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Anne Imhof. Image: Nadine Fraczkowski<\/p>\n Anne Imhof. Image: Nadine Fraczkowski<\/p>\n
German Pavilion, Venice Biennale dell\u2019 Arte, May 2017. Performers press themselves against semi-transparent glass fronts, spray painting them black. Sombre organ music interspersed with someone whistling fills the space. Performers squat way of avoiding collision \u2013 the audience segues, trying to avoid being pushed by the tumbling performers. Props lie beneath the food. Fellow artist Eliza Douglas is there, too, reading texts on her mobile phone. Someone has started a small fire.
\nThe performers look exhausted, bruised. Their hair is tangled, their casual attire is dirty and worn. In the audience, clad in head-to-toe black leather, watches Anne Imhof, the artist behind this Golden-Lionwinning show. Shared countless times on Instagram, \u201cFaust\u201d is a spectacle which has left few visitors unmoved. As Douglas remarked,\u201c Anne knows how to move people, remove them from their ordinary realities.\u201d Her work captivates the audience via its repetitions and elisions.
\nNevertheless, sat in a Stockholm hotel room\u2019s armchair on a chilly late-September day, the artist seems surprised at the success of her piece, now in its fourth month. \u201cThere was a lot of tension after Faust and some people were very intrusive,\u201d says Imhof. \u201cWe needed bodyguards to accompany us from the museum to our homes to ensure that no one was bothered. No-one expected this! All I did was plan an exhibition.\u201d Mulling over her answers, measured sentences trail into ellipses as she elaborates. \u201cOriginally, I had a different idea of what the pavilion should look like,\u201d she continues. \u201cThe work was conceptualised for a smaller crowd in the space. The perspective changed and the number of performers was increased to facilitate audience interaction, and so it became a different piece to a certain extent.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Franziska Aigner and Emma Daniel in Anne Imhof, Faust, 2017, German Pavilion, 57th International Art Exhibition \u2013 La Biennale di Venezia. Image: Nadine Fraczkowski<\/p>\n
Imhof mobilises the uncanny aesthetics of contemporary urban life at its most nihilistic. Combining millennial obsessions (shareable images, electronic devices, banal streetwear) with more provocative themes (sex, masturbation, casual violence), she elevates disparate features into a seamless presentation. Absurd, surreal elements and props such as dobermanns and fire guitars enhance the menace. As curator Susanne Pfeffer writes: \u201c[C]ontemporary biopolitical bodies are [\u2026] a dense interior, encapsulating both life and political control \u2013 in the form of exchange and communication. A new subject appears: hormonal, medial, highly networked.\u201d Which is to say, here, the artistic medium intersects with social interaction, creating new dialogues.
\nStill, Imhof was unprepared for \u201cFaust\u2019s\u201d social media success. \u201cIt is impossible to plan [for], you cannot know how people respond to the work [\u2026] I did not expect anything. But for me, this is a sign of detachment rather than involvement.\u201d To be sure, it is impossible to read her work as a simple expression of a singular meaning. In \u201cFaust\u201d, as with the dialogues and conversations in her earlier work, \u201cAngst\u201d, there is no driving narrative, only thematic sequences; what the audience experiences are not fully realised pieces, but a series of improvised encounters.<\/p>\n
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Left: Mickey Mahar, Franziska Aigner and Enad Marouf in Anne Imhof, Faust, 2017, German Pavilion, 57th International Art Exhibition \u2013 La Biennale di Venezia. Image: Nadine Fraczkowski. Right: Mickey Mahar in Anne Imhof, Faust, 2017, German Pavilion, 57th International Art Exhibition \u2013 La Biennale di Venezia. Image: Nadine Fraczkowski.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy paintings and performances are united by the same perspectival thoughts, the same gestures, the same symbolism, the posture of the body, layering and tonality,\u201d the artist reflects. \u201cPerformance and painting, it\u2019s just what I do. The two remain distinct mediums though. The resulting image is the actual artwork. I came up with sketches that reflect the exact same positions [and] attitudes that can be seen in Faust. The image of the open mouth is a recurrent element in my drawings, and in the performance it may be an open mouth of someone who screams and this comes together with something that appears in the music. I find this very intriguing.\u201d This arrangement could easily collapse into improvised theatre, yet Imhof\u2019s practice exists outside the formal structures of her discipline.
\nThe work itself is not an appropriation of ist constituent media, but rather a break: everything is turned into motif, nothing remains referential. As such, it is resists definitive interpretation, as well as the notion of the existence in art of a coherent system of signs capable of ever rendering one.<\/p>\n
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Eliza Douglas Anne Imhof. Installation view, Galerie Buchholz New York, 2017. Courtesy of Eliza Douglas, Anne Imhof and Galerie Buchholz, Berlin\/Cologne\/New York.<\/p>\n
The contemporaneity of \u201cFaust\u201d is also derived from its reformatting of the relationship between images and media. Hito Steyerl has argued that \u201cthe thing called normal life has already become deeply imaged\u201d, i.e. copied or reproduced. Consequently, she contends, the artist\u2019s task now lies in different forms of circulation, leading to a \u201creconsideration between image life, what we used to call reresentation\u201d. With these considerations in mind, Imhof\u2019s work poses certain considerations. How can storytelling be interwoven with digital media? And how does a work\u2019s life on social media interact with its performance? Although \u201cFaust\u201d entertains these questions, it refuses to give straightforward answers.
\nNotwithstanding this avowed open-endedness, the artist\u2019s show in Venice functions in tandem with its setting. \u201cThe glass creates a separation between the performers, with the roof, the door and the anterior chambers,\u201d says Imhof. This transparent level transforms the German pavilion into a multi-layered stage, where performers crawl underneath the audience through traces of previous show littered around them. Historically, artists have frequently addressed the architecture of this Nazi-era structure, and Imhof is no exception, giving it a double glass floor and sealing off its side rooms. Performers patrol the roof and upper stories. \u201c[This] enables me to unite two forms of architectural dominance,\u201d she explains. \u201cWhere money and power are evident, in the architecture of banks, for instance, glass is the dominant material. It was important to me that the bodies of the visitors would be elevated vis-.- vis the building. I wanted to make the monumental, sculptural room disappear and turn it into something flatter.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Billy Bultheel and Ian Edmonds in Anne Imhof, Faust, 2017, German Pavilion, 57th International Art Exhibition \u2013 La Biennale di Venezia. Image: Nadine Fraczkowski.<\/p>\n
Other aspects of \u201cFaust\u201d are equally immersive. Spray paint and water obscure and separate performers, and the music (organ recitals, chanting, electronic beats and a vocal by Eliza Douglas) heightens this surreal atmosphere. \u201cWe worked in close collaboration on the music,\u201d reveals Imhof. \u201cI wrote the songs together with Franziska Aigner, Billy Bultheel and Eliza Douglas.\u201d
\nPrior to Douglas joining the troupe in early 2016 (she hung out backstage at an early performance at Berlin\u2019s Hamburger Bahnhof, with the stated objective of wanting to go home with the artist), neither the singing nor the clothing were accorded central roles. In fact, the wardrobes were intended, in part, to counteract the performers\u2019 inexpressiveness. Imhof has spoken of her interest in the designs of Vetements\u2019 founder Demna Gvasalia, and there are sequences in \u201cFaust\u201d resembling catwalk struts. Indeed, the performers are frequently decked out in casual attire and sports brands (Adidas, Nike, Reebok, jeans and plain t-shirts), leading to comparisons with the Berlin techno club Berghain. \u201cThe performers partly wear their own clothes ,\u201d Imhof notes. \u201cWe also have costumes, which I make in collaboration with Eliza Douglas. I am interested in fashion but I would not consider it to be an essential element of my work.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Eliza Douglas Anne Imhof. Installation view, Galerie Buchholz New York, 2017. Courtesy of Eliza Douglas, Anne Imhof and Galerie Buchholz, Berlin\/Cologne\/New York.<\/p>\n
Despite its studied art-world internationality, \u201cFaust\u201d strikes a Teutonic note. From the Goethe-derived title to its multi-disciplinary operatic structure, Imhof summons her artistic predecessors \u2013 Wagner in particular, whose notion of gesamtkunstwerk (the \u2018total artwork\u2019) seems relevant. Imhof disagrees. \u201cI am not sure whether this term gesamtkunstwerk applies,\u201d says the artist. \u201cI do not define myself along those lines and I do not see any points of contact there, not with Beuys, not with Wagner.\u201d
\nGoethe\u2019s brooding genius looms large over German culture. Hegel considered him to be the German language\u2019s first and last great playwright, and Imhof\u2019s rendition of his famous work is conscious of this. Her glass perches form an allusion to it, and the endless possible mutations of the performance appear to enact Faust\u2019s restless search for knowledge. Indeed, just as Goethe\u2019s scholar-protagonist strikes his infamous bargain, trading his soul for transcendent wisdom \u2013 and in doing so, trading something that doesn\u2019t exist for something that cannot exist \u2013 Imhof\u2019s images exist as promissory notes, eliding fixation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Four months into her epic prize-winning performance “faust”, Anne Imhof reflects on fame and creative relationships.<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":59985,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[11856,139],"tags":[7130,9849,7396,4935,9850,5889,9851,380,3811,9852],"class_list":["post-59971","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sleek-art","category-art","tag-anne-imhof","tag-billy-bultheel","tag-eliza-douglas","tag-faust","tag-franziska-aigner","tag-goethe","tag-golden-lionwinning","tag-hito-steyerl","tag-venice","tag-venice-biennale-dell-arte"],"acf":{"main_category":null,"legacy":"1","exclude_from_ads":null,"hero_title":null,"subtitle":null,"hero":null,"teasers":null,"facebook_image":null,"related_articles":null,"next_article":null,"sleek_card_focus":null,"content":null},"yoast_head":"\n