Valie Export, “Body Configurations” (1972-76)
In a series of photographic ‘body configurations’, geometric figures such as circles, lines and squares serve Valie Export as reference points and counterpoles to the body – as seen in this mimetic convergence and matching of the curve of the body to the abstract and rational ‘roundness’ of an architectural element. This process deflates the body to the status of a spatial component, nothing more than an element in a lifeless sculpture, an element which, in Valie Export’s words, ‘hides its wound’. At the same time, however, this configuration of body and environment also visualizes an internal state.
Archives for the month of: September, 2018
Markus Prachensky (Austrian, 1932-2011), Etruria orizontale, 1984. Acrylic on canvas, 130 × 175 cm.
David Wojnarowicz, The Death of American Spirituality, 1987
The abandoned George Conrad Flavel House in Astoria, Oregon.
Home of a family of eccentric recluses who fled the city following one’s guilty verdict for a stabbing in the town.
More info here.
Felix Nussbaum (Osnabrück, 1894 – Auschwitz-Birkenau, 1944): Die trostlose Straße – The Cheerless Road; or: The cat that walks alone.
German-Jewish artist, the rise of the Nazi party caught him in Rome. Refusing to obey the lines given to Mussolini by Goebbels —namely, that German artists settled in Italy had to promote the Aryan race—, Nussbaum flees to France with his wife, and then Brussels. After the fall of Belgium in 1940, Nussbaum is arrested by Belgian police as a “hostile alien” German, and taken to a camp in France. On the train ride to Germany, he manages to escape and is reunited with Felka in Brussels, beginning, as a Jew, a life in hiding.
In July, 1944 —Brussels would be liberated in September—, Nussbaum and his wife were found hiding in an attic by German armed forces. They were arrested and sent to Auschwitz. Just a week later Felix was murdered at the age of 39.
Robert Johnson (May 8, 1911 – August 16, 1938), from Robert Crumb’s Heroes of Blues, Jazz & Country.
malsonus.com 