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Andreas Kühne
LIVING SCULPTURES
RECURRING MOTIFS IN THE WORKS OF ANGELA DORRER
On the occasion of the exhibition Make it new. The rise of Modernism, shown last year at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center in Austin, Texas – which explored the roots and progressive forms of the modern – a group of writers and visual artists was asked to record which modern works or artistic groups had had sustained influence on them in their creativity. Among those asked was British dramatist Arnold Wesker, who became one of the most important prot-agonists in the literary moderns in the second half of the 20th century. In his essay “What makes us modern”? 1, intended as an answer and printed in the exhibition catalogue, Wesker comes to the sobering conclusion that he knows less now than ever what may be “modern” and what makes us the “moderns”. The nature of the moderns changes from day to day and appears, after the reading of a novel by D.H.Lawrence, fundamentally different than on the morning of September 12, 2001. “Groupings worry me,”2 continues Wesker. “They limit understanding of the individual artist, confine what might expand beyond what the label implies. It might help academics to be orderly, this parceling out, but I’m not sure how deeply it gets to the essence of an artist’s work.” 3
Beyond this skepticism (which is not exclusively rhetorical), even Wesker had to admit that there were images, works and concepts that accompanied his own over a long period of time and that had become artistic and human standards for his own work. For the visual arts of the late moderns, Joseph Beuys’ concept of the Social Sculpture was bestowed with such a key function. With its help, he attempted to replace the autonomic understanding of the moderns through a concept of art that included an anthropologically-oriented, political, economic and social activity. “Thinking, Speaking and Acting,” are understood as “plastic”, consciousness-expanding actions, which transfer an existing condition onto another. This kind of expansive artistic concept evokes the possibility of waking the creative potential that lurks in every person and to win these for remodeling the social body. Since, according to Beuys’ convincing, art is the only evolutionary power, prevailing societal conditions can only be changed by means of human artistic creativity. Even today, the concept of ‘social sculpture’ possesses an inspiring power, above all because it equals an image and does not let itself be captured into narrowly defined boundaries through its ambivalence. For reasons of this openness, the concept does not have a pedantic effect, but meanders along the boundaries of media, styles and groupings.
If one compares the various projects and performances of Angela Dorrer, a number of recurring themes occur that move like Ariadne’s Thread through real and vir-tual spaces. One of the motifs is the artist’s integration into the social sculptures she has developed. It is exactly at this point in which a connection can be made to some of Joseph Beuys’ activities, in which he not only acted as a director and catchphrase-provider but also included himself in the “sculptures”. For the familysculptures, Dorrer searched for the world for people with her last name, contacted around 300 “Dorrers”, and asked each of them to send her a garment. Today more than 80 pieces of clothing from Japan, Australia, France, Germany, Austria and other countries are in the possession of the artist. In the chewing parties, dough is formed in the artist’s mouth, then baked and offered to invited guests and gallery-goers. In both activities and performances, Dorrer sees herself in the role of the “stimulating lever” on the one hand; on the other hand, however, she herself is part of the field of experience. In the familysculpture, she experiences herself as an “intersection of all Dorrers”; in the chewing parties as the intersection of all cookie consumers. In that she reveals something of her private patterns of feeling and thought, and in that she implements symbolic activities, she wins the freedom to create objectifying structures that may overcome the boundaries of inside and outside, or interior and exterior.
Looking back, Dorrer sees these boundaries as an experience in her life history. “I consider the interior as "mine” and it melds with the image that I make of myself, and it becomes, so to speak, my home, my identity or my system. Here, my skin, or an always newly defined area of my system, functions as a bound-ary. Everything that I find good and useful I attempt to adapt to. Everything outside this delineated area, beyond the boundary of the skin or the boundary and what I deemed less good, was considered fear-inducing. It was damned to be either rejected or fallen in love with, since then it would transfer into my order and consequently no longer represent a threat.” 4
Not leastly through the development of familysculp-ture has Dorrer succeeded in breaking through the wall of her own reflexive shelter and directs her look through and behind the mirror. This social sculpture does not stay hidden in the traditional protective packaging, but rather stretches beyond geographic, political, social and ethnic boundaries. One of the work’s crystallizing seeds is the American custom of clothes swapping … to meet friends to trade pieces of clothing that one doesn’t use anymore and to explain the feelings and stories contained in the garments. Dorrer initially connected the garments of people from the most varied backgrounds who coincidentally carried the “Dorrer” name into sculptural installations. The knotted network of favorite pullovers, favorite T-shirts and favorite nightshirts later mutated into social sculptures. This made the donators simultaneously also recipients. The artist initiated and organized family reunions, which meant meetings in which the family members could trade garments and memories. From these ritualized encounters emerged the actual social dimension, that allowed the material traces of the family sculpture; the “fashion shows”, the exchange of favorite garments and their tempor-ary installation become something ephemeral and transitory, while the activated social relationships, friendships and conversations have a continued effect long after the event. This “Life Frieze” can of course branch off independently from the artist’s influence and take on an unpredictable life of its own. In this way, Dorrers from different countries report the feeling of having found long-lost apparent family members. Others use the familysculpture as a possibility to make contact to descendents or relatives from earlier Dorrer generations.
The social sculpture as a religious metaphor
In his essay collection Kritische Gänge (Critical walks), art theorist Friedrich Theodor Vischer (1807–1887) predicted the impending end of Christian art as early as 1844. He considered it a “Fata morgana of a transcendental world.” 5 In its place, “major historical scenes” would enter, which one could observe as “pages from the divine book” but not as the representation of
God. The history of the moderns has showed that Vischer can claim correctness insofar as even symbolic representations of the “holy” became ever rarer and solidified to hardly recognizable ciphers, even with Adolf Hölzel. However, the uninterrupted longing for a religious or even only contemplative certainty that can emerge from an artwork has always remained virulent. Only in the last third of the 20th century did the visual arts find its way, in a few cases, to convincing artistic solutions. In this way, Beuys’ expanded concept of art expressly includes the religious moment. With this background, Dorrer’s social sculptures can be read as religious metaphors in both a formal and contextual sense. Since her performances never remain singular, but are often repeated, structural forms must be found that can be most accurately described with the term “ritual”. Only in creating imaginable structures does an event like a “reunion” of people carrying the Dorrer name gain meaning and sustainability. Unstructured chatter would quickly lose randomness and soon in-cite no interest in those not connected by common experiences. Only a ritual that both isolates the individ-ual and connects the community can make the reunion memorable. A self-relinquishing with strangers grows from the ritual, which would be hardly imaginable under “normal” conditions. The garments contributed by other people carry the connotation of existential meaning like “memory”, “mourning”, “joy”, “fun”, “forgetting,” “crazy” and “performance”. The semireligious metaphor is even clearer if contextual moments are reminiscent of liturgical processes. The chewing parties in which bodily fluids and therefore a part of the body of a stranger is assimilated in a symbolic way, consciously play on the Christian Eucharist. In a playful way, a piece of long-lost spirituality is won back.
The boundary between “network” and world
A Munich exhibition organized by Patricia Drück and Christian Schoen in 2001 with the title inSITEout 6, introduced performance and installations, in which the overlap between the virtual space of the Internet and the tangible, “real” world of haptically experienceable objects were located. The curators dealt with showing "how artistic strategies can demolish the system boundaries of the closed communication system of the Internet through their effects in real space The effort to represent the correspondence between inside and outside or manufacture them in an image possesses a long tradition in Occidental art that dates to the Middle Ages. Artists from Petrus Christus and Jacopo de’ Barbari to Max Beckmann repeatedly attempted to penetrate the boundaries from the interior to the exterior world in that they created views through open windows and doors on the one hand, and attempted to bring the outer world inside through mirrors and crystals on the other. In the computer age, the mirror is replaced with a screen or monitor on which both im-ages and verbal relationship can be projected.
In her projects, Dorrer generally uses the computer as a tool and aid, but not as a transformation of an underlying artistic medium. With the help of a computer, the interplay from inside and outside from intimacy and public are brought into action as well as represented and documented, since only via the Internet do the international carriers of the “Dorrer” name find out about each other. Only through the Internet is it pos-sible to simultaneously inform and invite people to a “reunion.” And only the Internet allows the images of the resulting “social sculpture” to be quickly dissem-inated and retained beyond the moment of contact.
In the first “family reunion”, Dorrer invited all the Dorrers known to her to a Familysculpture Lounge in Munich. Eighteen Dorrers, from various branches of the family and different countries, who didn’t yet know each other traveled to the Isar and met at the Dorrer archive. Other international Dorrers also participated via webcam. The establishment of a familysculpture on the Internet led to the fact that Dorrers from all over the world participated, made contacts, told their stories and searched for common forefathers. The artist represented a reference point and also served as a moderator. In this way, the social sculpture was cre-ated not only on the Internet but also “completely real” at the “family reunion” in Munich, Graz or Amstetten.
The chewing parties, on the other hand, require no media preparation and support, besides perhaps their documentation. With these events, which are reminiscent of Fluxus happening, Dorrer offers cookies formed in her mouth and later baked to eat. As a return service, the consumer is asked to leave behind verbal comments, which are then collected and disseminated on the Internet. But a presentation of the commentary in the framework of a conventional exhibition is thinkable and has already occurred. Dependence on the Internet is even clearer in the Promicookies perform-ance. Here, the real, physical presence of celebrities is required. They form the cookies in their mouths. The true fan can then later chose to keep the Promicookie as a relic or assimilate it and therefore destroy it. While these activities and relationships can be mirrored or documented in the media, they primarily take place outside the electronic media. Otherwise they would be less social than medial sculptures.
Dramatic and Epic Theater
In contrast to Baroque theater, which primarily appeals to our empathy, to our ability to project ourselves into the inner situations on the people acting on the stage, Dorrer’s performances tread a the thin line between abstraction and empathy. Here, the epic theater of Brecht, which forces the observer to analyze, is just as present as the drama on the old stage, which exposes the audience to an emotional roller coaster between euphoria and lust, horror and disgust. With the “fashion shows” in a small city like Amstetten Austria, moments of the costume festival, carnivals and Baroque theater have the cumulative effect that participants slip not only into a costume but also into someone else’s life role, put themselves on display and observe their usual existence from an ironic of comic distance. This ritual – which corresponds the media-moderns – that adopted the form of a moderated fashion show, can incite a catharsis via a liberating laugh, a healing moment that continues its effect after the event has ended.
“My method,” says Dorrer, “consists of the observation, seduction and the interrogation of a multitude of people who have relationships to each other or who could build them. Again and again, it is about networks and the identity of communities. I am motivated by curiosity in various fields, allowing oneself into situ-ations or their productions with the goal of creating atmospheres and images. The research, the personal interactions, the stories and the results are all equally important. I myself take on various roles in my project. The incompatibility between a subjective-personal and a distanced-analytical role represents an insoluble dilemma for me. I react to this situation by very consciously choosing to a walk a thin line between both perspectives. Sometimes I steer the situations from outside, then I become a part of the created image. I am fascinated by the tipping points between both areas, when, for example, the subjective moment points beyond itself and therefore a general validity is aimed at. An idea form is then reached when I find the openness that allows the shifts between proximity and distance.” 7
Notes
1 Wesker, Arnold: What makes us modern. In: Make it New. The Rise of Modernism. Hrsg. Kurt Heinzelman. Austin/Texas: Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, 2004, p. 25.
2 see note 1
3 see note 1
4 Angela Dorrer: Inszenierte Archive. Über die Projekte Cookies und Familysculpture. In: Sammeln. Museum zum Quadrat, published by Turia & Kant and Karl Stocker, Joanneum, Graz 2005
5 Vischer, Friedrich Theodor: Kritische Gänge. Tübingen 1844, Bd. 1, p. 195ff.
6 s. a. Kühne, Andreas: Hallo Außen, hier ist Innen. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung 01.06. 2001, p. 21.
7 see note 4
Translation: Kimberly Bradley
from: “U C D - United Collection of Dorrer”, 160 Seiten, 82 Farbseiten, German/English, essays by Thomas Macho, Andreas Kühne, Hannes Fehringer und Stefan Lindl, Verlag für Moderne Kunst Nürnberg 2005
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