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Over the last twenty years, art made by and about women has shifted away from the politically charged, body-oriented work of early feminist activist art of the 1970s toward a more internalized art of restraint, control, and suggestion. As cultural discourses have developed, the issue of women in art has become less explicit and more nuanced and complex. The Marieluise Hessel Collection, with its concentration of works from the last twenty years, reflects this shift with significant works by male and female artists from this era. The works in The Arch of Desire have played an important role in the negotiations of the subject of women in contemporary art and discourse. Testing the Arch For this exhibition, we selected pieces where desire is not only the dominant feature of the work but manifest in the undertow of a situation or image, contracted, tacit, and suspended. Works by male artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe or Matthew Barney emphasize the multifold relationships that are rooted in this particular suspension of desire. Their images traverse the terrains of gender, sexuality, and fantasy, illustrating the ambiguities of our desire. The Arch of Desire offers no monolithic idea of woman, nor does it focus on the power struggles between male and female. Rather, this exhibition seeks to explore the gray areas around issues like the male gaze, patriarchy, or essentialist views of the female body. By examining the role played by desire in the negotiation of such issues, this exhibition focuses on the dynamics of imagination. Most of the works in the exhibition use desire as a trigger for imaginary identifications. From Cindy Sherman’s adopted personas in the Film Stills, 1977–80, to Rebecca Horn’s violent machines such as Untitled from "Buster’s Bedroom," 1988–90, the works are invested with the psychological energy of pent-up and deflected desire. In other instances, the process of identification resurrects absent figures: in Sophie Calle’s Untitled (The Graves), 1991, and in Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s Untitled (Love Letter), 1992, it is a loved one; in Donald Judd’s Side Chair (F-14), 1991, it is simply the memory of a body. Desire emerges from lack; within the context of this show, such absences operate as an eloquent metaphor for the displacement of the body in these discourses. Desire for an other can also be seen in the spectral alter egos present in works by Laurie Anderson, Valie Export, Mona Hatoum, Kiki Smith, and Rosemarie Trockel, whose representations do not mirror a resolved coherent subject but represent a continuous flow between self and other, inside and outside, presence and absence, body and object. In Mona Hatoum’s piece Marrow, the fallen rubber baby crib questions notions of motherhood and femininity. Like a marrow without a bone, the form has no structural strength. It founders, jelly-like on the floor, and the collapse of the fixtures of the crib evokes a prison-like structure that has disintegrated. This breakdown of the formal structures contains the very potential of the piece, mirroring the desire for a breakthrough, freeing motherhood from stereotypical assumptions. Robert Mapplethorpe’s photograph of Louise Bourgeoise holding Fillette, her baby sculpture in the form of a phallus, is a strong statement of liberation; likewise, her ironic grin appears as a silent critique of feminist, aggressive activism in favor of a more profound dimension of human existence. This flow is also evident in Lisa Yuskavage’s ambivalent Bad Habits Facing West, 1996, which depicts caricature-like statuettes of women with exaggerated breasts on hourglass figures, set on a window ledge in front of a gray cityscape. While this ambiguity is often associated with feminist strategies, Yuskavage’s vision complicates and compromises her position. Jenny Holzer employs a similar strategy in her work, using polemical statements to project a political position, although she distances herself from the work by using industrial materials and manufacturing processes. The emotional detachment that characterizes the work of these artists is indicative of suppressed desire. Artists like Bruce Nauman and Michelangelo Pistoletto display a critical ability to manipulate the symbolic in their work while maintaining a distance from their intimate subject matter, which enables them to contrast forces such as aggressiveness and vulnerability, or order and disorder, in ways that blur the categories of female and male traits. The formal coldness of Alex Katz’s painting Ada in Blue House Coat, 1959, reveals a remoteness not unlike French cinema of the 1970s, where emotional reserve and the economy of the picture heightens the tensions of suspended feeling and desire. In contrast, Rebecca Horn’s film about Buster Keaton (Buster’s Bedroom, 1996), is about the explosion of desire on every level, manifest in her exposition of the interrelationships of the characters. From the bizarre love triangle between the young and ingenious Micha (Amanda Ooms), to the sinister characters of Doctor O’Connor (Donald Sutherland) and the masochist Diana Daniels (Geraldine Chaplin), the film is about the hope, frustration, failure, and despair of love. From this piece we learn the dangers of attraction, and how the body struggles in search of a world defined by its longings. Is desire the bridge between the real and the symbolic? While desire may not be a search for a lost object as such, it is activated as an imaginative projection and sometimes a substitution. Desire creates tensions between reality and fantasy, between the real and the symbolic, holding us to ourselves like an arch held up by opposing physical forces.
Exhibition Checklist Nicholas Africano Nicholas Africano Nicholas Africano Laurie Anderson Janine Antoni Matthew Barney Sophie Calle Anne Chu William Copley William Copley William Copley Valie Export Nan Goldin Felix Gonzalez-Torres Felix Gonzalez-Torres Mona Hatoum Mona Hatoum Mona Hatoum Jenny Holzer Jenny Holzer Rebecca Horn Rebecca Horn Rebecca Horn Joan Jonas Donald Judd Alex Katz William Kentridge Robert Mapplethorpe Bruce Nauman Blinky Palermo Michelangelo Pistoletto Rosangela Renno Cindy Sherman Cindy Sherman Cindy Sherman Cindy Sherman Cindy Sherman Cindy Sherman Cindy Sherman Cindy Sherman Laurie Simmons Kiki Smith Rosemarie Trockel Rosemarie Trockel Rosemarie Trockel William Wegman Lisa Yuskavage |
