Kerstin Cmelka

Austrian artist Kerstin Cmelka explores the way art's icons are alive to the present.

Kerstin Cmelka is a visual artist who works primarily with photography, film and oil paintings from photos. Her recent works source film stills, film-production stills and documentation of performances, such as those of VAIAE EXPORT. While many of her works show subjects that were originally intended to provoke emotional extremes, Cmelka avoids indulging in the emotionally charged portrayal of her selected subjects by deregulating their original readings. Her subtle reworking of found materials brings new relevance to her subject matter, or offers a new reading of its existing qualities. Cmelka's recent exhibitions include the 2nd Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, (2007); Overtake, at the Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Ireland, (2007); and the last Busan Biennale (2006). She lives in Berlin.

SHANNON BOOL Maybe we could start by you telling me what your starting point is in the works that you've recently made, Multistability (2006) and the Re-actions on VALIE EXPORT (2006). Can you tell me what interests you in the original materials?

KERSTIN CMELKA Mostly it is an image that I see several times that keeps on preoccupying me in one way or another. The VALIE EXPORT photos, for instance, are images I've known since I was a child and that have always had an effect on me. If some images always reoccur in my head--sometimes there are years in between--and if I keep wanting to look them up again and again, then I will start to work with them in a more analytical way. The way I use them, or the new work that comes out of them, is decided afterwards.

SB How would you describe this relationship to using the images as being analytical?

KC I mean to use an artistic method to deal with material that is not your own. So I don't mean analytical in a scientific sense, but more at first being attracted to something in an emotional sense, and then trying to find the parameters that attract you, the parameters that affect other people--why do these images exist, or how they are regarded as a part of a collective knowledge?

KC Yeah, your starting point is your own attraction, and then you start to think about perception in general. In German, you call it "intersubjektiv"--you know, something that happens to you, but can also be shared with other people.

SB Intersubjectivity.

KC Yeah, intersubjectivity. And this is always to me the kind of parameter that makes something valuable enough to be an artwork, the question of it having enough intersubjectivity, or better: if it is able to create a new intersubjectival perception.

SB A lot of the materials you use are often very highly charged with emotion.

KC Yes.

SB So, for example, in the Multistability works, everything functions on very specific plains of affect. Can you talk a bit about the concept of multistability?

KC It's a term from cognitive psychology where the perception of an object can switch in an unstable manner from one thing to another. Pop back and forth from one thing to another. Different interpretations.

SB The old woman, the young woman.

KC Yes, that is the easiest example. Images where you have two images in one and most people see just one image in the first case. Once you know there should be another one, you really concentrate on the image; and then maybe after a while you see the second image.

I read that in this moment where your perception switches from one image to the other, what actually happens in that moment is not clear. It has been researched on people. While looking at a multistable image, their brain functions and their eye positions were measured. But every time a person said, "Ahhh, now I see it, now I see that other image," there was no change in the brain functions

SB Like they knew it already.

KC I don't know the explanation for that. But what is interesting is that you can't measure that switch, even though people experience it.

SB For example, in Multistability #2 (2006) you have this portrait of a woman, who has a rose balanced on her head, or did you balance it on her head?

KC No, it looks manipulated or Photoshopped, but it is the actual film still; it's "real."

SB It is an Antonioni film?

KC No, it's Fellini, I think it's called Juliet and the Ghosts (1965) in English.

SB Right right. So going through some film stills, you pick one that has a woman who is also in a very ambiguous pose, where on the one hand, her breasts are coming out of the picture and her tongue is coming out of her mouth, it's completely seductive, but then there is the rose balanced on the top of her head, which formally blocks her sexuality into the picture frame. Then you have the two-sided photograph, Multistability #1 (2006), which you informally refer to as the "psyche," in reference to the old Austrian term for furniture, such as a dressing table, that is inset with a full-length mirror. Your "psyche" has a portrait of Luchino Visconti's mother on each side that could, theoretically, be spun around.

It's interesting because many of your works seem to stem from you growing up in Austria. You haven't lived there for about eight years, have you?

KC Ten years now. I think with those Austrian topics it's similar to what I said earlier, it's maybe something that affected me in my childhood, or in my youth, and then later when I was in Germany and studying art, interests in art came into my head that somehow linked to old interests that I had as a child, or as a teenager, but at that time--that sounds a little bit romantic-I didn't have any form of expression for these things.

SB Yeah, that's what I mean. That's where that kind of ambiguity comes in. For example take another work that was in your artist book, Extra (2006), which you took from the biggest archival book about Viennese Actionism.

KC Yeah, the book that VALIE EXPORT and Peter Weibel published and which was banned.

SB It's not in print anymore?

KC No, it hasn't been for years.

SB So you went to a friend of yours who lives in Vienna, borrowed the book from him and took this photo of a woman's bottom, and there is a flower propped between her thighs.

KC Yes, a poppy between her upper legs. It's actually a close-up I made from a documentation photo of an Otto Muhl performance. In the actual photo you see more of the woman. You can see all of her legs, and you also see a man with a 16mm Bolex camera filming her.

SB So, in the original you see that it's part of a performance?

KC Yes. But you just see part of his head, and the Bolex, so it's a very cliched photo. You have this photo of the woman with the flower stuck between her upper legs, and then you have the 16 mm Bolex, which symbolizes a weapon, and half of the male face filming ... I thought it was too easy, too funny, so I did the close-up, I manipulated it. Do you say "adapt", to take something and ...?

SB Appropriate?

KC No, that's not the word I am looking for. Appropriating something, it's like, come on, the original is fucked up anyways, and the original is so cliched you can't believe it, so to just say appropriating is too thin, it's adapting it, in that case.

SB Also, in other Multistability photos, you took a still of a woman lying on a bed, and you tilted the still 90 degrees, so the woman was lying vertically, as opposed to horizontally. This can bring to mind Rosalind Krauss' idea about Dali's work, The Phenomenon of Ecstasy (1933), where the photos of the women were tilted ...

KC From a vertical to a horizontal position ...

SB And then they looked like illustrations of hysteria ...

KC Exactly.

SB So when you tilted the photo in the opposite direction--horizontally to vertically--it changed the viewer's perception of the woman from one of lying on a bed, suffering, to a position where maybe she is laughing or in a state of ecstasy.

KC With that photo, what was so thrilling for me was that it was the first photo that I found where the technique of a simple tilt worked--where I didn't have this feeling that it was just a photo turned upsidedown. A different expression became visible through the tilt that was as strong as the expression in the original photo.

SB Well you very carefully map out how large you make a work, how you cut the work, how you frame the particular expression you're showing--also if you're working with dancers that aren't professional or in the theatre, which is work that you also do. That also connects to what you did with VALIE EXPORT and her performances that she did in public in the 60s and 70s, which at the time were very revolutionary in a feminist sense. But then you made what you termed Re-actions.

KC Actually you called them Re-actions, and I then used the term because I liked it [laughs].

SB You really took the political value of her performances out of the photos.

KC In a way, yes. VALIE EXPORT--she will kill me if she hears this comparison now--she had something else to express as well, and somehow used and then later transformed the format of the Viennese Actionists that she'd been initiated into.

SB So, when you did your Re-actions, you chose a lot of the more obscure performances that she did, but you also used her most famous performances; you can't avoid Action Pants: Genital Panic (1969), Touch Cinema (1968), Portfolio of Doggedness (1968).

KC That's because my work was more about the iconic character of the documentary photos than about the actions or performances themselves. And that's why I wanted to make a book about it, because you learn these things through books, but sooner or later there will be nobody who was there when they happened. Today, those photos might have become more and more similar to photos from other contexts. If you didn't know anything about VALIE EXPORT today, you could also think these documentary photos were showing a film star from a strange 60s Austrian avant-garde movie. You may just get a feeling of attitude and style, things like that. Still, there is the iconic effect coming from them. This was interesting for me.

SB There is the iconic effect, but also the affect, and this is something that I thought was a great tension in that work, that when you look at the photos of VALIE EXPORT, she looks a lot like a film-noir star. We can't deny there is something very sexy about her representation, and when you learn more about her performances, like in Action Pants, where she was sitting in a cinema, got up and walked through a row of people with a machine gun and with the crotch cut out of her pants, that she was very aware of her power as a ...

KC Female performer?

SB As a female performer. And this is something you really unravelled or deconstructed in your portrayal of her.

KC I didn't play out these sexy parts too much. They have another value today. What she achieved was coming from Actionist art. You remember the poppy and the woman's ass filmed by a male cameraman? And the Viennese Actionists, I mean, all the wives of those artists didn't have any function other than maybe something similar to starring in an Yves Klein performance. Of course it's great what the Actionists did, but still you can't say that they were dealing with female artists at all. VALIE EXPORT brought herself into the pool of Viennese Actionism, using many parameters of that movement, but she brought a different reading to it. The first action, the Portfolio of Doggedness, was totally performed for the camera. The photos of the Viennese Actionists are all documentation photos, but the actions took place whether there was a camera or not. That was not what it was about with EXPORT, where the action is clearly made for the camera. She had other ideas and a different character, I would say, and because of that she used her sexiness and her aura as tools.

SB Well, she was very conscious of herself as a commodity.

KC Yeah, but she also had fun with that, I think.

SB Yeah, sure.

KC There was something unclear in a good way. Everybody could have said, "Wow, she's showing her tits." Of course she was more than aware that people would think about her that way. She also has star qualities and that is the great thing about her work. I'm sometimes angry about the reception, because at the time she gave titles like Touch Cinema and called it the first real feminist film, or called Action Pants: Genital Panic a film. She always liked to have really one-way readings and titles. I think that was necessary at the time, but then feminists in the 80s only talked about her as being the super feminist of that time; it's just not entirely true.

SB Why not?

KC It's only one line of interpretation, not dealing with anything else that is in the performance; for example, that it is maybe totally contradictory or ambiguous within the parameters of feminism, at least in the 80s. Sure, it's a feminist work, I would never deny that, but it's not only a feminist work, it's a female work.

SB Do you think in your Re-actions you are lending an experience that wasn't allowed in the original performance, or wasn't permitted in the 60s? You were talking about how Actionism was able to accept VALIE EXPORT and her method of making feminist films, largely due to the fact she was working on their terms. Do you think that elements present in your photos were missing before? Like how you hone in on fragile aspects of the performance?

KC No. I think I showed moments where you have to focus somehow. I would guess that EXPORT experienced this, too. I mean when she went out with that thing, the Touch Cinema box, I can't imagine she wasn't standing nervously in the staircase of her apartment waiting for the performance to start.

SB I know. Maybe my question is too much of a moral one. I mean it's more a question of whether you think these fragile details should have been let in before?

KC Okay, now I understand. No, they couldn't have been let in before--of course not. It wouldn't have worked. Because then she would have been a vulnerable woman trying to show her tits in public.

I thought the same thing about the Portfolio of Doggedness. Of course she must have been really tough to do that at that time, when artists in Vienna were arrested for actions that were far more harmless. But I think there must have been those moments of focusing and exact timing for what had to happen in the next moment, and also nervousness. That is the reason why I did those preparatory photos, too, or invented documentation photos, like the photo of me exiting the tram before the Portfolio of Doggedness actually started. You know? The one where you always talk about my "spaced-outness".

Shannon Bool is a Canadian artist who lives in Berlin. Her work has been most recently exhibited in the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, Herald St. in London, and Buchmann Gallery in Berlin. She is represented by Galerie Iris Kadel in Karlsruhe, Germany.