Precarious lives: Reflections on the work of Gabriela Oberkofler
Helena Pereña
A group of birds of prey circle shining stones. They try to grasp the small treasures with their claws (Fig. p. kk). Precious objects that are helplessly at the mercy of the animals, despite or precisely because of their beauty. Gabriela Oberkofler deals with the theme of necessity in nature. The birds of prey can’t help themselves: they have to take the stones with them. However, they cannot be held responsible for their actions. A predator that kills cannot be compared with a brutal murderer. Or to put it another way: brutality is in the eye of the beholder.
The moral difference between humans and animals or other species has been a topos of philosophy since antiquity. Friedrich Nietzsche describes man as “the only animal that has not yet been determined”.1 Instincts do not lead to the goal, as (too) many options open up with every step. Human life is therefore characterized by constant and unpredictable change, but also by the search for identity, or, to use Nietzsche’s phrase again, for “how to become what one is”.2 The lack of definition of human action and the associated hunt for a constant identity, which is doomed to failure, are key themes in Gabriela Oberkofler's work. She deals with so-called folk culture, traditions, landscapes and agricultural living conditions from her region of origin, South Tyrol. In her works, loneliness and decay collide with the supposedly identity-forming homeland. The formal beauty of her drawings does not conceal the disturbing motifs. This creates a contrast of great poetic intensity.
Alpine romance?
In a photographic work entitled Salten/Dolomites (fig. p. aa), a young woman in a dirndl sits on a magnificent horse. She is holding a pitchfork in her hand. There is something determined in her calm, forward gaze, which her horse seems to be imitating. The Dolomites can be seen in the background of the fantastic larch meadow. This staging of (South) Tyrolean virtues appears perfect—and therefore deeply artificial. The rider is the artist herself. She is still using the photograph, which was taken in 2008, as a business card in 2016. What does this say about Oberkofler’s identity? The ironic attitude becomes clearer when you consider that she lives in Stuttgart. The artist also turns stereotypes about Alpine dwellers on their head in Gipfelstürmen (Fig. p. aa). In this video work, Oberkofler, who yodels, plays the accordion and wears a dirndl, climbs a building site, a pile of rubble from wartime and the concrete remains of an ornamental fountain. Despite his critical stance, Oberkofler’s works are not destructive. Oberkofler ironically sows seeds of doubt where clichés threaten to take root. The artist herself describes her subtle approach to drawings as “taking the motif completely apart” in order to create something else.3 It is a metamorphosis that can also be felt in these early works.
The decomposition of the motif begins when the individual elements are recognized. Empty space plays a decisive role in Oberkofler's drawings. This emphasizes the isolation of the motifs. It creates the necessary distance to the depiction, which offers enough space for concentration. Fragments illustrate how precarious ideas of wholeness are (fig. p. kk, kk). In combination with the emptiness, they also allow for silence by slowing down the pace of reading contemplation. Oberkofler describes the creation of the hay bales (fig. p. kk) as follows: “My hay bales also contain the landscape, they roll towards the viewer like avalanches and can no longer be stopped. I spent months meticulously inscribing the content, the structure of the dried grass, into the large form in pen and ink. It is very important to me that the motifs in my drawings become pictorial objects through the application of a great deal of time and are ultimately much more than two bales of hay lying in the fields in the fall, waiting to be pulled in by a giant machine. “4 This constructive approach stands in radical contrast to the romanticized pictorial traditions of landscape depiction, which stage an anthropocentric view of nature. In a miniature-like and delicate manner, the artist attempts to identify the components of the hay bales individually in order to transform them into an image. Conventional strategies of representation are thus called into question from the ground up.
Oberkofler goes one step further in Baum (Blätter, Blüten, Stängel) (Fig. p. kk). Here, the original tree has been broken down into three components and depicted as a pile of leaves, a pile of blossoms and a pile of branches. The drawing is related to an action in which the artist brought Christmas trees that had already been disposed of after the holidays into an exhibition space (fig. p. aa, aa). They already bear traces of their fate, as the trunks have been cut off and the branches partially broken. The trees were gradually dismantled with the help of many visitors. As a result, they have disappeared as Christmas trees, both in their natural and traditional appearance. Regarding Baum (Blätter, Blüten, Stängel) (fig. p. kk), Oberkofler explains: “In my mind, it is still a tree (I see it in the forest) that has become something else in the course of the process. Something that has experienced the changes of our time. It is the treatment of nature in a civilized world, in which not only the myth of nature as such, but knowledge and utilization determine the sense of nature. “5
The idea of the second nature, with which man surrounds himself following the example of the first nature, resonates here. The second nature is built, it is culture and so-called civilization. For as an unidentified animal, man “cannot rely on his instincts. Where nature lets him down, he has had to take his evolution into his own hands in order to survive. “6 The emergence of the natural sciences through sorting and analyzing natural processes in order to tame them, to counteract the existential surrender to the forces of nature, is often associated with this. Drawings such as trees (leaves, flowers, stems) or hay bales can be viewed meticulously, almost scientifically, up close and abstractly from a distance. Art is neither first nor second nature and is perhaps therefore able to form a bridge between the two.
The longing for the animal
Animals are an important motif in Gabriela Oberkofler's work. We encounter wild animals and predators, birds, dogs, horses and many insects in the sheets—whether as a barely legible swarm (fig. p. aa) or as a portrait-like depiction (fig. p. kk). Always isolated or fragmented, even in groups, they are always injured, bleeding or even dead. The strange double gaze of the wolf in one drawing (ill. p. kk) challenges the viewer: Who is looking at whom? Is the round one my own pupil? The viewer becomes the hunter.
The direct juxtaposition with the wild animal continues to exert a great attraction that has always thrilled zoo visitors and adventurers alike. As a figure of identification and at the same time a threat, animals can, anthropologically speaking, still establish a connection to the first nature, to a natural origin. Their important role in myths, fairy tales and fables allows them to mediate between nature and culture: Animals appear liberated from the fears of humans. “Young readers quickly become familiar with picture book animals in particular, whether cuddly or ornery, because they often personify just one human characteristic. And so authors like to package light-hearted but also serious everyday topics in animal stories. “7 But the control and power of humans—including children—over animals also play a central role: the threat of the predator is eliminated by eradicating it. In the end, the hunter wins.
When Oberkofler deals with animals, she is taking part in a very current development in art. Among the quite diverse positions that can be discerned in it8, her criticism is aimed at “trivializing or glorifying” representations whose conventions are projected onto real animals.9 In the video work Mr. Nobel (fig. p. kk, kk), Oberkofler shows the nocturnal rounds of an old dog in the Stuttgart Wagenhallen, where her studio is located. Occasionally, Mr. Nobel encounters a white cat. Nothing else happens. Nevertheless, the senses are sharpened in the dark night. The work invites contemplation. It is a poetic portrait of a dog that does nothing but walk around day and night - in its “natural” environment.
The daily repetition of one or more activities, as observed in animals such as Mr. Nobel, can also help humans to develop an “identity”. In the installation Filomena Egger, née Oberkofler (fig. p. aa, aa), Oberkofler refers to a deceased farmer's wife by combining her still-living chickens with oppressive drawings. Filomena herself cannot be seen in the installation. Since caring for the animals determined her daily rhythm, she was given a precarious identity through such external factors, through her daily tasks: a determination. Oberkofler humorously stages another connection between animal and identity in the work Ahnengalerie (Fig. p. aa, aa). She writes that she found photographs of her ancestors among hunting trophies and stuffed animals.10 However, the ancestors are not people, but a neat group consisting of a stag, a goat, a deer and a horse, whose oval frames are reminiscent of both trophies and cameos. Is this a Darwinian confession? The longing for the animal is given a twinkle in the eye.
Life as a process of decay
Deceased ancestors, just like Filomena’s everyday routine, can give people stability. As they are closed lives, they can no longer change. This guarantees a stable genealogy. Living people, on the other hand, harbor uncertainty. Death as an identity-forming moment is a recurring theme in literature, art and philosophy. Only with death does becoming coincide with the state of “being”—only then are they identical. Rainer Maria Rilke describes “individual death” in the “Notes of Malte Laurids Brigge”: “This was not the death of some water addict, this was the evil, princely death that the chamberlain had carried within him all his life and nourished from within himself.” Even the children of his family “died what they already were and what they would have become. ”11
The close connection between birth and death takes on a different, particularly virulent dimension in cases of congenital diseases and genetic defects. Gabriela Oberkofler has selected a group of animals with albinism from the Natural Science Collections of the Tyrolean State Museums for a dialog with her drawings (fig. p. kk-kk). Due to a genetic defect, they lack melanin, the pigment that determines the color of skin, fur and feathers in vertebrates. In addition to their sensitivity to light, which can lead to skin cancer and blindness in albinos, they are easily spotted by predators as their natural camouflage does not work. Albinos are therefore doomed to an early death. In an artistic context, not only the color white but also the wild animal is often associated with innocence. In the Tyrolean Folk Art Museum in particular, one is involuntarily reminded of infant mortality: in 1610, the town doctor of Hall, Hippolyt Guarinoni, stated that among “one hundred children born, whom God brought into the world fresh and healthy, not ten would grow up”.12 According to the statistics on infant mortality in the “Demographic Yearbook Austria 2012”, 22.82 percent of 1000 live births in Tyrol in the years 1871–1875 died within the first year of life. After a steady decline, this figure fell below ten percent between 1931 and 1935, and only dropped below two percent from the 1970s onwards.13
At the Folk Art Museum, Oberkofler has focused in particular on the section of the display collection entitled The Precarious Life, which deals with people's hopes and worries. This resulted in the series Votive Figures (ill. p. kk-kk). In her personal interpretation of the theme, some motifs take on biomorphic traits, such as two chairs that could also be mistaken for beetles (ill. p. kk-kk). But it is above all the amulets used in connection with fertility and birth that are the focus of her interest: a votive toad with the associated idea that the uterus resembles an animal wandering around the body, causing abdominal pain by biting and nipping (fig. p. kk, aa). Or a spiked ball (fig. p. aa), which was intended to symbolize the woman's stabbing abdominal pain as a childbirth votive. Oberkofler transforms it into a fertility sphere full of flowers (fig. p. kk). A baby in swaddling clothes is a reminder of the high infant mortality rate at a time when (numerous) offspring were the livelihood of many families (fig. p. kk, aa).
Many of the motifs that Oberkofler used for her votive figures simply tell of the lives of people who have long since passed away. The Tyrolean Folk Art Museum mainly exhibits everyday objects that are no longer in use. Beautiful and fragile, the former everyday objects can often only be handled with care. As Oberkofler depicts them very sporadically on the white sheet, the children’s clothing items primarily refer to their missing owners (ill. p. kk-kk). Gifts of love such as a tobacco tin (ill. p. kk) are reminiscent of extinguished passions. By not only dispensing with all accessories, but also dynamically changing color and form, Oberkofler gives absence a shrill presence. The dead are brought back to life. As in Filomena Egger, née Oberkofler (ill. p. aa, aa), animals or objects from the lives of the deceased stand for their identity, which is at least precariously recognizable. For the exhibition, Gabriela Oberkofler has arranged an installation with traditional shoes of women and men from the museum depot (ill. p. kk). Mixed-up pairs stand on a round pedestal with their heels facing outwards. These erotic symbols, important for courtship, are now being used again. The unusual presentation breathes life into them.
The artist has also selected two other objects from the depot: the bird Self-knowledge (fig. p. kk) and a coffee grinder with a farmer's wife (fig. p. kk). The two-headed hybrid of human and animal, pinching its nose, is one of the most striking symbols of self-reflection. Only from a certain distance from oneself is the possibility of self-knowledge possible at all. Nietzsche also uses the image of an animal that steps out of itself in order to achieve a kind of ecstatic self-reflection.14 The farmer's wife of the coffee mill, on the other hand, seems to embody the opposite. The connection between her figure and the grinder creates a new kind of conformity. The function determines her identity; introspection is no longer possible. Life could hardly be more precarious.
Whispered into the afternoon
Sun, autumnal thin and timid,
And the fruit falls from the trees.
Silence dwells in blue rooms
A long afternoon.
The dying sounds of metal;
And a white animal breaks down.
Rough songs of brown girls
Are blown away in the falling leaves.
Forehead of God’s colors dreams,
Feels the soft wings of madness.
Shadows turn on the hill
Fringed black with decay.
Twilight full of peace and wine
Sad guitars run.
And to the mild lamp inside
You return as in a dream.
Georg Trakl, 1912
1 See, among others, Nietzsche, Friedrich: Jenseits von Gut und Böse. On the genealogy of morality, in: Colli, Giorgio/Montinari, Mazzino (eds.): Friedrich Nietzsche. Complete Works. Critical Study Edition in 15 Volumes, Vol. 5, Munich 1980, p. 81.
2 Subtitle to Friedrich Nietzsche's treatise “Ecce homo”.
3 Oberkofler, Gabriela/Meyer, Werner: Wenn nur noch bliebe, die Natur zu archivieren. A conversation between Gabriela Oberkofler and Werner Meyer, in: Mayer, Werner/Reckert, Annett (eds.): Schwarz ist die Nacht nie. The wind rose. Gabriela Oberkofler, catalog Kunsthalle Göppingen and Städtische Galerie Delmenhorst 2016, Göppingen 2016, pp. 7-23, p. 13.
4 Oberkofler/Meyer: Wenn nur noch bliebe, die Natur zu archivieren (as note 3), p. 18.
5 Oberkofler/Meyer: Wenn nur noch bliebe, die Natur zu archivieren (as note 3), p. 13.
6 Safranski, Rüdiger: Wieviel Globalisierung verträgt der Mensch?, Frankfurt a. M. 2004, p. 7ff.
7 Hahn, Karin: Animals in children's books. Ehrliche Freunde, kluge Ratgeber, listige Feinde, in: Deutschlandfunk, 25.10.2014, http://www.deutschlandfunk.de/tiere-in-kinderbuechern-ehrliche-freunde-kluge-ratgeber.1202.de.html?dram:article_id=301386 (accessed: 21.11.2016).
8 See, for example, Bechtloff, Dieter (ed.): Kunstforum International. Out of Africa. Im Zoo der Kunst I, vol. 174, Cologne 2005, and Bechtloff, Dieter (ed.): Kunstforum International. The Genres of Photography. In the Zoo of Art II, vol. 175, Cologne 2005.
9 Jahn, Andrea: Look back in sorrow - Der Blick der Tiere in unseren Augen, in: Jahn, Andrea/Stadtgalerie Saarbrücken/Kunstverein Ulm (ed.): Alles wieder zurück - Gabriela Oberkofler, catalog Stadtgalerie Saarbrücken and Kunstverein Ulm 2014, Vienna-Bolzano 2014, pp. 5-10, pp. 5f.
10 Oberkofler, Gabriela: Die Ahnengalerie: Hirsch, Reh, Ziege, Kuh, in: Müller, Helmut A. (ed.): Blut im Schuh - Gabriela Oberkofler, catalog Hospitalhof Stuttgart 2009, Stuttgart 2010, unpaginated.
11 Rilke, Rainer Maria: Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge, in: Rilke-Archiv in conjunction with Sieber-Rilke, Ruth (ed.): Sämtliche Werke, vol. 6, Frankfurt a. M. 1987, pp. 720f.
12 Guarinonius, Hippolytus: Die Grewel der Verwüstung Menschlichen Geschlechts. In sieben vnterschiedliche Bücher vnd vnmeidenliche Hauptstucken, sampt einem lustigen Vortrab abgetheilt ..., Ingolstadt 1610, (reprint, ed. by Elmar Locher, Bolzano 1993), p. 775.
13 STATISTICS AUSTRIA (ed.): Demographic Yearbook Austria 2012, Vienna 2013, p. 236.
Cf. on infant mortality: Macho, Thomas: Der vorzeitige Tod, in: Felderer, Brigitte (ed.): Das Letzte im Leben. Einträge zu Sterben und Trauer 1765 bis heute, Vienna 2015, pp. 105-111.
14 Nietzsche, Friedrich: Ecce homo, in: Colli/Montinari (eds.): Friedrich Nietzsche (see note 1), pp. 263, 339.
Precarious lives: Reflections on the work of Gabriela Oberkofler
Helena Pereña
A group of birds of prey circle shining stones. They try to grasp the small treasures with their claws (Fig. p. kk). Precious objects that are helplessly at the mercy of the animals, despite or precisely because of their beauty. Gabriela Oberkofler deals with the theme of necessity in nature. The birds of prey can’t help themselves: they have to take the stones with them. However, they cannot be held responsible for their actions. A predator that kills cannot be compared with a brutal murderer. Or to put it another way: brutality is in the eye of the beholder.
The moral difference between humans and animals or other species has been a topos of philosophy since antiquity. Friedrich Nietzsche describes man as “the only animal that has not yet been determined”.1 Instincts do not lead to the goal, as (too) many options open up with every step. Human life is therefore characterized by constant and unpredictable change, but also by the search for identity, or, to use Nietzsche’s phrase again, for “how to become what one is”.2 The lack of definition of human action and the associated hunt for a constant identity, which is doomed to failure, are key themes in Gabriela Oberkofler's work. She deals with so-called folk culture, traditions, landscapes and agricultural living conditions from her region of origin, South Tyrol. In her works, loneliness and decay collide with the supposedly identity-forming homeland. The formal beauty of her drawings does not conceal the disturbing motifs. This creates a contrast of great poetic intensity.
Alpine romance?
In a photographic work entitled Salten/Dolomites (fig. p. aa), a young woman in a dirndl sits on a magnificent horse. She is holding a pitchfork in her hand. There is something determined in her calm, forward gaze, which her horse seems to be imitating. The Dolomites can be seen in the background of the fantastic larch meadow. This staging of (South) Tyrolean virtues appears perfect—and therefore deeply artificial. The rider is the artist herself. She is still using the photograph, which was taken in 2008, as a business card in 2016. What does this say about Oberkofler’s identity? The ironic attitude becomes clearer when you consider that she lives in Stuttgart. The artist also turns stereotypes about Alpine dwellers on their head in Gipfelstürmen (Fig. p. aa). In this video work, Oberkofler, who yodels, plays the accordion and wears a dirndl, climbs a building site, a pile of rubble from wartime and the concrete remains of an ornamental fountain. Despite his critical stance, Oberkofler’s works are not destructive. Oberkofler ironically sows seeds of doubt where clichés threaten to take root. The artist herself describes her subtle approach to drawings as “taking the motif completely apart” in order to create something else.3 It is a metamorphosis that can also be felt in these early works.
The decomposition of the motif begins when the individual elements are recognized. Empty space plays a decisive role in Oberkofler's drawings. This emphasizes the isolation of the motifs. It creates the necessary distance to the depiction, which offers enough space for concentration. Fragments illustrate how precarious ideas of wholeness are (fig. p. kk, kk). In combination with the emptiness, they also allow for silence by slowing down the pace of reading contemplation. Oberkofler describes the creation of the hay bales (fig. p. kk) as follows: “My hay bales also contain the landscape, they roll towards the viewer like avalanches and can no longer be stopped. I spent months meticulously inscribing the content, the structure of the dried grass, into the large form in pen and ink. It is very important to me that the motifs in my drawings become pictorial objects through the application of a great deal of time and are ultimately much more than two bales of hay lying in the fields in the fall, waiting to be pulled in by a giant machine. “4 This constructive approach stands in radical contrast to the romanticized pictorial traditions of landscape depiction, which stage an anthropocentric view of nature. In a miniature-like and delicate manner, the artist attempts to identify the components of the hay bales individually in order to transform them into an image. Conventional strategies of representation are thus called into question from the ground up.
Oberkofler goes one step further in Baum (Blätter, Blüten, Stängel) (Fig. p. kk). Here, the original tree has been broken down into three components and depicted as a pile of leaves, a pile of blossoms and a pile of branches. The drawing is related to an action in which the artist brought Christmas trees that had already been disposed of after the holidays into an exhibition space (fig. p. aa, aa). They already bear traces of their fate, as the trunks have been cut off and the branches partially broken. The trees were gradually dismantled with the help of many visitors. As a result, they have disappeared as Christmas trees, both in their natural and traditional appearance. Regarding Baum (Blätter, Blüten, Stängel) (fig. p. kk), Oberkofler explains: “In my mind, it is still a tree (I see it in the forest) that has become something else in the course of the process. Something that has experienced the changes of our time. It is the treatment of nature in a civilized world, in which not only the myth of nature as such, but knowledge and utilization determine the sense of nature. “5
The idea of the second nature, with which man surrounds himself following the example of the first nature, resonates here. The second nature is built, it is culture and so-called civilization. For as an unidentified animal, man “cannot rely on his instincts. Where nature lets him down, he has had to take his evolution into his own hands in order to survive. “6 The emergence of the natural sciences through sorting and analyzing natural processes in order to tame them, to counteract the existential surrender to the forces of nature, is often associated with this. Drawings such as trees (leaves, flowers, stems) or hay bales can be viewed meticulously, almost scientifically, up close and abstractly from a distance. Art is neither first nor second nature and is perhaps therefore able to form a bridge between the two.
The longing for the animal
Animals are an important motif in Gabriela Oberkofler's work. We encounter wild animals and predators, birds, dogs, horses and many insects in the sheets—whether as a barely legible swarm (fig. p. aa) or as a portrait-like depiction (fig. p. kk). Always isolated or fragmented, even in groups, they are always injured, bleeding or even dead. The strange double gaze of the wolf in one drawing (ill. p. kk) challenges the viewer: Who is looking at whom? Is the round one my own pupil? The viewer becomes the hunter.
The direct juxtaposition with the wild animal continues to exert a great attraction that has always thrilled zoo visitors and adventurers alike. As a figure of identification and at the same time a threat, animals can, anthropologically speaking, still establish a connection to the first nature, to a natural origin. Their important role in myths, fairy tales and fables allows them to mediate between nature and culture: Animals appear liberated from the fears of humans. “Young readers quickly become familiar with picture book animals in particular, whether cuddly or ornery, because they often personify just one human characteristic. And so authors like to package light-hearted but also serious everyday topics in animal stories. “7 But the control and power of humans—including children—over animals also play a central role: the threat of the predator is eliminated by eradicating it. In the end, the hunter wins.
When Oberkofler deals with animals, she is taking part in a very current development in art. Among the quite diverse positions that can be discerned in it8, her criticism is aimed at “trivializing or glorifying” representations whose conventions are projected onto real animals.9 In the video work Mr. Nobel (fig. p. kk, kk), Oberkofler shows the nocturnal rounds of an old dog in the Stuttgart Wagenhallen, where her studio is located. Occasionally, Mr. Nobel encounters a white cat. Nothing else happens. Nevertheless, the senses are sharpened in the dark night. The work invites contemplation. It is a poetic portrait of a dog that does nothing but walk around day and night - in its “natural” environment.
The daily repetition of one or more activities, as observed in animals such as Mr. Nobel, can also help humans to develop an “identity”. In the installation Filomena Egger, née Oberkofler (fig. p. aa, aa), Oberkofler refers to a deceased farmer's wife by combining her still-living chickens with oppressive drawings. Filomena herself cannot be seen in the installation. Since caring for the animals determined her daily rhythm, she was given a precarious identity through such external factors, through her daily tasks: a determination. Oberkofler humorously stages another connection between animal and identity in the work Ahnengalerie (Fig. p. aa, aa). She writes that she found photographs of her ancestors among hunting trophies and stuffed animals.10 However, the ancestors are not people, but a neat group consisting of a stag, a goat, a deer and a horse, whose oval frames are reminiscent of both trophies and cameos. Is this a Darwinian confession? The longing for the animal is given a twinkle in the eye.
Life as a process of decay
Deceased ancestors, just like Filomena’s everyday routine, can give people stability. As they are closed lives, they can no longer change. This guarantees a stable genealogy. Living people, on the other hand, harbor uncertainty. Death as an identity-forming moment is a recurring theme in literature, art and philosophy. Only with death does becoming coincide with the state of “being”—only then are they identical. Rainer Maria Rilke describes “individual death” in the “Notes of Malte Laurids Brigge”: “This was not the death of some water addict, this was the evil, princely death that the chamberlain had carried within him all his life and nourished from within himself.” Even the children of his family “died what they already were and what they would have become. ”11
The close connection between birth and death takes on a different, particularly virulent dimension in cases of congenital diseases and genetic defects. Gabriela Oberkofler has selected a group of animals with albinism from the Natural Science Collections of the Tyrolean State Museums for a dialog with her drawings (fig. p. kk-kk). Due to a genetic defect, they lack melanin, the pigment that determines the color of skin, fur and feathers in vertebrates. In addition to their sensitivity to light, which can lead to skin cancer and blindness in albinos, they are easily spotted by predators as their natural camouflage does not work. Albinos are therefore doomed to an early death. In an artistic context, not only the color white but also the wild animal is often associated with innocence. In the Tyrolean Folk Art Museum in particular, one is involuntarily reminded of infant mortality: in 1610, the town doctor of Hall, Hippolyt Guarinoni, stated that among “one hundred children born, whom God brought into the world fresh and healthy, not ten would grow up”.12 According to the statistics on infant mortality in the “Demographic Yearbook Austria 2012”, 22.82 percent of 1000 live births in Tyrol in the years 1871–1875 died within the first year of life. After a steady decline, this figure fell below ten percent between 1931 and 1935, and only dropped below two percent from the 1970s onwards.13
At the Folk Art Museum, Oberkofler has focused in particular on the section of the display collection entitled The Precarious Life, which deals with people's hopes and worries. This resulted in the series Votive Figures (ill. p. kk-kk). In her personal interpretation of the theme, some motifs take on biomorphic traits, such as two chairs that could also be mistaken for beetles (ill. p. kk-kk). But it is above all the amulets used in connection with fertility and birth that are the focus of her interest: a votive toad with the associated idea that the uterus resembles an animal wandering around the body, causing abdominal pain by biting and nipping (fig. p. kk, aa). Or a spiked ball (fig. p. aa), which was intended to symbolize the woman's stabbing abdominal pain as a childbirth votive. Oberkofler transforms it into a fertility sphere full of flowers (fig. p. kk). A baby in swaddling clothes is a reminder of the high infant mortality rate at a time when (numerous) offspring were the livelihood of many families (fig. p. kk, aa).
Many of the motifs that Oberkofler used for her votive figures simply tell of the lives of people who have long since passed away. The Tyrolean Folk Art Museum mainly exhibits everyday objects that are no longer in use. Beautiful and fragile, the former everyday objects can often only be handled with care. As Oberkofler depicts them very sporadically on the white sheet, the children’s clothing items primarily refer to their missing owners (ill. p. kk-kk). Gifts of love such as a tobacco tin (ill. p. kk) are reminiscent of extinguished passions. By not only dispensing with all accessories, but also dynamically changing color and form, Oberkofler gives absence a shrill presence. The dead are brought back to life. As in Filomena Egger, née Oberkofler (ill. p. aa, aa), animals or objects from the lives of the deceased stand for their identity, which is at least precariously recognizable. For the exhibition, Gabriela Oberkofler has arranged an installation with traditional shoes of women and men from the museum depot (ill. p. kk). Mixed-up pairs stand on a round pedestal with their heels facing outwards. These erotic symbols, important for courtship, are now being used again. The unusual presentation breathes life into them.
The artist has also selected two other objects from the depot: the bird Self-knowledge (fig. p. kk) and a coffee grinder with a farmer's wife (fig. p. kk). The two-headed hybrid of human and animal, pinching its nose, is one of the most striking symbols of self-reflection. Only from a certain distance from oneself is the possibility of self-knowledge possible at all. Nietzsche also uses the image of an animal that steps out of itself in order to achieve a kind of ecstatic self-reflection.14 The farmer's wife of the coffee mill, on the other hand, seems to embody the opposite. The connection between her figure and the grinder creates a new kind of conformity. The function determines her identity; introspection is no longer possible. Life could hardly be more precarious.
Whispered into the afternoon
Sun, autumnal thin and timid,
And the fruit falls from the trees.
Silence dwells in blue rooms
A long afternoon.
The dying sounds of metal;
And a white animal breaks down.
Rough songs of brown girls
Are blown away in the falling leaves.
Forehead of God’s colors dreams,
Feels the soft wings of madness.
Shadows turn on the hill
Fringed black with decay.
Twilight full of peace and wine
Sad guitars run.
And to the mild lamp inside
You return as in a dream.
Georg Trakl, 1912
1 See, among others, Nietzsche, Friedrich: Jenseits von Gut und Böse. On the genealogy of morality, in: Colli, Giorgio/Montinari, Mazzino (eds.): Friedrich Nietzsche. Complete Works. Critical Study Edition in 15 Volumes, Vol. 5, Munich 1980, p. 81.
2 Subtitle to Friedrich Nietzsche's treatise “Ecce homo”.
3 Oberkofler, Gabriela/Meyer, Werner: Wenn nur noch bliebe, die Natur zu archivieren. A conversation between Gabriela Oberkofler and Werner Meyer, in: Mayer, Werner/Reckert, Annett (eds.): Schwarz ist die Nacht nie. The wind rose. Gabriela Oberkofler, catalog Kunsthalle Göppingen and Städtische Galerie Delmenhorst 2016, Göppingen 2016, pp. 7-23, p. 13.
4 Oberkofler/Meyer: Wenn nur noch bliebe, die Natur zu archivieren (as note 3), p. 18.
5 Oberkofler/Meyer: Wenn nur noch bliebe, die Natur zu archivieren (as note 3), p. 13.
6 Safranski, Rüdiger: Wieviel Globalisierung verträgt der Mensch?, Frankfurt a. M. 2004, p. 7ff.
7 Hahn, Karin: Animals in children's books. Ehrliche Freunde, kluge Ratgeber, listige Feinde, in: Deutschlandfunk, 25.10.2014, http://www.deutschlandfunk.de/tiere-in-kinderbuechern-ehrliche-freunde-kluge-ratgeber.1202.de.html?dram:article_id=301386 (accessed: 21.11.2016).
8 See, for example, Bechtloff, Dieter (ed.): Kunstforum International. Out of Africa. Im Zoo der Kunst I, vol. 174, Cologne 2005, and Bechtloff, Dieter (ed.): Kunstforum International. The Genres of Photography. In the Zoo of Art II, vol. 175, Cologne 2005.
9 Jahn, Andrea: Look back in sorrow - Der Blick der Tiere in unseren Augen, in: Jahn, Andrea/Stadtgalerie Saarbrücken/Kunstverein Ulm (ed.): Alles wieder zurück - Gabriela Oberkofler, catalog Stadtgalerie Saarbrücken and Kunstverein Ulm 2014, Vienna-Bolzano 2014, pp. 5-10, pp. 5f.
10 Oberkofler, Gabriela: Die Ahnengalerie: Hirsch, Reh, Ziege, Kuh, in: Müller, Helmut A. (ed.): Blut im Schuh - Gabriela Oberkofler, catalog Hospitalhof Stuttgart 2009, Stuttgart 2010, unpaginated.
11 Rilke, Rainer Maria: Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge, in: Rilke-Archiv in conjunction with Sieber-Rilke, Ruth (ed.): Sämtliche Werke, vol. 6, Frankfurt a. M. 1987, pp. 720f.
12 Guarinonius, Hippolytus: Die Grewel der Verwüstung Menschlichen Geschlechts. In sieben vnterschiedliche Bücher vnd vnmeidenliche Hauptstucken, sampt einem lustigen Vortrab abgetheilt ..., Ingolstadt 1610, (reprint, ed. by Elmar Locher, Bolzano 1993), p. 775.
13 STATISTICS AUSTRIA (ed.): Demographic Yearbook Austria 2012, Vienna 2013, p. 236.
Cf. on infant mortality: Macho, Thomas: Der vorzeitige Tod, in: Felderer, Brigitte (ed.): Das Letzte im Leben. Einträge zu Sterben und Trauer 1765 bis heute, Vienna 2015, pp. 105-111.
14 Nietzsche, Friedrich: Ecce homo, in: Colli/Montinari (eds.): Friedrich Nietzsche (see note 1), pp. 263, 339.