Tanzquartier Wien

“My wife once taught a ceramics class at a downtown night school. The first night two rather well-dressed women came into the ceramics room and, when they saw piles of wet clay around, asked with horror, ‘You mean you have to do it with your hands?’ When they were told that, yes, they did have to do it with their hands, they left and got their money back.”
Howard S. Becker, “Art Worlds”[1]

“Performativity must be understood not as the act by which a subject brings into being what she/he names, but, rather, as that reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains.”
Judith Butler, “Bodies that Matter”[2]

“The bodybuilder’s physique is like a work of art; the effect of a famous painting may be ruined if it is unfavourably displayed, if the frame, lighting and background fail to present it to full effect.”
Arnold Schwarzenegger, “Die große Bodybuilding-Bibel”[3]

A grey, frosty winter’s day. Seventies space-synth sounds. Ruth Anne Knebl and John Boy Pires Mata walk absorbedly through the forest, their knowledgeable gaze wanders over the nature surrounding them, they communicate by means of silent, dramatic gestures. A voice off camera tells us that the two are “curators of West German seventies pottery”. The natural backdrop is being inspected by Ruth Anne Knebl and John Boy Pires Mata as a potential exhibition venue; tree trunks, broken-off branches and various pieces of wood serve as displays for the objects they have selected, which were originally inspired by that very same nature. The brightly glazed vases and receptacles are carefully and lovingly restored to the place of their creative genealogy by the knowledgeable curators and are finally converted into loudspeakers and echo chambers into which a concluding curatorial chorus statement is recited.

This is the plot of the short, documentary-like film that opens the performance Wir sind Henkel by Jakob Lena Knebl and Markus Pires Mata. Five bodybuilders (Jekaterina Übelacker, Stefan Wottawa, Kevin Stütz, Katharina Stütz and Lara Tasharofi) pose among the floor vases, jugs, flower vases and lamps in changing formations on three platforms that are distributed across the stage space. Knebl and Pires Mata quote an essay by Georg Simmel (“Der Henkel”, 1909) identifying the handle as the crucial liminal element that sets the boundaries between art and design on account of its functionality. The performers lift the receptacles gently off the ground by their handles, clasping them tightly with their gold-painted hands and making the objects part of their competitive poses. The athletes demonstrate their tense muscles, and all of a sudden the massive ceramic receptacles appear delicate and fragile.

The bodybuilders’ fascinating sculptural physicality and impressive performative presence arouse curiosity and desire, the bodies merge with the ceramic objects to create a scenography of gender construction. Their rehearsed, repeated poses are reminiscent of Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity. In “Bodies that Matter”, Butler writes that “the regulatory norms of ‘sex’ work in a performative fashion to constitute the materiality of bodies and, more specifically, to materialize the body’s sex, to materialize sexual difference in the service of consolidation of the heterosexual imperative”[4]. The bodybuilders thus become ciphers for a genderqueer notion of the body, and the practice of bodybuilding can be read in the sense of building bodies as a strategy to subvert heteronormative gender typologies. The passive, handled receptacles turn the bodybuilders’ rehearsed acts into components of a transhuman spatial installation that challenges the artistic quality of design and/or the creative quality of art as well as the artificiality of gender roles and their physical attributes.
Finally, proposed in the form of a liberating exclamation, the question remains: Who or what is art again?

Monica Titton is a sociologist, fashion theorist and cultural critic. She lives and works in Vienna.

[1] Howard S. Becker, Art Worlds, Berkeley/Los Angeles/London 1992, p. 205.
[2] Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter. On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”, New York 1993, p. 22.
[3] Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bill Dobbins, Die große Bodybuilding-Bibel. Das Standardwerk ungekürzt und aktualisiert, e-book, Munich 2019.
[4] Butler 1997 (cf. footnote 2).

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