The Extremely Delicate Art by Lorenza Böttner

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

The Mysterious Selfies of Marcel Bascoulard

Marcel Bascoulard was 19 when he witnessed the murder of his father by his mother. Soon after he became homeless, living in precarious shelters in the Avaricum district, in Bourges. He would spend the end of his life in the cab of a truck offered by an owner of a breakage. He learned by himself how to draw.  He regularly represented the streets of his city, in a wide angle and completely empty, emanating a kind of realistic vertigo.

Admired and outcast at the same time, asocial and eccentric, he liked to dress as a woman, in dresses that he sometimes made himself. In one of his letters, he confided: “If I walk around in a feminine outfit, it is because I find it more aesthetic. For the sake of art, when I wear a women’s dress, I take with me my camera and I ask people I know to take a picture of me. ”

Living near the Morlet photo studio, Bascoulart began to be photographed in the 1940s. In these photographs with notched edges and in small formats, the expression of his face is always the same: the face slightly leaning to one side and without makeup. His waist is accentuated, the skirt blown up by petticoats, he resembles a young girl ready to be married. Sometimes he looks like a housewife in an apron, before transforming himself, later on, into an elegant bourgeois. Fashion changed, his silhouette shrank down and his hair became white. In 1970, he wore black skai apron to resemble a samurai warrior. A broken mirror he held in each shot is an additional strange detail.

Marcel Bascoulard staged himself, creating a gallery of disturbing characters – echo of his murderous mother (?) – a marginalized figure, he was accepted by the society thanks to those who took his picture. On January 12th, 1978, he was assassinated in Asnières-lès-Bourges, in an area called Les Gargaudières, strangled by a 23-year old homeless.

art brut   collection abcd

Several  works of Marcel Bascoulard  from the Pinault Collection are included in the exhibition ‘Dancing with Myself’ at the Punta Della Dogana, Venice, Italy, until 16 December 2018.

Forty years after his murder, Marcel Bascoulard remains something of an iconic curiosity for the people of Bourges. He was seen as a wandering visionary, an erudite outsider known for his highly detailed drawings of the town. He was self-taught and was the only character ever to appear in his work, as his photographs, taken over a thirty-year period from 1942 onwards, testify. These full-length photographic self-portraits show Bascoulard wearing dresses he designed himself and holding a piece of broken mirror, alone, in both interior and exterior settings.

Palazzo Grassi,Dancing with myself

The Pinault Collection

The exhibition ‘Dancing with Myself’ opened at Punta della Dogana, in Venice. The show curated by Martin Bethenod and Florian Ebner, stems from the collaboration between the Pinault Collection and Museum Folkwang in Essen.

The exhibition, presented in a first version in 2016 in Essen, proposes a revisited path with over 56 artworks not featured in the German museum. ‘Dancing with Myself’ faces the primordial importance of the artist’s role as actor and material of his/her own creations, from the 1970s to today.

The exhibition brings together a great range of artistic practices and languages (photography, video, painting, sculpture, installation…), cultures, geographic origins, generations and experiences, to establish a tension between extremely different artistic approaches: melancholy of vanity, ironic play with identity, political biography and existential questioning, the body as sculpture, effigy or fragment of its symbolic substitute.

The exhibition revolves around four themes – Melancholia, Identity Games, Political Autobiographies, Raw Material - that develop evenly through the spaces of Punta della Dogana with over 140 works. 116 works from the Pinault Collection, of which more than 80 have never been exhibited in Venice, establish a dialogue with a selection of works from Museum Folkwang in Essen. On view 32 artists, including Marcel Bascoulard, Marcel Broodthaers, Cindy Sherman, Damien Hirst , Urs Lüthi , Claude Cahun, John Coplans, Urs Fischer, LaToya Ruby Frazier,  Rudolf Stingl, Nan Goldin, Gilbert & George, Lily Renaud-Dewar and Giulio Paolini. 

Reviews of the exhibition :

But after passing through Félix González-Torres’s symbolist “Untitled (Blood)” (1992) strands of red beads at the exhibition’s entrance, it was encouraging to see the curators Bethenod and Florian Ebner digging deeper into the ‘self’ with emotional sub-themes of melancholia, political autobiography, materiality and identity games, best exemplified by the incognito poly-identities presented by Urs Lüthi, Claude Cahun, Marcel Bascoulard, and Cindy Sherman. Their self-masking thematic struck me the deepest as it reminds us that automated artificial intelligence facial recognition is soon destined to have a monstrous effect on our lives. 

(…)

The chimeric Sherman probably is the central artist of the exhibition, with 45 of her works included, which may have been too long a march through the female unconscious, considering there are none by Carolee Schneemann or the great hybrid poseur Pierre Molinier. In their absence, Cahun, Lüthi and Bascoulard take full advantage of the use of nuanced cultural façades that indicate an interest in signal ambiguity within the semiotic field. When looking at their work, desire can take us by surprise, leading us toward disguised hybrid-people we hadn’t imagined we would ever love or trust. Certainly, their impertinent masks within the look-at-me premise of the show can be reconsidered as culturally prescient in lieu of the psychographic politics that have dowsed the internet ego-rush of freely sharing selfie data — a rush that has remade unmasked masses into raw commodities.

The Alluring Dance of Selfies and Self-Portraits. By Joseph Nechvatal. Hyperallergic , May 23, 2018. 

A series of recently discovered photographs by Marcel Bascoulard, a talented autodidact who lived in a state of vagrancy in a rural French town, offers an unexpected portrait of an artist over time. Bascoulard designed feminine costumes for himself, commissioned from a seamstress using scraps of fabric bought in a local thrift shop. He appears posing proudly and elegantly in a long flounced skirt in 1944. Both the artist and his outfits evidence the dilapidation of time and an uptick in calculated eccentricity: by the early 1970s he appears hunched and gray, in a series of skirt suits stitched from thick leatherette. Apparently, he would throw his self-portraits at people’s feet, by way of provocation.

In the Age of the Selfie, Self-Portraits Are More Powerful Than Ever. By Hettie Judah. Garage, April 18, 2018.

You will dance better tomorrow thanks to the Pinault Collection. By Thibaut Wychowanok.  Numéro , April 23, 2018. 

   

These two images are amongst the earliest of a series of self-portraits Marcel Bascoulard made compulsively until his death (in 1978 at the age of 64), in or around the town of Bourges, in central France. During war-time occupation, Bascoulard was arrested at least twice by Nazi soldiers, only to be released without charge; accounts suggest they may have been unnerved by his strangeness, a prominent aspect of which was his seeming indifference to them. Bascoulard lived always on his own idiosyncratic terms, apparently unconcerned with the opinion of others.

Though the subject of these two photographs, Bascoulard is also their maker; the camera is his own (though a friend is operating it for him), and the intentions likewise. Six months elapsed between them being taken and Bascoulard’s sense of what he wants these images to address, and how, appears to have evolved. While his stance in the earlier picture is self-consciously feminine – a performance, in a private space – the later photograph is unapologetically of a man in a dress, out in the countryside for all the world to see. He seems more concerned now with straightforwardly recording a moment than with conforming to an established (gendered) aesthetic. ‘This is me, in this dress,’ Bascoulard seems to be saying. And nothing more.

This approach – directly addressing the camera, devoid of posturing – was to prove characteristic. Though the costumes change over the decades (Bascoulard designed them himself and had them made) the form of the photographs doesn’t, suggesting that, while something is being developed, something else is stuck in reiteration, both seeking and resisting resolution. Denying himself money and possessions, Bascoulard lived as a clochard – a vagrant – in a succession of slum lodgings or improvised shacks (the last of which was a rusting lorry-cab in the corner of a field), never washing or changing his clothes. In this way he spent his whole life in the one small community, known to everyone while remaining insistently alone.

He had trained as an artist and been exhibited once, in Paris. Known for his landscape drawings – which, at their best, are vital with the commonplace – he chose to sell only the most conventional: souvenir pictures of the town’s cathedral and mediaeval streets. He showed his photographic self-portraits to his friends, some of whom still live in the area. ‘Monsieur Bascoulard’ they call him reverently, even lovingly, as they explain to me that he only dressed up for the camera. According to an official report of an incident in 1952, when he was arrested for walking the streets in the ‘wrong’ kind of clothing, he told the police: ‘It’s an artistic necessity.’ He was seeking to avoid charges, but in the process provided his one explicit statement as to what he considered the photographs to be: Art.

They fall into three distinct phases. In the first, made during the 1940s, the youthfully lean and bright-eyed Bascoulard is radiantly self-assured, dressed as his grandmother might have been when she was his age and on her way to a party.

In the second (from the 1950s to ’60s), a more matronly Bascoulard continues to emulate an earlier generation: a middle-aged schoolteacher; a shopkeeper; a spinster aunt. Dutiful domestic service is evoked by aprons, sometimes worn incongruously over satin. While these images celebrate the mundane respectability of pre-war small-town life, the man who made them lived in squalor and stench. Looking at us quizzically, a piece of mirror always in hand – reading variously as a fan, a book or a machete – he is in his 40s now and bulking up. A bourgeois housewife prize-fighter.

Often, in this middle phase of the photographs, he seems too tightly wrapped – a chrysalis – and in the final phase (which takes us into the 1970s) emerges as a massive gravity-bound butterfly. He had always liked materials with a sheen and now it’s vinyl, the folds of which take on increasingly structural forms (sometimes as stiff and as gleaming as samurai armour). And the man himself? He looks a little doubtful at times, or a little impatient, his head and shoulders often dipping in a kind of curtsey. Is it a supplication? Or is he poised to go in for the kill? He has the battered and embattled look of a boxer.

In one picture (it’s undated but looks to be from his final years) he’s wearing a simple white smock, standing in an interior doorway. The wallpaper is unprecedented; it feels like someone’s home rather than a studio. I have the surprising sense of another person’s presence (he’s always seemed alone before, even though someone was operating the camera), and this suggests a narrative. It’s as if he’s asked a question and awaits our answer: it might be whether we want a cup of tea. I don’t think it’s whether we want a fuck: Bascoulard’s self-portraits are resolutely asexual. ‘There’s nothing to be afraid of,’ he seems to be saying, ‘however transgressive this might appear.’ In 1932, when Bascoulard was 19, his mother shot his father dead. She spent the rest of her life in a lunatic asylum. Does the paradoxically reassuring atmosphere of these images mask an intimation that women may not necessarily be as benign as convention suggests, or men necessarily as dangerous?

In the final photographs the juxtaposition of an undisguisedly male person with clothing conventionally regarded as female has evolved so that both the person and the costume seem imbued with a mix of masculine and feminine qualities. (Unless this is to observe only how we all, in ageing, tend to reassume the androgyny of adolescence.)

Bascoulard struggled to emerge from a traumatic childhood into a singular adulthood. In making these images is he seeking to ameliorate a sense of discomfort or to examine it? Is he trying to reconcile his mother and his father, or the masculine and feminine aspects of himself? And if so, does he succeed? In the early images his presentation to the camera seems a victory in itself, but the later ones are increasingly shadowed by a sense that the weariness of compulsion has overtaken the energy from which compulsion springs.

That his mother killed his father suggests a couple overly preoccupied with one another and unlikely to have much time for their children. Ultimately, for me, these mysterious self-portraits read as images of self-sufficiency. ‘I am all I need in one,’ he seems to be saying, ‘You offer nothing. I only want you to see. To know I’m here. And not to forget.’

The Mysterious Selfies of Marcel Bascoulard. By Philip Myall.   Frieze,  September 20, 2018.  

More : 

Two interesting French documentaries :

Bascoulard, le destintragique du dessinateur-clochard.  France 3 Centre-Val de Loire. Published  on November 7, 2017

Bascoulard et nous.   In 2017, eight students from different classes at the Lycée Jean Mermoz de Bourges made a documentary film retracing the life of an emblematic figure of the city of Bourges: Marcel Bascoulard. Lycée Jean Mermoz de Bourges / CICLIC - 2017

A book on his life and work :  

Bascoulard : Dessinateur virtuose, clochard magnifique, femme inventée.

texte de Patrick Martinat.  Editions Buchet/Chastel, Les Cahiers  Dessinés, 2017. 

An Exhibition Recreating the Isolated Huts That Philosophers Worked In

It was a family trip to Jamaica that brought into focus the real world implications of philosopher Dieter Roelstraete’s life’s work. “The one thing I was looking forward to most was switching off my phone. I didn’t want screens or computers. I didn’t bring a laptop,” he explains, sitting under the extravagantly frescoed Baroque ceiling of Fondazione Prada’s Ca’ Corner location in Venice, where he’s just opened his latest exhibition, Machines à penser. “But when I arrived there was WiFi,” he continues. “Even in paradise, we were unable to escape the prison of connectivity.”

The desire to disconnect is a longtime academic curiosity of Roelstraete’s, who was trained as a philosopher at the University of Ghent and currently works as a curator. With this exhibition, his curatorial mission was to explore ideas of exile, escape and retreat in relation to creativity, choosing to do so through a somewhat unconventional entry point: the philosopher’s hut, something philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger and Theodor Adorno have been connected to in their respective careers. In the exhibition, Roelstraete explores the hut as both an essential bricks-and-mortar shelter for cultural production and a metaphor for the seclusion required to fulfill intellectual potential. A ‘room of one’s own’ for male continental philosophers, if you will.

        “The triangulation of Heidegger, Wittgenstein and Adorno together with their huts is what really sparked the curatorial argument to make an exhibition,” explains Roelstraete. “I wanted to look at these structures as a way of talking about the relationship between thinking and place, between creativity and isolation, between reflection and solitude.” Visitors to the exhibition are invited to step inside mock-ups of both Wittgenstein’s and Heidegger’s huts, while Adorno’s life in Los Angeles as an exile during the war is recreated through detailed maps and photography by Patrick Lakey. Together, they provide a doorway into the three philosophers’ isolated physical realities during their most prolific stretches of time.

                                                                    

In addition to the huts, the exhibition considers a broad range of work by artists and intellectuals who have dealt with the idea of retreat and escape within their own practices. Gerhard Richter’s paintings of the remote Engadine landscape sit alongside a historical study of the hermit Saint Jerome, who spent his life alone in the Syrian desert translating the Bible into Latin. New work was commissioned for the exhibition, too: Goshka Macuga created a series of vases that take the form of the philosophers’ heads, as well as plans she made, unfortunately unrealised, to turn Fondazione Prada’s palazzo into a mossy, hut-topped fjord overlooking the grand canal. The Scottish poet Alec Finlay responded to brief with an epic poem tacked to cherry red lattice work enveloping a richly decorated Renaissance era studiolo, and Portuguese designer Leonor Atunes created a series of chandeliers inspired by the house Wittgenstein built for his sister in Vienna. We spoke to Roelstraete about his inspiration behind the show, his thoughts on exile, and why escapism should be seen as a virtue.

 “The title of the show is Machines à penser, an allusion to the famous quip by Le Corbusier, who called a house a ‘Machine à Habiter’ – a machine for living. It looks at philosophers who have been associated with huts in various degrees. The two most important ones are Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger who both had historical huts built for them. Heidegger’s hut still exists today in the Black Forest village of Todtnauberg, while Wittgenstein’s hut used to stand on the edge of a fjord in the Norwegian village of Skjolden. Thirdly, there’s the figure of Theodor Adorno, who never lived in a hut or built himself a hut, but strangely enough had this sculpture named after him by Ian Hamilton Findlay, who is British sculptor and poet who made this installation in 1987 named Adorno’s Hut. My discovery of the existence of the Adorno’s hut many years ago is what triggered the thought process that eventually culminated in the exhibition.”

“One thing that I was interested in doing was to stage escapism as a virtue, not a vice. If you’re called an escapist, it’s derogatory, right? Escapism is something that’s bad, right? Entertainment is escapist. It’s meant as a slur. I was interested in painting a picture of escapism as a completely legitimate attitude and productive for a variety of things: thinking, art making, but also perhaps social interaction.”

“If part of the exhibition is the relationship between thinking and space in the relative comfort of the space of one’s own choosing, we also show the connection between thinking and space if you are forced into that space. If all you have left of your home is your language. On display is a map that shows where Adorno and Horkheimer, who were immigrants from Germany, used to frequent when living in LA in the 1930s and 1940s during the war. It’s where the cream of the crop of German Weimar intellectual culture in LA used to live in that period. Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, all of these people. Hanns Eisler, [whose music is played in the gallery] is somebody who fled to the US, was initially welcomed with opened arms, and then in 1949 when the Cold War was gathering pace, was forced to leave again because of his Communist sympathies and return to his native Germany. He’s somebody who has hounded his whole life, on the run his whole life, and still managed to create.”

“You can make the same show about islands, or you could make the same show about the desert. In both cases, they’re spaces that are the recipients of our desire to escape. To flee and break free from connectivity, from the attention economy, from all these things. And so, that’s I think why this exhibition is relevant. This is something that we all dream of, that we all want. If you live in a big city, you probably dream about the mountains.”

      Another Magazine, June 20, 2018

                                                                         

“Machines à penser” focuses on three major philosophers of the 20th century: Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969), Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951). The latter two shared a life-long need for intellectual isolation: Heidegger spent long periods of his life in a secluded hut in the village of Todtnauberg in the Black Forest in Germany, whilst Wittgenstein retreated on several occasions to a small mountain cabin situated in a fjord in Skjolden, Norway. Adorno, on the other hand, was forced into exile from his native Germany during by the Nazi regime, first to Oxford and then to Los Angeles, where he wrote Minima Moralia, a collection of aphorisms that also reflects on the fate of forced emigration. These reflections inspired the installation conceived by the Scottish artist and poet Ian Hamilton Finlay in 1987 titled Adorno’s Hut, a centerpiece of the exhibition alongside architectural reconstructions of the actual huts of Heidegger and Wittgenstein.

As Dieter Roelstraete explains: “these were the places where our protagonists hatched out their deepest thoughts. Isolation, whether chosen or imposed, appears to have inspired them decisively—and over the years their huts have proven to be an inexhaustible source of inspiration in turn for generations of artists, attracted to the fantasy of withdrawal as articulated in its most elemental architectural form.”

The exhibition takes place on the ground floor and on the first floor of the 18th century palazzo, creating an immersive journey that deepens our understanding of these three philosophers and the relationship between philosophy, art and architecture.

Adorno is the protagonist of the first part of the exhibit, in which his American exile is recalled through a large-scale reproduction of a photograph by Patrick Lakey showcasing the interior of Villa Aurora in Los Angeles. The fate of forced retreat is explored through the work of artists such as Susan Philipsz; Ewan Telford; Patrick Lakey; Anselm Kiefer; and Alexander Kluge, who conceived a new video for the exhibition.

On the first floor of Ca’ Corner della Regina Martin Heidegger’s Black Forest cabin is evoked through a remake that contains, among other works, a series of personal photographs by the photo-journalist Digne Meller-Marcovicz and a set of ceramic pieces by Jan Bontjes van Beek. Contemporary work by artists such as Giulio Paolini, Sophie Nys, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle and Paolo Chiasera chart the long shadow cast by Heidegger’s thought across philosophies of building, dwelling and belonging.

Inside the reconstruction of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s small house in Skjolden, Norway, the viewer encounters Head of a Girl (1925-1928), the only artwork known to have been made by the Austro-British philosopher, shown here alongside his personal belongings. Wittgenstein’s self-imposed exile and lifelong quest for philosophical peace of mind form the subject of artworks created by a Norwegian artist collective comprised of Sebastian Makonnen Kjølaas, Marianne Bredesen and Siri Hjorth; Jeremy Millar; and Guy Moreton. A newly commissioned work by Leonor Antunes and a sculpture by Mark Manders are also featured in the exhibition.

Goshka Macuga designed three sculptures for the exhibition depicting the heads of the three philosophers, Mark Riley presents three dioramas and Gerhard Richter exhibits overpainted photographs of Engadin mountainscapes and sculpture Kugel III, evoking Friedrich Nietzsche’s thinking quarters in Sils-Maria where Thus Spoke Zarathustra was conceived.

The exhibition also includes a historical section focusing on Church father Saint Jerome (347-419), famous for leading the life of an anchorite in the Syrian desert while translating the Bible into Latin. Renaissance paintings and prints dedicated to the iconography of the saint are exhibited alongside a Renaissance studiolo containing, among other items, first editions of Heidegger and Wittgenstein’s writings, its outer walls clad in a site-specific installation by the Scottish artist-poet Alec Finlay titled Hutopia (2018).

     Fondazione Prada

     A review of the exhibition. Domus

     More photos of  the show here : TL Magazine  , Designboom 


  Additional :

 Much has been written about the writer’s cabin. Among the most notable recent books on the topic are “Heidegger’s Hut” by Adam Sharr and “A Place of My Own: The Architecture of Daydreams,” Michael Pollan’s account of  imagining and then actually constructing his own writing space. A standard Internet search can quickly yield images of the writing rooms (cabins, huts, sheds) of legendary scriveners: Dylan Thomas, Virginia Woolf, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Roald Dahl, Carl Jung, Henry Thoreau and — a writer of a markedly different sort —Ted Kaczynski, to name a few. And Jill Krementz’s 1999 collection of photographs “The Writer’s Desk” gives us tantalizing glimpses of writers sitting at their desks. But why the interest? Have these places somehow become secular sites of the sacred?

The Lure of the Writer’s Cabin by David Wood, December 9, 2012, New York Times

 

                                                                       

  On Heidegger’s hut and Wittgenstein House by Edwin Heathcote,  Financial Times, September       2013,

‘I can’t imagine that I could have worked anywhere as I do here. It’s the quiet and, perhaps, the wonderful scenery; I mean its quiet seriousness.’ Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1936.

Ludwig Wittgenstein’s exile in Skjolden,  Einarlunga Wordpress

This short film takes through the beautiful countryside of Norway, in search of the hut where Ludwig Wittgenstein exiled himself from society from time to time, first starting in 1913.  Open Culture

A review of the book by  Adam Sharr, Heidegger's Hut. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006.

Hermitary

Our visit to the Heidegger cabin (Heidegger's hut). After x nature