Catalogue note by Kolja Reichert for the exhibition catalogue Was draußen wartet/What Is Waiting Out There, 6th Berlin Bienniale for Contemporary Art, 2010, pp. 205 (D), 216 (E); handbook pp. 79 (D), 80 (E). A link in the text opens the relevant documentation in a new window.
Marlene Haring
For her diploma examination, Marlene Haring, in a full-body, blond-haired suit made of plumber’s hemp, crawled through the Vienna Prater with her examiners and a crowd of curious spectators in tow. She made her way from the amusement park to the red light Stuwerviertel district, where she had a group photo taken in front of an alpine panorama in an vacant store and finally lured her audience to her apartment where she disappeared into the bathroom, leaving a sign on the door: “If you want to talk with me, you have to bathe with me.” (Marlene Hairy, or In My Bathtub I am the Captain, 2005)
This action united central elements of Haring’s art: transgressing customary frames of experience through surprising situations, examining the probabilities of action in social structures, problematizing normality, the critique of body images and forms of conditioning the body, and, last but not least, a title that shatters earnest debates.
Haring’s material is reality. She uses everyday stuff in irritating ways. She makes visible the boundaries and norms that regulate social praxis in a supposedly liberal society. She often works directly via the body. At Scope Miami she gave hickeys (love bites) to visitors for ten dollars (Sucking Marks $10, 2006)—radically compressing the terms of the artist-collector relationship.
When Haring applies Nivea Creme on mirrors she confronts both the male-dominated tradition of monochrome painting and female body-care rituals, while the familiar smell of the product provokes ambivalent associations. Her use of hemp fiber and spaghetti mocks the clichés of feminist body art—“Although I mean it seriously,” says Haring. Her aim is not so much to reclaim latitude for identity as to overcome identity altogether. Cordially, her art hints that one can always be many things at once.
Haring’s installations work through consistent excess. With that, she gets the better of self-institutionalizing institutional critique. So, in 2009, when Haring was supposed to lecture on the freedom of art at the Vienna Secession, the building was Closed Because of Pubic Hair. She had blocked the monumental stairway and entrance portal with blond plumber’s hemp and invited the guests for a conversation in a beer garden. Rather than occupying positions, Haring opens situations. In her work Living in Hope for the Festival of Regions in Linz, 2009, Haring tested the limits of performance as a permanent regular for a month in a pub on the outskirts of Linz, thus introducing a small difference in a defined social space.
In recent weeks Haring has been in Berlin to develop an installation and a performance for the Bienniale. At the time of going to press, only the titles were available: Title Holder and Title Fight on Orange Square. Haring: “A biennial is a title fight too.”
Kolja Reichert, 2010
The German text will be posted shortly