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BACK TO THE FUTURE FUTURING ECHOING THE SPIRIT OF ROMANTICISM EVA & ADELE’s extensive self-portraits were first celebrated by exhibitions at the Sprengel Museum in 1997 and the Nordic Watercolour Museum in 2003. This aspect of EVA & ADELE’s work was also tackled at displays at Salzburg Museum of Modern Art and the Lentos Museum of Modern Art in Linz in 2008 yet on these occasions there was something different from before. ‘Performative Installation 208’ on a wall 12 metres long combined the familiar self-portraits with works which didn’t contain likenesses of EVA & ADELE: instead, the 208 small drawings framed with lace borders played with vanitas symbols, art history, and fetish and pornographic culture. This flurry of colour3 was something of a ‘Danse Macabre’, a life of extravagance and debauchery encountering an army of skulls, although the memento mori couldn’t be taken too seriously since it was far too quirky, playful and complicit in its ‘lacy underwear’. Some of the drawings now gathered at Marta Herford, especially the series of drawings ‘Nebelglanz’ (Silver Haze) and ‘Kaktusblüte’ (Cactus Blossom), seem to be reaching out for new horizons, yet also to be scratching at residual motifs which may stem from the early days of their joint work and have accumulated in the sediments of memory. Notwithstanding the sheer opulence and blaze of shrill pink generally prevailing, these new drawings and collages are an astonishing act of artistic asceticism. EVA & ADELE’s renunciation of their own imago, the proven mantra of the double face, comes as a surprise and is a bold move. EVA & ADELE are changing from conceptual performers who, although they have always produced images and objects, always referred to their own iconic ‘brand’, into seemingly conventional producers. By pulling the safe ground of established iconography from beneath their feet, suddenly they are simply making ‘just’ art like everybody else. Like everybody else? Whereas in their self-portraits based on photographs they tried out different attitudes and styles, 4 whereas courageously they dug up kitsch and trash with their bare hands and jumped double-headstrong into the resulting hole, the stencil-like twin-self also acted as a shield, as conceptual Teflon on which criticism was condemned to roll off like water off a duck’s back. In the drawings not based on photographs, they appear almost naked, exposed and very vulnerable. The absence of the familiar twins logo in these drawings reveals another expressive gesture not acted out in the performances. Some drawings graphite on laid paper seem to have been executed with unabated furore. The ‘Kaktusblüte’ (Cactus Blossom) cycle was produced on the French Isle of Rhé, on Usedom and in Berlin. Erotic flora, botanical sex: much of it looks like a blend of humans and plants, like an Ovid illustration in which the drama of transformation has been purged and replaced by a bizarre humour. Not for nothing are cactus flowers hermaphroditic. Spines, flowers, hairs, tendrils, mouths, eyes. Nature as a mirror of the soul and the lower abdomen. Germination and sprouting are to be seen; enfolding, opening and penetration. And the skulls put in a reappearance, albeit this time without lace borders. The drawings in the ‘Kaktusblüte’ (Cactus Blossom) series share a morbid, erotically grotesque imagery that humorously cushions the impact, yet can doubtless also be regarded as concealed (?) self-portraits. Interestingly, the cactus motif echoes historical precursors and leads back to a key figure of jet-black Romanticism and proto-surrealist vision: Odilon Redon. His ‘Cactus Man’, a charcoal drawing from 1881, shows a pained, melancholic figure who is also adorned with a crown of thorns. Such Christian pathos doesn’t go so well with EVA & ADELE’s glad tidings: “The smile as a work of FUTURING is intended to be an area which hasn’t been occupied by the traditional Christian story of suffering,” according to a recent interview with EVA & ADELE.5 Yet despite all the happiness displayed, there is always an air of despondency and complex emotional architecture underlying EVA & ADELE’s FUTURING project. A word appears in the ‘Kaktusblüte’ (Cactus Blossom) drawings which later became the title of a separate series of pictures: ‘Nebelglanz’ (Silver Haze). Like the ‘Kaktusblüte’ (Cactus Blossom), the drawings in this series were created at different places and over a protracted period. Lapping around the dark shiny graphite are areas of crumpled tinfoil. Partly a broken mirror, partly a relief-like structure, they turn the drawings into not so much collages as sculptural and graphic dialogues. This play of materials is augmented by finds from the costume bin in coloured leather. There are echoes of figurative elements, although more reduced than in the ‘Kaktusblüte’ (Cactus Blossom) drawings. The drawings have a calmer form, with some featuring an almost classical design. Beyond all the gender debates and self-referential discourse, the term ‘Nebelglanz’ (Silver Haze) goes back even further than Redon. Found so inspiring by Jorge Luis Borges because it was such a wonderfully typical German compound word (‘Nebelglanz’), it comes from Goethe’s famous poem ‘To the Moon’ (the latter version from 1789): And thy gentle beams descend Kindly where I go, Like the mild eye of a friend On my joy and woe. Echoes of the times gone by Tremble through my heart, ‘Twixt delight and grief I ply, Evermore apart. Dearest river, flow, oh flow! Joy cannot abide. Play and kisses vanished so, Faithfulness beside. Once oh, could I but forget! It was mine: the rare! And it is a torture yet Memories to bear. River, flow the vale along, Without rest or ease, Murmur, whisper to my song Gentle melodies! Swelling in the winter night With thy roaring flood, Bubbling in the spring’s delight Over leaf and bud! Blessed is he who walks apart, Though no hate he bears, Holds a friend within his heart; And with him he shares All that steals, by men unguessed, Or by men unknown, Through the maze of his own breast In the night alone.6 As Paolo Bianchi wrote: “In this sense, the artistic character of EVA & ADELE is not so much a postmodern schizophrenic subject as a Romantic double.”9 In EVA & ADELE’s self-fiction and self-definition,10 this means a unity of souls comprising two bodies which transcends art and life, and which undermines and overcomes all gender boundaries and role constraints. The logo-like heart-shaped double portrait showing EVA & ADELE cheek to cheek acts as a distant echo of a type of image which on the one hand follows the traditional depiction of ‘charity and justice’,11 yet also quotes Overbeck’s painting of ‘Italia and Germania’ (also friendship) an icon of Romantic painting.12 As highly professional protagonists of the art world, EVA & ADELE operate with great consistency, yet also always very pragmatically and flexibly. Despite all their loyalty to themselves, they refuse to commit themselves to a permanent aesthetic style or gesture. Just as they pursue a ‘Romantic project’, they think nothing of tackling a ‘pop project’. It is in this mode of duality that the framework develops in which performance, Mediaplastic, and also drawing EVA & ADELE’s private means of retreat and reflection can be productive in relation to each other. Once again, it was Goethe who coined the term ‘double life’, originally for the painter Mantegna, whose works he believed embodied the indissoluble dichotomy of antiquity and nature, ideal and reality. Regarding EVA & ADELE’s watercolours, Andreas Schalhorn once remarked that they were poised between truth and theatricality, between role-play and authenticity.13 In fact they lead a double life, maybe even more than one, in which the different discourses, be it gender, Romanticism, pop, nature or art, become entwined and in turn generate new questions. And in these processes, drawing is always the navigation system which finds the right detours, no matter how inconvenient they are.
1 Zeitmaschine. Interview mit Nina Kirsch. In: Rosa Rot. Catalogue, Museum der Moderne, Salzburg; Lentos Kunstmuseum, Linz, 2008, p. 94. |
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