Human Condition - Universalmuseum Joanneum

66 Luce Irigaray, “How to Make
Feminine Self-Affection Appear?”
in: Two or Three or Something.
Maria Lassnig, Liz Larner, edited
by Adam Budak, Peter Pakesch,
Kunsthaus Graz 2006, p. 41.
67 Maria Lassnig in: http://
www.artknowledgenews.com/
Maria_Lassnig.html.
68 Silke Andrea Schummer,
quoted in Russell Ferguson, “Iron
Virgin and Fleshy Virgin,” in Two or
Three or Something. Maria Lassnig,
Liz Larner, op. cit., p. 88.
69 Maria Lassnig in “Inside Out,”
conversation with Jörg Heiser,
Frieze 103, November – December
2006.
is acted out by a crowd of amateur actors, performing an array of characters of the age
of morality in crisis. In a way similar to Manders, each of Lassnig’s paintings is being
considered as a self-portrait – a shelter, an escape into identities beyond her own, a
rehearsal or audition for a true self yet to come. All her subjects derive from a process
that the artist describes as “body awareness“ where the physical appearance of the
body is extended through the dimension of sensation. The body is not depicted as it is
perceived from the outside; instead, it is a production of introspection, an experience
from the inside. Very often humanoid-like and alien, grotesque and distorted, Lassnig’s
body is dismembered and contorted, in spasm and agony, suffering the existential pain,
tormented by both hyper-affection and violence. Her figures are often defective, supported
by crutches, with dysmorphic or tortured parts. Skin is viewed as a membrane
that registers sensations such as heat, cold, tension, pressure, weight, painted by the
artist as the outlines of the body in lines and smudges of vibrant colour that pulse
with energy; flesh is portrayed as “naked” open matter, stripped, exhibitionistic, “drastic”
tissue, susceptible to wounds, injury or simply, to aging. Lassnig’s “physical event
of bodily experience” leaves the spectator with a feeling of psychological discomfort
and unease: here, in this disturbing corporeal decor, we are at the core of human frailty,
in the house of physical and psychic butchery of contemporary civilization turned
into a shrine of elemental passions and ordinary feelings, as the artist herself in an
unbelieveably innocent though seemingly provocative way comments upon her “drastic”
paintings: “I do not aim for the big emotions when I’m working, but concentrate
on small feelings: sensations in the skin or in the nerves, all of which one feels.”67
Simultaneously, tragic and humorous, violent and tender, her work evokes urgent
moral imperatives and articulates the human condition in a state of ethical alert and
as such, it remains within the sphere of privacy and overwhelming intimacy, as Silke
Andrea Schummer rightly comments upon Lassnig’s self-portraits, Womanpower (1979)
notwithstanding: “She has never related the display of her body to a social issue. In
her case, the body is both a private instrument of perception and a topic of research,
but not a repository of social functions or a social metaphor.”68 Indeed, Lassnig herself
expressed her dislike for Womanpower, once perceived as an icon for women’s emancipatory
tendences, disclaiming it as one of the silliest and her least favorite paintings
(“It’s interesting as a title, but not as a picture.”69) The artist though has always been
manifesting her independent position and emancipatory drives. The exhibition Human
Condition. Empathy and Emancipation in Precarious Times presents two extraordinary
studies of Lassnig’s self-portraiture: Woman Laokoon (1976) and Stilleben mit rotem
Selbstportrait (Still Life with Red Self-portrait) (1969). Facing provocative Woman
Laokoon, this sublime study of hysteria, we are in the presence of humanity at its
most sincere and devastating moment of personal fear and suffering. The directness
of this representation is strikingly daring and aggressive, passing beyond any moral
standards, regarding intimacy and its public exposure. Gazing into this memorable face
in pain, we are in the mirror of the human condition, between powerlessness, impossibility
of action and hopelessness.
Judith Butler’s quest for “being addressed” and Hannah Arendt’s “will to understand”
receive their unusually alarming expression in the Dutch artist, Renzo Martens’ filmic
work-in-progress, harshly entitled Episode 1 (2000/2003) and Episode 3 (2009). These
are indeed episodes, tv-like serialized stories from the world, captivating reports on
life in a state of exception, filtered by the artist/author’s very intimate experience of
his own private life. In fact, Episode 1 and Episode 2 are Martens’ self-portraits, featuring
the artist himself narrating, infiltrating and in a Brechtian way alienating the storyline,
thus critically foregrounding a dramatic contrast between realities and worlds
in general. For Episode 1, the artist travels to the war zone of Chechenya in order to
give the video camera into the hands of the disillusioned refugees to film him, while