Ursula Mayer, Valentijn & JD (detail), 2013. C-Print, 42 x 29.6 cm, framed. Courtesy the artist. Copyright Margaret Salmon
Urusla Mayer explores gender and identity in a time of fluidity and collapse
“But we loved her” read a banner held up by an elderly man, pictured on the front page of a British newspaper on the day of Margaret Thatcher’s funeral. Borrowing this for the title of a major show in her native Austria, Ursula Mayer employs the suggestive ambiguity of the statement to form the underlying mood of uncertainty that inhabits her investigation of postcapitalist social conditions. The splintered possibilities spawned from neoliberal thought, the radical egoism propagated by Ayn Rand’s school of Objectivism, the influence of Rand’s ideas on world leaders like Reagan and Thatcher, the prevailing social effects of Thatcherism, as well as formal and theoretical ideas from experimental cinema all feed into Mayer’s constructed cinematographic space, where nothing is binary and everything is fluid.
Occupying the 21er Haus’ entire ground floor, the show consists of three films, as well as a central installation and a collection of objects behind display glass. The film “Gonda” (2011), adapted from Rand’s play “Ideal” by writer Maria Fusco, explores the subjective notion of seduction, appeal and desire. Featuring all-androgynous actors, its main character is played by Dutch transgender model Valentijn de Hingh, and the film’s highly stylised scenes where gestures are stronger than narrative, advance feminist film theorist Patricia McCormack’s idea of “Cinesexuality”, which argues that spectatorship in itself is inherently queer. The film “Medea” (2013) is shot on the actual location of Pasolini’s 1969 version, and stars queer icon JD Samson, of the band MEN and Le Tigre (Maria Callas starred in Pasolini’s film). Myth and artefact help to thicken the plot, as characters don objects that can either be jewellery or torture tools. Minerals, water and other elements give the scenes an earthly weight.
The space between the screening niches, in the centre of the ground floor, is where the two main characters meet. Mayer photographed Samson and de Hingh inside the monumental, bio-mechanical sculptures of Austrian artist Bruno Gironcoli, who in turn attempted to produce a contemporary image of the human body in his work from the 1960s onward. Labyrinthine and fluid but not elusive, the show looks at the impermanence of gender, and by extension, the pliability of identity and the body to point at new freedoms available today. This is, however, contrasted by the contemporary human condition where social and political systems are imploding in various ways around the world, but no real alternatives seem to materialise.
Ursula Mayer, “But We Loved Her”, is at 21Haus, Vienna, until 12th January 2014 www.21erhaus.at