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Laudatio on behalf of the awarding of the Ernst Schering Foundation Art Award 2005 to Cornelia Renz

Mark Gisbourne

Welcome……!  It is always difficult to summarise an artist’s work, to say its essence is this or is that….etc.   I suppose after giving many of these said introductions, and twenty years or so of post-graduate teaching contemporary art in London, I should have cracked the system.  But the truth is there is no system to explain definitively the work of an artist, if there were, a single monograph would suffice….and we could leave it at that.  Perhaps, the greater truth is that as much as we visually claim to read a work of art, at the same time it reads us….it tells us what we have chosen to see….to concentrate upon….to emphasise….and sometimes in moments of insight fundamentally tells us what we are at the time of looking   We know this because when we return to the same work, we are inclined to read it slightly differently on each occasion.  A little bit like human memory, when we re-remember it is always with a subtle difference of inflection and content.  For human beings are never neutral, they are never standing still, no matter how conservative our taste or how profligate our actions might claim to be.

I suppose what I am suggesting here, is that determinism is a dangerous thing.  And, equally so, the tendency towards creating any monocular view of the life, and working practice of a painter.  Having said this one cannot avoid the fact that Cornelia Renz trained at Leipzig (Hochschule fuer Grafik and Buchkunst, Leipzig) in the years 1993-1998, and was a master student of Sighard Gille in the years 1998-2001.  But here I return quickly to the dangers of determinism, particularly so in the current international vogue for what is sometimes called ‘The Leipzig School’….though I must confess that in the English language and speaking world, I am partly to blame for writing a long article on the LIGA group over two years ago.  Cornelia Renz’s work is decidedly distinct and separate from those painters (who are mostly male) whose interests are largely architectural, spatial, perspectival, facture-based and/or phenomenological.

And, I should say, without reserve, this is why when I wrote a short outline of my understanding of her work recently; and I hope I avoided the dangerous determinism that can be created by forced association.  Her work is quite distinct from any other members of the ‘Leipzig School’.  And, also this is the reason why I started writing the aforementioned text with an old English nursery rhyme, a farcical little narrative that unwittingly sustains many of the clichés of gender determinism.  Those stereotypes constructed around childhood and which can have such deleterious effect on childhood’s passage to a so-called adult life.  It goes like this……..

What are little boys made of?

Frogs and snails

And puppy dog’s tails.

That’s what little boys are made of

 What are little girls made of?

Sugar and spice

And all things nice,

That’s what little girls are made of.

Nursery Rhymes (J.O.Halliwell, 1844)

It is - as it were - the very thing that much a Renz’s work questions?  Those period(s) of human life so often referred to as ‘rites or passage’, those physical and psychological transitions in our life that are always ambiguous and difficult to pin down.  Where are the boundaries for instance between the supposed immediacy of pre-pubescence, pubescence and subsequent maturity?  Is it merely a question of age and simple discursive allocation? Seen from another viewpoint when do we become mature, when does middle age or old age begin?  The fact is that in our lives we are always in a state of becoming, we are always becoming something, and as in the case of a ‘coming of age’ there is never a verifiable instant of change……be it biological, physiological or gender-based….hence our identity is formed both in and through process, alongside the context wherein our life manifests itself.

In large measure the painter Cornelia Renz makes such ‘transformative’ moments the substance of her art.  In her case she often chooses to highlight the pre-pubescent girl, the clichéd ‘girl-bride’ and the eroticised nymphette.  This said there is always an ambiguity to be faced in her work.  Sometimes its takes the form of plagiarised gender, boys dress in girl’s clothes, girls adopting the militaristic roles of men, and vice versa.  And, though it is easy to suggest analogies to Nabukov’s ‘Lolita’, to Carroll’s ‘Alice’, and Sade’s ‘Justine’ or ‘Juliette’, one misses the point if you place them within the rubric of the libidinal economy alone.  It is true there are also some references to ‘psychodelia’ and the gender ambivalences of earlier ages.  But these women and settings are more than that, rather they are at times moral monsters, made all the more surprising as they spring from the hand and thoughts of a very self-analytical woman.  And, because of this they are moreover bereft of the ‘voyeurism’ that one might normally suppose from such a subject matter. 

Indeed, one thinks sometimes satirically of the Calvinist ‘monstrous regiment of women’ (John Knox), turned to such telling effect by male and female writers over the last forty years. In fact the re-thinking of what constitutes male-female gender may yet turn out to be the most substantial event that have taken place over the last half-century in our Western culture.  For as Cornelia Renz shows there is no sugar and spice to be found here, no elevation to, or simple dichotomy into, the masculine-derived stereotypes of the virgin and the whore. These young women invariably transgress and as they do so, they overtly erase the role classifications generally accorded them by society.

Yet this said there is certainly a graphic immediacy to Renz’s paintings and drawings, like latter day ‘Vivian Girls’ (and references to Henry Darger may be their correlate) they often work through line and hatching, with the large paintings playing around with the ideas of top and bottom, as if the artist wanted you to optically and aerially move around the work.  The fact that there is a manipulation of the aerial viewpoint shows direct analogies with the conventions of child art, and with psychotic art and art brut.  And, it appears to me that the artist’s background in art education and psychology tellingly points to her subtle awareness of the primary impulses of picture-making. For as we all know the child usually works upon the paper as if looking from above, and this is clearly evident in such large-scale paintings by Renz such as Bambi (2001), the naming itself bringing forth a redolence of childhood. And the same might be said to be true of another earlier painting called Camouflage (2001). Renz’s literalism of colour also betokens the conventions of graphics with there sense of immediacy, and is almost like a comic book at times whereby the silhouette and outlines are challenged by (one might even say’ ‘grate against’) an astringent use of colour be it either as paint or ink.  I am inclined to think (and this is pure speculation on my part), that her unique use of colour is somehow indebted to the period she spent in India in the mid-80s.  Only she can confirm this for us……..  The colours certainly share some sort of affinity with those found in the street colours of that cacophonous sub-continent.

Yet the subject matter is hardly child-like in origin, unless it is drawn from within the traumas or dreams of childhood disturbance. And, it always contains itself within the surface that is not always true of the approaches of childhood, one has only to spend time in a kindergarten and look at the desks of the children to understand that.  Conversely, therefore, it tends towards the fetishist parameters of art brut and psychotic art, those chaotic transgression-realms wherein dream projection, desire, and catharsis take root by necessity.  But, even so certain ambivalences continue to reign.  For as you look again you find the paradox of that that is both sweet and sour, those contraries, forming an oxymoron that strangely harmonises itself only within the imagination alone.

Another aspect of her work is that it is clearly indebted to ideas concerning the masquerade, and the conventions of dressing up, and it is often theatrical and circus-like at times.  There are the accoutrements of the ‘tutu’, which reminds me personally in many respects of my English background and the notion of the pantomime.  As many of you may know Englishmen take a great delight in dressing up in women’s clothes, one might almost say that it is an English pastime, since every year in pantomime performances the female parts are played by men, and all the male parts by women. Indeed, it has a long tradition in the English theatre going back to Shakespeare’s day, when men often played women’s roles.  Hence the role of the masquerade  common to all cultures takes an important role in concepts of gender identity and gender formation.  The child’s delight in dressing up in their parents clothes should not be lost to us here.  And, no doubt the birth of Cornelia’s daughter Anna in 1988, has no doubt brought this home to her.

Masquerade must also lead us on to concerns of the Carnivalesque, those deeply imbedded ideas and moments of licensed transgression or law-breaking that are permitted and even celebrated in all cultures and societies.  As Mikhail Bakhtin put it “Here is the dimension in which thrashing and abuse are not personal chastisement, but are symbolic actions directed at something on a higher level, at the king.  This is the popular festive system of images, which is most clearly expressed in carnival.”  You might say we no longer have a king, so what is the relevance.  The term king is that which we call encoded sovereignty, embodied in the law of a sovereign state, and which in annual catharsis we partake in for the purposes of transgression.  That is to say be it the ‘Love Parade’, the Carnival in Koeln, or the Christopher Street Day celebrations that take place all over the world.  It is the festive and celebratory, be it passive, or aggressive, or passive-aggressive that is so often found in the images of Cornelia Renz.

In the same paradoxical sense the paintings and drawings are also like nursery rhymes or fairy tales, or at least, of their fantastical and grotesque remains left to us in an age without innocence.  We all know of course of the inherent violence in fairy tales and nursery rhymes, Germany has a particularly rich legacy through the Brothers Grimm, or in others like Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood, or even the Three Little Pigs, etc.  These have been passed onto us like fragments from collective memory, and we carry them with us throughout our lives.  One might also therefore see the accreted elements, the extraneous materials grafted onto Renz’s images as carrying forward a token of those fragmented memories we all carry within us.  That is to say the disparate relations between things and which seemingly operate in a strange set of juxtapositions in our daily lives. 

One thing we have surely learnt from our modern world is that we gain as much insight from the flea market and we do from the encyclopedia.  Indeed, the internet at times might be characterised as the cyber flea market it so often proposes, one minute we are on Ebay, and the next, perhaps, looking at a website on Stoicism.  What does this say about the becoming flux of our modern minds, or, even, you might ask, the strange set of juxtapositions that are be found in my mind since I often gravitate between what some might consider vulgar commercialism, and the other an elevated intellectual pursuit.

I suppose what I am trying to say, is that the child’s picture book has become as profound in its own way as the Blaue Reiter Almanac in the working practices of art and artists.  Cornelia Renz’s knowledge of art history is also a reflection of this understanding, both parts being expounded upon and delivered through her use of a newly recharged and vibrant vocabulary.  Of course I would like to finish by congratulating Cornelia Renz on her winning the Schering Stiftung Prize, an award richly deserved for the imaginative innovations in her paintings and drawings.   Her little girls, her boy-girls, her girl-boys are all as one, cruel or coy, seductive or repulsive, sweet or sour, but then I suppose this posits a position for us all.  We live now in a world that is neither ‘frogs and snails and puppy dog tails,’ or for that matter a place where girls are ‘sugar and spice and all things nice’.  I think Cornelia Renz is trying to say that the world is a better place because of it, and that we should be left free to imagine and to be whatever our personal sense of gender requires.

Vielen Dank.

© Mark Gisbourne, March 11, 2005