Summaries issue 1 volume 19 2003  

Uncomfortable nude  | Thorn Prikker | Carry van Biema



Uncomfortable nude
Early performance art during the sixties
Catrien Schreuder

In the performances of the sixties, wholly or partially unclothed women were a common phenomenon. This article examines the varied meanings attached to the naked bodies of ‘indecent’ women in these art experiments.
In 1967 the performance Opera Sextronique, created by Nam June Paik, caused a scandal when the cellist Charlotte Moorman appeared topless. Quite early on in his career Paik used the female body to lend a sexual connotation to his avant-garde musical performances. His association with Fluxus gave him an opportunity to stage these eccentric musical pieces. During the sixties, other Fluxus artists also incorporated naked women into their performances. Often the female nude appeared in an everyday, non-eroticized setting. This had an alienating, even shocking effect, because sexuality was being detached from the ‘forbidden territory’ of eroticism. The Flower Power and hippy movements saw these instances of public nudity as sexually liberating, anti-bourgeois manifestations.
Around the same time, the French artist Jean-Jacques Lebel developed a type of happening which appealed directly to repressed human sexual instincts. Here the naked female body was a direct embodiment of the ‘forbidden’ feelings of sexuality. By organizing festivals and publishing widely, Lebel encouraged many artists in France and abroad to introduce this radical element into their performances. As far back as the fifties, the Viennese artists Hermann Nitsch and Otto Mühl had created radical happenings known as ‘Wiener Aktionismus’. In what they called ‘Abreationspiel’, repressed emotions, longings, and passions were given free rein. These events were characterized by an appeal to the female body as an object of male sexual desires.
In a number of such happenings organized by the women themselves, the male domination of the art world and the one-sided approach to the female body as an object of desire was subjected to a critical examination. Artists like Carolee Schneemann, Yoko Ono and Valie Export used the sexual connotations of their naked bodies to make the audience aware of the aggressive aspects of male sexual passion. At this time, however, there was as yet no feminist movement or theory, and such manifestations would only retroactively be placed within a significant framework.
In the sixties the naked female body served mainly as an instrument for countering sexual taboos. The self-assurance with which these women took off their clothes was accompanied by a growing awareness of sexuality and differences between the sexes as an ideological construct. The lack of understanding within society and the budding feminist sentiments placed these ‘indecent’ women in a highly uncomfortable position.
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Three 1892 Christ paintings by Johan Thorn Prikker
‘ An art of their own flesh and blood’
Christ on the Cross (part 1)
Joan Greer

This is the first of two articles focusing on three paintings from 1892, an important year in Thorn Prikker’s early artistic career: Christ on the Cross, from the beginning of the year, and A Love and A Bride, from the end. In this article the focus is on the first of these works, Christ on the Cross.
Christ imagery provided Thorn Prikker with a means of expressing his ideas on his personal position as an artist and the role of the artist in general, ideas which were beginning to evolve during this twelve-month period. In addition, Thorn Prikker’s imagery is related in a more general sense to the image of the artist as constructed by others in avant-garde circles in the Netherlands. In this respect, Thorn Prikker’s knowledge of and interest in contemporary literature and poetry, as well as his growing anarchist sympathies are relevant.
Christ on the Cross. By and large this work was favourably received by the critics who, in one case, pointed to the work as heralding an art of the future. The style linked the painting to newer tendencies in European art, and the subject had a particular resonance in symbolist cultural production in Holland and beyond. The suffering Christ figure in particular was used extensively by symbolist writers and artists – often as a means of addressing the artist’s own feelings of alienation and suffering vis-à-vis contemporary society. This was embodied in the notion of the poète maudit in the writings of Albert Aurier and Paul Verlaine, and later that year Thorn Prikker would become personally acquainted with Verlaine. In Holland, the artist-Christ motif was prominent in the writings of the Tachtigers, with whose works Thorn Prikker was familiar both through his own readings and through his discussions with the poet Henri Borel.
Thus Thorn Prikker’s Christ imagery was developing at a time when in literature and poetry the use of Christological images of the poet or artist was widely known in Dutch avant-garde art circles. Furthermore, critics writing about the artist and his position in society reinforced the ideas embodied in this image of the suffering Christ as artist. There are numerous instances in which the Dutch artist is constructed in elevated and exalted terms consistent with this suffering Christ-artist image. Indeed, such elevated descriptions of the artist are also directed towards Thorn Prikker, for example, in the writings of the critic Robert Stellwagen or in the personal journal of Henri Borel.
This interest in the Christ motif is also related to a wider interest in cultural production from the Middle Ages and in mysticism and mystical religious experience. Two tendencies becoming apparent in the contemporary writings on art early in 1892 are relevant here: the call for a new religious or spiritual art and the call for an art which would serve the community and which would also be part of a community of the arts. These would converge in the idea of a new art form - Gemeenschapskunst, which will be discussed in part II of this article.
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Carry van Biema (1881-1942)
Portrait of a German artist
Francisca van Vloten

During the interbellum Carry van Biema (1881-1942) was active in artistic circles in both Germany and Holland. Her letters and diary entries, as well as an unpublished autobiographical novel, provide a detailed impression of her thoughts, her activities and the people she met. As a visual artist, Van Biema appeared to be more inclined towards the applied arts than the autonomous visual arts. She tended to apply what had been developed by others, placing her own stamp on it, and in comparison with the avant-garde of the day, her work displayed a moderate and cautious modernity. She was much praised for her technical skills, her sense of harmony, and her affinity with the decorative arts. Van Biema was also a talented poet and writer. Her - as yet unpublished - Bildungsroman Oramuro is the story of a female artist living in Hannover in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
It is as a pedagogue that Van Biema has been most influential. Her textbook Farben und Formen als lebendige Kräfte (1930) was all but sold out shortly after it was published and is experiencing a new surge of popularity following its reissue in 1997. In the early twenties she did much to introduce the theories of Adolf Hölzel into art circles in the Netherlands, a country to which she was closely related by ties of blood and friendship. In the summer of 1921, Van Biema took part in one of the famous Domurg exhibitions (1911-1921) and from autumn 1921 to early 1922, she taught courses in The Hague, Amsterdam and Rotterdam. It was thanks to her that Jacoba van Heemskerck (1876-1923) became interested in Hölzels's colour theories. Thus during a period when the contacts with Herwarth Walden tapered off, Van Heemskerck was able to explore new paths for herself in Germany. Thanks to her ultramodern, German-oriented artistic endeavours, she occupied a special place within the Dutch art world. With the support of her friend and maecenas Marie Tak van Poortvliet (1871-1936), she was able to develop her talents and devote herself to the realization of her ambitions.
Carry van Biema did not have the benefit of such support. The Gedok Hannover (Gemeinschaft Deutscher und Österreichischer Künstlerinnenvereine aller Kunstgattungen Ortsgruppe Hannover) made it possible for her to develop within the existing structures, which were well suited to her talents and ambitions. Her courses were highly regarded and many of her pupils were also friends, and yet even with them she never fully succeeded in throwing off the sense of utter loneliness which had plagued her since childhood. She felt that that loneliness was an inherent part of being an artist, and all her life she hoped to meet kindred spirits. In this she was ultimately disappointed, despite a number of close friendships. She strived to give her melancholy ('Ich leide, leide um mein eigen Wesen') a place in her life: 'Wir müssen uns selber retten, oder untergehen.' It was this which led her to create her own inner world of beauty.
Looking back, the painter, writer, journalist and photographer Käte Steinitz (1889-1975) characterized her as follows: 'Sie ruhte in sich selbst, und wenn sie auch 1933 die Heimat verlassen musste, konnten die äusseren Ereignisse nicht die innere Ruhe zerstören und ihr eigentliches Wesen berühren. Sie träumte, anstatt auf der Hut zu sein. Sie wurde in Holland ein Opfer der Nazis. Verschleppt und verschollen!' From 1933 on Van Biema spent more and more time abroad, and in 1938 she moved to Holland. In August 1942 she was transported from the concentration camp in Westerbork to Auschwitz; she died in the gas chamber shortly after her arrival.
The main character in Oramuro had had the same dream since childhood: again and again she walked through an endless room without doors or windows, hearing only the echo of her own footsteps and a dull thumping and scuffling sound under her feet. Then the floor opened in front of her and a number of ghostly grey, grinning figures with long, hairy arms arose out of the darkness and, wrapping their icy-cold hands around her feet, knees and hips, dragged her into the depths. Then everything went dark and quiet: she was all alone deep within the earth - until the same empty room again opened up before her. Carry van Biema saw the dream as a prophetic symbol of the humiliation and ruin which constantly threatened the soul of the artist.
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