Sabine R
Artist, Cultural Scientist
H29 Aesthetic Forms
The Knowledges:
H- Culture
29- Culture
Participant No.17
Artist, Cultural Scientist
H29 Aesthetic Forms
The Knowledges:
H- Culture
29- Culture
Participant No.17
what kind of
AESTHETIC FORMS
would rF be?
AESTHETIC FORMS
would rF be?
ENGLISH VERSION:
Games of thought. A contribution to the artistic research project remontant Fury by Stevie Bothor.
"In my desk in Galle México, I keep the painting that someone will paint thousands of years from now, with substances that are still scattered all over the world today."
Jorge Luis Borges
In 1880, a patient escaped from the Salpetriére psychiatric institution where she was being held. Her medical records tell of traumatic family events, of an assault by her mother's lover, diagnosis: hysteria.
She escapes, disappears, goes into hiding and her fate is unknown. Her name was Augustine, she was a patient of the famous MonsieurJean Martin Charcot, who held the world's first chair neurology at the Höpital des Salpétriére in Paris, famous among other things for his studies on hysteria. The institution's practices included demonstrations in which hysterical patients were presented to an audience, whereby a hysterical seizure was provoked for demonstration purposes
using hypnosis and various dubious-looking stimulants. The stimulants included, for example, electric shocks or the so-called ovary press, a device with which the patient's ovaries are pressed in order to trigger a seizure. The events were not only of medical but also erotic interest to the exclusively to predominantly male audience.
It is not surprising that Augustine wanted to escape such treatment and it is also interesting how she managed to do so: She escaped disguised as a man.
What is the remontant Fury? When I thought about the term Fury, I inevitably thought of mythological figures, revenge figures, the Erinyes of the Unteo world, angry women in theater
and film, and involuntarily of hysteria with the attribution: the raging, the enraged woman. The Greek term hystera, uterus, refers to the bizarre idea from antiquity that the "hysterical
seizure" was due to the fact that if the uterus was not regularly supplied with male sperm, it would wander around the body and become trapped in the brain, causing the seizure to break
out. This theory was followed in medicine for hundreds of years, but it was only in the seventeenth century that doubts arose and it was Freud and Charcot who out in the nineteenth
century that the symptomatology of hysteria is a neurotic disorder, which can also be a disorder in men and has neurological and psychological causes.
The term hysteria was common in psychiatric jargon until 1980. Only then, one hundred years after Charcot, did the entry on hysteria disappear from the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual of Mentaí Disorder), the internationally used manual for mental disorders.
Remontant - blossoming again - there is a of the flower, women and flowers, a familiar connotation, how many women's names are flower names? Some women are angry about being
picked like flowers, as expressed more recently in the debate surrounding Eugen Gomringer's poem, which adorned a façade of the Alice Solomon Hochschule in Berlin and was denounced as a "classic patriarchal art tradition". Here, if you will, Furies appeared primarily as younger women who perceive themselves as sexualized. The activist type is found in such contexts. It is striking that women who appear as activists are often younger women who sometimes defend
themselves against oppressive images of women and rigid regimes by publicly exposing parts of their bodies.
These include, for example, the so-called bosom assassination attempt on Theodor Adorno in 1969 as well as performances by the Pussy Riots. Is the remontant fury also an activist?
My thoughts are guided by images. Augustine has escaped the Salpêtriére in men's clothes. A second image moves in front of it. It is the woman in a trouser suit. Preferred clothing for business or politics. The woman has disappeared into the men's clothing. To enter the male sphere, she has to don the garments of manhood.
But what is a woman?
The woman smiles, shows herself in beautiful dresses, with fluttering skin. For centuries, women have been defined by their bodies. A woman gives birth. A woman is like a flower. A woman has a period. Is a woman more defined by biology than a man? Not all women bear children. And some women also give birth and rule empires, run businesses, go to war, build houses, dive in the deep sea, are doctors, pilots, repair fences or teeth. They always have been. Why does a woman have more bodies than a man? And why does her body disappear
when she ages? How do women perceive themselves? Is she tired of being a body?
The actions of activists like Pussy Riot are basically paradoxical. Physical exposure, nudity is supposed to draw attention to the female body because it is about the female body. The action exposes soil by placing the exposure in a different context and thus becoming a subjective, aggressive act that denounces the objectification of the female body. However, the angry naivety still serves common patriarchal and erotic clichés, from which one cannot escape, precisely because the body is also used here. The debates about sexualization and harassment are mainly about young bodies.
It's obvious why. As women age, they notice how sexual interest in them wanes. Not everyone finds this bad. Many are relieved that they are no longer whistled at on the street. But if the role of women is culturally defined to a large extent in physical terms, this can become problematic. The “faded" woman, the older woman, is no longer sexualized, so she disappears, she becomes invisible.
Thinking like this, an old activist who exposes herself is obsolete.
So the old flower is not an activist? Or is ? What can make her angry? Her invisibility? That's why Fury? An angry woman. A second blossom of fury. Fury- blossoms. (Zornesblüten)
The remontant Furîe is an imaginary figure, a detic figure. She is still more of a blind . Empty position.
What can I say about her?
As a hysterical person, Augustine was an object. The objectified, the prefigured female body. There are countless photographs and drawings from the nineteenth century showing hysterical women. In the Salpêtriére, photographs were taken for scientific purposes. These images are also
aesthetic products and can be studied as such. Of course, they not only show what is depicted, but also reflect the photographer's gaze. It is interesting to note that the gestures and facial expressions of the women depicted also reflect common aesthetic criteria of representation from art and stage performance; the pathology here mirrors the art, the women make use of the means of expression even in morbid agony.
forms that they have learned culturally. TOn the other hand, actresses have studied the photographs of the diseased in order to rehearse dramatic gestures.1
It is easy to understand that photographs and images are aestheticproducts, as we have learned. But human art is also imprinted with an aesthetic appearance by its respective culture. But here it remains historically or presently.
When I play with the figure of thought, it becomes clear that I am dealing with a figure of the future. There are no products, no material, no aesthetic forms that I could investigate. I have to resort to aesthetic imagination. This is where I start. The character is invisible. Does that make her a fury? Because she wants to be visible?
An angry figure of the future* A figure of revenge? The woman in the trouser suit? I imagine the older woman, the ageing one. Wrinkled, gnarled, dry, concave shapes. Wonderfully beautiful like an old tree. A tree instead of a flower. I wander into the imaginary. The figure, coming from being an Object must become the subject. She must become visible. It can't be the woman in the trouser suit. The suit does not indicate her independence, only her conformity. The figure is subjective and connect to everything, like a forest. She finds new aesthetic forms of expression.
Perhaps there are approaches that still need to be read.
Let's take Augustine. The historical Augustine escaped psychiatry. That's all know. Her fate is unknown. She was young, in her teens. It is to be feared that she suffered a so-called "women's fate", that things did not go well for her. But what if she did? Perhaps she is the character we are looking
for. Resilient, inexperienced, but undaunted. She gets better. She grows from her experiences, finds her . She lives, ages ....
...and it has become a subject in 2021.
1 ' Vgl.Eva Wilson: Watch your atitude, younglady .the idea of the histrionic woman and the hysteria of the beautiful soul. In: ilinx 2, Mimesen, ed. Institute for Cultural Sciences Humboldt University Berlin, 2011.