Recently closed, Natalia LL’s show at Ernst Museum in Budapest, titled Opus Magnum, was an exhibition that offered me the privilege of a double and downright exciting discovery. Thus, l’ve had the opportunity to encounter an artist of which, to my embarrassment, I knew almost nothing about (and seeing the show I realized that I probably should have known much more) and an institution I knew absolutely nothing about (and seeing the show I realized that I should have visited it earlier). Also, Opus Magnum starkly reminded me that a well done retrospective exhibition, albeit unavoidably incomplete and fragmentary, is probably the best way to meaningfully approach an artist
The currently functioning Ernst Museum is the heir, so to speak, of an important and vibrant private artistic venue, build up around the more or less coherent, yet undeniably important Ernst collection of modem Hungarian (and not only) art. Founded in 1912 by the collector Ernst Lajos, the venue hosted also some of Budapest’s most significant modem art shows between the World Wars. Bringing together exhibition spaces, a cinema, as well as artist studios, the place was one of the vibrant hubs of Budapest cultural life at the time. Although the collection had a rather sad destiny, being dismantled after 1937, the building still functions today as an exhibition venue, hosting contemporary art shows, as part of the Budapest Kunsthalle (Mücsarnok), yet is by far less known as the latter institution itself or as its main venue in Dozsa Gyorgy street.
Natalia LL is one of the prominent Polish artists of the last decades, being active mainly in the fields of photography, performance and video and approaching those media from a perspective that was mostly considered to be feminist. However, as we’ll further see, this labelling, although perfectly justified from the very perspective of the artist, who joined the so called International Feminist Movement in the mid-seventies, not only fails to account for the complexity of her endeavours along the decades, but is also misleading, as h does not comprehensively grasp some of the defining characteristics of the artist’s impressive production, such as the intertwining of plain humour with somewhat complicated irony, the constantly displayed fascination for image as icon and as tool used to provoke the occurrence of beauty or the apparently dull, yet essential and obliquely critical and self-critical aestheticism.
A larger than life character, Natalia LL, (born in 1937, in Żywiec, as Natalia Lach – Lachowicz) was also an active figure in the Neo – avant – garde movements of the sixties and the seventies, as well as a make – things – happen – person on the Polish cultural scene. Despite her participation, mostly during the seventies, at rather highly ranked contemporary art events, such as the Sao Paolo biennale, she never actually attained the status of international art star. Nevertheless, she is an artist with a career that spans some fifty years of intelligent, sometimes brilliant and always stimulating artistic production.
The spaces available at the Ernst Museum are not the usual, gigantic volumes of a large contemporary art museum or Kunsthalle. Therefore, a smart selection of the works that were to feature in the Opus Magnum retrospective had been crucial for its meaningfulness. The artists herself choose to curate the show and did it remarkably and, I would say, surprisingly well. A well balanced mix of video works, video documented performances and photographic works was displayed, comprising a comprehensive image of Natalia LL’s decades long artistic activity.
Probably the most straightforwardly telling work of all, with respect to the topics encompassed by her art, is Natalia ist Sex, displayed as a text on the wall. When one comes closer to the wall, he or she actually discovers that the letters of the text are made out of more or less pornographic images featuring, presumably, the artist and a male companion. And, indeed, the issue of sexuality is placed at the core of LL’s artistic production. There is hardly a single art piece in the show that do not refer to this topic, while the balance between feminist suggestions and aestheticization (hedonism) sensual enthusiasm is perpetually fragile.
This is, for example, made plainly visible by works that come together under the title / concept of Consumer Art. Developed mostly in the seventies, the series includes a video of the young, naked and beautiful female artist licking the liquid content of a plate, the grainy aspect of the film being unable to tame either the sensuality, the irony or the gross look (for shy or “righteous” eyes) of the scene. Closely related to such works are the panels composed of some twenty photos of a young woman eating a banana, or rather using it for an ambiguous teasing game, as the female character is depicted in somewhat over – staged sexually alludong poses. The black and white images are very “clean”, depleted of any unnecessary details, in a Pop – like manner, not totally dissimilar to the one put at work in Andy Warhol’s so called portraits. However in the end, they present the viewer with an almost formalist aesthetics, which essentially is at odds with both a feminist stance and with the semantics of the classic pin – up. The black and white images also allude, in a sophisticated and ironic way, to the probably false value of noblesse, many times naively associated with the traditional types of photography.
Following Consumer Art, Natalia LL produced a series of photographic works, in large, almost monumental format, coining them as post – consumer art. If the dialectics of its semantics are pretty much similar to that displayed in the previously produced tongue – in – cheek images and videos mentioned above, the visual result is even more ambiguous and startling. The photos present the face of the artist in sexually alluding, kind of seductive poses, with traces of white liquid on or around the lips. The pornographic reference is more than obvious, yet something in the images makes them uncomfortably hard to grasp, as they tantalizingly avoid being clean cut porn shots.
As we’ve seen so far, Natalia is indeed sex, i.e. body. Her works are constantly using her body, yet investing it with the power to metamorphose and to assume various roles and identities, rather than testing its limits, subjecting it to rigorous trials. Thus, if the use of her body is more or less driven by feminist ideology, the Polish artist b closer to Cindy Sherman’s deployment of the body than to Abramovic’s. Many times, costumes are frequently used by Natalia LL and she often deploys masks in order to produce either glossy or softly morbid photographic images that seem to allude to an existentialist atmosphere and mindset. The images of the body that has long left behind its prime of youth, strength and beauty are often used in combination with masks, in order to produce such effects, which are augmented by deploying specifically charged symbolic props such as the couch in the recent series of photographs titled Birth According to the Body.
Nevertheless, we can also see a more direct and quite specific mode of using the body in several sixties and seventies videos present in the Ernst Museum show, such as Impressions, from 1973. The camera is soon fixed on the artist’s breasts, which the artist is, partly erotically, partly frantically, shaking, rubbing, squeezing and massaging with some white substance that looks like milk. Again, the body as object of sexual desire is somewhat devoid of its sensuality via humour. However, the key word here is “somewhat”: sensuality is never actually neutralized and the tension between lust and goofiness is the key and powerful characteristic of such works.
Thus, the traces of white substance on the artist’s / performer’s / subject’s face are accompanied, so to speak, by traces of pathos and of getting transfixed as her expressions most of the times suggest. There are ambiguous facial expressions, which become more and more ambiguous the longer one actually scrutinizes the images. Their pornographic nature, that appears to be so obvious at a first glance, gets blurred, at least in some of them. In the end, these tatter remain probably the most impressive images in the show, as they are composed with the formal care one would expect from a high end fashion or life style magazine photos. In short, they prove to be far too arty (i. e. aesthetically aware) to be convincing as kinky or trashy porn.
Turning things on their head is something that artists are somewhat supposed or expected to do; it is also something that Natalia LL is particularly good at. Take the banana, for example, an obvious phallic avatar, used as such by the Polish artist, as mentioned above. However, in a video piece such as the 1994 Brunhilda ‘s Dream as well as in its corollary, the Anatomy of a Room installation, from 1995, which featured in Opus Magnum, the banana is pierced by a sword, which rhythmically cuts through the fleshy fruit until it finally breaks apart. The classic phallic form is ironically turned into a vagina, while the mighty combination of sex and violence turns almost hilarious.
Characters like Brunhilda and other more or less mythological or mythologized personifications of the prototype of the smart and strong minded, but also sexually overt and finally, by virtue of these very characteristics, utterly dangerous woman are also recurrent in LL’s artistic endeavours. A performance, again from 1995, is called Brunhilda III and its photographic documentation was also present in the retrospective at the Ernst Museum. We see the artist barely dressed, wearing high boots, a sort of mask and flowery crown, sword and shield in hands, at the edge of a forest. A sexually aggressive, strong and presumably menacing woman seems to confront the viewer. O However, the character gradually looses all its symbolic might, as one realizes that this all about amounting clichés. From a presumably feminist perspective, both romanticist automatisms and pornographic props are critically approached and deconstructed, apparently reduced to semantic rubble. But the actual ramifications of the thinking process sparked by the vaudeville Brunhilda go deeper, I believe. Thus, what is really important here is not just noticing that (a form of) Romanticism is brought together with (a form of) pornography, but realizing that they kind of belong together, that the juxtaposition appears natural. They are both products of the same type of cultural, political, but also erotic desires, in which oppression could probably be rooted in, yet what is certain is that they are unnervingly durable and irritatingly polymorphous. In the end, the laugh might just be on (a form of) feminism, just as well as (a form of) shame could tentatively be cast upon pornography or corny Romanticism.
Bogdan Iacob
April 7, 2012