A Life of Their Own

A female figure protrudes from the wall, her gaze fixed firmly ahead, like a hunting trophy. She wears a reflective suit of armour, loosely entwined with a rope from which various objects hang. Magdalena Frauenberg works with scanned images of Renaissance busts, which she physically transforms, expands and transfers into the present, thereby appropriating historical forms in many different ways.

While reinterpretation or reworking are less common in art, staging is an inseparable part of the essence of the performative. In her essay ‘Writing Bodies in Space’, the American theatre and film studies researcher Francesca Coppa explores the transformative power that lies in the adaptation of an original. She writes: ‘In theatre, there‘s no assumption that the first production will be definitive; … we want to see your Hamlet and his Hamlet and her Hamlet; to embody the role is to reinvent it.’(1).

Remix, sampling, citation or transformation require both an understanding of the original and an audience that is familiar with the attributions and histories of objects and symbols. This view ‘on’ something is united in Frauenberg‘s relationship to the original and the replica. Her sculptures unite various images of the ‘ideal woman’ and the domesticated body across the centuries. Her works combine charged objects with the moulding and shifting of power of the female body.

Every representation of the supposedly feminine draws on earlier stagings: ‘All behaviour, as Richard Schechner (2002) explains, consists of recombining bits of previously behaved behaviors.’(2) Coppa writes, using a quote from performance theorist Richard Schechner. The person who has perfected this adaptation and recycling of cultural codes is the international marketing icon Kim Kardashian, who adapts seamlessly to beauty trends and the changing looks of her respective partners. In ‘Shellbreak’, she steps out of the advertising space of Anna Stüdeli‘s collaged wall sculpture facing the viewer.

In her practice, Stüdeli takes advertising spaces from the public space as a starting point, which she documents photographically in order to reunite them in collages. Her mimetic advertising panels take visual habits as their starting point, which she subverts through targeted editing. Using decollage techniques, she combines different motifs to create new, sensually aggressive compositions.

Although the transformative works of both are in a state of reference back to their original, they do not remain dependent on their source. Stüdeli and Frauenberg draw on existing objects and expand them into presentation surfaces. By forcibly breaking open their supposedly perfect surface, a new level is created on which not only different times come together. They offer their multimedia collages as a setting in which representation, seduction, defence and vulnerability meet, with destruction and creation inextricably interwoven.

— Katrin Krumm

Sources:
(1) Francesca Coppa: ‘Writing bodies in Space: Media Fan Fiction as Theatrical Performance’, in: The Fan Fiction Studies Reader, Karen Hellekson & Kristina Busse, 2014, University of Iowa Press