Gisèle Vienne – Gewaltiger Auftritt

In the entrance, on a high white pedestal, a girl with long hair sits with her back to us. To her left is an almost empty room with a soft white carpet that you want to enter, but you are not allowed. Only from a great distance can one see a disturbing installation with life-size dolls. They are all teenagers, dressed individually in hoodies, jeans or T-shirts, just like the girl in the entrance.

In Romanticism, the back figure invites you to identify with it and look into the sublime landscape. If we look into the large hall directly in front of us, there are room-filling display cases lined up right next to each other on the floor, always at the same distance. Inside, always lying on their backs with their hands stretched out to either side, were countless teenagers with lifeless eyes.

The solo exhibition in the Haus am Waldsee »Gisèle Vienne. This Causes Consciousness to Fracture – A Puppet Play” breaks the visitor’s expectations right from the start. Because in order to let the dolls play, every single Snow White coffin would first have to be broken. Perhaps Gisèle Vienne (* 1976) is also alluding to the photographic series “The Games of the Doll” by the surrealist Hans Bellmer with the title. Despite their nudity, his erotically staged dolls always wore white socks and black shoes, like the Viennes girls, whose feet are inextricably linked to modeled Mary Janes.

The first part of the English title is also a quote. Vienne refers to a track by Italian musician Caterina Barbieri. It is part of her album “Patterns of Consciousness” recorded in 2017 and in turn quotes an essay by the psychologist Bernard Rimé. He was interested in the role of emotions in our perception. In Vienne, it is primarily the anger and resistance of young adults against structural and institutional violence. The youthful rebellion against the dominance of authoritarian forces is often dismissed and devalued as a temporary pubertal phase. Vienne became aware of this devaluation at the age of eleven. She then began building her own dolls with her mother.

Dorothéa Vienne-Pollak is a student of Oskar Kokoschka, whose failed affair with Alma Mahler once culminated in the desire to own a life-size doll of his lover. The doll maker Hermine Moos fulfilled his request, but he was extremely disappointed. A party in honor of the doppelganger ended disastrously: Kokoschka poured red wine over her and threw her, her head torn off, into the garden, where horrified neighbors thought they would discover a bloody woman’s corpse the next morning.

Kokoschka sought in the doll a docile and always available female being, just as the ancient sculptor Pygmalion turned away from living women in disgust and created a marble model of the ideal woman. The doll is less a replacement than a model for ideal femininity. The children’s doll is also more than just an innocent toy: the child is supposed to use it to learn how to behave later in order to adapt to the norms of society. Vienne shows early on with her first dolls that she doesn’t want to follow any external model.

Today Vienne works as a theater director and choreographer, but also as a visual artist and filmmaker and stages human and puppet bodies in a wide variety of locations. In order to give enough space to this complexity, another exhibition can be seen at the same time in the Georg Kolbe Museum: “I know that I can double my size. Gisèle Vienne and the dolls of the avant-garde«.

Historical dolls by Lotte Pritzel and Sophie Taeuber-Arp, film clips of Valeska Gert’s and Josephine Baker’s dances, and photographs by Claude Cahun and Hermine Moos are placed in relation to Vienne’s contemporary works. The focus here is on non-conformist modern women who broke the role model of their time. Vienne created the film “Kerstin Kraus” especially for the exhibition.

With the dolls, the artist reflects ambiguously in the exhibition space, in the film and on stage in the Sophiensælen – where Vienne’s full-length performance “Crowd” was shown four times last week – on different levels of perception about the socio-culturally damaged body and the breaks in it Society, about familial and institutional abuse and structural violence. It goes to the limits of what is possible and bearable. This extreme commitment deserves a big appearance.

» Gisèle Vienne. This Causes Consciousness to Fracture – A Puppet Play«, until January 12, Haus am Waldsee, Berlin.
»I know I can double. Gisèle Vienne and the Dolls of the Avant-Garde”, until March 9th, Georg Kolbe Museum, Berlin.