134 | 2016

ANETTE KUBITZA

Flirting with the Fringe. A Conversation with Annette Frick

AF Popular culture has always aligned itself toward thematic areas that art has already laid claim to, and pulled parts of this out of context. Thankfully, though, the world of fashion and advertising moves on quickly. When the wave has passed, you can often more clearly see the content or context of an image that seems superficially similar—see what only has meaning temporarily, and what will endure. In the world of TV and advertising, socially marginalised groups might perhaps be included, but outside of this protected framework, it’s still a risk for anyone that sticks out, one that requires courage and confidence, especially when he, she, or it is travelling alone at night. This goes for drag kings every bit as much as for drag queens and all transgender people.

(3) “To pee or not to pee?”: “Bad Girl” Women Artists and the Question of Subversiveness
 
AK In the 1990s, the so called “Bad Girls” became popular in the US. They turned with renewed vehemence to representations of the female body, not shying away from pornographic explicitness and brutal realism, while challenging social taboos, hetero-normativity, and gender stereotypes. Examples are Catherine Opie, Renée Cox (“Yo Mama” series, early 1990s) and Nicole Eisenmann (“Amazon” images, 1990s), as well as performance artists Annie Sprinkle (“Public Cervix Announcement”, 1989) and Karen Finley (“We Keep our Victims Ready”, 1990). To what extent are there connections between your works of the late 1990s and those by “bad girl” artists? In your diptych, “Feuer und Wasser” (Fire and Water, 1992), for example, you urinate standing over a fire, dressed in pumps and a tight leather outfit. The act of standing up when urinating as a woman has caused outrage, and your images have evoked criticism and censorship when they were shown in the lobby of the Bayer corporation in Cologne in 1998.
AF I think the situation was there first, and the “Bad Girls” label came later. In the mid-1980s, a lot of women got fed up. People were used to rougher stuff due to the protest and punk movements and the women’s movement too, for sure. The media had to catch up if they didn’t want to be left behind. Basically, there have always been women that have expressed themselves in new radical images and forms. But they were considered a threat and taken out of circulation through censorship or ignorance. We all learned about Marinetti, Boccioni, and Severini in art class. But I’d never heard of Valentine de Saint-Point, who’d already written a Futurist manifesto in 1912: a manifesto about lust!

Text feature in Camera Austria International 134/2016, pp. 9–21.

MAREN LÜBBKE-TIDOW / BEATRIX RUF

Isa Genzken: Allowing a Stronger World Presence

BR Maybe we have to pose that question the other way around: what has always made the reception difficult was that the artist has consistently resisted classification, both stylistically and in formal/material terms. This always makes it difficult to carry on advocating for a work in any cohesive way. What I find fascinating is that Genzken has always demanded and produced a type of world relevance: in an interpretation of the relevant. People often talk about the chaotic aspect, what appears “messy” in the new works. But if you take a closer look, you can see that they’re composed in a very compact way and should be seen as the highly logical continuation of the earlier works that processed Minimal Art and some of the themes of performance art—works that increasingly allow for the world’s presence and assert this presence and its importance.
I think one of the other things that led to this change in reception was that many more young artists work similarly to Isa Genzken today. The fact that, aesthetically, the simultaneity of everything—“flatness”— is allowed, in other words, the transition from the idea of the collage to a simultaneity of the widest variety of images, things, and states all brought together on the same surface. This aspect of simultaneity comes from the digital world, with the difference that Genzken anticipated it very early on, in the type of composition she used.
MLT In this regard, Isa Genzken is way ahead of her time in her work. Do you think that Genzken’s methods were long misunderstood, and that we’re only now—at a time when the world is far more thoroughly permeated by the digital—able to become better involved in her simultaneity of different formal means?
BR You say “become involved”—I think this is the best way to approach the work, because it’s become more natural. I don’t know if Genzken’s work is necessarily understood, but it has definitely become more natural to become involved with it on the aesthetic level, because these formats have also become more a part of our world.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 134/2016, pp. 22–33.

GABRIELE SCHOR

There Is Joy in Repetition. A Conversation between Gabriele Schor and Stefanie Seibold

It’s very interesting that your objects are formally abstract, but at the same time propose a way to read them politically. The series of corner objects that you depicted in your photographic work “4 Centerfolds” (2015) and “Because Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend …” come across as crystalline minimal objects that can also, however, be read with sexual connotations. For the queer exhibition “Rosa Arbeit auf Goldener Straße” (Pink Work on Golden Street, 2012) at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, I asked myself: How can I charge an abstract object with content? On principle, I work from feminist research; I’m interested in women’s participation in art history and their marginalisation in the canon. Why do you search out an abstract form, when it’s “queer” you’re interested in? The exhibition carried the subtitle “Queer Abstraction”. Apart from this, however, I deliberately leave out the body. When you affirm a queer form of expression via bodies, you run the risk of creating new modes of exclusion. It’s important to me to avoid these. Well, that’s a powerful statement—that you leave out the body when you take on a queer position. When you consider that for feminist, gay, lesbian, transgender, and queer movements, reflecting on one’s sexuality was and continues to be identity-establishing. Sexuality isn’t always just the body. It also operates through signs. But you also made installations that you positioned collages next to, and these contained bodies. Yes, for instance my installation “Sapphic Modernism I (An Archive of Feelings)” of 2013. “Sapphic” is an old term for lesbian that derives from the classical lyric poet Sappho. In America, there’s a branch of study called “Sapphic Modernism”, and I thought that sounded great, because it’s connected to a poet and artist. I was invited by the Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart to take part in the exhibition “Vom Zaudern” (On Dithering, 2013). I’ve always been fascinated by folding screens, because they’re neither open nor closed. When you stand in the exhibition space, you don’t know if you’re in front of them or behind them. When they’re folded shut or opened all the way, they stop being folding screens because then they collapse. They only exist in this in-between state. That was my point of departure with the form.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 134/2016, pp. 34–45.

KIRSTY BELL

Recalibrating the Eye. Ken Okiishi and Kirsty Bell in Conversation

KO The real psychological answer is that my father, as a Japanese American, was a soldier in Vietnam, and he saw Woody Allen’s “What’s Up Tiger Lily” (1966) there—where Allen takes a Japanese spy movie and dubs it with a voice-over of a completely different thing for the entire movie. My father was a soldier because his parents didn’t have any money, and so that’s how he paid for college. But he was also a Japanese American at the time of WWII, when all of these things were happening. This became one of his favourite movies. The point is that I love translating the aesthetics of misunderstanding and complicated identity into third contexts, so there was something fascinating about my group of American friends in Berlin who were escaping New York. It was the post-9/11 time. There was something about that specific interface that was full of misunderstanding and mistranslation in a really decorative way, and a lot of the aesthetics that emerged came out of these complicated misunderstandings.
KB Sometimes there’s a work that occurs quite early on in an artist’s career that seems to touch on many subjects that continue as a thread throughout the subsequent work. That really seems to be the case with “David Wojnarowicz in New York” (1999–2001), this idea of mapping urban experience and its relation to history.
KO I was studying in the East Village, at Cooper Union, and just walking around the city a lot. At that particular moment, which was 1997, everyone was saying NY was over. This was also before the Internet was such a thing. You couldn’t search for real estate on the Internet—those rapid ways of reorganising the city were not possible yet. But there was this digital camera which was light and newish; the images that it made were very pixelated, but beautiful; and there was also this machine where you could take the digital image and put it onto negative film, and then print them in the darkroom. There was this paper that was like Cibachrome, but it was a negative process rather than a positive process, called Fujiflex. My favourite thing to do was just walk around the Meatpacking District. In terms of gay history, mine is the worst generation for sexuality—ten years old and you’re going through the AIDS crisis, all that Reagan stuff on the negative side, Act Up on the positive side, etc., these were the things that formed sexuality. So the specific history of the cruising areas, this free open zone, was also tinged with the potential for anger and death and exclusion, all these different things. Politically, it was a very loaded topic, but there’s also a kind of nostalgia tinged with a lot of fear. I think the anticipation of digitisation was more intuitive; I didn’t even have a cell phone. So the Wojnarowicz works were charged with all of these things. I find the photos very melancholy, like huge question marks. It was also a different time in terms of gay identity, it was pre-gay marriage, etc.—before it was even an idea. At that point, the idea was that corporatism was going to destroy the city and turn it into a suburban shopping mall. Little did we know that the Internet and digitisation were the mechanisms for making that happen.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 134/2016, pp. 46–58.

OMAR KHOLEIF

Spring Has Sprung and Become Summer, Again. A Thought Process on the Image of the Revolutionary Body

Ever since the 25 January 2011, the Day of Revolt as we called it, I have wanted to build a monument. A pretty one, perhaps commissioned by an artist.
I found a proposal from an Egyptian artist called Iman Issa. “A Proposal for a Crystal Building” from 2003 that I believe should now be erected in Tahrir Square. I believe it will work well.

Wading through images of 2011 on a search engine, I am reminded of Renzo Martens’s merciless film “Episode 3: Enjoy Poverty” (2009). We are swimming in the impoverished womb of our own creation.

“It’s very dark here. I can only see my fear.” I believe this to have been a line from one of these films.

My interest in the colonised image—or, to be more precise, my interest in images of so-called revolution—all started when I saw my grandfather, Abdel Kader Kholeif, dancing in Tahrir Square in 2011. He had become an activist in his eighties. A dean of an Egyptian medical school elected by the government. He wanted to subvert the authority of this role, but soon realised he could not.
He became a part of Kefaya, a movement that sought an end to the dictatorial regime of the Egyptian government.

He became a pamphlet writer.

 

Text feature in Camera Austria International 134/2016, pp. 74–75.