2023-09-28 11:34:16
With 312 red glass roses on meat skewers at the Venice Biennale in 2019, she caused a stir as the first individual artist in the Austria Pavilion. Renate Bertlmann was in her mid-70s and had already created 5,000 works. With a lavish retrospective at Belvedere21, the work of this late-discovered representative of the feminist avant-garde can now be discovered in depth. An ironic, combative course through phalli, vulvae and sharp blades.
The show “Fragile Obsessions”, which can be seen from Friday, shows more than 200 drawings, photos, installations and sculptures or documents from performances – almost half of which are being presented publicly for the first time. The time span spans from the Viennese artist’s very early work at the end of the 1960s to very fresh products from this year, in which Bertlmann celebrated her 80th birthday on February 28th. “Renate Bertlmann certainly didn’t make it easy for a broad audience with her work,” said Belvedere General Director Stella Rollig on Thursday. So before you climb the stairs to the exhibition rooms on the upper floor, you are warned on a board regarding “sensitive content that deals with sexuality, violence and death” and might have a “disturbing” effect.
With her taboo, sometimes embarrassing and kitsch symbolic repertoire, the artist has always primarily worked on questions of gender and the associated power relations. “It’s amazing how consistent my work is to this day. I only see that now that I’ve had the chance to show works from five decades,” said Bertlmann, who was awarded the Grand Austrian State Prize in 2017, on the sidelines of the Press tour of the APA. She describes the common thread of her work as “pornography, irony and utopia”.
Chief curator Luisa Ziaja pointed out that this “central protagonist of the feminist avant-garde” developed her typical vocabulary early on. The phallus and vulva, the pregnant bride, the wheelchair, pacifier and scalpel knife appear once more and once more in this chronologically structured overall show – the largest Bertlmann retrospective to date. Sometimes sharp blades protrude from heart-shaped breasts (“Ex Voto”, 1985), sometimes in the performance “Deflorazione in 14 Stazioni” (1978), which deals with defloration, the artist penetrates a linen slit with knife-studded pacifier fingers, sometimes there are dozens of knives stuck in a bride’s body ( “Throwing Knife Bride”, 1979).
As combative as the objects made with various materials are, they are also ironic. An oversized golden cock lies wrapped in gauze bandages in an incubator-like glass cabinet (“Corpus Impudicum Arte Domitum”, 1981), seven phalli each are in cardinal’s robes and a soldier’s uniform, brightly colored butterflies turn out to be winged penises on closer inspection (“Diverse Farphalle Impudiche”, 1983 ). And in the black and white photo series “Renée ou René”, Bertlmann in a men’s suit not only plays with gender fluidity, but also exposes the ridiculousness of male dominance behavior by masturbating with exaggerated pleasure grimaces and a fictitious penis.
The show summarizes the aesthetics of Bertlmann’s work from the late 80s onwards in the last of four chapters – following “Experiments in Female Defensiveness”, “Anger and Tenderness” and “Vulnerability and Stubbornness” – under the motto “Kitsch as a pleasurable breach of taboos”. Excessive color, tinsel and glitter – in short, bad taste – are supposed to tell us something regarding the state of society, says Ziaja. This is also evidenced by this year’s and therefore the most recent work in this diverse appreciation. It’s called “Drag Queen” and is the last addition to the long-running series “Enfant Terrible” to date. Miniature mannequins wear opulent costumes full of tulle, ruffles and sequins. Instead of heads, there is a dildo sticking out of each collar.
“Something has changed a bit, but not fundamentally,” Bertlmann told the APA in a less than encouraging conclusion. “We live in a phallocracy, in a world of violence and sexual abuse. A woman is still raped every two minutes in the world. That was the case 50 years ago.”
(SERVICE – “Renate Bertlmann. Fragile Obsessions” at Belvedere21, from Friday and until March 3, 2024, catalog for the exhibition will be published in November; www.belvedere.at)
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