Well not quite. But as I shook the hand of Katharina Sieverding this evening, I felt some kind of line if not lineage. Invisible line, threadlike, quantum-level vinculum. Two greats and a nought.
I didn't know what to say, really. I can't really explain it either, the desire to make contact. I wanted to press the flesh of she who is the person behind, inside the image that she has worked so often. Because tonight in a small lecture/presentation she was in person, not the image, but the image-maker and she was accessible, even if I had nothing to say except that it was an honor to meet her.
An honor to meet you, Katharina Sieverding.
Transformer, a multi-slide projection of blended images of Sieverding and Klaus Metting created in 1973, is part of a show of early media art from the SFMoMA collections. On all four walls of a rectagular room multiple large portraits appear, disappear, with slight variations, blend, him, her, the third other: mutations and metamorphosis. It was the reason for the lecture/presentation which included a half-hour reel, a mini film retrospective of her work beginning with her documentation of Beuys happenings through her self-portraits to China films and beyond.
The theme of deconstruction and reconstruction of identity she has explored again and again over the years, her own visage reworked, painted gold, colorized, blown out, oxidized, repeated, repeated, repeated. And then there she was in person and she wore ... her face.
After 40 years, death would come into it too, you'd suppose. And it does. This last image is from an installation at Köln Art Fair, 2002.
In an interview with Harald Fricke, she talks about the on-going tradition of gender-work:
This possibility of changing gender identity is very popular, even among people of various generations somehow interested in the idea of reincarnation for whatever reason; it creates a general sense of relaxation – away from competing identities and towards individual responsibility. That’s a future model… Seen in social and technological terms, Transformer from 1973/74 is an expression of self-perception that does not exclude the other, and is a model for integration.
This work, she says, is a "deconstruction of the male in art’s dominion," which in German is a deconstructive play on words: "Kunst-Herr-Schaft" = "Kunst (art) "Herr" (lord or sir) in "Herrschaft" (dominion).
Of course there is more going on for her besides an exploration of gender and identity (if that weren't enough). Her large-scale photos grew larger, and in the nineties, went public. Her work, Deutschland wird deutscher (Germany is getting more German), depicting herself in a circus knife-throwing act, was presented on 500 billboards in and around Berlin. "The 'larger than life' idea resulted out of an interest in using my own artistic production," she says, "to investigate the entire complex of mass media and popular culture, film and optical technology and then to 'develop' them in these 'spaces.'" She's working similar cultural zones as Warhol and like him, her work is recognizable, distinctive.
What I wished I'd been able to see was more of her films. This description from the press release from her show Close Up at PS1 in 2006 has to suffice.
While a visiting professor at the China Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou/Shanghai, Katharina Sieverding produced the film, Shanghai, 2002/2003. Never before seen in the US, the film, comprised of two five-minute loops, document (extra)ordinary street life in and around Shanghai. The first loop, Hongmeilu, which was shot in slow motion in a postmodern Shanghai suburb, depicts two private security guards as they follow a man, throw him into a hedge, and remove and discard his shoes. Unmoving, the fallen man lies there while a white-gloved guard confiscates his papers. The second loop, Nanjing, Road, takes place at night in one of the most infamous shopping malls in all of Shanghai; it portrays a crowd of Chinese workers as they systematically dispose of a fashion boutique's entire inventory. The merchandise is piled high into the center of the store. The very next day the store is transformed into a clinic for cosmetic surgery.
Here's looking forward to a West Coast survey of her work.
*images courtesy of Art Candy, ArtNet, and Reloading Images
