DELIVERED AND ASSIMILATED

Her expression is multifaceted, and as becomes evident in the retrospective view of the last two decades of her artistic production, she employs various media: Anita Frech explores states of being in performance, photography, painting, drawing, collage, sculpture, and object art.

“I stick to my own language when I work and don’t think,” she explains, attempting to describe the state that best suits tracing an inner experience. For better understanding, the two parts of her assertion could also be swapped and read as follows: “When I work and don’t think, I stick to my own language.” With this, Frech refers not only to practices that were experimented with in the arts at the beginning of the previous century—by the Surrealists in composing their automatic writing or in abstract painting after 1945. There was always an attempt to remove the creative process from conscious control to expose unconscious impulses unreservedly.

Such ambitions are often accompanied by an interest in the procedures of psychoanalysis—as with Anita Frech, who, like previous generations, understands how to explore the parallels between artistic and psychoanalytic explanatory models in her work. “With regard to the meaning of the object, I ask for your special attention,” Sigmund Freud wrote in his sixth lecture on Introduction to Psychoanalysis, explaining, “When I ask someone to say what comes to mind about a specific element of the dream, I expect them to engage in free association while holding onto a starting idea. This requires a special attitude of attention that […] excludes reflection.”

In his Interpretation of Dreams, Freud also pointed out that the path to the unconscious is primarily opened to those who allow their emotions and inner images to flow uncensored. Thus, the method of psychoanalysis has always relied on the spontaneous linking of mental contents to delve into the causes of psychological states through “unpremeditated” expressions. As the above quote indicates, associative thinking also requires a “special attitude of attention”—a concentrated focus on inner-world connections, on which Anita Frech’s work is based. Here are some thoughts on a selection of groups of works from her long-standing exploration.

Frech’s early drawings reveal a palpable striving in the alternation between delicately outlined and roughly sketched elements to represent the essence of her feelings. Even the repeated inquiries into certain emotional states are fueled by doubt as to whether what is represented as significant can truly capture the actual core. Thus, the symbolic becomes the anchor point of her artistic translation. In this regard, Frech is closer to the psychoanalytic concepts of Carl Gustav Jung than those of Sigmund Freud. Since the same or similar visual symbols repeatedly form in the artist’s mind’s eye, she relies on Jung’s superpersonal “archetypes,” independent of culture, gender, and experience, to symbolize moods in a universally valid form: “The contents of the personal unconscious are acquisitions of individual life,” Jung said, “whereas those of the collective unconscious are always and a priori existing archetypes.” Jung’s views not only provide confirmation but also motivate Frech to persistently continue her serial image productions.

Despite the staged compressions as they appear in the present art documentation, the respective subjects hardly ever lose their urgency. The physiognomies of the figures often mutate into counterparts that resist further dialogue—inwardly absorbed, with blindfolds, with a gaze lost in space or turned inward. Mostly a female, often a childlike self, which, as in dream events, finds a substitute in the faces of others. Occasionally, idols of the classical film industry are used, integrated into individual imaginations from the collective memory bank. Attached objects or animals can help interpret the meaning of the pictorial manifestations. As iconographic attributes, they are often directly related to or even integrated into the human figures.

Frech’s performative self-questioning has so far largely taken place out of the public eye—a concession to the indispensable need for concentration, as demanded by Freud. In the early 2000s, the artist experimented with camera and body in a dilapidated area of a former large-scale discotheque. In numerous images, some closer to painting than photography, the physical self is illuminated and staged from various perspectives. The action-oriented documentation can be read as a series of succinct storyboards of cinematic scenes. Following the specific atmosphere of the once perhaps infamous and now abandoned place, the fantasies previously depicted in two dimensions now take shape in three dimensions.

In the series “Animal M,” fur coats, animal masks, and mannequins serve as props. Frech presents herself to the camera and thus to the viewer’s eye as a beastly hybrid creature. In one “film still,” she bends over the female dummy, dragging its legs across leaf-covered asphalt. In a subsequent image, she remains motionless in front of her own reflection—the rigid gaze of the predator mask directed at her exposed and thus vulnerable upper body. The next photograph depicts the scene of a crime—the temporary conclusion and climax of the three-part image sequence—where naked doll legs protrude from the entrance of the former disco toilet in a grotesque twist.

The film that “plays out” in the minds of the viewers as they contemplate this staging cannot deny the ambivalence underlying these artistic interpretations of existence. Just as the subsequent presentations of youthful self-representations, often highly sexualized, sometimes showing challenging sovereignty and then again indicating a maltreated vulnerability: alongside the reversal of perpetrator-victim roles, the feigned shifts between passive and active behavior delineate a disturbingly painful path of identity search.

In “Schattenspiel” (Shadow Play), the ambivalence tolerance, the ability to accept divergent components such as good and evil, strength and weakness as integrative parts of one’s own psyche, seems to be pushed to the limit: The dynamic merging of drawing and photography once again blurs the boundaries between perpetrator and victim—between the one raising the knife-bearing arm and the abused. Exposed to immediate threat, the drawn victim figure leans towards the weapon, while the photographic silhouette turns away from it in a strong counter-movement. The static representation of the perpetrator makes it difficult to provide a clear answer to the question of who is responsible for the depicted escalation of violence: the dynamic representation of the victim gives the impression that it proactively confronts the fulfillment of its destiny, the completion of its (self-)injury. Whether this depiction illustrates a conflicted inner tension or merely the chronological sequence of the crime remains at the discretion of the respective observer’s interpretation power.

Animalistic elements also appear in the series “Birdeggs.” The recurring motif of the bird is expanded here to include aspects of body-fruit and protection: in the background, a nest with an egg, a glass marble, and a cut-out paper eye, in front of which the protagonist, clad in black leather in a martial stance, focuses on the camera with lowered head in threatening defense. Then there are gazes through and onto a Janus-faced bird-human and her lap, which, like that of the conceptual artist Birgit Jürgenssen in 1979, holds a nest in a body area that is synonymous with origin and security and of archetypal character.

Detective fetishes such as trimmed, blood-smeared silver shoes or collaged facial fragments with hats made of feathers and “borrowed” hair lead to “Girl Noir,” a predominantly black-and-white series that, with only one exception, focuses on the expressive power of the female face. Despair, fear, and concern characterize the numerous facial expressions, which, as before, may be drawn from the treasure trove of classic film history.

Anita Frech strives to capture in her images the moment when a dreadful premonition creeps into consciousness, whose direction or impact is hardly measurable—situations in which the uncanny breaks through, prompting even Sigmund Freud to undertake an “aesthetic investigation.” In this, the psychoanalyst concluded that “the uncanny is that kind of frightening thing which goes back to what is long known, long familiar,” and he quoted from the definition of the term, which reads as follows: “Heimlich, adj. (-keit, f. -en): 1. also Heimelich, homely, belonging to the house, not strange, familiar, tame, familiar and intimate, homely etc. (a) (obsolete) belonging to the house, to the family, or: regarded as belonging to it, cf. Latin familiaris, familiar: The Heimlichen, the household members […]”.

The close connection between the uncanny and the familiar also becomes virulent in Frech’s later works, which uniformly represent intimate, revealing, or exposed moments of existence: a worried gaze over the male shoulder in a romantic embrace, the back of a half-clothed female corpse lying on her stomach, or the revealing, identification photo of a murderer in frontal and profile view. Whether drawing on an actual event or emerging from pure imagination, these are familiar motifs that Frech self-referentially designs and stamps with the seal of universality.

Sensations of loneliness seem to underlie these images as much as the resulting longing for dissolution and/or union. The latter is explored in sculptural works of more recent date. Fabrics as equivalents of human skin form the starting point for Frech’s performances, which are again documented photographically. The theme of the “stage space,” already a subject of artistic exploration in the early Factory recordings, comes into focus.

The veiled body becomes a sculpture that, through its additive process, offers a variety of modulation possibilities: akin to the studies of Leonardo da Vinci or Albrecht Dürer, draperies are used to emphasize or conceal gestures and poses. In configurations where the different textures of skin contrast with those of fabric or where the folds of the fabric emphasize the flow of movement, the classic tasks of sculptural design find a continuation, and the fabric takes on the character of a garment.

In other arrangements, the colored fabric serves as camouflage: The body sculpture increasingly resembles the stage background and ultimately merges with its surroundings. Embedded in the self-made set, Anita Frech operates the camera’s self-timer, capturing her newly achieved object status and the act of assimilation.

Monika Pessler
Vienna, 2021