‘We are deranged’
‘We are deranged’
Markus Schinwald
Suddenly at the centre of a hype, Markus Schinwald (b. 1973) is not happy with all the attention his work is getting, which goes along with the interest in the essence of man, sex and passion that seems to be cropping up everywhere. This type of art, which nowadays he is sometimes associated with, he calls ‘psycho-kitsch’, while his own work is of a more conceptual nature. Time to set things right. This year, Markus Schinwald’s automated marionettes were shown as part of the Don Quixote exhibition at Witte de With and at the Berlin Biennial. In his installations, photos and videos, the Salzburg-born artist regularly focuses attention on human beings with their fragile, manipulable physicality and their bottomless psychological depths. Schinwald often puts his characters at the mercy of contrived obsessions, and he does not shy away from autistic rituals or neurotic ticks. He works all the registers of the diverse intellectual heritage of Vienna, where he lives, with enthusiasm and precision, just as he unhesitatingly makes use of current crossovers between fashion, cinema and science fiction.In the film Dictio pii (2001), seven characters make their way around an empty, rather shabby hotel. Their unintentional encounters remain strangely vague. Doors open, only for the figures to disappear into the next room. In a lift, an old man ceaselessly dusts off his clothes; one actor wears a jacket that has been converted into a straightjacket; an elderly woman wears a metal fixture on her shoulder as she moves through the puzzling scenarios. The curious protagonists appear isolated, but also linked in some unspecified way, although there is no conventional plot binding them together. The film consists of five individual sequences that can be freely combined. There is, then, no beginning or end – instead, a level of meaning is generated by the indefinable hotel setting and the fetishized outfits. The scenes are also linked via the soundtrack, which applies to all of the protagonists. This voice off slowly morphs from a deep male voice to that of a woman. The last sentence of the videos, which is spoken in lip-synch, is: ‘We are deranged’.
Do you use the voiceover as an experimental shifting of codes, or is it more a play on the enigmatic aura of the androgynous?
‘The voice in Dictio pii begins as a kind of inner monologue, making what is said valid for each of the characters we see, only the last sentence is spoken in lip-synch. It could be described as a breaking of the voice in reverse, beginning deep and ending high. With the morphing voice I wanted to underline that thought (or human existence in general) is not stable.’
… and as a way of destabilizing gender codes?
’Yes, but unlike the gender debate where genders are treated separately, I was interested precisely in not making this distinction and letting the voice pass smoothly from one to the other.’
The strange metal prostheses from the video also appear in similar form in the reworked portrait engravings from the Biedermeier period: delicate metal apparatuses hold the faces in shape and missing features are replaced by prostheses. Are the prostheses and constructions you design for the films and portraits something like stabilizers that help to bear the condition of being deranged?
’Yes, that’s how I’ve always seen them. Although I never wanted to define exactly what it is that they stabilize. Before I rework the oil paintings, for example, the men and women in the pictures do not look as if they had any kind of deficit, or least not the kind which I then attribute to them. Looking at items of old medical equipment, as a non-historian it is often near impossible to identify the ailment they were meant to remedy. And this is exactly what I’m getting at here.’
In the ‘restored’ Biedermeier portraits, you manipulate clothing, hairstyles and other details in almost imperceptible ways. The alterations are not immediately identifiable as such, so that any attempt at historical classification is rendered absurd. The prostheses, or the bandages that seem to merge with the skin and the collar, suggest methods of treatment and forms of therapy from a bygone age, or sinister visions of the future developed during such periods. In this way, you use deformation, mechanical apparatus and fetishized items of clothing to show the body and its determinedness not only as an unstable locus for identity formation by oneself and others, but also, frequently, as a cultural construct in itself. How important are the levels of the past and cultural history to you?
‘I consider this a central aspect, I have always tried to include a kind of trans-historical dimension in my work. In Dictio pii, for example, it was important for me that one cannot be entirely certain of the exact period or decade, the codes of the architecture, the people and the clothes in the film fit with a great many different periods.
In Children’s Crusade, it was exactly the other way round, with a great many historical contradictions: Baroque architecture with recent graffiti; the children’s crusades of the Middle Ages; the 1970s music, written to a Baroque scale; the costumes, etc..In Children’s Crusade, it was exactly the other way round, with a great many historical contradictions: Baroque architecture with recent graffiti; the children’s crusades of the Middle Ages; the 1970s music, written to a Baroque scale; the costumes, etc..
I tried to include different historical locations in the individual elements and then to combine them in such as way that in the end it does not seem conspicuous or unusual.I tried to include different historical locations in the individual elements and then to combine them in such as way that in the end it does not seem conspicuous or unusual.
When I work with Biedermeier portraits, it has nothing to do with nostalgia – it’s more like speaking a foreign language.’When I work with Biedermeier portraits, it has nothing to do with nostalgia – it’s more like speaking a foreign language.’
The film that you just mentioned, Children’s Crusade (2004), combines the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamlin with the historical children’s crusades of the High Middle Ages. At the time, more than twenty thousand children set off for Jerusalem to convert the infidels. Around the year 1284, hordes of children are supposed to have followed the Pied Piper to an uncertain fate, as if hypnotized, just as the child crusaders followed the religiously motivated mass hysteria. In Children’s Crusade, the Pied Pier appears as a two-faced marionette. After shots of anonymous streets, a life-size human figure comes into view. It follows the cobblestones through the deserted streets. A child appears, a second follows, by the end there are close to forty. They start to sing. The Janus-headed marionette stops, turns its face inwards, and sets off again with a new, determined expression. The faces of the children are blurred by the superposition of images, forming an impermeable crowd, and for a moment it is unclear whether the children are compulsively following the marionette or whether they are pursuing it.
Your Pied Piper seems to me like a reversal of active and will-less subject. It is like a mechanical double that stands as a substitute for the split identity of its own personality. Can you tell me something about where the figure of the marionette came from?Your Pied Piper seems to me like a reversal of active and will-less subject. It is like a mechanical double that stands as a substitute for the split identity of its own personality. Can you tell me something about where the figure of the marionette came from?
’Originally, the marionettes were just part of large-scale dioramas that I made for a few exhibitions. It wasn’t until Children’s Crusade that I put them in front of the camera. The idea in the installations was to give a puppet human ticks, like a nervous twitch or walking on the spot. But the marionette in the film represents more of an absence, because although the strings holding the puppet can be seen, the person pulling them cannot.’
The invisible deus ex machina…
’…or an artifex ex machina.’
When you show the marionettes in an exhibition space, they are often dressed in ordinary men’s suits and are busy performing odd little actions: standing on a swing and rocking mechanically back and forth, equipped with small motors, or lifting one leg in a compulsive-obsessive rhythm. The viewer faces a remote-controlled other with minor neurotic ticks, so that one asks who is imitating whose compulsive gestures and extreme mental strain. For the video Children’s Crudsade, you deliberately chose the two-faced puppet, you gave it the name “Otto”, but you have also shown it on its own, for example at the last Berlin Biennial. What is it about the doppelganger or Jekyll and Hyde phenomenon?
‘I borrowed the principle from a Japanese netsuke figure of a monk who turns his head –a simple sphere – back and forth. One side is a sinister grimace and the other a very happy face. As with nearly all polycephalous figures, be it Janus or split personalities in literature, the monk has a face with two starkly contrasting sides. I wanted to build a puppet which has two alternate faces, but faces that do not differ to a significant degree. Not a figure that is good and evil, but one that simply has two sides.’
Is this marionette something like an alter ego?
‘No, it’s not an alter ego. There’s very little of me in it. And I don’t want to associate the puppet with anyone in particular.’
So is there something of the irreducible, eternal other – the other that is absolutely other – in these life-like figures?
‘You’re right, I am interested here in this irreducible other. It could be described as a Levinasian figure.’
With Lévinas, we encounter a face that can ‘assume liability for itself’ and that stands for ‘absolute authenticity’. At the same time, we also see in ‘Otto’ a figure that ‘loses face’, whose face turns into a grimace or a masquerade. An embodied ambiguity of the real, an uncanny impossibility. References from the field of psychoanalysis also appear in the Contortionists (2003), a series of large-format, densely atmospheric photographs of female bodies twisted in ecstasy. Like acrobats in exaggerated poses, the women sit, stand or lie in hotel interiors that recall fashion shoots and glossy magazines. They are reading books or looking out of the window. In Contortionists (Rachel), a woman dressed in a discreet suit and long white gloves lies with her back arched on the floor in a foyer or waiting room, the soundproofed door to the adjacent room stands open. The contorted form of the woman lying on the floor quotes the arc de cercle, the typical posture observed in photographic studies made at Salpetriére Hospital in Paris, diagnosed by Jean-Martin Charcot as a symptom of hysteria. What do you find interesting in the restaging of this pictorial quotation?
’The two photos are based on a similar premise – hysteria is a neurosis in which the mind forces the body to mirror it. The fact that this is not a particularly pleasant experience is readily apparent in the photographs from the Salpetriére. The Contortionists series was also based on the idea that the mind can do something like that to the body, but with a positive end result. For example, there are organs in our bodies that are incorruptible – no one has their laughter under control. If something is really funny, you just have to laugh! This was more or less where the idea for the twisted bodies of the Contortionists came from.’
Your distinctive mises-en-scène not only adapt motifs from psychoanalysis, they also associatively make links within cultural history, as well as referring to fashion, theatre and film. How do you operate in your artistic work with or across the dividing lines between disciplines?
’Probably like most people of my generation, my first cultural experiences were not with art but with other areas of cultural production. First one is interested in cinema, in music videos or in fashion, and an interest in art only comes much later. To exclude all that later on would be strange. If I am working on a dance production, for example, I don’t worry about dividing lines between different sytems. I don’t go beyond them, I’m afraid. I think that the “art system” doesn’t really have borders. Something becomes art when you find someone, if possible many people, who are prepared to treat this thing, this action, or whatever, as art. A claim is enough. Although that doesn’t mean that everything is equally good or interesting. But the system can be described in this way. Which is why this concept of dividing lines between systems has never got anyone very far in art. It would be better to speak of overlapping systems than about transgressing borders. But from my own experience, I know that attempts at overlapping are very demanding, because different fields are governed by different conventions, there are different historical developments, and works are treated differently.’
Nonetheless, your new film Ten in Love (2006), that was shown at Art Unlimited in Basel, strikes me as a good example of these, let’s say: cross-references. The film shows ten individuals in a vaguely futuristic, sparsely furnished space who have a series of individual encounters and interact via repeated non-semantic gestures. The movement between the protagonists recalls elements of contact improvisation, and at the same time, the individual processes have the feel of a scientific experimental set-up. The closed space and slow but steady circular motion of the camera turn the scene into a chamber piece, an exaggerated theatrical mise-en-scène. For your films, do you act as the director, the choreographer, the laboratory manager…?
’I can’t say exactly what I am most, it changes constantly in the course of a production. During the preparations I am probably most like a director, and then during shooting there were often moments when I felt like anything other than a director and longed to be back in my studio. For most of the projects, I work with highly specialized collaborators, people who are expert in and at very specific things. I’m not like that – if at all I’m a specialist in elusive fields.’
Your work featured in the last Berlin Biennial, whose focus on the big issues of life, death, pain and trauma seems to mark a certain trend away from discourse- and theory-oriented exhibition concepts. How would you position your works in the matrix formed by the production of theory, aesthetic mise-en-scène and essentialist experience?
’A few years ago, I wondered why certain topics had slipped out of current art discourse, and why I could think of a hundred artists from the late nineties who had done work on urbanism and modernism, but only very few good works on sex, pathos or the theatre. Now, just a few years later, the canon has changed considerably, and I am often appalled at the psycho-kitsch that is sometimes dished up. Unfortunately, this is also a problem for me, as some of my works also fit in this category, although they were developed in quite a different way – I see them more as disguised conceptual art than as ghost train art.’
Markus Schinwald is having solo exhibitions in the Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, 15 December 2006-28 January 2007 and MAMbo Galleria d’Arte Moderna of Bologna, 22 April-24 June 2007Markus Schinwald is having solo exhibitions in the Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, 15 December 2006-28 January 2007 and MAMbo Galleria d’Arte Moderna of Bologna, 22 April-24 June 2007
Christina Werner
