It breathes. Yet. But the features are getting weaker and weaker, the tent-like structure slowly but surely collapses before it inflates room-high again. Alexandra Bircken created this oversized installation called “Lunge” before the pandemic. But it is so close to the danger of suffocation from Covid-19 and the fear that the sight is almost physically painful.
You walk through such an exhibition by a contemporary artist with different eyes, a different body feeling than would have been the case two years ago. Which is interesting in this case, because Alexandra Birckens has now devoted herself to the art of body experience presented in the Brandhorst Museum in Munich. Mostly it is fabrics, ropes, threads or latex strips that appear organic. Cut and stretched nylon stockings hang on the wall like a hunter’s skins, and they trigger exactly this unpleasant association of a possible shedding.
Bircken presents her own placenta plus umbilical cord as a scientific exhibit
Bircken is interested in skin as that which holds the body together, protects it, but also makes it vulnerable. Whereby her approach is not deep psychological as with the French-American soul artist Louise Bourgeois and also not sensually exuberant as with the Brazilian Ernesto Neto. At Bircken, a nylon stocking is first and foremost a stocking and not an invitation to touch or grasp a person. The artist used to design fashion, but her focus is still primarily on the material and its properties.
Alexandra Bircken’s image of a vagina: “Trophy”, 2016.
(Photo: Photo: Roman März, Berlin./// Alexandra Bircken, Courtesy BQ, Berlin and Herald St, London.)
Sometimes Bircken goes all out in a very unsymbolic way and equips her sculptures with – mostly blond – human hair, which she combines with skis or other everyday objects. Or she exhibits her own placenta plus umbilical cord, with the title “L’Origin du monde”, origin of the world, named after Gustave Courbet’s scandalous image of female shame from 1866. With the body product, she counters this with a female creation of her own, as she did before Since the early modern period, the motherly creativity of childbirth has been compared and weighed against the creation of artificial figures in the studio.
There is little evidence of female self-empowerment; old gender clichés still rule
But Bircken’s art does not come across as a hopeful female self-assertion. The bodies in this pictorial world are dressed up. The placenta, for example, is a medical preparation like the one found in old university collections, reified for science and posterity. The pickled lump does not tell what a birth feels like. Not even the molds of the artist’s vagina cast in nickel silver have something lively, some of which are reminiscent of a chastity belt. However, the masculine power symbols in the show are no better off. Car gear sticks hang on the wall like limp trophies, rifles have been cut up and made unusable. And the many motorcycle suits in the exhibition end up stuffed in the corner or nailed to the wall as if after a nasty rear-end collision.
Alexandra Bircken: “RSV 4”, 2020.
(Photo: Photo: Roman März, Berlin. / Courtesy the artist, BQ, Berlin and Herald St, London.)
It should be noted that many of the works are older, created for the taste in the first few years of this century. The contrary gender clichés are strange from today’s point of view, fluid identities are not yet here en vogue. To be constantly motorized with noise and stench is still considered in this art as a high ideal that has to be deconstructed – and not as an already outdated idea, which can now be followed by something new, different. And calling a collage of cut black nylon stockings “Black Skin” might not be as lightly as it was in 2012 – in between there is a debate about how white artists deal with the suffering of blacks, whether they empathize or rather have a good deal in mind.
But that’s the way it is, not every single work by every artist ages well in the face of rapid social change. There are also pieces in this show that still leave you feeling cold today. For example, Bircken has replaced the noble wooden lattice above the floor ventilation of the museum with chicken bones in a cabinet: Death is there, and it is not made more aesthetic by industrial breeding, in which the animals were reified and killed in large numbers. In such moments, reality moves into the museum, drastically and not particularly subtle, but also above any repression.
And where is that going? Alexandra Bircken gives no answers to that. She is not a visionary, does not feast on wild utopias, but minutely dissects what everyday phenomena she finds. This is touching and revealing at times. But in 2021 it will no longer be enough to understand the present and perhaps finally shape it.
Alexandra Bircken: AZ, until January 16 in the Brandhorst Museum in Munich, www.museum-brandhorst.de. Catalog (Hatje Cantz): 48 euros.