About Madeleine Berkhemer

„VIRGIN IN MILK“ IN PROCESS, 2003
(AT NEUE GALERIE GRAZ, 2003)

Madeleine Berkhemer’s work is defined by the heterogeneity of its materials and styles.   It is an investigation of the dimensions of time and space and a radical   examination of social and economic conditions in which she ruthlessly employs   her own body. In doing so she exposes herself to a voyeurism   that she herself initiates, in order at the same time to exert control over it   and to keep her work at a distance.   Within this field of tension she develops her own form of sculpture, whether   she is drawing, making collages, posing or working with soft or hard materials.   Whenever she integrates herself into her work as an adaptable model, it is not   a question of implementing private mythologies, but a reflexive examination of   different media and the reception of appearance, presentation and manipula-tion as well as balances of power. Her interest lies in boundaries: in a formal sense in terms of the body and space; in the sense of content, in connection with zones of taboo and critical analyses of the market and society. She formulates, lays open and crosses these boundaries herself. Hence her final show for her fashion degree at the Academy of Art in Rotterdam consisted of a collection of elastic bands, which showed the contours of the clothing and accentuated the body. Even at this early stage, one recognises a sculptural concept arising from the constructivist thinking and formal approaches of Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner, in which the minimisation of forms and the integrated factor of time and space play a significant role. Her preferred material is stockings and tights, which grow into her sculpture. Their elasticity is as important as the feminine connotations of the material, which suggests a second skin and reveals the boundaries of the physical. Parallel to the formal-constructivist approach is the beginning of an analysis of the physical and in particular of femininity in surrealism. From the construction of the femme fatale at the end of the 19th century, and following on from psychoanalytical discoveries, there developed a new image of femininity involving the unconscious. Individual parts of the body are isolated in order to be manipulated and multiplied as male wish projections. Whether this is in lyrical departures such as those of Joan Miró or in the constructed mystification of Salvador Dali, linear connections are drawn to and between representations of women, forming systems of perception. The construction of the body as a doll, as seen in Hans Bellmer or Giorgio de Chirico’s work, as a collaged interweaving of different realities or as a wish machine, represents another facet in the image of woman at the beginning of the 20th century. With regard to Madeleine Berkhemer’s work, the most sensational contribution besides Marcel Duchamp is afforded by Francis Picabia, among others in the works “Mechanique, Portrait d’une jeune fille américaine dans l’état de nudité”, in which a sparkplug is equated with a naked girl, or “Prostitution universelle”, both dating from 1916. This direction is borne out in Picabia’s oil paintings of the early 1940s, for which photos taken from erotic magazines served as models, drawing attention to the dividing line between classical nudity and erotic imagery. His pictures can thus be seen both as an attack on the From Male Wish Projection to the Infiltration of Power and Market Structures. modernist and classical principle – repudiating these principles and celebrating the vulgar long before Jeff Koons did. In doing so, he seeks out photos without any artistic pretensions, trite images, and documents his interest in the female anatomy. Pierre Molinier is a master of the multiplication of individual body parts, of the transcending of gender, the exploration of the second skin as a theme and the synchronism of self-display and voyeuristic pro-vocation. His self-surrender and at the same time his being left to his own devices creates a radicality that is also characteristic of Madeleine Berkhemer. On the of M From Louise Bourgeois to Annette Messager, it is the search for matriarchal archetypes, the investigation of the dichotomy of nature and technological processes and the problematisation of individual biography versus collective stereotype that characterise their work. Feminine themes, gender-specific attributable objects and materials with body-intimate associations and the reference to deep social changes in connection with industrial manufacturing processes in Rosemarie Trockel’s work also have their roots in the female-specific critical position of the 1980s. Conscious of this tradition, which has been perpetuated by Rebecca Horn, Barbara Kruger and Kiki Smith through to Elke Krystufek, Sarah Lucas and Pipilotti Rist, Madeleine Berkhemer positions her work in a radical form. One also finds points of reference with Berkhemer’s work in Eva Hesse’s, which recognised the chaotic potential in order and repetition structures in the surrealist principle of alienation long before the debate about non-linear systems arose. Using emotion, erotica and corporeality, she undermined both the minimalism and the concept art of the 1960s, which were dominated by masculine rigidity, without getting sentimental in the process. Her interest lay in the tension between order and chaos, between geometric and biomorphic forms, seriality and singularity as well as between continuity and constant change. She often chose non-traditional materials to express this, such as string, sand or latex and placed her work in unfamiliar positions: so that sculptural arrangements were often hung from the ceiling or stretched across individual spatial sequences, leant against the wall or continued on the floor, in this way retaining their change-based appearance. Another important position for Berkhemer has been that of Cindy Sherman: in showing the construction of different images of women in her “Untitled Film Stills” of 1978 and then slipping under the skin of very different female typologies, she always introduces her own body, which is however only significant for its ascribed characteristics, construction and resolution of ideas. She deliberately turns the initial appeal into repulsion, although without losing the seductive veneer. For Madeleine Berkhemer, a crucial attitude beyond political correctness was adopted by Cicciolina, who came out as a soft-porn actress, deliberately infiltrated the art world and used her appeal to gain a seat in parliament, in order to address general political issues of power. The work of the chameleon singer Madonna also follows this direction. She broke through all ideas of correct behaviour and boundaries of taboo, earning the admiration of among others a woman, that is Camille Paglia in her 1992 book “Sexual Personae”. She presented herself as a self-confident woman against all social convention; Madeleine Berkhemer also presents herself to the observer in this way, with an awareness of her appeal and the feminine power of her sexuality. In surrendering her own body, which functions as a sculptural measure vis-à-vis the observer, she creates three types of women from the construction, Milly, Molly and Mandy, portrayed as prostitutes, her alter ego. Milly is blonde, the child woman, Lolita, who floats with the current. Berkhemer attributes her drawings, sketches and collages to this character. Molly, the girl with the unhappy childhood, doesn’t care about anything and does what she likes. The porn ads, sculptures and the cheap and unpretentious works are credited to her. And Mandy, the redhead, is a bourgeois creature of luxury who seeks decadence. She is attributed with Berkhemer’s performances and refers to Rita McBride’s work in “Arena” in the Witte de With centre of 1998. These three fictional characters constantly flow into one another, highlighting Berkhemer’s interest in the body and in sexuality. In this context, the body also signifies the medium which can be both stretched and also broken down into tiny microscopic bits, into cells. This dissection, the collage of individual details taken from porn magazines and the physical aspects are of interest to her in that male voyeurism is already factored in. She has herself photographed by the erotic photographer Roy Stuart, drawing parallels with Joe D’Allesandro, the hero of Andy Warhol’s films “Heat” and ”Trash” and seeking to examine the differences between the sexes. She also assigns each of the three female types a luxury car: Milly has a Maserati Ghibli, Molly a Rolls Royce and Mandy a Lamborghini. These three cars, which suggest freedom and individuality and yet also betray the uniformity and social classifiability of their owners, a paradox of socially and economically determined assignations of meaning and readability, luxury items, objects of social prestige and identification with masculine connotations, are driven into the ground, in order that they can be used as a base for her networked sculptures. The materials used in these sculptures are stockings, tights, soft padding and plastic balls. From a dense conglomeration of tightly filled material, she stretches the individual stocking parts and knots them together by hand, creating a subtle mesh, an idiosyncratic structure. While this work demonstrates the underlying, the self-positioned, in others it is entire spaces that she annexes. Similar to the work of Paul Thek, her means of construction in these, correspond to techniques for architectural designs and industrial manufacture. Interlocking surface areas are juxtaposed, opening up new perspective and spaces and developing an energetic vitality from their three-dimensionality. The link between emotionality and constructive analytics is created by the choice of material and the way in which it is handled. Photographed under black light, the hybridity of analogous meshing and technical structures becomes particularly clear in that they are as reminiscent of deconstructivist architecture as they are of the human nervous system. The closed and yet at the same time fragile nature of the form, the ambivalence of the examination of spaces and the way they are adapted to, her self-portrayal and the risk of being examined herself: on the one hand this points to the commodity character of the self with its undeniable fetishisation; on the other hand, criticism of the unquestioning acceptance of mass consumerism and mass production. She also describes and crosses the boundaries of her own body by creating a second skin directly on her body with make-up, clothes, accessories, shoes and wigs, an ambiguity that swings between being protective and alluring. In other works, she surrenders her body to the public as a central pole of intimacy and at the same time seals herself off. In a self-confident pose she positions herself as a sculpture in an interplay of dominance and submission. In having herself photographed with a heap of men’s shoes, she is not only making a reference to fetishism, coquetry and the ironic question of male dominance, but also the attempt to step into their shoes, to assume their perspective. No criticism of male domains or their destruction is intended here; rather, she is infiltrating in a lascivious and direct confrontation of their power in a subversive manner. Likewise, she opens up systems of the market, dependencies and economic structures in order to use them and disavow them herself.

By Elisabeth Fiedler