-Being”) where she guided her Partner Peter Weibel on a dog leash through the city of Vienna, thus reversing the role of male and female. Later EXPORTS work became less controversial and she began to explore the space of nature and architecture, uncovered the social and political dimensions represented by certain forms of architecture, media and environmental planning.

So this was my point of departure for the selection for the slide show: the question if there was still an artistic photography scene that can be located in the tension of these two focal points: the body as a psycho-individual entity and the body as a tool to appropriate the environment. This is what I found. I will present a few images by each artist, not too much, so that you still be curious enough to also go to the slideshow...

The artists I chose are between 38 and 52 years old, not the youngest generation obviously; but the bodies of work I present stems from the last 4 years.

Eva Brunner-Szabo seems closely related to the actionist's tradition. In Bandages – a word play between the medical term „bandage“ and „bondage“ she analyses the  spaces of memories. She writes: „These spaces of memories are not only spaces in the topographical sense, like public space, interiors or spaces of remembrance, but also the spaces that I develop further. Besides the physical space I deal with the psychological space. I see my body as a space of memories and work with it accordingly. Strong experience of reality is mediated by intense sensual and mental re-experience. Rendering from the psychic to the physical – to the body, pain and the deliverance – is transformed from the real onto the photo.“

In „Bandages”, the artist uses her own bare body to explore the mental space of painful memories. In presenting herself as a medium for as well as an object of the untouchable, Brunner-Szabo takes this tradition of the Viennese Actionists a step further. It is a proof that a body is still important even in the age of the so-called virtual reality.

Sabine Bitter and Helmut Weber question the neoliberal limitations of urban space. In “Plugged In. Fenced Out” they counterpoint the utopian metabolic urban movement represented by the Habitat 67 in Montreal with the processes determined by the logic of utility, flexibility, effectiveness and mobility, as well as by the neoliberal enclosure and privatization of a city space. This work no longer poses the question of urban utopias, but rather directs our focus to the inconspicuous, marginal, and the everyday and spectacular forms of contemporary “metabolic” processes (e.g. EURO 08 in Vienna) and asks about the effect that these forms have on our urban experience.

Where is space left for our private bodies in the public space (which in former times belonged to all of us, because it was political space) after the business and event companies have taken over. Fencing out the unwanted individuals, plugging in the consumers – this is left in our brave new world, in this holistic society which we all dreamed about; and now when the dream has become true, we feel uncomfortable...

Robert F. Hammerstiel takes us a step further into the neoliberal space. All the photographs in the series Private Stories II were taken at the Blaue Lagune (“Blue Lagoon”). The Blaue Lagune is an estate of more than a hundred different prefabricated houses south of Vienna. In the unoccupied show-houses, visitors and prospective buyers find interiors completely furnished in every detail, the aim being to motivate buyers. Poses, gestures and postures, signs of intimate privacy, to which every observer can relate, are staged in this ‘public’ home by Robert F. Hammerstiel. What irritates is the fact that without background information the location cannot be defined, so it could be a real home or a staged film-set. The series of photographs is meant to be understood as a discussion of the authenticity of places and gestures.

The installation called “Alles in bester Ordnung III” served Robert F. Hammerstiel as a stage-set for his video production Alles in bester Ordnung IV in which four actors show everyday, constantly recurring, activities in a kind of „father-mother-child role-play”. Types of pictorial and body language are used here, such as are common in television advertising, reproducing a family idyll. The repetitions, which were really filmed, were repeatedly cut one after the other, thus trenchantly uncovering stereotyped patterns of behaviour.

The exclamation Commo-nice! by Sabine Maier takes us back to a very typical experience eastern Austrians had before the year 1989.

The images of this series were taken while I was exploring the former Eastern European countries – Serbia, Bosnia, Albania, and Latvia. The fascination with Eastern Europe dates back to my childhood. It started with pictures, names, books, television news, among others. And the fact that those countries seemed so far away. It was the iron curtain back then, which made these countries seem so far away even though they were so near. Bit by bit, I became very curious about this part of the world. When I finally went there, something happened outside of me. I still do not know what this ‘something’ was, but it was definitely related to the people, the buildings and differences in history. Sabine Maier

Maier's work is the counterpart to Bitter/Weber's: the fence in this case turns into a projection screen of unknown space, leaving traces and memories to explore and discover. The body has to travel to come back to itself. To find the long forgotten in a world never seen...

In Herwig Turk's world the Agents have taken over and replaced our bodies. It looks like science-fiction but nevertheless is a common, a normal world. In this body of eighteen photographs, Turk takes six pieces of laboratory equipment out of their context, removes them from their assigned position in the efficient organization of work in a lab, and shows them in isolation and devoid of function. The detail from a laboratory worktop with shining white tiles and blackish-grey grouting, shown in artful lighting, opens up a visual space where, among other things, a microscope, a pipette and a cold-light source with a two-arm light guide become actors under the artist’s vision control and mise-en-scène.

These artificial bodies start to dance on an artificial stage in an artificial world. The sterile space has replaced the dusty erosive world. In this context, the practice of observing, measuring and experimenting, organized both in terms of material and theory, as well as the relationship between experiential knowledge and the actors involved in experiencing are of special interest to Herwig Turk. As we watch them they seem to watch us. Are we still real? Are we still bodies?

Will the real bodies please stand up?
May 2009