»Glokale Welten«—Home as a way of life
Günter Baumann
»… Grün ist der wald, perg, au, gevild und tal. /
die nachtigal / und aller voglin schal /
an höret ane zal / erklingen überal …«
(Oswald von Wolkenstein, »o wunniklicher, wolgezierter mai«)
»Das Kalb geht die Nacht ein / Ich schlaf draußen
im Stall / Hier, die Suppen is in der Kanna /
Geh fei ins Bett, morgen müss ma naus«
(Nora Gomringer, »Bauernzart«)
Suddenly everyone is talking about “Heimat” again, most loudly where it is backward-looking and therefore obsolete - and at the same time the term is so topical that it not only needs to be discussed, but can also be rehabilitated at the same time against the eternal apologists of the “Stammtischraunen”. Gabriela Oberkofler, on the other hand, uses “Heimat” subtly and strikingly quietly, emphatically incidentally, as an artistic idea and as a social utopia—and not least as a way of life. Reason enough to choose the draughtswoman, object, performance and video artist as the winner of the Gerlinde Beck Prize for Sculpture 2018. The subsumption of her work under sculpture may initially be irritating. One of her academic teachers, Werner Pokorny, wrote in a foreword in 2012: “Can drawing in itself, the drawing of simple things, can sculptural considerations, pictorial attempts in general, be a way of marking positions in an increasingly complex situation?” Approaching her favorite medium - drawing - as a “sculptural consideration” should appeal to Gabriela Oberkofler, as she sees her art less as a technical visual language than as a social image. It would be possible to use social sculpture here, but this would place the artist's work too much in the tradition of Joseph Beuys, whose private myths were of a different nature than her connection of art to real nature—in terms of man's alienation from it and the violence that man inflicts on it. Thus her private gaze is less mythical than actually directed towards a legendary homeland, which for the South Tyrolean from the small mountain village of Jenesien near Bolzano represents a completely different nature of its own than is generally implied when talking about 'homeland'. Before we ask ourselves the insoluble question of whether home is a (fated) place, a (political) concept or a (subjective) feeling, or all of these at the same time, let us briefly sketch the conceptual field in literary terms. It is less the artists who stand out here than the authors, be it in ironic denial as in Herbert Achternbusch, who derives the basically untranslatable word “Heimat” from the Bavarian 'hemad' (shirt), which is closest to one's heart, or as a critical thesis: in Robert Menasse (“Heimat is a human right, nation a crime”), Hertha Müller (“Phantomschmerz im Erinnern”) or Bernhard Schlink (“Das eigentliche Heimatgefühl ist Heimweh”). Home cannot be defined, but it can be told.
Gabriela Oberkofler does not document a home, although she not only carries her image of Jenesien in her heart, but also stages it in her work - but then in such a way that it becomes universally valid. And when she incorporates nature, she sometimes creates a species-appropriate chicken coop in the front garden of her studio—the 'Rosensteinalm'—in Stuttgart's Wagenhallen, which translocates rural existence into the wastelands of industry. In all her exhibitions, she creates spaces that are dominated by finely chiselled, sometimes microscopically and sometimes macroscopically deepened or sometimes monumentalized drawings, but which become environments, spatial sculptures, through her sculptural thinking. In such a thoroughly narrative transformation of the world, Ernst Bloch enters her work as a guarantor, who as early as 1946 declared Heimat to be a forward-looking place of longing and a social desideratum, in short, the counter-position to all right-wing attempts at interpretation: Heimat not as a demarcation from the foreign, but as a “philosophical concept against alienation” in itself, a world “where the object is no longer afflicted with something foreign to it”. In “The Principle of Hope” it says: “The real genesis is not at the beginning, but at the end, and it only begins when society and existence become radical, that is, when they get to the root. The root of history, however, is man who works, creates, transforms and overtakes circumstances. Once he has grasped himself and established his own without alienation and alienation in real democracy, something arises in the world that shines into everyone's childhood and in which no one has yet been: home.”
Gabriela Oberkofler’s works are characterized by breaks and gaps, omissions. “My aim is to show that something is missing.” This is where her root treatment lies, which also hurts: for example, when her fictional-real home is laid out on tables—a church tower, boats, fish heads that seem to peek out of the water, a fountain, a bridge, half a house, a knitting doll, hay bales, horse and deer legs, relics of past existence, next to plants that are sorted by leaves, stems, branches, thus destroyed. Art here, nature there. In between, the nature-loving guest's daughter groups so-called “small hybrids”, mixtures, crosses. Object-like clay bowls with real plants, with cooperating growth forms such as fungi and lichens, as well as disproportions: Plants that displace each other, depriving themselves of the basis of existence. In addition to this sculptural world of memories, fractals, the floral and the sculptural, there is—one might almost say—the actual, graphic world, also entitled “Hybride”. Gabriela Oberkofler creates a filigree, colorful shimmering flower culture with papayas, orchids, pomegranates, hibiscus and coconut. For all its realism, it is not about closeness to nature, but about a social category. We see overformations, new formations, cross-sections of stems and flowers, cell structures. This analytical view elegantly glosses over social questions: Who is in control of nature here? How do the species live together? Who displaces whom, who benefits whom? And what is nature? We see it through the breeder's gaze of civilization, of society; it has to deliver what we expect from it. The local region, the intimate world, meets the concessions of globalization—the 'Oberkoflerin' has found the word “glocal” for this. The blending of private and general questions, the “worries of being part of an ... unknown context”, in connection with homesickness, the fear of homelessness through grafted forms of coexistence, allow the work to go beyond the image of nature. “I think that the hybrid term 'glocal' plays an important role in this context,” Gabriela Oberkofler said in an interview. “I have always dreamed of taking everything that defines me - my culture or what my parents and my village have given me—with me on my travels.” The task of art is to give these ambivalent relationships a stage. The artist creates a multi-layered world from set pieces of our memories, experiences and knowledge. With her sculptural reflections on nature and home, she goes beyond drawing and highlights social contexts. The great Enlightenment philosopher Gotthold Ephraim Lessing already knew this: “In nature, everything is connected with everything else, everything intersects with everything else, everything changes one thing into another.” With regard to home and its localization in a forward-looking spirit, let us once again quote Ernst Bloch, whose credo could provide a motto for an artist who climbed the post-war rubble mountain of Stuttgart, the so-called Monte Scherbelino, to “yodel” on it, who performed together with the Kastelruther Spatzen to fill the emptiness of being a stranger with the illusion of home, who had herself photographed in a fantasy costume on horseback with a pitchfork in her hand in front of an Alpine backdrop to pay tribute to rural life (and indirectly to fellow artist Marina Abramovic), and who, in a performance called “Buggelkraxen”, walks through the village street with a stretcher full of crate board houses—in other words, with a transportable sculpture on her back or even as a living sculpture herself: “To think is to transcend. ”
»Glokale Welten«—Home as a way of life
Günter Baumann
»… Grün ist der wald, perg, au, gevild und tal. /
die nachtigal / und aller voglin schal /
an höret ane zal / erklingen überal …«
(Oswald von Wolkenstein, »o wunniklicher, wolgezierter mai«)
»Das Kalb geht die Nacht ein / Ich schlaf draußen
im Stall / Hier, die Suppen is in der Kanna /
Geh fei ins Bett, morgen müss ma naus«
(Nora Gomringer, »Bauernzart«)
Suddenly everyone is talking about “Heimat” again, most loudly where it is backward-looking and therefore obsolete - and at the same time the term is so topical that it not only needs to be discussed, but can also be rehabilitated at the same time against the eternal apologists of the “Stammtischraunen”. Gabriela Oberkofler, on the other hand, uses “Heimat” subtly and strikingly quietly, emphatically incidentally, as an artistic idea and as a social utopia—and not least as a way of life. Reason enough to choose the draughtswoman, object, performance and video artist as the winner of the Gerlinde Beck Prize for Sculpture 2018. The subsumption of her work under sculpture may initially be irritating. One of her academic teachers, Werner Pokorny, wrote in a foreword in 2012: “Can drawing in itself, the drawing of simple things, can sculptural considerations, pictorial attempts in general, be a way of marking positions in an increasingly complex situation?” Approaching her favorite medium - drawing - as a “sculptural consideration” should appeal to Gabriela Oberkofler, as she sees her art less as a technical visual language than as a social image. It would be possible to use social sculpture here, but this would place the artist's work too much in the tradition of Joseph Beuys, whose private myths were of a different nature than her connection of art to real nature—in terms of man's alienation from it and the violence that man inflicts on it. Thus her private gaze is less mythical than actually directed towards a legendary homeland, which for the South Tyrolean from the small mountain village of Jenesien near Bolzano represents a completely different nature of its own than is generally implied when talking about 'homeland'. Before we ask ourselves the insoluble question of whether home is a (fated) place, a (political) concept or a (subjective) feeling, or all of these at the same time, let us briefly sketch the conceptual field in literary terms. It is less the artists who stand out here than the authors, be it in ironic denial as in Herbert Achternbusch, who derives the basically untranslatable word “Heimat” from the Bavarian 'hemad' (shirt), which is closest to one's heart, or as a critical thesis: in Robert Menasse (“Heimat is a human right, nation a crime”), Hertha Müller (“Phantomschmerz im Erinnern”) or Bernhard Schlink (“Das eigentliche Heimatgefühl ist Heimweh”). Home cannot be defined, but it can be told.
Gabriela Oberkofler does not document a home, although she not only carries her image of Jenesien in her heart, but also stages it in her work - but then in such a way that it becomes universally valid. And when she incorporates nature, she sometimes creates a species-appropriate chicken coop in the front garden of her studio—the 'Rosensteinalm'—in Stuttgart's Wagenhallen, which translocates rural existence into the wastelands of industry. In all her exhibitions, she creates spaces that are dominated by finely chiselled, sometimes microscopically and sometimes macroscopically deepened or sometimes monumentalized drawings, but which become environments, spatial sculptures, through her sculptural thinking. In such a thoroughly narrative transformation of the world, Ernst Bloch enters her work as a guarantor, who as early as 1946 declared Heimat to be a forward-looking place of longing and a social desideratum, in short, the counter-position to all right-wing attempts at interpretation: Heimat not as a demarcation from the foreign, but as a “philosophical concept against alienation” in itself, a world “where the object is no longer afflicted with something foreign to it”. In “The Principle of Hope” it says: “The real genesis is not at the beginning, but at the end, and it only begins when society and existence become radical, that is, when they get to the root. The root of history, however, is man who works, creates, transforms and overtakes circumstances. Once he has grasped himself and established his own without alienation and alienation in real democracy, something arises in the world that shines into everyone's childhood and in which no one has yet been: home.”
Gabriela Oberkofler’s works are characterized by breaks and gaps, omissions. “My aim is to show that something is missing.” This is where her root treatment lies, which also hurts: for example, when her fictional-real home is laid out on tables—a church tower, boats, fish heads that seem to peek out of the water, a fountain, a bridge, half a house, a knitting doll, hay bales, horse and deer legs, relics of past existence, next to plants that are sorted by leaves, stems, branches, thus destroyed. Art here, nature there. In between, the nature-loving guest's daughter groups so-called “small hybrids”, mixtures, crosses. Object-like clay bowls with real plants, with cooperating growth forms such as fungi and lichens, as well as disproportions: Plants that displace each other, depriving themselves of the basis of existence. In addition to this sculptural world of memories, fractals, the floral and the sculptural, there is—one might almost say—the actual, graphic world, also entitled “Hybride”. Gabriela Oberkofler creates a filigree, colorful shimmering flower culture with papayas, orchids, pomegranates, hibiscus and coconut. For all its realism, it is not about closeness to nature, but about a social category. We see overformations, new formations, cross-sections of stems and flowers, cell structures. This analytical view elegantly glosses over social questions: Who is in control of nature here? How do the species live together? Who displaces whom, who benefits whom? And what is nature? We see it through the breeder's gaze of civilization, of society; it has to deliver what we expect from it. The local region, the intimate world, meets the concessions of globalization—the 'Oberkoflerin' has found the word “glocal” for this. The blending of private and general questions, the “worries of being part of an ... unknown context”, in connection with homesickness, the fear of homelessness through grafted forms of coexistence, allow the work to go beyond the image of nature. “I think that the hybrid term 'glocal' plays an important role in this context,” Gabriela Oberkofler said in an interview. “I have always dreamed of taking everything that defines me - my culture or what my parents and my village have given me—with me on my travels.” The task of art is to give these ambivalent relationships a stage. The artist creates a multi-layered world from set pieces of our memories, experiences and knowledge. With her sculptural reflections on nature and home, she goes beyond drawing and highlights social contexts. The great Enlightenment philosopher Gotthold Ephraim Lessing already knew this: “In nature, everything is connected with everything else, everything intersects with everything else, everything changes one thing into another.” With regard to home and its localization in a forward-looking spirit, let us once again quote Ernst Bloch, whose credo could provide a motto for an artist who climbed the post-war rubble mountain of Stuttgart, the so-called Monte Scherbelino, to “yodel” on it, who performed together with the Kastelruther Spatzen to fill the emptiness of being a stranger with the illusion of home, who had herself photographed in a fantasy costume on horseback with a pitchfork in her hand in front of an Alpine backdrop to pay tribute to rural life (and indirectly to fellow artist Marina Abramovic), and who, in a performance called “Buggelkraxen”, walks through the village street with a stretcher full of crate board houses—in other words, with a transportable sculpture on her back or even as a living sculpture herself: “To think is to transcend. ”