Had she
been alive today, it would be impossible to ignore Lorenza Böttner (1959–1994),
the trans artist on the streets. Lithe, hirsute, and completely armless,
Böttner’s eroticized body has a mermaid-like quality that transcends gendered
limitations and features extensively in her work. She painted with her foot and
mouth on the streets and posed unclothed for photographs and video
installations that shone a spotlight on how she went about her day-to-day life,
unaffected by what some may have seen as her body’s functional inadequacies.
Böttner’s
somewhat exhaustive body of work is the subject of an ongoing exhibition in the
German city of Stuttgart. It comprises of pencil and pen sketches, photographs,
video installations, pastel art, and miscellaneous documents from her life,
like her birth certificate and her graduation thesis, titled in German,
“Behindert?” [Disabled].
With
materials gathered from her friends — who are in possession of her art — and
her mother — who preserved much of it in her basement in Munich — the
exhibition, Lorenza Böttner: Requiem for the norm, informs the viewer on how
she used her body for aesthetic expression. “There may be more of her work out
there, but this is all we could manage to collect,” Iris Dressler, a director
at the Württembergischer Kunst Verein museum in Stuttgart told Hyperallergic.
But what is
on display proves that even as strikingly visible as Böttner was in public
consciousness at her time, her work was dictated by an unremitting emphasis to
provide visibility for disabled trans bodies like hers. As provocative as she
may be, it’s not exhibitionism that dictated her work but the need to subvert
the marginalization of disabled bodies in art. “I wanted to show the beauty of
the crippled human body,” she explains her motive in a short video about her
life.
Though
Böttner’s playful pen and pencil sketches depict homosexual liaisons of beefy
men in leather and assorted images of gay subculture, her pastels and other
mediums where she is the main subject tell a different story. In one arresting,
nude self-portrait, Böttner, flat-chested, yet sexually ambiguous, with flowing
hair, longingly watches the baby in her lap, while feeding formula, nursing the
bottle between her cheek and collarbone. It is easy to recognize the picture as
assuredly maternal, but it also slowly dawns on the viewer that this person is
ungendered, muddling views dictated by rigid gender strictures.
While in
art, the unblemished human body is demanded and aspired for, through her
disabled body, Böttner sought to challenge that notion. In the printed program
note of Venus from Milo — a performance piece in which she dressed up as an
armless Venus that she staged in New York and San Francisco — she noted: “A
sculpture is always admired even if limps are missing, whereas a handicapped
human being arouses feelings of uncertainness and shame. Changing from
sculpture into human being, I want to make people aware of this problem.”
Böttner was
aware the epistemological framework for observing artistic work needed to be
altered to suit the ever-evolving perspectives on gender, body, and sexuality.
One of her self-portrait pastels, set in a pleasing teal background, records
the ambivalence of gender normativity and the de-sexualization of human body.
She is a woman, unmistakably, in the first image, albeit with chest hair, while
the second and third images render her as a man in varying degrees of
acquiescence.
Born Ernst
Lorenz Böttner, he suffered burns to his arms in an accident and underwent
amputation of his arms as a child. Though Böttner dressed up as a woman in her
formative years and identified so, she decided against gender reassignment
surgery in her later years to avoid complications to her already bruised body
after many surgeries she endured as a child.
Curator of
the exhibition Paul B. Preciado believes Böttner’s work is a critique of the
hegemony of the hand in art history. “She teaches us that what we call art
history is just the history of the hand, but we know nothing or very little
about the history of the foot and mouth,” he observed.
Fueled by
the need to fight against the stigma of being considered a disabled person and
not as an artist, Lorenza Böttner’s art created new avenues of visibility for
the human body. The exhibition Requiem for the norm offers a window into it.
A
20th-Century Artist Who De-Sexualized the Trans Body. By Prathap Nair. Hyperallergic , April 30, 2019.
These are
two routines which are normal daily events, but she executes them with such
extreme delicacy that in our fascination on observing them we forget that she
is actually carrying them out without her upper limbs. In the work of this
Chilean-born German artist it does not occur to us that she has no arms or
whether she is a man, a woman or a transgender person. What might, at first
glance, seem the key to her work ends up becoming diluted. Also, it shouldn’t
matter to us that she is the Petra of the Barcelona 92 Paralympic Games.
Lorenza
Böttner (1959-1994) achieved what she wanted to say in a short documentary
which was shown at the exhibition “I wanted to be accepted in the extreme”. The
radicalism of her character goes beyond any talk of overcoming physical
disabilities (or functional differences, if you like) and the acceptance of a
transgender body. Böttner goes one step further in rejecting prothesis which
would “normalise” her body and does not submit herself to a sex change
operation. This is where she is at her most radical, where which paternalism is
eradicated. We do not see her as a courageous artist (even though she is) but
as just another artist. Overused words like “overcoming” or being “resilient” to
her personal situation lose all meaning here. That fact that that they do not
exist in her world mean that there is no political correctness. Paul B.
Preciado, the curator of the exhibition, explains that Böttner’s work is a
“celebration of body and gender”. And it
is true that Lorenza Böttner is so far on the edge of the edge that she manages
to turn everything on its head.
From here
we can begin to assess a work, based on self-portrait and the experimental
construction of the body and subjectivity. This is the recurrent theme in
contemporary practice, especially when we are talking about gender and
feminism, but unlike artists such as Cindy Sherman, who takes on different
characters in a rejection of female stereotypes, Böttner presents herself in a series
of characters in which she is also herself. In that sense, her spirit is closer
to the surrealist photographs of Claude Cahun. There is a room in the Virreina
which justifies the entire exhibition with a series of photographs in which
Böttner presents herself in a dozen different identities, although to be more
specific she reveals a split identity, showing her beauty both as an elegant
woman and a bearded young man in a tie. Even when she makes up as a cabaret
artist Böttner makes it clear that everyone wears a mask.
Despite her
excellence in drawing, Böttner also brazenly produced work in very different
artistic disciplines: painting, drawing, performance, photography and dance.
Ever flexible, always delicate in her approach, Böttner did not recreate herself
in injuries or the effects of any kind of illness, like some of the other
artists of the 1960s.
Even though
beauty is still such a taboo word in contemporary art, it was this that Lorenza
Böttner sought with the same intensity as when she was small – she climbed onto
a high tension electrical tower just to be able get a closer look at the birds.
Her fall then changed her life forever, but she continued to fly and flow
through her art.
Lorenza
Böttner. An Extremely Delicate Art. by Montse Frisach. Mirador de les arts, December 21 , 2018
Lorenza
Böttner (1959–1994) was an artist who held an acute, embodied relationship with
transformation. She transformed a painting practice into a performance art that
took to the streets and made public space a stage for a politicized bodily
difference. In part, her practice is aligned with the tradition of mouth-and-foot
artists who make a living from painting in public. Yet, she also subverted this
tradition through her themes and a conceptual language that cut through and
spoke to political and sexual issues.
Lorenza,
originally named Ernst Lorenz Böttner, was born in 1959 into a family of German
origin in Punta Arenas, Chile. At the age of eight, he was electrocuted when
climbing up a pylon, resulting in both arms having to be amputated below the
shoulder. He returned to Germany with his mother in 1973 to undertake a series
of plastic surgery operations and moved to Lichtenau, a city near Kassel.
Böttner grew up being considered “disabled” and suffered the same internment
and exclusion as the so-called Contergan children, who were born with
morphological differences from in-uterus effects of the drug thalidomide.
Böttner,
however, resisted and refused prosthetic arms. S/he chose to transform her
situation, developing an impassioned interest for classical ballet, jazz, and
tap dancing, and learning to paint with her feet and mouth. S/he studied
painting at the Kassel School of Art and Design, graduating with a thesis
entitled “Behindert?” in which s/he questioned the category of disability and
explored the genealogy of mouth-and-foot painters. In Kassel, a double process
of subjective and artistic self-construction began. Firstly, Lorenz decided to
use the name Lorenza, affirming an openly transgender feminine position;
Lorenza’s drawings and self-portraits as a woman, feminine clothes designed for
armless bodies, and photographic sequences documenting this process of
transformation functioned as performative technologies for creating an
armless-transgender subjectivity (as seen in the Venus de Milo performance,
first enacted in Kassel in 1982, later taken to New York and San Francisco).
Secondly, if medical discourse and modes of representation aim to desexualize
and degender the impaired body, Lorenza’s performance work eroticized the
trans-armless body, endowing it with sexual and political potency.
Lorenza
went on to travel extensively, presenting hundreds of street
performance-paintings. She was affiliated with the Disabled Artists Network,
and rallied for the recognition of mouth-and-foot art by art history and museum
institutions. She also actively opposed the processes of desubjectification,
incapacitation, desexualization, and castration that modern normalizing
societies reserve for the bodily other. In 1988, Lorenza moved to Barcelona,
and in 1992 became the living embodiment of Petra, the controversial Paralympic
mascot designed by Mariscal. She died in 1994 from HIV-related complications.
Lorenza’s
dissident transgender body became a living political sculpture, a trans-armless
sculptural manifesto. Surpassing categories of abstract expressionism or the
feminist tradition of performance art, Lorenza painted and danced, in the
streets, on paper or canvas, claiming the right to exist and create in a
transgender armless body.
Lives and
Works of Lorenza Böttner. By Paul B.
Preciado. From the catalogue of Documenta 14.
Documenta
14 took place in 2017 in both Kassel, Germany, its traditional home, and
Athens, Greece. It was being held first in Athens from 8 April till 16 July,
and in Kassel from 10 June till 17 September 2017.
Page on the website of Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart
No comments:
Post a Comment