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Look under the bonnet...

On the works of Cornelia Renz

From the Katalog ‚Cornelia Renz.‘, Marion Ermer Foundation, 2001, realised on behalf of the the Marion Ermer Prize 2001.

Barbara Steiner

The ‘Charlottes’, ‘Lolitas’ and ‘Lulus’, the precocious, prepubescent little girls who populate literary history, were succeeded by the ‘Garçonnes’ and ‘Flappers’ of the Twenties, the ‘Teddy Girls’ of the Fifties, the ‘Teenagers’ of the Sixties and Seventies and the ‘Girlies’ of the Nineties. These ‘child-women’ are still ubiquitous in advertising, music and film. They appear as desirable idols and, at the same time, they provoke public outcry about the (sexual) abuse of children (see Calvin Klein campaigns featuring Kate Moss).

When I – a member of the jury for the Marion Ermer Prize - was asked to write something about the works of Cornelia Renz, I was happy to agree. It seems to me their subject is still highly controversial on a sociological level. In working on this, I happened to stumble across Michael Wetzel's book ‘Mignon. Die Kindsbraut als Phantasma der Goethezeit’1  [Mignon. The Child-Bride as a Phantasm of the Goethe Era] and this led me to investigate the role of the ‘child-bride’2 through history and to examine her place in the modern world. This is an issue which is attracting increasing interest among women/female artists, such as Karen Kilimnik, Rita Ackermann or, indeed, Cornelia Renz.

The girl image which forms the basis of this concept, lies somewhere between childish naiveté/immaturity and emerging sexual desire/maturity, between the masculine and the feminine. It is a product of history and is closely linked to the discovery of childhood and its idealization. The innocence and the purity of callow youth has been seen in a positive light since the Eighteenth Century and has led to an increase in  pedagogical responsibility for children. Puberty, as the phenomenon of transition between childhood and adulthood, has become the focus of society's interest.3

In his book Michael Wetzel points out that both the concept of ‘childhood’ in general and the motif of the ‘child-bride’ in particular are social inventions, they are ‘the invention of innocence’ and not something which always existed and was simply waiting to be discovered. Seen in this way, the ‘child-bride’ is a (male) ‘phantasm’, ‘which denies both the real developments of the transition from girl to woman and the difference between the sexes which results’. (Wetzel, 1999, S.7). Stripped of all biological and gender-specific processes, the ‘child-bride’ is transfigured into an image and/or an idol. In other words, this is an invention of the early Modern Age, a construct, an artefact which has appeared repeatedly as a literary and artistic leitmotif since the final third of the Eighteenth Century.4   But the ideas that revolve around the ‘young girl’ vary: she suggests to us the possibility of returning the state of childhood ourselves. At the same time, the child-woman offers us the opportunity to deny our sexuality, to arrive at a different, maidenly-daughterly femininity in contrast to a mature-motherly femaleness. However, she can also be ‘sexualised’ and lead directly to moral decay. (Wetzel, 1999, S.35).

In the Seventies and Eighties of the Eighteenth Century, the production of ostensibly sentimental girl images by the painter Jean-Baptiste Greuze reached a high point. ‘The Broken Pitcher’ shows a pubescent girl (her right breast is uncovered), who is the epitome of an image of the loss of innocence: the broken pitcher represents the loss of virginity; the blossoms and the white dress signify an untouched childhood, which is equated with a perfection beginning to wilt. More than 100 years later, the same theme appears in the works of Cornelia Renz. The personification of innocence is ‘shot’ to a certain extent it suffers a violent end. There is an important detail: the murderer is a girl herself.

The girls that Cornelia Renz paints are far from nice and innocent. Rather, they are comparable with so-called monster girls; wild, untamed, cruel girls. In women's literature in particular, there is a strong interest in the awakening of girls' lust and the aspect of violence which results when a girl's desire encounters men's lust.5   To an extent, this is the manifestation of the reverse side of the male idealization of the child-bride, of the sexual violence girls are subject to. In this context Wetzel speaks of ‘the spiritualization of and/or identification with the trauma of the experience of sexual violence, the reverse side of the projection upon which the phantasm is based. The one who is threatening sees in the mirror of the monster child only his own monstrosity…’ (Wetzel, 1999, S.61). To an extent, the monstrosity of the masculine is reflected in  monster girls. This ambivalence between idealization and violence, between innocent games and sexual temptation, can also be found in the pictures and drawings of Cornelia Renz, for example when innocent-looking girls with their hair in plaits reveal their genitals or even – apparently unintentionally – offer them to the onlooker.

In the works of Renz, however, it is precisely the ‘snow-white seam of the child's knickers’6  so enthusiastically celebrated by Walser which appears monstrous to us. The artist not only deals with pushing the pure, the untouched over the edge into the threatening, the demoniacal, she is also concerned with the ‘abyss of all childlike nature’, which is also described in detail by Marie Luise Kaschnitz in ‘Tage, Tage, Jahre’ [Days, Days, Years]. A five-year-old girl asks a man to fetch her ball which has landed in the gutter. She spurs him on to ever more daring manoeuvres, so that at some point he becomes convinced ‘that the child's intention was finally to push him over the edge or to make him fall, and that that was the only reason she had entered his flat.’7 

In this story it remains unclear whether this is a delusional assumption of a demoniacal side to the girl or whether it is rather a recognition of its supposed/insincere innocence. Renz's images also refuse to send a clear message: is it our fantasy which makes little monsters of girls or are they really so? Or indeed, it is not the brutality of the girls which is the primary issue, but rather the brutality of the myth itself which is presented so aggressively in the pictures and drawings. This myth of innocence is intrinsically connected with a whole series of values (such as softness, tenderness, a potential need to be protected, lack of independence, etc.), which determine the social role of girls and later of women from an early age. For example, when in Cornelia Renz's ‘Bambi’ a little girl in military-looking clothes kills a full-grown stag, she is no more shooting a tender little deer – as the title ‘Bambi’ would suggest – than she herself is an innocent and tender little girl. Her attack is directed not only at the animal itself but also at the concept embodied by ‘Bambi’: the myth of the tender, innocent little thing. The pictorial gesture echoes the aggressiveness of the depicted action. Renz rejects the traditional ideas of a smooth and pleasing style of painting: her way of painting is intended to ‘disturb’ and to ‘upset’, to enable the onlooker to gain a new view of girl images.

To a certain extent, Renz is the feminist counterpart of Greuze: while he consciously reckons with the voyeuristic male observer, Renz leaves him out of the equation – in part by means of her painting style. In the works of Renz, painting is placed at our disposal – which also explains her repeated references to masterpieces of art through history. History and with it the traditions of painting, technical achievements (such as perspective) and depicted social images are dealt with and forced to bend to her will.

Renz gets down to the roots of the myth of the innocent little girl, and in doing so, she attacks a male construct of reality, which over time has become ‘a natural image of what is real’. To an extent, the artist takes over ‘symbols and symptom of male desire’ (Wetzel, 1999, S.21), full in the knowledge that these are ‘connected with symbolic systems and therefore with communicative contexts, whose rhetorical strategies are less the subject of theories of physiological needs, than aesthetic forms of representation…’. Renz takes as her starting point developed cultural images, associations and roles, and shows us the building blocks of those constructions, which are the basis of our ideas. Thus, she raises the car bonnet of innocence and allows us to peek inside.8

© Barbara Steiner, 2001

Notes:

2) The first occurrence of the German term ‘Kindsbraut’ [child-bride] – i.e. the correlation of the child as an innocent, naïve being and the bride as a source of erotic temptation – is to be found in a translation of Charles Dickens' ‘David Copperfield’ by Arno Schmidt.

6) ‘… the sweetest and loveliest thing was when a tiny portion of the snow-white seam of her child's knickers appeared.’

8) ‘look under the bonnet’, a phrase used by Rosalind Krauss in a text about Cindy Sherman. She used it in reference to Cindy Sherman's ‘Girlie Myth’ which she was trying to decipher.