ART-PRESENTATION: Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz
Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz have collaborated since 1998. Their work often revisits materials form the past, usually photographs or films, referring to and excavating unrepresented or illegible moments of queerness in history. These works show embodiments, which are able to cross different times, but also draw relations between time to reveal possibilities for a queer futurity.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Van Abbemuseum Archive
The presentation “Normal Work & Toxic” is one of a number of projects at the Van Abbe in 2016 that examine queering as a methodology for engaging with the museum. In this presentation, two film installations by Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz are shown “Normal Work” (2007) and “Toxic” (2012). They are based on performances that examine the history of photography and its connection to sexuality and lived intimacies. In their work the artists critique the notion of identities as fixed that have limits in relation to others. The two film installations in this presentation approach this subject from a historical perspective. The starting point for “Normal Work” is the relationship between Hannah Cullwick (a servant in 19th Century Victorian England), her employers, and her lover Arthur Munby. The artists discovered Cullwick’s diaries, letters and a number of photographs in the Munby Archive at Trinity College. Cullwick shows herself not only as a maid, but also as a bourgeois lady, as a bourgeois man or as a male slave. Her muscular physique and rough dirty hands, as a result of the heavy work, played an important role in her relationship with Munby, with whom she conducted a sadomasochistic love affair. The photographs act as a crossing of the different codes of conduct of the time based on social class, race, and gender. 150 years later Werner Hirsch restages Cullwick’s poses in Normal Work, creating a dialogue between Cullwick, Hirsch, the directors and viewers of the film and relating Cullwick’s crossings to today’s neoliberal conditions of labour. In “Toxic”, the artists explore the concept of toxicity in relation to film/photography on the one hand and to sexuality on the other. The video starts with a series of re-enacted “mug shots,” a form of photography that has been used by the police since the 19th century in order to record, and therefore stigmatize, criminals, prostitutes, homosexuals, and people from the colonies, in short, those who deviate from the norm. Wearing masks, the subjects portrayed in Toxic make a mockery of this recording process. Boudry & Lorenz start from the premise that it could be useful to see not only substances, as toxic but filmic apparatus as well, its history since the 19th Century, its social effects, and the way with which we continue to work with it today. Toxins can kill, but also heal, provided they are administered in the correct doses. As the work progresses “Toxic” degenerates into a rebellion against the film protocol.
Info: Curator: Christiane Berndes, Van Abbemuseum, Bilderdijklaan 10, Eindhoven, Duration: 28/5-4/9/16, Days & Hours: Tue & Fri-Sun 11:00-17:00, Thu 11:00-21:00, http://vanabbemuseum.nl
