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TIME MACHINE


Interview with EVA & ADELE by Nina Kirsch


Nina Kirsch:

With your numerous staged public appearances in the art world and your subsequent media presence, it would be easy to get the impression that appearing as a living art work is the main part of EVA & ADELE’s artistic work. In fact, however, you also paint and draw, and your painting and drawing oeuvre is an essential, independent section of your work. Is it possible that the performative work covers up the visual artistic work?


EVA & ADELE:

Media presence and the dissemination of our picture are conceptual work, just as our smile is a work of art. At the same time, we are photo artists, painters, video artists, graphic artists, communicators, costume designers, make-up artists, sculptors, performance artists. All of these “professions” merge together in the gesamtkunstwerk, and they all orbit like satellites around the same center: EVA & ADELE. We regard the different artistic expressions that are inextricably linked as a whole, as one.

Naturally one sometimes covers up another, and the facets of this are as rich and abundant as the work itself. There are people who have never experienced us in person, but are intimately acquainted with every conceptual drawing from our first museum catalogue CUM (Sprengel Museum Hanover 1997). Others have watched us from a distance for years and then suddenly newly discover us in conversation. This game of self-presentation makes it possible for us to open new doors and learn again and again. We make use of all media and invent new ones as well: the “Olympics of Walking in High-Heeled Shoes”, for example, is the product of an altered artistic praxis, a way of thinking not previously covered.


NK:

For the exhibition in Lentos you are designing a large wall for the first time with over 200 works on paper – works of different techniques, sizes and dates of creation. Is it possible to read a development of your oeuvre from the wall? Where did the idea of conjoining all these works on paper come from?


E&A:

The idea of the 12-meter long drawing installation is a montage, a film with cuts from sections of time and sections of images, a road movie. Most of the pages were created during our travels over the years. Especially when we are traveling, drawing is our way of withdrawing from public view and at the same time a way of exploring what is strange and alien inside us through what is externally strange and alien.

What this basically involves is a “performative installation”, which makes the drawings tangible in the sense of a simultaneity of theatrical appearance in everyday life and in museum institutions.


NK:

You use the term “performative installation” in a completely new way. Whereas exhibition objects from other artists can often be seen as relics of their previous performances, your works bear witness to a retreat from public view into the studio. Is this process generally a component of your performance?


E&A:

We take all the experiences we collect in public with us into the studio; the studio is a kind of laboratory, where things are analyzed, dissected and conjoined. With the term “performative installation” we refer to the expansion of the term performance: life as work, work as life.

A classical performance has a beginning and an end. It is announced, usually documented by an institution or by the artists, and the material immediately goes into circulation, into the market. EVA & ADELE, on the other hand, are EVA & ADELE. Around the clock: every day, every week, every month, every year; not only in public, but also in the studio.


NK:

Your most recent works – small format drawings that have never been exhibited before – will be presented in the middle of the wall as the center of the installation. Unlike your earlier works, these are not based on pictures of you. What do these pages deal with and why have you chosen new motifs?


E&A:

Perceiving, feeling and thinking, artistic autonomy, the universe of individual perception are expressed in the new motifs. The small format ink drawings revolve around the theme of vanitas. There are erotic depictions of the human body and depictions of angels, all of it a journey through both art history and the culture of fetishes and porn. The letters spelling out EVA & ADELE in pink are concept, logo and authorship.


NK:

The EVA & ADELE logo – the two heads together with their outline forming a heart – is found as a signature on many of your works. Yet it also appears in the inside lining of your specially tailored clothing or your VW camper that accompanies you on your travels. How did you come up with the idea of developing a logo and using it in advertising as a trademark?


E&A:

We developed the logo in 1992. It is to be seen as a symbol for our decision to live and work as an artist couple. It was intended as a trademark from the beginning, demonstrating protection and assertion of a new gender self-awareness. For the heart-head logo introduces the self-fiction and self-definition of gender. In our artistic work the logo is always a reference to the living gesamtkunstwerk: EVA & ADELE.


NK:

Many of the pictures first become intelligible to the viewer at a second look. With their small formats, the intricacy of the drawings and the distortion of certain objects, the motifs seem like secret messages. Are they actually to be understood as such?


E&A:

The drawings are a humorous game that holds secrets and mysteries, or that also points out contradictions, thus opening up a complex field of associations.


NK:

Another feature of the new drawings are the lace borders: a frame that has something playful, lascivious and dainty about it at the same time.


E&A:

Borders are like lingerie, they cover and seduce. We have a whole repertoire of undergarments available to us: for every visible performance costume there is also this hidden, invisible part.


NK:

Sexuality is repeatedly addressed in your pictures, for example through the portrayal of sexual organs – especially male phalluses. On the other hand, as art figures without an unequivocal gender, you also transport something asexual. How can that be reconciled?


E&A:

“Man has the phallus, woman is the phallus.” (Jacques Lacan)


The appearance of EVA & ADELE is a manifesto of the self-staging of gender. The first Wings performance for documenta IX in 1992 consisted of pink wings in fetishist vinyl, black seamed stockings, high-heeled shoes, heads shaved like a phallus, and glamorous make-up. With this performance we posited the self-designation “Hermaphrodite Twins in Art” for the first time. If we are perceived on the other hand as asexual, that could be due to reservations on the part of the media and the viewers.


NK:

Biografische Skulptur N° 9, House of Futuring is part of the exhibition in Lentos. This is a walk-in space, where the walls consist of paintings that originated before the shared period of EVA & ADELE. Can the use of these canvases be seen as a way of working through your (pre-) past?


E&A:

Yes, in EVA & ADELE’s time machine there were the 151 canvases that form the house. We painted over all the canvases after we met, demonstrating where we were headed. On each canvas we painted the word “FUTURING” and added eyes and mouths from the EVA & ADELE logo on the backs. This act of transubstantiation resulted in the Biografische Skulptur N° 9, House of Futuring.


NK:

All of your canvases are characterized by a material multi-layeredness. Multiple levels that can be distinguished according to form, color, technique and material suggest both a spatial depth and a depth in the subject matter. Is this an intentional product of working over them multiple times, or do the works develop in an unforeseen working process?


E&A:

The major portion of the canvases exhibited in Lentos belong to the ensemble Transformer-Performer, a time accumulator that overlays a dense interweaving of multiple layers of time and meaning on top of one another through painting, following the principle of the palimpsest.

The double heads interwoven into the paintings expands EVA & ADELE into performative space and back again to the image plane. This can be seen in both the painting sense and the performative sense as a reciprocal process of “pull and push”.


NK:

Coming from the future is probably much easier for artists than coming from the past, since there is no comparison or categorization in art history. This guarantees the uniqueness of EVA & ADELE. Is that the background for the idea of “FUTURING”?


E&A:

On the contrary! It is harder to come from the future, because society trusts in and is dependent on references. With the artistic positioning “Coming out of the Future” we entered the field of the greatest risk. For us, coming from the future means living the absolute present.


NK:

A female artist was not recognized by society 100 years ago, 50 years later then mostly only in connection with a male partner. Today society is ready for homosexual artist couples like Gilbert & George or Pierre & Gilles. As EVA & ADELE – appearing as female artists but not revealing your true gender – you are among the most famous and successful artists couples in the world. What is your view of this development? Can there be a further step in the development of artist couples?


E&A:

Gender is a social construct, which would designate EVA & ADELE as male & female by birth. The self-invention of the same-sex pair EVA & ADELE, which we introduced into societal reality, is at the beginning of the 21st century. With this vision we are at the start of a new development of artist couples and of authorship.


NK:

On the one hand, anything is possible in art today, but on the other your dazzling appearance sometimes meets with intolerance as well. Through their obvious differentness EVA & ADELE create distance, but at the same time the impression arises that you are omnipresent and constantly available as an “art product”. How do you see this discrepancy?


E&A:

As a living art work that breaks taboos, we operate in public space without protection, without guidelines and without etiquette. Insecurity can provoke aggression and intolerance on the part of the viewer. In these cases it is sometimes hard to find the right language to establish a level of communication, in order to avoid aggression, but most of all to set a dialogue in motion. In these cases there is no camera there to document these kinds of crisis situations. This participatory process frequently takes us to the limits of our own actions as part of the work. At the same time, winning over the audience requires that the artistic effort consumes our performance, a precise choreography on our part. From these self-staged settings we derive potential, findings and material for our artistic work.


NK:

With the slogan “Wherever we are is museum” you express that the historical, traditional institution of the museum is not necessary for exhibiting or being able to see art. Yet in the meantime, you now regularly have exhibitions in museums yourselves. How does that fit together?


E&A:

That’s a misunderstanding. The slogan doesn’t express that the traditional institution of the “museum” isn’t needed. “Wherever we are is museum” expresses theatrical engagement outside the institution of the museum. Through the appearance of EVA & ADELE museum is globally invented beyond all boundaries. The unexpected appearance in the most diverse locations – in a forest, in an airplane, at a gas station, in the mountains, by the sea – is the concept.


NK:

Goldenes Manifest is also to be seen in Lentos: gilded panels with your slogans and the EVA & ADELE logo. Do the slogans in total consequently form a manifesto, which is imbued with a special value through the color gold? The manifesto as art work?


E&A:

Yes.


NK:

Why do you use body measurements as a biography? Normally this information is listed on the setcards of photo models to indicate a perfect body. Are body measurements therefore the most important thing in a woman’s life? Can one reduce a woman’s biography to this? Aren’t you supporting the superficialness of our times in this way?


E&A:

This is not about the body measurements of a woman, but rather about the measurement or dimensions of a living sculpture. It is a stance that indicates the use of our own bodies in the work and asserts a position in contemporary art as different and expansive.


NK:

Every artist has their own special abilities. In the case of an artist couple, preferences and talents that are inevitably different come together. How do you handle your collaboration? Is there something like a division of labor?


E&A:

We don’t publicize any attribution of individual achievements in our collaboration. Naturally there are individual achievements and especially individual decisions: on the whole it is a very complex, complicated and differentiated interplay that flows into the work of EVA & ADELE.


NK:

You talk about “beginning after the end of art”. What is the end of art for EVA & ADELE?


E&A:

The beginning of “FUTURING”.

TEXTS