HAVE FUN!
About the Work Complex “FactoryLand” from Anita Frech
“The animal looks at us”: It’s not actually an animal gazing directly into the camera, but rather a human figure wearing a fur coat and a lioness mask, pulling the legs of a doll protruding from the bottom of the image. The scene takes place in an autumnal courtyard enclosed by a high wall, likely an industrial area: The ground is covered with wilted leaves, and sparse greenery sprouts from barren soil. Plants grow over the fence, as if the wilderness is reclaiming the civilized area. It’s a carnivorous, if not cannibalistic, scene, however one interprets the protagonist’s state of being. “The animal looks/goes at us (nous regarde),” writes Jacques Derrida, “and we stand naked before it.” But even the human-animal presents itself naked in a subsequent photograph: the fur coat has opened – like a wound – revealing female breasts. The prey from the previous image has been left in a toilet. With the door open, only the legs are visible, resembling corpse parts. Next to it on a wooden fence, in red letters, reads: “Have Fun!”
“The animal looks at us,” writes Derrida. And we stand naked before it: “Perhaps thinking begins there.”
In the series “Factory/Land,” boundaries are discussed, problematized, interrogated: The boundary between human and animal, between wilderness and domesticated life, between the linguistically expressible and the unsayable, between night as a zone of existential boundarylessness and day as the presumptive stage of orderly life, here disrupted by the intrusion of the incommensurable: Sauve qui peut la vie!
Artist Anita Frech chose as the scenario for her photographic performances, carried out with her own body as a medium and created shortly after the turn of the millennium, a place that fueled the lustful dreams of multiple generations of adolescent night creatures: The “Tanzfabrik” in Radlberg near Sankt Pölten was Austria’s first large-scale discotheque and organized nocturnal revelries until the 1990s. By the millennium, the former ‘Pleasure Dome’ had long since descended into urban wasteland: neglected buildings, soiled facades, blinking mirrors, and cracked asphalt, with vegetation of all kinds finding its way through: Oh wilderness, oh protection from it.
The setting, one could say the scene of the visual assaults on a ghost world of the past, which appears as a pale projection, combines numerous topoi of fantastic literature, genre film, black romanticism, and leftist social criticism into a multidimensional paradigm of meaning: The forest as a dark universe inhabited by bandits (including those of Schiller) as well as the German soul, impulse crimes, and the uncanny. (From the art of Anita Frech to Mike Kelley’s exhibition “The Uncanny” is not a huge leap, by the way.)
The factory as the scene of meticulous capitalist production, but which nevertheless can also exude a peculiar enchantment. For example, when one thinks of “La Fabricca illuminata,” Luigi Nono’s illuminated factory in composition, which by its title alone appears as a magical place before the mind’s eye and makes one forget that the composition is actually about harsh criticism of the system. The name Tanzfabrik seems to be a contradiction in terms at first glance: On the one hand, it refers to precisely timed, optimized production processes aimed at achieving maximum efficiency, while the first part of the word denotes (freestyle) dance as a practice of kinetic boundarylessness, seeming to formulate a contradiction. However, it is precisely from this dialectic that an ontological tension arises, which in turn generates frictional heat in Anita Frech’s art situated there. “Factory/Land” plays out both in the devastated interiors and in the surrounding exterior zones, making the traces of decay/neglect and the signs of industrial past such as the giant chimney part of the staging. On the one hand, the materiality of a place is exhibited in a transformation process – from movement to standstill, from highest performance efficiency to unproductivity – on the other hand, a series of micro-narratives is evoked, focusing on feminine empowerment/assertion (and also incorporating the romantic doppelgänger motif): “In the toilet lies a female corpse, mine, I draped her,” writes the artist. “I wear fur and a lioness mask on a bare lioness heart. I killed her, the one who ate me up, body and soul. Now she belongs to me, I fuck her as she fucked me. The noose around my neck. To survive, I must kill.”
There’s a saying by Picasso that’s often quoted: “I don’t search, I find.” The same could be applied in the context of Anita Frech’s art: She exposes herself to the genius loci or, if you will, the horror vacui of a place saturated with a history of energies of boundarylessness in pop culture and is inspired by it in a somewhat paranormal way. For example, a bird’s nest containing a dead egg is found, becoming part of the staging as a kind of cult object. Elsewhere in the photo series, shoes appear – sometimes flat shoes, then, in another sequence set in a parched field, silver high heels, given red hues through special color filtering. It’s hard not to think of David Lynch’s film “Blue Velvet” when faced with these images, and when adding the doll from “Animal M.,” the thought of a fetishistic character of these works is hard to dismiss. This, in turn, recalls the artist Hans Bellmer, who throughout his artistic career worked with the eroticized image of a often abused female body. For his anarchic-erotic productions, he used parts of mannequins, which he hybridized with wood, metal, and plaster into fetish-like objects. In a similar imaginative space, which, however, receives a completely different spin through the feminine perspective, plays the art of Anita Frech: It is mixed media in the best sense, encompassing drawings, installative aspects, performance, and photography, without any medium per se standing out. It’s not about the form of representation, but about a traumatic core that the work circles, identifies, and ultimately seeks to exorcise. Here, ravens made of paper begin to speak, hairpieces and wigs made of paper are part of a masquerade game in which different identities are blended together, and past, present, and future merge into one. One could say with Georg Trakl: “A breath makes me tremble with decay.”
It’s this trembling before the intolerabilities of existence that gives Anita Frech’s art its urgency. So it’s only logical that she continued her investigations into the nightmarish depths of being, begun in the seemingly idyllic zones of Austrian provinces, which have also produced figures like Fritzl, a little later in Los Angeles, the James Ellroy Land, where black dahlias bloom. If one wants to consider this art in the context of what else is the case, names like that of the sensation-seeking crime documentarian Weegee, the comic noir artist Raymond Pettibon, or the dye transfer photographer William Eggleston, who established color as a self-evident condition of perception, come to mind. But reference systems are secondary in a work that attempts very individually and solipsistically to explore possibilities, boundaries, and shocks of one’s own being. It wants to mark a point where, as Jacques Lacan writes, the image, the illusion, serve to seal off a vulnerable, traumatic, that is, a porous, (uncontrollably) opening body and its interior. “The image is supposed to close a lack and closes it only too well, too completely, thus creating a new, now unending desirability.”
Thomas Miessgang
Vienna, 2022