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Nivea
by Marlene Haring, 1999 and 2000

posters, 840 x 594 mm, overdrawing

Marlene writes: Nivea (1999) was made for the exhibition 'Nicht aus einer Position' curated by Martin Prinzhorn at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. The posters were placarded around Vienna on the billboards, wich normally advertise cultural events. Seemingly Nivea body lotion is being advertised, but the posture and the body do not really fulflill advertising requirements. Nivea (2000) is one of a series of overdrawings of the 1999 poster. I made the posters the site of my own graffiti and the subject of a critique.

'Haring plays with the pose of the white pin-up girls. She questions the borderline between woman and animal as well as the idealised beauty of women. In Hollywood cinema from the 1930s to the 1960s, white, blonde women played a prominent role and were a compliant projection surface for sexual desire. Haring picks up on these fantasies by satirising women’s alleged proximity to nature and the animalism in their existence by humorously confronting the two posters, namely a naked blonde and a woman covered in hair. Testing the limits of a female subject-position in the arts was also a frequent provocation in Haring’s work in the collaboration Halt+Boring (1991–2003, together with Catrin Bolt). Their pieces like Corrections and Call Boys (a video installation which displayed film of the artists having sex with male prostitutes they hired with the money they received for their contribution to an exhibition in Salzburg, Austria) repeatedly take up the male-connoted genius-gesture and give it short shrift with a wink of an eye and without a warning finger.' (excerpt from Who wants to be a feminist? by Rosa Reitsamer, Art in Sight, London, no. 26, January 2005)

 I am not a feminist. I am normal.