The contemporary body is often thought of in binary terms: masculine or feminine, martial or vulnerable, powerful or miserable. Drawing on sculpture and fashion, Alexandra Bircken’s work offers other representations that reverse or even implode these polarities.
Stretch : stretch and stretch oneself. We stretch a muscle, we stretch ourselves; we stretch a fabric, a garment, tights, a jumpsuit, a kimono: dance, sport, combat. And as Alexandra Bircken points out, whose Contemporary Art Center of Ivry (Crédac) is hosting the first solo exhibition in France, the organ that we constantly stretch is the skin. There are also the skins that we tan, to make leather; skins that on a human body, become a second skin.
The opposite of stretching is when you curl up, when you retract: with the impact, the shock, the fall. The skin marks, it is marked. The tattoo, symbol of belonging to subcultures in XIXe century, has now become synonymous with conformity. It has entered mainstream culture to the point of having its ultra-luxurious New York salons on the Lower East Side and its institutional exhibitions. We will therefore thank Bircken for proposing a reflection on the skin without the use of real skin, and for avoiding considering the skin from its more or less mimetic — or even prosthetic — representations that a material like silicone, increasingly frequently used in art, allows. Bircken refers to the skin through a metonymic substitute: clothing, and particularly motorcycle suits.
Cylinders
The opposite of stretching is also contraction: the finger contracting on the trigger; the bow being drawn. But we don’t draw—at least, in the exhibition Stretchwe do not get hard according to a heteromasculine conception of sexuality. Deployed with authority and grace over the 3 rooms of the Crédac, the sculptor’s works examine, manipulate, and quietly play with the symbols and tools of a certain virile conception of power, together and separately.
Throughout the superb exhibition by the German sculptor (born in 1967), we will see in particular a certain quantity of weapons and motorcycles split in two: a collector’s Ducati (Ducati Diana2014), which opens its two cut-out parts to the ground “like a butterfly”; another “large cylinder” open in width (Aprilia2016); a third motorcycle with its engine and frame reversed. Not far away, a submachine gun (Uzi2016); elsewhere again, a AK-47 (AK 472016). Both are opened in two and hung on the wall. In these last two cases, the writing conventions of exhibition labels have never been more effective in their factuality: after the announcement of the title and date of the work, that of the medium: “weapon”.
Since Marcel Duchamp, sculpture has never stopped struggling with the readymade. Through the aesthetically simple (and technologically very complex) process of machine cutting, Bircken reinvents and transforms the Duchampian process of displacement in a context of artistic exhibition of the mass-produced industrial artifact.AK-47 is today as banal as a bicycle wheel (Duchamp, Bicycle wheel1913)? In the cultural industry, most certainly; in the context of globalized violence, probably. “How can we be indifferent to the news that reaches us every day?” asks Bircken in the interview conducted by the director of Crédac (Claire le Restif) with Kathleen Rahn and Suzanne Titz.
It is not only a question of making the above-mentioned machines appear, but also, according to a double operation, of neutralizing them materially and of emphasizing their symbolic power. The object AK-47 splits in two: its function of use evacuated, it becomes two images of itself. Not without recalling the way in which repetition screened the traumatic image in Warhol, in Stretch the machines—which, even when they are not weapons, can become machines of death—are multiplied. Thus the trauma is simultaneously presented and distanced, reflected in the silver panels that adorn the main exhibition room of the Crédac. The object becomes a slightly unreal image (blurred and distorted by the non-smooth mirrors), while at the same time, it is de-fetishized: the effect of the “shiny bodywork” of the motorcycle used in Aprilia (2016) is undermined by the cutout, which reveals all the internal mechanics of the vehicle. We are a long way from the series BMW Art Car (1975 – ) where big names in contemporary art – Warhol and Koons, among others – were invited to “create” a car of the eponymous brand. And the author of this review could not help but, faced with Apriliato remember this particularly hilarious episode of Gaston Lagaffe where the office boy thinks he is getting a deal by buying a collector’s car at a low price… cut in two.
Anatomy of the breast
Because Bircken’s works have a subtle and penetrating humor. Thus, in the third room of the Crédac, Held (2016), bronze replicas of motorcycle gloves placed on the ground, seem like the two legs of an animal ready to move, while Walking House (2016), moving and funny in the fragility of its assembly and its materials (wood, wool, plaster, metal), not only remains static contrary to its title, but what is more stands on a single boot. In the same room, Breast piece (2013), shows one breast from the front and the other in cross-section: the dark wax used for this fragmented female breast would give it an unrecognizable appearance, if a piece of clothing (a mesh tank top) stuck on this “chest” did not allow this ambiguous object to be identified. The artist wanted to show the anatomy of the breast, “cut up to show the inside, as a pathologist would do”. At the same time, the mesh refers to the isolated breast, fragmented like a “fetish”, but also like a piece of salted meat on a butcher’s stall. The breast becomes the remains of a fragmented body, perhaps become external to itself and which should be reinvested by looking inside oneself. These examples attest to the semantic richness allowed by the versatility with which Bircken combines the most diverse materials, thereby summoning incongruities cultivated by the surrealists.
The airy hanging does justice to these dreamlike collusions between forms and materials, objects and textures, creating a coherent dialogue between the body and the machine/object, the handmade and the industrial, the solid and the soft, the supple and the rigid (Cocoon Club2015).
Balance by juxtaposition
Thus, rather than a polarization, it is a balance that emerges from the whole exhibition, where the pieces question each other. The proximity of Eva (bronze made from an inflatable doll) with Kirishima (2016, motorcycle suit), for example, presents on one side a representation of a hypersexualized female body for heterosexual purposes, and on the other, a metonymic substitute for a body connoting power. The juxtaposition of these two objects on the piece that serves as their walking base (Trolley II2016) reveals heteronormative and sexist conceptions of the feminine and the masculine as two sides of the same coin. Moreover and above all, Bircken’s work on these two objects allows us to deny the binarism of these categories: the inflatable doll, a masturbatory object but also a comfort object, has become a heavy, threatening object; the “cavity” which in its original textile version was perhaps less defined, has become precise, hard, hostile. While Bircken’s crashed motorcycle suit Kirishimahanging on a beam of the scaffolding-like structure, on the contrary evokes a corpse, an inert body. And in another room, Storm (2013) shows another motorcycle suit, depicting a body on the ground, bruised, curled up in a fetal position.
Moreover, what are the bodies to which Bircken’s exhibition refers? They are not bodies locked in a strong binarism. e/vulnerable, but on the contrary always hybrids. Cyborgs? New Model Army I – 5 (2016) presents 5 mannequins dressed in other worn motorcycle suits, on which strange protuberances can be seen: the artist, who padded them, reassembled them using nylon tights. So much so that the 5 mannequins, which at first glance seemed like clones in uniform, reveal themselves to be unexpected, non-standard bodies, which call into question the canon of the athletic and muscular body. It is only after the fact that we notice that the mannequins used initially represented female bodies: the worlds of fashion and martial arts cancel each other out by merging, to end up with a non-binary, undefined, perhaps queer body. And the surprise increases when we notice, very close, Crown (2015): nickel-plated steel cast of the inside of a vagina placed on the ground. This sculpture reverses the relationship between positive and negative space, between the (allegedly) empty and the (allegedly) full: the matrix imagined as welcoming in the original function of the object becomes hard, impenetrable. Sarah Lucas’s sculptures at the British pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2015 announced with hilarious accuracy a universe of detumescence. In this way, they constituted the happy counterpoint to the phallic hysteria of Balloon Dogs Koons, and an equally felicitous critique of the masculinism inherent in the sculpture world (among others). Bircken’s casts of female genitalia (another, entitled Trophyfeatured in the exhibition) are infinitely strange: in this, they offer a happy alternative to the current recuperation by certain contemporary artists of medical representations of the clitoris in its entirety. But Bircken’s sculpture, as critical of binarity as Lucas’s is of heterosexism, is never grating or acerbic: a buffalo tail hangs from the top of Trolley IIgiving a lightness, a sense of the absurd to the duo’s suggestions Eva/KirishimaFor example.
From the overall exhibition, there emerges the feeling that the objects presented, to be here readymadesthere are remadesare not vulgarly appropriated. They are not approached and shown from an external point of view. On the contrary, they attest for some to an intimate knowledge of their use: of what happens between the person and the machine or the object. Bircken intends to represent the zones of contact between the inside and the outside, the skin and the clothing, between an acting self and the world in which one moves, as well as the objects with which one surrounds oneself. Contact, the encounter, the capacity to feel: what makes human beings.