Martin coomer
TEXT FOR THE CATALOGUE ACCOMPANYING THE SOLO EXHIBITION ‘OMNIVORES’ AT THE ALEXIA GOETHE GALLERY, 2008
table manners
Soon her eye fell on a little glass box that was lying under the table: she opened it, and found in it a very small cake, on which the words `EAT ME' were beautifully marked in currants. `Well, I'll eat it,' said Alice, `and if it makes me grow larger, I can reach the key; and if it makes me grow smaller, I can creep under the door; so either way I'll get into the garden, and I don't care which happens!'
These words, from Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland 1, perhaps inevitably spring to mind when looking at the work of Lia Anna Hennig. In drawings and videos Hennig takes us on a journey during which a deceptive innocence is employed to spotlight the absurdities of good manners and decorum – what it means to be well-behaved or, as is more often the case, badly so, and how little separates the two. Throughout, we are alerted to matters of scale and focus, both in terms of physical appearance and perceived importance.
It is from within an implicit system of societal codes that Hennig explores processes of consumption and transformation while humorously testing the various transgressions that turn somewhat ordinary events into interesting art. Food and sex, as every Freudian knows, are sources of unconscious motivation that have a habit of betraying the individual; all the more so if they are resisted or denied. The scenarios Hennig creates on screen and on paper take these matters into hand with gusto. Everyday activities are examined, prolonged, even exhausted so that they become heightened or, over to Freud again, uncanny.
In the 2006 video Eat Me (and here the phrase's more vulgar connotation is clearly conjured) a camera hovers in front of the artist's mouth – bright red lips and pink tongue contrasting with white teeth – as she chews gum, occasionally blowing bubbles and toying with the collapsed strings and suggestive folds, or rolling both tongue and gum so that, coated with red lipstick, they lose definition. Completed in 2007, Lust for Life is a video performance that takes a mundane activity – food preparation – and turns it into a sequence of absurdities. Something about the sustained washing, caressing and massaging of the chicken carcass in this video, combined with the fruity sound effects of ticklish squeaks and appreciative gurgles added later by the artist, conspires to paint a picture of, if not an explicitly violent or injurious scenario, then perhaps a disturbed state of mind. Certainly the plot, if one exists, goes way beyond expressing regular domesticity, or even sensuality or desirability: a latent pathology is revealed.
The title of this exhibition, Omnivores, can be read as a straightforward explanation of eating habits but it also speaks of opportunism, or voraciousness, especially when connected with the various types of appetites and hungers alluded to by Hennig. Her drawings – repeated dots, dashes, circles, curlicues, spirals and tiny figurative motifs such as teardrops, love hearts and strawberries that sometimes accumulate to create larger images – knowingly plunder the obsessive, hallucinatory style of Outsider artists such as Adolf Wölfli and Edmund Monsiel and plunge us into a rich, disorientating arena that ultimately confuses what is being consumed and by whom. As in the artist's videos, there's a sense of overflowing appetites. These are not still lifes so much as spirited food terrains that slide and spill, like hastily carried soup plates, disgorging themselves of content so that we might mop up some of their meaning.
They are, on one level, perfect examples of how to embrace and choreograph thematic slippage. Chains or coils of superb intricacy meander through areas of Op Art chequerboard patterning. Branches and roots appear from terrains that could be outer-spacey or inner body. Veins of spaghetti twisted around a fork erupt into red teardrops, continuing their trajectory in the form of broken (hearted) lines. Seed heads burst open, broadcasting black teardrops to the ground. Cartoon-ish bones are revealed as decorative strata get laid down. There is a great deal of movement here, a kind of writhing action that enables the artist to conflate various circulatory systems – bodily or otherwise. We think of the artist's hand moving back and forth between ink pot and paper, a stray drip here and there becoming incorporated into the design, part of the improvisation, and how long each drawing takes to complete, the industry involved (an instance of Hennig choosing virtue, being 'good'). But the results, while indicative of labour, aren't meant to be thought the product of unflinching devotion or crazed obsession. There is always a bigger picture. Hennig's drawings often depict a central platter or vessel that grounds the image in spite of embellishments that do their best to camouflage or erode.
In this respect, Hennig locates herself not in the position of the Outsider artist driven by fevered compulsion. Her dense webs and decorative foils, with their nods towards unhinged obsession, do not suggest personal trauma. Rather, she might be considered as something of a latter-day, media-savvy Surrealist, summoning strange images and conjuring unusual energies in an attempt to blur the boundary between the real and the imaginary. Her drawings remind us of the authoritarian familiar ways of looking at things and ask whether we might instead be willing to digest absurdity through alternative pictorial structures, and to be liberated by them. If these drawings enable the artist to, remembering Paul Klee, take a line for a walk, they also encourage her in some instances to violate common sense. As viewers we are asked to do the same. Throughout, Hennig's schemata test the degree to which we accept a depiction of something as the thing itself, even when it is robbed of its descriptive heft. This is not a cloud or a crocodile we should remind ourselves, thinking of René Magritte's 1928 painting The Treachery of Images. If objects are traditionally described according to particular characteristics of weight and texture, these images remind us that they carry a residue of these characteristics even when they are reduced in depiction to black and red lines of ink on white paper.
The idea of food as an agent of change courses through Hennig's work. Devout observers may notice the preponderance of red ink in her drawings and look for religious significance, perhaps hoping for a rite similar to transubstantiation to come to the fore. However, Hennig never falls into the trap of easy symbolic elevation, preferring to keep things bawdier. In this she adheres to a humble tradition of food in art. Kenneth Bendiner, in a chapter of his book Food in Painting from the Renaissance to the Present 2 titled The Contempt of the Familiar notes that "food imagery in the arts has almost always ranked low, a matter of vulgar comedy or anti-heroic ordinariness" – in spite of the obvious theological significance of food in both Old and New Testaments. Bendiner goes on to cite the Belgian artist Wim Delvoye's 1996 canvas print Susan, Out for a Pizza – Back in Five Minutes – George, a Caspar David Friedrich-esque image of mountains carved with a throwaway note, as a key example of food used to puncture some of art's loftier ideals. In her drawing Pizza Quattro Stagioni Hennig enlists a similar wit, reinterpreting the grandeur of the four seasons theme with its meditation on time passing so that it dovetails with the consumption of a humble take-away.
These are works that, with a keen sense of mass media's coercive effect, raise an eyebrow at disposability while cautiously summoning and deflecting art's rehabilitative, ennobling power. In Hennig's drawings a busy hand builds a teeming, at times contradictory universe that charms. In her video work, where the notion of resurrection is soundly trounced, the same hand amuses, perplexes and disturbs. In Fit for Fun Hennig puts female figures from a 1980s exercise manual through their paces, animating them into stuttering gym routines or quasi-Germanic marches and adding sound effects that muddy the exact nature of exertion taking place. It's worth pointing out that these aren't animations so much as re-animations – the once active body has been frozen by the camera and brought back to half-life by the artist. Are photographic images dead? Can they be brought back to life? By imparting cursory movement to these still images, Hennig refers to the infancy of recorded movement in the work of Eadweard Muybridge and others. Putting us through our conceptual paces, such agitated temporal sequences seem also to prompt thought about the physiological and psychological currents and tensions of the body in today's society.
Freud's notion of the uncanny or 'unheimlich' 3 as being the animation of inanimate or vice versa is interpreted here with black humour. The 2005 video Sweet Pieces and the Sound of the Birth of a Fish – a reverse animation of a fish on a board having its guts, skin and fins replaced by the artist – leaves no doubt as to the creature's state. Does the video equal some sort of aberration or violation – a degree of adding insult to injury? In Transgressions: The Offences of Art 4, Anthony Julius says that works of art by Damien Hirst and others in which dead animals are used catch us in a bind because they scramble our natural responses. Since the animals are already dead, we cannot argue that the artist has wronged them, yet neither can we ignore social mores regarding our relationship with these creatures.
It is precisely this area of ambiguity that Hennig mines so effectively and from where she extracts comedy (and we should remember that laughter is synonymous with hope, and that, like food, it is usually something best shared). “I never promised you a rose garden”, as the song goes. Hennig takes the sentiment further. In the recent video I never promised you anything Joe South's 1970s pop-country song – in fact a slowed-down version of Lynn Anderson's hit version – has been used to accompany a looped scene from Park Chan-Wook's cult 2003 film Oldboy in which the actor Choi Min-Sik eats a live octopus. In this instance repetition and proximity – you are invited to watch this scene by peering into a small, wall-mounted viewing enclosure – are brought into play to perpetuate, depending on your sensitivities, a moment of intrigue or disgust, or even to delay the point of expiration. Of course, what shocks is the 'realness' of the scene. Hennig increasingly undermines the insulating aspects of art, allowing her work to float mischievously between actual events and their portrayal.
Beauty can be an unexpected outcome. The recent video Lust auf Echtes features footage of the artist's dog chewing a bone in the back garden of her parents' house. Nothing exceptional about this presentation: the family pet, the Sunday joint, the back yard. Yet, filmed in autumn sunlight, cropped and judiciously edited, the scene becomes sumptuously ambiguous as carnivorous, canine teeth sink into flesh and red meat – alive and dead – merges with a carpet of fallen leaves. The 'lust for the real thing' suggested by the title could be a lament for such untrammelled enjoyment as that experienced by the dog. The contradiction, of course, is that such an exquisite expression can only be brought into being through the sophisticated structures and multiple layers of art. Such contradictions are ripe for the viewer to digest. Dyspeptics and vegetarians should perhaps be wary but those with sturdy constitutions and broad appetites, omnivores if you like, will find rich pickings in Hennig's generous art.
1. Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, 1865
2. Kenneth Bendiner, Food in Painting from the Renaissance to the Present, 2004
3. Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, 1919
4. Anthony Julius, Transgressions: The Offences of Art, 2002