Pleasure Lab: Weirdness and Decadence in the Work of Renate Bertlmann
Guest post: Dr. Eirini Kartsaki, East 15 Acting School
Fig. 1: Renate Bertlmann, Knife Breast (1975). Copyright: Renate Bertlmann / Bildrecht Vienna.
These knife-breasts are impossible to caress. They exist in different realms of feeling or touch. These knives repeat elsewhere. On pacifiers, on fingers, on other extremities. Soft surfaces and scalpels. 312 perfectly symmetrical roses with knives protruding out of them. It does not matter that we are unable to touch or embrace. These thorns are necessary. A thousand razor cuts if you are not careful, a slit on the skin, an opening up, a wounded surface that becomes something else. But, some softness is necessary. Some other land is seen from here. A game for children but with adult consequences. A moment of relevance. A sharing of sorts, a quieting down (fig. 1).
Another scene: two hands, fingers, extremities, looking for something. These extremities, fingers, hands, are not just appearing as the edges of the body. They are also performing an extremity themselves; they are sharp and pointy, blades that can sever the skin or surface. Fingers themselves are covered in soft latex, what looks like milk bottle nipples. Something soft and hard. Eager fingers existing at a limit ‘of art or the social, of bodily integrity and comfort’.[1] Existing at a limit is here once again uncomfortable, revealing a potential of what can take place, marking a boundary, beyond which something exists. Although there is no harmed body, no scar, no scraping, something is still exercised, identified, overcome. A sense of rupture is alluded towards, rupture of flesh and feeling. Something opening up (fig. 2).
Welcome to the pleasure lab. Within this space, I explore weirdness, extremity and a sense of againstness as elements of a performance of decadence. This is a guided tour. I will take you through works by Austrian avant-garde artist Renate Bertlmann, who makes ambivalent performances, installations and objects that discuss sex, motherhood, risk and pleasure. Amongst her well-known material is the use of pacifiers on the fingers, on the face or head, and also the use of knives that protrude out of fingers, pacifiers or breasts. Bertlmann often uses these objects alongside similarly shaped objects, such as condoms that are ambivalent in their use and function. This convergence of sex, references to motherhood, pain and pleasure, and the focus on how the body feels, reacts or takes responsibility, seems to make a proposition: that it is possible to demand everything. To demand from ourselves and others that both our utterances and silences are heard, that we are allowed to enjoy both taking care and taking risks, that our unrelenting desires can be exhausting, but also gratifying in this balancing act.
Fig. 2: Renate Bertlmann, Knife Pacifier Hands – Ambivalences (1981). Copyright: Renate Bertlmann / Bildrecht Vienna.
In her recent representation of Vienna at the Venice Biennale (2019), Bertlmann exhibits 312 red roses made out of glass, perfectly symmetrical, in the atrium of the Austrian Pavilion, an installation entitled Discordo Ergo Sum (fig. 3); each rose is pierced by the blade of a scalpel. Similarly, in Knife Pacifier Hands (fig. 2), Bertlmann wears pacifiers, threateningly pierced with blades, that are protruding from each finger. In this blog post, I discuss Bertlmann’s work with a focus on her 1977 performance action Deflorazione in 14 Stazioni that took place in the Communal Museum of Modern Art in Bologna, which is, as the title suggests, a simple action in 14 stations (fig. 4). In it, Bertlmann wears a garment that has breasts attached to it with a blade coming out of each nipple. She appears behind a long piece of thin, white paper that extends across the gallery walls. We can see her body from the waist down. A horizontal slit is made on the paper, like a c-section. Strange fingers like tentacles emerge from the slit, wearing pacifiers. The hands move in a way that feels slow and meditative, but also aggressive. The scalpels slash the paper at each station and eventually the arms can be seen too. The sheet is torn more and more and blood can be seen on the fingers, until we are finally able to see the knife-breasts and the rest of the body in the final station, but not the face.
Fig. 3: Renate Bertlmann, Discordo Ergo Sum (2019). Austrian Pavilion, Biennale Arte 2019, Venice. Photo: Sophie Thun. Courtesy of the Richard Saltoun Gallery, London / Renate Bertlmann, Vienna.
What is this fascination with protrusions entering and exiting the body, the fingers, the breasts, working hard to penetrate, foresee, give pleasure? Some of them sting or harm the skin. Others transcend a boundary, move further than imagined. This feels like an exercise of trying something out, a new move, which oscillates and teeters. In this movement, back and forth, in this balancing act, an ambivalence is performed. Something weird is taking place. Something that is difficult to articulate in the first instance. Mark Fisher, in his book The Weird and the Eerie (2016), suggests that we can call ‘weird’ that which does not belong, an ‘exorbitant presence, a teeming which exceeds our capacity to represent it’.[2] Weirdness here appears as an ambivalence or a place of experimentation, a pleasure lab; a workshop in which the limits of pain and pleasure are tested. In the heart of this lies the desire to have access to everything we find enjoyable, or to take pleasure in things that we are not yet able to articulate, or that exceed our capacity to represent them. In other words, we are able to demand those things from ourselves and others: to demand the multiplicity, the uncertainty, the ambiguity, and to be existing with these things existing together. These things may not belong together; they may seem weird at first. But demanding these is a step towards embracing the weirdness of things that do not belong, but also our multiple and ever-changing desires. In this pleasure lab, each finger, rose, breast, and piercing demands something; all together, they demand everything.
What is performed here is a strange ambivalence about desire, pain and pleasure, tenderness and violence, attraction and repulsion, protrusions and openings, the real and the imagined, the possible and the impossible. This ambivalence has something to do with excess, with the imagined possibility of leaning in, into these fingers, these extensions, these extremities. Dominic Johnson recognises this space in what he calls the performance of extremity, which ‘enables or requires an excessive route of imagination, then feels out the borders and boundaries of the possible and the impossible.’[3] This type of work shows us the borders of the possible, and therefore alludes towards the impossible. It speaks to what is not enough or too much, endeavouring ‘to engage, anatomise and finally overcome one’s limits as a maker, viewer, critic’.[4] Extremity, also, has to do, for Johnson, with ‘the extremities of the body, of fingers, toes or genitals – the pieces of oneself that interpenetrate with other bodies and objects in the sensible world, often sensually or painfully, when they slip inside or get succoured, snagged, sliced or severed by autonomous things outside ourselves, are licked or fondled, caught in machinery or trapped in doors’.[5] These extremities, in Bertlmann’s work, are addressed, manipulated, adorned, experimented with. They are extended, disguised, caressed. They are human, non-human, plant; they derive from the earth and extend beyond it. They penetrate, protrude, disappear and re-appear to continue their work, inside or outside of themselves. In this weird, balancing act of extremities, Bertlmann offers the proposition that engaging with one’s limit may show us what we do not yet know about pleasure.
Fig. 4: Renate Bertlmann, Deflorazione in 14 Stazioni - Performance (1977). Photo: Roberto Vidali.
Weirdness can also be seen as ‘a place for potentially radical disarticulations and reformulations of traditional binaries, starting with self and other’, according to Timothy Morton.[6] This disarticulation of the self opens space for defiant, weird desires. Bertlmann’s multi-layered objects and garments demand a right to pleasure. All of these characteristics seem to define what author Julia Skelly has named ‘radical decadence’ in examples of feminist artists’ work, such as Tracey Emin or Mickalene Thomas. Radical decadence encompasses not only excess, but also women ‘seeking after and experiencing pleasure’.[7] While Skelly positions decadence within a feminist context, decadence historically has been seen as primarily male, and exclusionary of female subjectivity. Skelly proposes radical decadence as a productive framework for the study of feminist works ‘that address issues related to consumption, drug use, female sexuality, self-fashioning, and “excessive” living more generally’.[8] ‘Excess’ and ‘decadence’, in this context, are not synonymous; they are but overlapping concepts.[9] In this feminist context, radical decadence has to do with assuming agency, being self-reflexive, and refusing to always fit within prescribed notions of living, thinking and taking pleasure. This space of againstness or refusal to fit in connects to the performance of extremity that interrogates boundaries, but also encourages us, as viewers, to question our own limits. Excess and decadence, in their preoccupation with extremity, desire, hedonism and a fascination with destruction, point towards this exploration of boundaries. However, 19th century decadence had similar preoccupations with excess, alcohol consumption, pleasure and non-normative sexualities.
Fig. 5: Renate Bertlmann, Deflorazione in 14 Stazioni - Performance (1977). Photo: Roberto Vidali.
Decadence in its historical context was also interested in weirdness, in moving beyond the familiar, creating a spectacle or shocking the audience. For instance, the Anglo-Dutch artist Laurence Alma-Tadema, in his 1888 painting The Roses of Heliogabalus, depicts an orgy organised by the Emperor Heliogabalus, who has become closely associated with the decadence of Ancient Rome thanks to his imperial biography chronicled in the Augustan History, among other sources. The painting depicts a banquet, which takes place amongst an abundance of rose petals that overfill the room and keep pouring as guests become more and more drunk through the night. Of course, some sources argue that Alma-Tadema was not painting Romans at all, but rather Victorians in togas, yet the excess that characterised the Roman Empire was distinctive and memorable. This kind of decadence is related to extreme pleasure, but also to strangeness and unfamiliarity, to that which is ‘new, strange, disquieting or immoral’, according to Wendell Harris.[10] This decadent scene also seems to depict a pleasure lab, in which all desires are welcome and explored. While the context of nineteenth-century decadence or that of Ancient Rome are far removed from twentieth-century feminist avant-garde art practices, decadence seems to bring together excessive desire, radicality and weirdness in a fruitful and dynamic way. In Bertlmann’s work, the misogynist decadent desire is reconfigured to address female desire that takes risks and challenges the norm. Hedonic excess becomes part of the discussion, which places the emphasis on the search for pleasure as a deviant mode of resistance to a male-centred discourse. The scalpels protruding out of fingers, breasts or roses are read as distinctively female symbols of excess and weird longing. Pleasure specifically has to do with strangeness, here, and the space to explore pleasure is precisely this laboratory. Pleasure then in strangeness, things not quite fitting together or exceeding our ability to represent them. Pleasure in things we cannot describe, an exorbitant presence which can only be articulated in this space. Decadence then becomes ‘more a way of thinking than a moment in time’.[11] It has much more to do with an approach to economies of desire, than a narrow historical framework. It is ‘a stimulant that bends thought out of shape, deforming traditional conceptual molds’ and questioning what we know.[12] Decadence, in this context, connects with and makes space for an exploration of weird, excessive desires, which may have to do with what is ‘too much as well as not enough’. [13] This is what extremity dramatizes, according to Johnson: the challenge to push our limits and move beyond the permitted and prescribed.[14]
In the contexts I’m addressing, weirdness is connected to excess or the process of exceeding a boundary, which are also features of decadence. There is a clear hedonism throughout Bertlmann’s work, coupled with a fascination with tools of destruction. Both of these elements, alongside weirdness as a place for reformulation of desire work to develop deviant modes of resistance against social normativity that often sees female pleasure interlinked with tenderness, singularity and lucidity. However, Bertlmann’s work shows the ambivalence of desire, which becomes clearer within a space of creative exploration, a pleasure lab. Within that, we encounter a series of tools of destruction that have the potential to harm; yet, physical pain is not necessarily the point here, but rather the expansion of what we know as pleasure, the moving beyond what is permitted in the social or personal context and the discovery of what, truly, feels exciting and moves us. This is what leads me to propose that the convergence of hedonism (a permission to move beyond what we know) and ambivalence (an insistence on exceeding prescribed boundaries and reformulating desire) constitutes a weird aesthetics of decadence, which is distinctly useful for articulating what is at stake in Bertlmann’s work.
Fig. 6: Renate Bertlmann, Discordo Ergo Sum (2019). Austrian Pavilion, Biennale Arte 2019, Venice. Photo: Sophie Thun. Courtesy of the Richard Saltoun Gallery, London / Renate Bertlmann, Vienna.
Weirdness and an aesthetics of decadence contribute towards the creation of what I call a ‘pleasure lab’. Within it, what is slowly unveiled has to do with pleasure that is inconsistent, unstable or plural, excessive, contradictory, and prone to change. Bertlmann’s abstracted and fragmented breasts, limbs, and extremities push towards an understanding of pleasure that is fuller, more diverse and flexible, a kind of fascination with pleasure’s wild, weird and unpredictable nature. Within this space, our unrelenting desires can be exhausting, but also gratifying, and we always seem to exist at a limit, as viewers, makers and participants in the work. We are offered the imagined opportunity to lean into these objects, the threatening, excessive tools of destruction, in order to anatomise our own limits. Bertlmann’s pleasure lab explores the anatomy of a desire that is multiple, weird and decadent, that extends beyond prescribed notions of living, thinking and taking pleasure, and that encompasses what lies beyond what we already know.
Notes
[1] Dominic Johnson, Unlimited Action. The Performance of Extremity in the 1970s (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019), 4.
[2] Mark Fisher, The Weird and The Eerie (London: Repeater, 2016), 10.
[3] Johnson, Unlimited Action, 6.
[4] Johnson, Unlimited Action, 6.
[5] Johnson, Unlimited Action, 7.
[6] Timothy Morton cited in Roger Luckhurst, ‘The Weird: A Dis/orientation’, Textual Practice, 31 (6), (1041-1061), 1049.
[7] Julia Skelly, Radical Decadence: Excess in Contemporary Feminist Textiles and Craft (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 12
[8] Skelly, Radical Decadence, 17.
[9] Skelly, Radical Decadence, 17.
[10] Wendell Harris, ‘Identifying the Decadent Fiction of the 1980s’, English Literature in Transition, 5 (5) (1962), 1.
[11] Kristin Mahoney, Literature and the Politics of Post-Victorian Decadence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 200.
[12] Charles Bernheimer, Decadent Subjects (Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), xvii.
[13] Johnson, Unlimited Action, 11-15. Emphasis in the original.
[14] Johnson, Unlimited Action, 11-15.