In 1978 a Plexiglas object titled AMO ERGO SUM was created. It contains 77 Plexiglas letters filled with messages from myself and others. In the course of my artistic work, a life plan . which I strive to realize with greatest perseverance . sprang out of this title. In 1988 it became necessary to recapitulate, or rather, document the last 20 years in form of a publication. The result of this memory work is the trilogy "AMO ERGO SUM" with its three parts: Pornography (Part 1), Irony (Part 2) and Utopia (Part 3). This division was a compromise in regards to the complexity of the undertaking. Today I still fluctuate between these three areas with the intention of weaving a dense, system analytical web of relations.
Logically, this leads to a complex, mutual fusion of all three parts. This means that PORNOGRAPHY is ironic and utopian, IRONY is pornographic and utopian, and UTOPIA is pornographic and ironic. In this sense the trilogy became the entrance into and a starting point for a .hypermedia. project, which is fascinating to me on a daily basis because it consistently produces new links, ties and additional information itself, as well as being able to take in from the outside.
Renate Bertlmann, February 2001
In the introduction to the trilogy AMO ERGO SUM I indicate that for me UTOPIA is not a matter of visions of the future but rather a journey into the unknown. It is thus about progression, a state of permanent movement, change and transformation. On these travels I have learned that there are many different ways to confront so-called "travel experiences". I can embrace them or stamp them into dust, I can swallow them, digest them and spit them out again, I can let myself be led or be dragged by them. Since I tend towards regarding a peaceful state of being to be a kind of stagnation, a standstill of growth, I have developed a way of coping with experiences in a way which I call "ironic". Somehow I seemed to sense that IRONY - and only IRONY - would protect me from losing myself within the world: DISCORDO ERGO SUM!
No sooner do the "lower, middle and upper worlds" appear to gain stability, I let IRONY uncompromisingly in on them as a disruptive factor . they begin to distort, to crumble and to lose that validity which gives them a dangerously false sense of security. A battle begins to rage, the flames start to blaze . what remains for me but to throw myself into the rescuing, cooling sea of IRONY, with the hope of being washed onto the shore of a newly found identity?!
The fear of entirely losing my own reality however made me recognise that this thoroughly ironic behaviour would have to be reined in to a certain degree. At least one area of life should be treated with proper dignity and seriousness. And what comes to mind more forcefully than . LOVE?
I therefore gave my life plan and work concept the title AMO ERGO SUM and promised myself that I would treat LOVE, this most holy aspect of life, as a contra-ironic taboo. And yet how much I have fooled myself, failed to recognise myself and misunderstood LOVE. For what is LOVE but a constant alternation between self creation and self destruction, between finding oneself and losing oneself, and is not this very oscillation between birth and death an expression of IRONY? Of an IRONY which, in the tension between these two poles, creates and destroys itself by creating and destroying distance.
It became clear to me that in fact LOVE itself is the very own and most happy hunting ground of IRONY, for it is after all through love that human absurdities and contradictions are most impressively revealed. One moment we are floating in a rose-coloured whirl of emotions, the next we are sinking once again in bottomless despair. Today we fill our pores with love goo, tomorrow we laboriously scrape it away again because it is threatening to suffocate us.
And so it happens that LOVE, unifying, infinitely exhilarating LOVE, can all of a sudden become the playground of vanities, of pathos, of obscenities and the most cruel injuries.
Learning to occasionally "watch" yourself in the process, from a distance, you learn the fear . and the laughter! IRONY thus becomes the harbinger of times of upheaval, awakening, even rebellion . and can become a ride on a knife.s edge. Whether we skip light-footedly over the razor-sharp edge or are cut in two depends on how much courage we have.
And that is what is ironic about IRONY: everywhere where I am subject to dangers and painful realisations, irony is both weapon and shield. It leads me to despair . and leads me out again . as long as I can make use of it.
Making use of IRONY correctly is however no easy matter, since it has many faces, it makes a fool of the fooler, understands and misunderstands, unifies and divides. Ironic behaviour is thus deeply subversive, it is Wordplay ("An-Spielen" - allusion, insinuation), Foreplay ("Vor-Spielen" . also meaning performance), Downplay ("Unter-Spielen"), and Playing the Game ("Mit-Spielen" - going along with something). It is attack and defence, self assertion ("Selbst-Behauptung") and self beheading ("Selbst-Enthauptung"): carrying my own head in front of me by the hair I can observe the world from the necessary distance and from varied viewpoints. The traces of blood show me the way, and with a painful, wistful smile on my pale lips I convince myself that IRONY just is a dangerous game with extremes . and a dialectic act which ultimately joins together what has been separated.
(Sandor Ferenci)
Pornographic or obscene jokes and dirty language have long, as we know, been a male domain. Men.s jokes are found amusing, but the "woman.s joke" has yet to acquire an equivalent social position and indeed, under patriarchal conditions, will only be able to gain a subversive, outsider role. As Freud rightly observed of our culture, jokes of a dirty, pornographic, always tendentious nature are "levelled originally at women". The joker appears chiefly as the attacker, whilst the woman appears more conservative, mainly as the object of the attack. She is the object and the man the subject of a sexual stripping bare and an aggression which, above all, generates lust. The desire to see what is sexual laid bare is for Freud the original motive behind jokes and dirty language. They serve the "satisfaction of a (lascivious) drive", in the face of "its cultural repression". Jokes and dirty language provide the individual with an outlet against the culturally dominant denial of lust and subsequent psychological pressure. In contrast to his general cultural theory of sublimation, Freud (in his work "Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious", 1905) identified jokes and dirty language positively as a means of reversing the repression and censorship of sexuality in our culture and so win back what has been lost.
Those who do not master the art of the (dirty) joke or who spurn it, also limit themselves in their expression of lust. This is the case for the female members of our society in an unequally high proportion to the male. The cultural process of sexual repression may affect both men and women, but, as the lack or rather complete absence of women.s jokes shows, it is mainly women who are the bearers and victims of this general repression.
Renate Bertlmann belongs to those artists whose work, in the context of these reflections, earns, or rather provokes, our particular attention. Her antipornographic objects and montages cause laughter - but not at first, if at all, from men, for here without exception men become for once the objects of the sexual stripping bare and aggression. Here the leopard is given the opportunity to learn to change its spots: for men to set aside their wounded pride and let themselves be disarmed by this unfamiliar "women.s joke".
In view of the many phallic caricatures, the unerringly accurate satires of male narcissism and fantasies of omnipotence, the question arises as to whether Renate Bertlmann has not conquered a new terrain; one which enables women to answer the lustful aggression of men with an equally lustful retort. The artist leads the way by creating montages of objects and images which are wholly disrespectful and expose self confident virile genitality, where nothing remains of what Freud identified in his time as the culturally valuable, sensitive "inability of women to endure explicit sexuality". Bertlmann.s "Präservativwurfmesser" ("Condom throwing knife"), her catapult in the form of two penis shafts, her cartridge belt decorated with stuffed condoms, her votive picture "Reliquie des Heiligen Erectus" ("Relic of the Holy Erectus"): all of these works are a double declaration of war against the pornographic violence of men and the male privilege of lust in patriarchal society.
As a general rule women react entirely passively, mutedly, expressionlessly, to the offensive jokes of men. Typically they react with the kind of martyr behaviour culturally intended for them as female objects, which is to look away with indignation or embarrassment and withdraw from the scene of obscene provocation. Renate Bertlmann makes a feminist protest against this withdrawal, but also, as an artist, she provides this protest with a humourous outlet so that it does not merely remain at the abstract level, hidden in theoretical and moral arguments.
In the caricatures, which take aim at figures of authority within our inescapable male society and reduce the manager, the cleric, the military commander, the old greying figures of eminence and religious prophets as well as their whole brood of sons and heirs to a common phallic denominator, there is alongside the accusation and criticism also a pointed humour to be found, a sense of enjoyment, a healthy sadism in handing it out. This double-edged approach to the caricatures is what makes them palatable artistically and distinct from feminist rhetoric. In the extent to which caricature in Bertlmann.s work closes in upon its object, the male and his sphere, fear of it diminishes accordingly, and the repression and censorship of female lust is reversed. It is this liberating element which is decisive, not the appropriation of male aggression, which reproduces the ubiquitous men.s joke and in the same obscene coin pays back what has been dealt out to women.
The new terrain which Renate Bertlmann has opened up for the "women.s joke" in closed male society does not try to compete with crude, violent and basically humourless pornography. This is assured by the poetic alienation with which the artist takes apart and reassembles in new ways the artifacts and relics of male lust, in particular the imposing, grandly decorative torture instrumentarium which her expanded condom collection becomes. No man can endure this rearrangement. The conflation of a "Männerschwanz" ("dick") and a butterfly (in "Diverse Farphalle Impudiche"), the "men.s protection" inflated to a balloon or drying on a washing line ("Der Waschtag" / "Washing Day"), textured condoms, bizarre in themselves, arranged into colourful artificial flowers and stylised as little hands or cock.s heads ("Fleurs du Mal") . all these material montages, and the way in which they appeal to the viewer.s desire to touch, destroy the false status of virile ambition for power. These varied caricatures twist men.s arrogant sexual prestige into metaphors of their failure. But they also disarm in terms of the goal which usually awaits women behind the male strategy of advances and .encouraging. jokes: deadly serious, sweaty coitus.
The utopia of a gentle, tender relationship with the world and our fellow humans is diametrically at odds with our current experience. Noise around us prevents stillness, and yet we need stillness if we wish to hear the quiet voices inside and around us. Haste keeps us from lingering, and so we lack the time to calmly take things in or pass them on. Greed of all kinds prevents us from carefully drawing nearer to and touching others. An atmosphere of violence is increasingly pervading our lives, urging the addictive satisfaction of the crudest urges. Some presumptiously exploit all and everything to that end, with no concern for the consequences. Others try to distance themselves, and struggle. If they isolate themselves, then they are no longer able to exchange thoughts and feelings, and risk withering inside. If they give up and conform with the masses, they become all the more incapable of contact, since they lose their sense of their own identity. Genuine communication necessitates a You and an I, the whole self with body, mind and soul, or, as Renate Bertlmann names it, "thinking loving, loving thinking".
Communication based on closeness and respect needs people who are prepared to open up to one another, to whom all forms of violence are alien, who lack the thirst for power. Nowadays however the dead and injured are par for the course. A society in which everyone respects one another is a dream of the future, a utopia. Working towards it requires a struggle, a fight with love against all that kills. Death however is inescapable. One of those puzzling antinomies of our existence is that there are some people . Elias Canetti is one of them . who take on this hopeless fight against death. For Canetti, death is an "opponent who lifelong calls upon us to develop, in resistance to him, what makes us essentially ourselves" Deeply anchored within us there is a yearning for something lasting which death cannot touch, a longing for indestructible life. There is no cult and no religion which is satisfied with death as the final end of existence. Death may always mark the end of our earthly existence, but it is also a transitional stage to another, unknown life.
Nevertheless, death is feared. We fear the unknown, even though death is the only certainty in our lives. It strips away our final doubts about our unique existence. In the face of our certain death, the short timespan of our lives takes on a weighty significance which only love helps us to bear. Love frees us from the fear, brings us closer, erases what separates, connects us. It does not banish death from the world, but it enables us to accept it in allowing us to act as conscious beings and, through fear of death as the final, most painful abandonment, allows uncompromising courage to grow. It is the utter fearlessness of a Cassandra who proclaims the truth in the face of all false hope, or the utter fearlessness of an Antigone, who in her loyality to the commands of the gods buries her brother in spite of the will of the king. This is the limitless courage which the utopias of love demand.
The works of Renate Bertlmann are steps in this direction. They are purifying exercises marked by the hardness of battle. They show the paradoxes and polarities connected with our inner and outer worlds. They hint at mystical experiences of love, life and death, like those described by Angelus Silesius.s short verses in his "Cherubinischen Wandersmann" ("The Cherubic Pilgrim"):
"Der Mensch hat eher nicht vollkomm'ne Seligkeit,
bis daß die Einheit hat verschluckt die Anderheit".
("Man does not know perfect bliss
Till unity has swallowed otherness.")
"Der Tod, aus welchem nicht eine neues Leben blüht,
der ist's, den meine Seel' aus allen Toden fliehet".
("It is the death from which no new life grows,
from which, of all deaths, my soul flees.")
In her multi-part black and white photographic series 'RENÉE ou RENÉ', Renate Bertlmann conveys temporal change and transformation through the use of photographic sequences. This method of performative photography has gained a special significance in the socio-critical analysis of gender specific role-play, brought to life as artistic self-performance. Dressed in a men's suit, the artist woos and seduces a female shop dummy. Bertlmann presents feminist reflection and elements of performance – a staging of the self – in a photographic role-play that questions male and female behavioural patterns, patterns which move between two extremes, and in so doing reveals or deciphers these. Since the 1970s Bertlmann's work has focussed strongly on the topic of sexuality as well as on the role and status of women and the relationship between the sexes. The breadth of her work ranges from performance and objects to drawings, paintings, writings and photography.
Carl Aigner, 1991
Translation: Larissa Cox
The interrelation of Eros and Thanatos stands at the centre of Renate Bertlmann's aesthetic investigations. Faithful to the motto "Amo Ergo Sum" under which the Viennese artist subsumes her work since the early 1970's, her sumptuous settings, settled in the sensitive frontier zone between kitsch, art and taboo, visualise this timeless topic in an equally imaginative as subtle way. Corresponding to the complexity of the reproach, this extensive artwork is intended as a trilogy whose equal parts are titled Pornography, Irony and Utopia. "Pornography concerns itself in the closer and broader sense with the war of the genders, the offenders and victims and the many other facets of naked survival. Irony is on the tracks of desires and an aggression rooted in infancy and tries to handle the arising sensations of pleasure and revulsion. Utopia does not dedicate itself, as one might be lead to believe, to visions of the future. On the contrary, it paves the way into the uncertain with sudorific exercises like asceticism, denial and exercises in death" (Renate Bertlmann, 1989). Resulting originally from the need to order the innumerable works of an overflowing creativity, the trilogy rapidly emerged as a demanding program which has, to this day, lost nothing in topicality and necessity. As powerful and meaningful the individual elements may appear for themselves, they are permeated and dependent on each other. In all facets of Bertlmann's productions Pornography appears ironic and utopian, Irony utopian and pornographic and Utopia pornographic and ironic. "Amo Ergo Sum" aims at self-assertion and self-confidence directed at communication in a patriarchal society from an explicitly feminine perspective. It means the equivalence of body, soul and spirit in a piercing, indivisible totality (Maria Vogel, in 1989).
When Renate Bertlmann tracks the trivial myths of desire in her plastic and picturesque settings, which are analysed in film and photography in a second work sequence, she takes moral and social traditions into her visor. The total concept does not only refer structurally to the trinity, this Christian dominion symbol of a male triumvirate, but also in content.
Great importance is given to aspects of gender differences and the function of role clichés. With joyful gesture the artist dismantles the insignia of male power and glory. However, she also describes the power of longing and lends form to the image of successful inter-sexual communication. Not least, she imagines sensations of shame in pictures which directly touch all the senses and explores the sensual fascination which lies in the interrelation of distance and approximation. The artistic interest applies primarily to metamorphosis. Performances and photo sequences with diverse scenarios of metamorphosis are joyfully experimented with. Installations and picture cycles sketch poetic stories and accompany their participants on their journey through an eventful existence. The differentiated iconography of these compositions is uninhibited in helping itself from the historic fund. The archaic fertility symbols of phallus and vulva appear as well as popular motives of piety.
Popular fairytale characters like Snow White and the seven dwarfs or the unicorn appear in an altered narrative context. Impressed by the feminine discourse concerning feminine role models and the individual need for space from attacks of reality, symbols of utopian, egalitarian love dominate in her early work. In the sequence, "Zaertliche Beruehrung" (Gentle Touch), two contrasting- coloured latex pacifiers explore the different stages of intimacy. The two equal cast members rub against each other unabashedly, wrap around and penetrate each other in an unmistakable representation of a sexual encounter. "Ex Voto", a sculpture of the late 1980's, is substantially more aggressive: feminine breasts, promising nourishment and care put forth an unexpected destructive quality. A sharp knife points out from a nipple of the heart shaped Styrofoam torso, presented like a valuable in a glass aquarium. The object of desire, the female body no longer signals vulnerability, but threatens injury, suddenly demands a respectful distance. The compositions of the past decade are dominated by a rather ironic gaze, preferably falling on the erect phallus appearing in the most unlikely costumes. A devotional is dedicated to "San Erectus" with glamour and glitter. Lavish, tailor cut ladies. robes decorate a group of colourful dildos, "Les Enfants Terrible," who have come together for an absurd fashion show. Seeking shelter underneath a glass bell with "Cheese from Austria" embossed on it, the seven dwarfs are dressed splendidly in their long pointed red caps. The cardinals bedded in silk and satin (from the computer animated sequence, "Zwitscher Litanei" . Chirping Litany) prove that spiritual vestments suit the upright fellow very well. Depictions of the male organ no longer shock. They are caricatures, "that pick at the obligatory male society and their relevant representatives and. brings the military, the eminence grise, religious prophets and the entire breed of heirs under a common phallic denominator." (Peter Gorsen, 1989).
Revisions to Renate Bertlmanns work. (2008) (PDF)
Translation: James Renier
Upon entering her studio one gets a Déjà vu-effect: in the Sixties there were the so-called "Stores" American Pop and happening artist - I think of Carolee Schneemann, but also Claes Oldenburg. Also a suspicious factor arises: is Renate Bertlmann still too American in her early work, because the resonance and demand of galleries and arts centers are too small in Vienna? Indeed and unjustly she was not celebrated such as younger artists like Carola Dertnig as the "Mother of Invention" of feminist performance art.
But the Austrian art scene is slow-acting, harsh, it rarely changes and Renate Bertlmann works had still touched on two other points very early on, which are connected with one another: ambivalence and kitsch. These methods up until a few years ago were practically not or only hardly embodied in the Austrian art scene. That is, there are many tendencies, which arose in her work decades earlier, which were not written into the history of art in part due to the unheard manner and ephemeral character of the performance. Also contributing alongside her often use of ambivalence the "breaking the leitmotif" and the gift of the revision.
One of her tactics thereby is to make lustful cute embarrasses from pornographic implements, bride dresses, pacifiers, hearts, and garden gnomes. The art theorist faction often homogenized by conceptual thinking sees in these tools the trivial as an enemy of its actual pictorial refusal and takes panic-stricken flight. It could be possible, the trinity for their work blocks - pornographies, irony and utopia to describe- with a title, selected by the artist, like "St(r)ammhalter im Bru(s)tkasten". Just like what Louise Bourgeois's loved, in Robert Mapplethorpe's photos with an under the arm carried sculptural penis, "La Fillette", also Bertlmann answered the gaffe of the female "penis envy" - among other things -, stirred up by Sigmund Freud, with shrill doll dresses pulled over the dildo from the porno shop, and above all extra large black ones. Or the large cock wrapped like a mummy and put into a showcase replacing the incubator: "Corpus impudicum arte domitum". Subversively on the offensive taboo "borders" are Bourgeois and Bertlmann common like often the questions about identities, achieved by disguising or transformation, perversion and deconstruction, whereby female stories do not address themselves accusing to an opposite - thus the male view "of the different one" is included in principle as social criticism.
A typical American feature is the interactive communication with the audience, which were included in her performances right from the beginning. This means that Bertlmann not only uses her body as a screen (projection surface) of female identity and enters the room with her body and with malleable work partially consisting of relics, but that her performances are rather like "happenings". The visitors and people of the audience were actively integrated in the process in a stronger way than by the male representatives of the "Wiener Aktionismus" as they had to throw money into a collection bag, or had to shoot at parts of the art piece, dance or push a wheel chair. They had to actively participate. Not only did Bertlmann perform together with international colleagues of the performance scene at festivals in Bologna, Amsterdam and Vienna, but her encounters with Gina Pane and Ulay/Abramovic left such a mark on her work, while leading "Aktionismus" into the direction of an international development. The Viennese specialties such as injury and concealment are shared only between her, Rudolf Schwarzkogler and Rita Furrer. However, some views she displays differ from the rest, such as her humorous aspect and what more is the interaction of music, language, the use of teaching boards, sketches as well as the photographic and film documentation - just as most young artists do - right from the beginning. In the 70's she co-founded the "BC - collective" with Linda Christanell as an early teamwork of two women to ensure these interactions. Mutual filming with Super - 8 cameras allowed for documentation of their ephemeral work, whereas the objects, which are made of textile, wood, latex, etc. that are used here could also stand for themselves in installation photos. Therefore there are more possible variations of their "tender loving care" presented on chairs or hanging from string to show a kind of "laundry (wash) day" for the artistically manifested taboos.
Staged Subjectivity in Renate Bertlmann's Photo Videos dacia (PDF)
To copy the truth can be a good thing,
but to invent the truth is better, much better.
(Giuseppe Verdi)
In a nimble balancing act between irony and a careful securing of evidence, Renate Bertlmann's photo videos initiate a discussion about the reality of images. Since 2001 and after various experiments with performance, installation and object art, as well as with staged photography, the artist also explores the medium of photo video. The hybrid nature of this medium equally employs the imaging strategies of both photography and film, consolidating photographic snap shots into film sequences by means of animation and cross-fades. Through the fusion of these two different image forms-still image, in which time and movement appear to be frozen and film, its unique quality based on the organization of time and movement-artistic gems emerge, whose unconventional imagery reveals new perspectives and allows for a multitude of interpretations.
The enthusiasm for the genre (whose history Alain Resnais' begins with in the artist biography, "Van Gogh" from 1948, where sections from various paintings are compiled to tell one story) is based largely on the enormous amount of creative freedom and the fascinating technical possibilities this genre offers. Similar to film and video, photo video is likewise dependent on equipment as well as on the advances and developments in digital image processing programs. However, in contrast to the tedious production processes of film, photo video allows for a more direct, immediate, and inexpensive production. One single person can carry out work on the camera and computer so that, in the ideal case, the entire creation of a photo video, from the concept to choice of imagery and composition to sound design, stems from one single author. As the starting point for artistic activity, the most diverse photographic material can be drawn upon: found or newly produced images, staged photography or snap shots. Their visual quality is relevant and is defined by clair-obscure contrasts, spatiality, plane and contour, harmony or dynamics. The transformation from a static single image to a moving stream of images occurs through cross-fading and animation, whereby the transition to video clip is smooth. In addition, an effect of this process is that the position of the camera appears to be fixed, as if the artistic gaze was focused on the scene of events from one specific point. This gives the photo videos a subjective, as well as a theatrical character and blurs the boundaries between documentation and mise-en-scène. In condensed narratives, realms of experience are constructed, whereby the penetration of reality and virtuality and the interplay of visual saturation and aesthetic concentration irritate and sensitize perception.
Thematically, Renate Bertlmann's photo videos - oscillating between matter- of-fact protocol and poetic transcription - revolve around the question of the subject as well as of the boundaries and possibilities our society provides for the work of humans on themselves. They are attempts at reassuring oneself in a time, where the development of media advances the differentiation of society and with the media presence of each individual potentially on the rise, the complexity of communication increases and along with it, the need for even more symbols. Precisely these symbols have always been at the center of Renate Bertlmann's artistic focus. Under the motto "Amo ergo sum", she has developed a very personal variety of ironic- romantic feminism and with her versatile artistic work, she makes a case for a respectful and tender relationship to herself and to the world. She contrasts the objectified image of self and of the world in a knowledge society and its primacy of analytical thinking with aesthetic imagination and the power of subjective impressions.
Work with memory offers a starting point; it is a rather fragmented and ephemeral medium that is nevertheless the foundation of how we position ourselves in society, and that forms cultural identity in general. Guided by a leitmotif formulated by the feminist movement, "The private is political", Bertlmann explores the spaces of individual and collective memory in her photo videos. The spectrum of images in her short works ranges widely. It ranges from subtle portrait studies that grant glimpses into the life and world of women friends, to mini-dramas, where dolls become the protagonists to examine patterns of roles and relationships. The spectrum of images include symbolically laden studies of nature, where unspectacular landscape scenery invites for reflection about the rhythm of becoming and disappearing again, as well as explorations of urban architecture and panoramas of life, in whose associative vista of images the simultaneous and non-simultaneous are themes: nearness and distance, movement and suspension of movement, history and presence. Time and again, Renate Bertlmann's gaze turns to her own art objects, whether they are concerned with finding an expression for the most basic human needs, wishes and sentiments, or whether they are about questioning ritualized patterns of communication and conventional gender roles. However, now and again, her objects are also concerned with a formal experiment that examines the particular artistic view that both stages the interplay between form and color, space and time, image and audio in the film analysis and directs the meaning of the images through conscious contextualization.
daciaThe call for self-determination and liberation from constraints that was voiced in all spheres of life by women in the 1970s made no exception of art. At issue was mainly the image of the female in art, which up to then had been - with a few exceptions - an image of women made by men. And the issue was to develop a female image, made by women, which did not yet exist. The search for adequate artistic expression of these demands and the new female self-conception went hand in hand with introspection and the exploration of what this image might be, and of what it might be like. It was the disclosure of societal conditions and constraints, the deconstruction of traditional image concepts, questions of identity, the exploration of one's own body and sexuality, and the demand for control over them that informed the search for formal and contentual possibilities outside of and beyond the established patriarchal forms of representation.
Renate Bertlmann numbers among the most consistent of the Austrian women artists who took this path in the 1970s. Her work revolves around the subjects of love, eroticism, and sexuality. She casts light on the innermost realms of the female psyche, making them public and placing them in a social context. From a distinctly female perspective, she represents feelings and desires, addresses the battle of the sexes, unmasks society as being informed by a type of male-determined, fetish-obsessed sexuality, and assumes different female and male roles to trace and explore different identities. The range of subject matter in her work is characterized by ambivalence: tenderness stands alongside aggression, lasciviousness alongside asceticism, the feminine alongside the masculine, and the dead serious and profound alongside a revealing and occasionally biting humor. And at times, the one switches into, or merges with, the other.
The artist creates parallel groups of works which highlight various aspects of a subject, and the consistent iconography that thus emerges lets her oeuvre grow into a coherent and increasingly complex system. Drawings are made alongside objects which she reuses for staged photographs and performances.
One central group of works from the 1970s is her "tender-poetic" pieces. There, the artist develops abstracted and reduced shapes representing affectionate experiences of a tender corporeality. In her 1974 drawings entitled Berührungen [Touches], gently shaded outlines form organic shapes, shapes which touch and embrace each other. Renate Bertlmann finds an equivalent to them in the form of inflated condoms and latex teats. Through the way in which they are used, through the gaze being purposefully directed towards the soft materiality of the surface, and through the works' titles, these objects become synonyms of tenderness. The fact that these drawings belong to the spheres of both the sexual and the infantile adds to their abstract quality, evoking associations of sexuality, contraception, motherhood, and childhood experiences. The period beginning in 1975 saw the creation of a large number of teat and condom works: inflated condoms positioned in light contact with one another in glass cases, including instructions for re-inflating in case they should "go limp"; teat mats and objects with pushed-in and protruding rubber nipples that can be read as female or male genitals; the photo series and film Zärtliche Berührungen [Tender Touches] showing the inflated ends of two condoms caressing and eventually penetrating each other; Zärtliche Hände [Tender Hands], a Zärtlicher Christus [Tender Christ] wearing a crown of latex nipples; the first series of staged photographs, Zärtliche Pantomime [Tender Pantomime], showing the masked artist intimately absorbed in herself and her sexuality. At the same time, Renate Bertlmann combines teats and condoms with scalpels in other drawings and objects, thereby creating images of repudiation and aggressive self-defense in light of the vulnerability of tender intimacy and with regard to images of aggressive sexuality.
at the presentation of her DVD Amo ergo sum Works 1972-2010
Secession, Vienna (PDF)
As the DVD presentation illustrates (even more so than the catalogue trilogy published in 1989 by Ritter or the catalogue from the Fotogalerie Wien in 2002), Renate Bertlmann has since the beginning of her artistic career been a multifaceted player on various levels (in terms of content), she has used diverse technical media since 1970 and has made use of her own body in public performances as well as in stagings in her atelier. The transformation of sculptural approaches applied to installations and objects, combined with theatrical sequences, at times including music and sound through tape recordings creating sound-space sculptures, were since their introduction by John Cage, Japanese Gutai, but also Yoko Ono, brand new in Europe during the 1970s. This was received as a total surprise, often even considered offensive and scandalous, at a time when Actionism and the Happening after 1958 – with George Mathieu, the "Wiener Gruppe" or Vienna Group), the Prachenskys as well as Nitschs with the primal scene of theater interwoven with gestural splash and drip paintings (Bildschüttungen) self-paintings (Selbstbemalung) (Brus) – was only able to establish itself with painstaking difficulty. Yet it proved to be an even rockier road for the feminists of Viennese Actionism that, with Renate Bertlmann, also brought the characteristics of Allan Kaprow's or Wolf Vostell's Happenings to Vienna. Audience participation, a relevant aspect of the animistic aesthetic in art since 1945 (see for example the current exhibition Animismus. Moderne hinter den Spiegeln at the Generali Foundation, Vienna), then became especially relevant for the artist practice of artists such as Renate Bertlmann, VALIE EXPORT, Linda Christanell, Helga Philipp, Peter Weibel, etc..
The path to acknowledgement in collective consciousness was a dogged one – with a delay in regional museums to this day – and such acceptance was only made possible due to artistic research. Despite the exhibition "Mothers of Invention" and Carola Dertnig's publications, and in spite of the increased relevance of Bertlmann-like works for young artists from Anna Jermolaewa and Andrea Kalteis to Die Geschwister Odradek, it is still widely unknown that the "Streicheleinheiten" (or "caresses") or pacifier wreaths and phallic objects (among others made out of latex or foam, Plexiglass, tulle, and glitter) that are worn or carried by the human body preceded Franz West's "Passstücke" ("adaptives" or "fitting pieces"). Bertlmann is more frequently associated with her role as a serious pioneer in the fields of staged photography and the expanded field of photography (being a founding member of the photography initiative FOTO FLUSS is one such example). She is also known to a certain extent for her objects and expanded notion of art in general. Her use of her body in the performance scene should however become just as recognized as "Action Pants: Genital Panic" by EXPORT. By now, the break away from logos-masculine / mythos-feminine for which EXPORT, Katharina Sieverding, Marina Abramovic, Gina Pane, Birgit Jürgenssen or Bertlmann fought for, has long since been achieved. The younger generation has been able to reap some of the benefits. Yet a lamentation about the almost non-existent hype surrounding actionist women is here entirely inappropriate, since art history is constantly being rewritten and the DVD could once again change something in the ever-delayed expansion of a narrow-minded, undemocratic and still very elitist art historiography here in this country. It is here that I would like to remind the reader of a quote by Christian Krawagna in an artist catalogue published in Krems in 2003: In Austria only one woman per decade is allowed be the great new discovery...
The irony, fateful no less, that the exposed penis has been largely absent from our culture while the phallus is ubiquitous in its symbolic form and dominant as power structure, has occupied analysts, from Sigmund Freud to Jacques Lacan and beyond, whose work extended from psychoanalytical practice to the investigation of cultural neuroses.
Freud’s exploration of the psychological effects that derive from infants observing physiological differences between the female and male gender, was based on the visibility and related exposure of the penis and the perception of a ‘loss’ when the penis could not be seen. According to Freud an absence of the penis prompts castration anxiety in the male infant while the female child perceives the penis as an object that is missing and which she therefore desires. This is not a genital or sexual desire but defined as ‘penis envy’ – the wish to possess an object that others have1. For this infantile recognition the exposure of the penis is significant. When it is not there or hidden the envy and anxiety, respectively, become sublimated further and enter the realm of the purely symbolic – with the potential to generate neuroses at a later stage. Since most societies conceal the primary genital area this symbolic power and function of the penis is heightened to an extent that the male member can be represented in reduced shape and diminutive size – think for example of the pre-pubescent look of male genitalia in occidental sculpture and painting – without forfeiting any of its acquired socio- cultural power and dominance.
For an artist like Renate Bertlmann, born and working in Freud’s adopted home town, the prevalence of such cultural myths borne from the psychological sublimation of physical distinctions between the sexes poses the question of how to avoid the trap of Freudian orthodoxy while still articulating the evidential phallocracy in Western culture. When Bertlmann wrote in 1982 about the continuous threats ‘die uns Frauen be-herr-scht’ (that master us women)2 she articulated a concrete socio-political reality, as much as a cultural cliché, that many feminist artists are facing. An evident procedural step for her was to expose the penis in order to counter the symbolism of the phallus; to show (male) members in order to demonstrate the misogynist exclusivity of their member-ship.
The progression from articulating genitalia as modernist abstraction (‘Exhibitionism’-series, 1973), via condom-objects (‘Ammunition Belt’, 1976), to the ‘Phallic Objects’ of 1980 display the penis successively as a plastic object whose symbolism and cultural mediation merely dresses up a distinct type and form that remains unchallenged and formulaic. Although given to erection, the ultimate incarnation of this form – as ritualised golden object in ‘Iunvencus Cupidus’3 of 1985 – is curiously droopy and appears now, despite its 30 cm circumference, symbolic rather than aggressive. Here the enlarged visualisation is remote from penis envy: either the male is pitied for having to push laboriously his member around or he is sidestepped to escape any confrontation with his ludicrously glorified bell-end.
The interrelation of Eros and Thanatos stands at the center of Renate Bertlmann’s aesthetic investigations. Her extensive artwork is intended as a trilogy with the title AMO ERGO SUM whose equal parts are titled “Pornography”, “Irony”, and “Utopia”. Her work revolves around the subjects of love, eroticism, and sexuality. She casts light on the innermost realms of the female psyche, making them public and placing them in a social context. From a distinctly female perspective, she represents feelings and desires, addresses the battle of the sexes, unmasks society as being informed by a type of male-determined fetish-obsessed sexuality, and assumes different female and male roles to trace and explore different identities.
Exo-subject: sculpture and surface as identity (PDF)
Awkwardly grasping a rounded belly with bony fingers, extended and exaggerated in length by latex teats, we witness the uncanny spectre of Renate Bertlmann’s photographic self- portrait, Pregnant Bride, 1976. The bride’s white net veil is crowned not by a wreath of spring blossoms, but by a ring of the same, oddly shaped, man-made protuberances. She wears a long white dress, but where we expect to see her blushing beauty, there is the blank plane of a crude mask: a white shape with rudimentary facial features glued onto it; unseeing slit eyes, bulbous nose and smaller latex protrusions indicating the position of the mouth. In a ceremonial touch, the outlines of these features are encrusted with different coloured glitters.
Choosing a heteronormative social ritual, and its associated values to do with virginity and promised – but traditionally withheld - fertility, the artist deliberately pulls some triggers in this piece. As well as the push and pull between traditional costume, and brutal disruption thereof, the figure’s posture is at odds with her theme. Instead of standing or sitting poised and upright, she appears slumped, perhaps asleep, in a wheelchair: a pose that suggests she may not be able to move independently. Coupled with the masking of her face, and despite the appearance of premature pregnancy, this pose further effects confusion between whether the subject of this photo-portrait is animate or inanimate. For the live performance by the same name, 1978, [location]. Bertlmann’s presence dressed thus invoked disturbance, even horror. In this work, the feminine archetype, rather than being prepared in typical fashion for the marital ceremony, is recast through surreal substitutions and extensions that render her apparently unnatural: technologies and prosthetics extending or propping up her human shape in ways that positioned her between life and death, between real flesh and man-made supports. The figure of the bride that Bertlman presents appears simultaneously monstrous and futuristically evolved. Is she automata or corpse? To whom is she due to be in union, and how does she procreate? If indeed we can identify her as ‘she’? The signifiers of her subjectivity and her social role are deliberately disrupted. At the end of the performance, the bride, by all accounts somewhat shockingly for the audience, abandons her ‘newborn baby’.
The Pregnant Bride was one of a number of self-portrait images captured by Bertelman in the 1970s. Typically, in her work in this period, the artist plays upon archetypes and expectations using her own appearance as material, combined with masks, costumes and prostheses: both found, and of her own making. She addresses not only the performance of femininity, or maternity, but also people’s awkwardness in light of non-normative behaviours or appearances, including disability, and investigates the intersubjective balances at play in asserting power, or plying seduction and intimacy, often with a healthy dose of irony. Bertlmann made the self-portrait photographs as part of a practice that also included the making of line drawings of anthropomorphic forms such as her Stele series, 1974, in which worm-like shapes are rendered, entwined with each other, or with simple drawn blocks, and also object-sculptures. In the latter, the artist introduces a lexicon of body-substitutes that she alternately wears and presents in the gallery. The Malformed Humans of Tomorrow, 1975, for example, comprises a set of small shelves that display a taxonomy of her found objects and plastic shapes: a set of pacifiers and bottle teats in different shapes and sizes: some bulbous, some elongated, some fat, some with a blunted tip. Sometimes these dummies are sliced or deflated in the display. These objects – akin to the condoms that frequently appear in her work - present as a curious set of possibilities for sucking or drinking or stopping-up the mouth: as soft material interfaces to extend, or prevent, contact between humans. The display forms a kind of bassline or key to understanding the origin of those shapes and forms that recur throughout her work.
The Laughter of Tragedy
Sometimes it happens that suddenly certain characters from Renate Bertlmann’s theater make me laugh. Yet they seem as serious as popes.
I’m talking about a very singular kind of laughter, among all the sorts of laughter. It’s the laughter at what in my daily life does not make me laugh, the Laughter of Tragedy. This laughter that erupts in the midst of despair or dread.
A Laughter of resistance. It has lasted for so long, the Dictatorship of the phallocracy, this worldwide exercise of power, how long has it been? Since forever. Since time immemorial, it has become the sediment of thought, the History of Humanity, one would think it’s the Proper trait of humankind, this omnipotence, this imperial gravity.
There has been however more than one attempt at revolution, more than one sunrise in the reigning obscurity, each century has known a movement of contestation, a bursting forth of voices, a heroic revolt, every fifty or hundred years, women wake up with a start, call to one another to rise up against the temples, the monuments, the fortresses, launch great cries of indignation, are pursued by Servile Opinion and its suppressive forces. Are repressed, incarcerated. Erased. Extinguished. Fall. In ashes. Beneath the silence of the ashes revolt smolders.
Beneath the erasure, the spark of anger. And one morning a hundred years later, the fervor reignites, the revolt takes off again. And what if this time the revolt won, if it went from dream to its realization? If the Just carried the day, if Life finally had its chances?
If, this time, let’s say for example in these springtimes of the 70’s (1770, 1870, 1970, 2070?) the Phallus were dethroned, put to route, or, simply unmasked, if it deposed itself? If Narcissus gazing down at himself saw himself looking madly at himself and suddenly was mortally bored of being only ever in his own company? If the mirror sent back a self-portrait of Himself as Phallus-itself, Phalself?
But this If, from Century to Century, undergoes the same fate, rises, hopes, and loses. What wins, if there is winning, what grows is discouragement. It takes more and more energy, more faithfulness to the idea of Life, to rekindle the hope, the will to act. The more time passes the more the Phallus sends its roots deeper and deeper toward the heart of the Earth higher and higher toward the extremities of the Universes.
There are moments on the path of destiny when fatigue is irresistible, when the world seems closed like a concentration camp, when the soul finds itself confined without exit. So one sits down on a staircase step. One says to oneself: “It’s over. Human beings are fools for the love of hate.”
It is then that from the bottom of one’s belly, from the middle of one’s chest bursts forth, with the freshness of a spring suddenly freed from secrecy, a stream of laughter. The gift of Life. In certain cases it is called Grace. The respite granted when there is no more hope. Then from desolation bursts forth a crisis of laughter. Irresistible.
It is immortal Life that pierces the wall of Tragedy.
Crossing the little bridge over the Rio dei Giardini that separates the first international pavilions from the newcomers in the 1930s and wandering to the left, we find ourselves standing in a somewhat disheveled garden, the ruin of something more formal between the canal and the tired facades of a few countries. We pause in the ragged grass and face a seemingly immaculate, clearly defined blank wall with the handwritten words AMO ERGO SUM in shiny white metal floating in front of it. The wall itself floats in the garden with a large framed rectangular opening in the middle, through which we can see a blot of red. Moving closer, the blot breaks up into small discrete red clouds and hints at a geometric garden filled with surprisingly tall flowers. Passing through the hole, the garden on the other side turns out to be a precise grid of 312 roses, a kind of red army standing at attention in the sun. Each bloom is not made of delicate petals but translucent, blobby, congealed and bloody glass, violently pierced by the shiny blade of a scalpel. Or is it that the blooms have given birth to the razor-sharp knives? The rose not defended by thorns but a thorn in its own right. Tenderness/violence, softness/hardness, desire/repulsion, sensuality/aggression, surface/edge, curve/straight line, vagina/penis are all blurred here or tumble into and out of each other. The masculine and feminine stereotypes that engineer the pervasive brutalities of everyday life are overlapped, inverted and subverted in a kind of painful beauty.
There is an irresistible urge to touch these alluring dangerous flowers hovering at the same level as our hearts, even to lean over to smell them, at the risk of getting cut, but a glass pane holds us back at the threshold. We stand between the two gardens, the public Giardini and the private courtyard of the pavilion. The architecture offers no protection. In fact, the Austrian pavilion designed by Josef Hoffmann in 1934 is not a building but a thin screen inserted into the Giardini and propped up by some rooms used as galleries. The real rooms are outside the structure yet produced by it. The public garden in front was originally very formal, and its geometric lines of plants, seating, flower beds, grass, and paths guided the visitor toward the screen that is textured with thin grooves that accentuate its horizontality and produce the effect of a hovering fabric. The screen is slightly raised, as if on exhibition, or simply to dramatize the hole by turning it into a kind of window through which the smaller courtyard garden on the other side and the trees beyond it can be glimpsed. The grass beds and the set of steps up out of the slightly sunken garden are directly lined up with the opening so that the perspectival effect passes right through it. The screen is so integrated into the geometry of the planting that it appears to be part of the garden, turning the garden itself into an interior with the lines of trees completing the effect. Rather than offer a building to the garden, Hoffmann turned the garden into a kind of building.
The experience of passing through the screen is to move from this large garden room to a smaller one but, despite the symmetry of the building, direct axial passage is impeded, turning the framed garden into a view, a picture. The visitors can’t see a way up until very close to the screen when two sets of hidden steps to either side require a last-minute detour, forcing them to slide along the face of the screen before the inner secret of this picture can be entered. On turning around and looking back through the hole toward the public garden the same thing happens in reverse. The screen shrinks and magnifies the garden architecture, like looking through each end of a telescope. The screen is ultimately not placed in the garden—it is a device that transforms the garden.
in: Staging Decadence, 2021 (PDF)
These knife-breasts are impossible to caress. They exist in different realms of feeling or touch. These knives repeat elsewhere. On pacifiers, on fingers, on other extremities. Soft surfaces and scalpels. 312 perfectly symmetrical roses with knives protruding out of them. It does not matter that we are unable to touch or embrace. These thorns are necessary. A thousand razor cuts if you are not careful, a slit on the skin, an opening up, a wounded surface that becomes something else. But, some softness is necessary. Some other land is seen from here. A game for children but with adult consequences. A moment of relevance. A sharing of sorts, a quieting down Another scene: two hands, fingers, extremities, looking for something. These extremities, fingers, hands, are not just appearing as the edges of the body. They are also performing an extremity themselves; they are sharp and pointy, blades that can sever the skin or surface. Fingers themselves are covered in soft latex, what looks like milk bottle nipples. Something soft and hard. Eager fingers existing at a limit ‘of art or the social, of bodily integrity and comfort’. Existing at a limit is here once again uncomfortable, revealing a potential of what can take place, marking a boundary, beyond which something exists. Although there is no harmed body, no scar, no scraping, something is still exercised, identified, overcome. A sense of rupture is alluded towards, rupture of flesh and feeling. Something opening up.
Welcome to the pleasure lab. Within this space, I explore weirdness, extremity and a sense of againstness as elements of a performance of decadence. This is a guided tour. I will take you through works by Austrian avant-garde artist Renate Bertlmann, who makes ambivalent performances, installations and objects that discuss sex, motherhood, risk and pleasure. Amongst her well-known material is the use of pacifiers on the fingers, on the face or head, and also the use of knives that protrude out of fingers, pacifiers or breasts. Bertlmann often uses these objects alongside similarly shaped objects, such as condoms that are ambivalent in their use and function. This convergence of sex, references to motherhood, pain and pleasure, and the focus on how the body feels, reacts or takes responsibility, seems to make a proposition: that it is possible to demand everything. To demand from ourselves and others that both our utterances and silences are heard, that we are allowed to enjoy both taking care and taking risks, that our unrelenting desires can be exhausting, but also gratifying in this balancing act.
In her recent representation of Vienna at the Venice Biennale (2019), Bertlmann exhibits 312 red roses made out of glass, perfectly symmetrical, in the atrium of the Austrian Pavilion, an installation entitled Discordo Ergo Sum; each rose is pierced by the blade of a scalpel. Similarly, in Knife Pacifier Hands, Bertlmann wears pacifiers, threateningly pierced with blades, that are protruding from each finger. In this blog post, I discuss Bertlmann’s work with a focus on her 1977 performance action Deflorazione in 14 Stazioni that took place in the Communal Museum of Modern Art in Bologna, which is, as the title suggests, a simple action in 14 stations. In it, Bertlmann wears a garment that has breasts attached to it with a blade coming out of each nipple. She appears behind a long piece of thin, white paper that extends across the gallery walls. We can see her body from the waist down. A horizontal slit is made on the paper, like a c-section. Strange fingers like tentacles emerge from the slit, wearing pacifiers. The hands move in a way that feels slow and meditative, but also aggressive. The scalpels slash the paper at each station and eventually the arms can be seen too. The sheet is torn more and more and blood can be seen on the fingers, until we are finally able to see the knife-breasts and the rest of the body in the final station, but not the face.