The things Gabriela Oberkofler carries around with her!
Rainer Ganahl
According to legend, Diogenes, a student of Socrates, lived in a barrel where he preached the complacency and simplicity of dogs—kyon in Greek. With this way of practicing philosophy, he created a school of Cynics who identified themselves with bustling cosmopolitanism, radical independence and critical speech. Cynics were outwardly recognizable by their walking stick, rucksack and domestic unpretentiousness. The Buggelkrax carriers, who inspired Gabriela Oberkofler’s Buggelkraxen works, led and occasionally still lead a small but hard “dog’s life” in the Tyrolean Alps. Agricultural and domestic work in the steep mountain regions of the Alps promised free board and lodging for the young people wandering through the countryside. However, what Diogenes saw as a radical, free, philosophical choice was only a free choice to a limited extent for the Buggelkraxenträger, as they were mostly recruited from the class of dispossessed young servants. The non-sedentary lifestyle and the temporary emergence from the unknown of these miners accommodated a possible romanticization of the circumstances, which occasionally left behind not only the fruits of this temporary labour, but also love affairs and children.
Gabriela Oberkofler knows what she is talking about, as she comes from an active family of mountain farmers in South Tyrol, which she left years ago to study art. It was her voluntary decision to leave her homeland, which is steeped in very old ideosyncratic traditions, customs and specific aesthetic guidelines, and to devote herself to contemporary art in Stuttgart. She is also not alone in deciding to thematize her origins and traditions in the initially neutral context of urban international art. With a colorful mixture of media—performance, video, photography, drawing, installations and objects—Oberkofler creates a very exciting work that attempts to mediate between her native mountain world and the reflected logic of today's geopolitical sensitivities. South Tyrolean country wit meets postmodern conceptual strategies without shaking off artistic responsibility. Oberkofler’s play with the high alpine roots must constantly negotiate between tourist kitsch, folk art, outsider art, regional marketing, personal and collective memories and existential traumas, which is always exciting, although neither a formula nor a style guarantees the bearable mixture for success.
Her many years of involvement with the most diverse set pieces of her origins include installations with (chicken) coops and bird graves, cross-fading with yodeling music stars, playing with local anecdotes and superstitions as well as surreal-looking drawings of mountain cattle, burning anthills and birds, in which Oberkofler sometimes reflects and stages herself. She even took a long time to learn how to play the accordion for her performances. With the Buggelkraxe works, the artist also opens herself up to sculpture without sacrificing media connectivity. They also reveal general artistic and philosophical questions, as already indicated by the projection onto Diogenesis: the relationship between man and house, a relationship that is constantly being posed anew in art.
I would just like to remind you of a few artistic positions that overlap with Oberkofler’s Buggelkraxen works in an interesting way. Bas Jan van Ader sat down on a chair on the roof of a house in Los Angeles and let himself fall. The Dutchman showed little interest in clinging to a house, a metaphor for belonging and stability, which certainly foreshadowed his tragic end. Van Ader attempted to cross the Atlantic alone in a small sailing boat with fatal consequences. His house/boat was found drifting off Morocco, but he was not. Marina Abrahmovic, who was forced by her military-strict mother to be home at 10 o'clock in the evening without exception until after her 29th birthday, chose to live with her partner Ulay in the 1970s and 1980s in an old Citroen police van with the glass inscription “Art is Easy”, in which they lived for years. The relationship between man and house is also a central theme for Vito Acconci. Not only has he repeatedly built and designed houses that are directly connected to the body and can therefore stand upside down or fold in on themselves, he has also understood the house as a continuation of the human function and his desires themselves. So he would lie under a wooden floor and masturbate for hours or sit in a cellar hole blindfolded, hitting everything that came his way. What is a person and what is a house becomes a question in itself. As a final example, I would like to remind you of Louis Beourgois, who made drawings in the 1940s that dealt with the relationship between man and house in a very unusual way. The drawing Femme maison (Engl: Woman House) from 1947 shows how a woman has merged with a house. According to Bourgeois' commentary, the woman shows herself “ ... at the very moment that she thinks she's hiding.” (Louise Bourgeois: Drawings and Observations, Boston, New York, London, Bulfinch Press, 1996) which associates the house with protection, clothing, hiding and self-deception. These themes culminated in the marble sculpture with the same title from 1994, which depicts an armless woman lying on her back, her head consisting only of a marble house. This sculpture not only alludes to the linguistic proximity of femme fatale and femme de ménage (housewife), but is also to be understood as a statement on the classic role assignments of women and the resulting psychological stress.
This brief detour into the world of other artists’ houses—an endless endeavor with artists who also cut up houses, blew them up, torched them, sank them in the sea, erotically abused them, etc.—is intended to show how quickly Oberkofler’s art gains complexity and relevance that reaches far beyond her Alps, even if she still directly addresses local identity issues, nostalgia and homesickness with her bugle-cracks on her back. Oberkofler's architectural lightweight constructions are made from wooden fruit and vegetable crates, as they are still used in her region. In urban contexts, wooden crates have already been replaced by cardboard boxes and those made of synthetic materials. The abstract constructions are made in such a way that they can be placed inside each other as building abbreviations—the church, the farmhouse, the school building, the inn, etc.—so that they can be transported on the back. Two photos also show the artist in Stuttgart and in the south of France, taking this entire village with her on her journey. In contrast to a Louise Bourgeois-like fusion of house and person, Oberkofler’s work is a burden that can be easily removed like a rucksack. The architectural structures can easily be set up anywhere and represent a village. It should be added that this is exactly what our miniaturized information technologies now allow: a permanent, space-independent connection with all the social and professional environments that make up our home, office or leisure time.
Another object in the exhibition that is in many ways suspiciously and uncannily related to a house is the bird cage. Birdcages are usually allowed in domestic areas for keeping domesticated birds. It is therefore a house within a house, inhabited by flying creatures that are alienated from nature in many ways, but not all, and do not have unlimited airspace. For her video Kleine Taube, Oberkofler borrowed a tourterelle from a bird store in France, which she in turn confronted with its natural habitat. Although she gave the little bird free rein, it did not accept this offer of freedom and only participated acoustically in the natural arbitrariness of its fellow species. The little pigeon’s walk with its cage ended at the starting point, the bird shop, as if the saleswoman’s initial warning that it would only survive in the wild for three days had also been understood by the bird. The bird theme finds its colorful, pointillist continuation in the drawings. Another animal habitat that the artist dramatically depicts in its destruction is that of ants. The altitude of her mountain village favors larch trees, which are susceptible to insects and are therefore a paradise for ant colonies, which explains the vast number of anthills in the open fields that pose an obstacle to the mowing farmers with their tractors. These dry, deep underground structures were simply torched by the farmers in 1975, which the artist remembered vividly and which she translated into a series of drawings.
There is something uncanny about Oberkofler’s drawings, which is not dissolved by the familiar themes or created by the unfamiliar, disturbed subjects. It is probably explained more by the quasi-absence of planes and lines and her unnatural, psychologically intense use of color. So many of her subjects dissolve like an anthill or a bee's nest into extremely colourful dots and short catatonic strokes, which has a destabilizing effect. Whether dog, bird, stream, bridge, church tower, horse, burning anthill or herself, everything is covered in an animistic-psychological eeriness animated in felt-tip pen, which Oberkofler’s remembered homeland wants to visualize in an abstract way. Although all those who only know the Alps from travel will always sense something folkloristic and naively abbreviated, there is a psychological unconscious at work here that is in no way inferior to the eeriness of these drawings and cannot be reduced to localities. Oberkofler manages to make home and art uncanny despite their childhood references, but without falling into the trap of alpine Heimatkunst. The secret that Gabriela Oberkofler carries around with her is called contemporary art and, like the goods of the poachers, must be enjoyed with caution.
Rainer Ganahl, New York, August 23, 2010
The things Gabriela Oberkofler carries around with her!
Rainer Ganahl
According to legend, Diogenes, a student of Socrates, lived in a barrel where he preached the complacency and simplicity of dogs—kyon in Greek. With this way of practicing philosophy, he created a school of Cynics who identified themselves with bustling cosmopolitanism, radical independence and critical speech. Cynics were outwardly recognizable by their walking stick, rucksack and domestic unpretentiousness. The Buggelkrax carriers, who inspired Gabriela Oberkofler’s Buggelkraxen works, led and occasionally still lead a small but hard “dog’s life” in the Tyrolean Alps. Agricultural and domestic work in the steep mountain regions of the Alps promised free board and lodging for the young people wandering through the countryside. However, what Diogenes saw as a radical, free, philosophical choice was only a free choice to a limited extent for the Buggelkraxenträger, as they were mostly recruited from the class of dispossessed young servants. The non-sedentary lifestyle and the temporary emergence from the unknown of these miners accommodated a possible romanticization of the circumstances, which occasionally left behind not only the fruits of this temporary labour, but also love affairs and children.
Gabriela Oberkofler knows what she is talking about, as she comes from an active family of mountain farmers in South Tyrol, which she left years ago to study art. It was her voluntary decision to leave her homeland, which is steeped in very old ideosyncratic traditions, customs and specific aesthetic guidelines, and to devote herself to contemporary art in Stuttgart. She is also not alone in deciding to thematize her origins and traditions in the initially neutral context of urban international art. With a colorful mixture of media—performance, video, photography, drawing, installations and objects—Oberkofler creates a very exciting work that attempts to mediate between her native mountain world and the reflected logic of today's geopolitical sensitivities. South Tyrolean country wit meets postmodern conceptual strategies without shaking off artistic responsibility. Oberkofler’s play with the high alpine roots must constantly negotiate between tourist kitsch, folk art, outsider art, regional marketing, personal and collective memories and existential traumas, which is always exciting, although neither a formula nor a style guarantees the bearable mixture for success.
Her many years of involvement with the most diverse set pieces of her origins include installations with (chicken) coops and bird graves, cross-fading with yodeling music stars, playing with local anecdotes and superstitions as well as surreal-looking drawings of mountain cattle, burning anthills and birds, in which Oberkofler sometimes reflects and stages herself. She even took a long time to learn how to play the accordion for her performances. With the Buggelkraxe works, the artist also opens herself up to sculpture without sacrificing media connectivity. They also reveal general artistic and philosophical questions, as already indicated by the projection onto Diogenesis: the relationship between man and house, a relationship that is constantly being posed anew in art.
I would just like to remind you of a few artistic positions that overlap with Oberkofler’s Buggelkraxen works in an interesting way. Bas Jan van Ader sat down on a chair on the roof of a house in Los Angeles and let himself fall. The Dutchman showed little interest in clinging to a house, a metaphor for belonging and stability, which certainly foreshadowed his tragic end. Van Ader attempted to cross the Atlantic alone in a small sailing boat with fatal consequences. His house/boat was found drifting off Morocco, but he was not. Marina Abrahmovic, who was forced by her military-strict mother to be home at 10 o'clock in the evening without exception until after her 29th birthday, chose to live with her partner Ulay in the 1970s and 1980s in an old Citroen police van with the glass inscription “Art is Easy”, in which they lived for years. The relationship between man and house is also a central theme for Vito Acconci. Not only has he repeatedly built and designed houses that are directly connected to the body and can therefore stand upside down or fold in on themselves, he has also understood the house as a continuation of the human function and his desires themselves. So he would lie under a wooden floor and masturbate for hours or sit in a cellar hole blindfolded, hitting everything that came his way. What is a person and what is a house becomes a question in itself. As a final example, I would like to remind you of Louis Beourgois, who made drawings in the 1940s that dealt with the relationship between man and house in a very unusual way. The drawing Femme maison (Engl: Woman House) from 1947 shows how a woman has merged with a house. According to Bourgeois' commentary, the woman shows herself “ ... at the very moment that she thinks she's hiding.” (Louise Bourgeois: Drawings and Observations, Boston, New York, London, Bulfinch Press, 1996) which associates the house with protection, clothing, hiding and self-deception. These themes culminated in the marble sculpture with the same title from 1994, which depicts an armless woman lying on her back, her head consisting only of a marble house. This sculpture not only alludes to the linguistic proximity of femme fatale and femme de ménage (housewife), but is also to be understood as a statement on the classic role assignments of women and the resulting psychological stress.
This brief detour into the world of other artists’ houses—an endless endeavor with artists who also cut up houses, blew them up, torched them, sank them in the sea, erotically abused them, etc.—is intended to show how quickly Oberkofler’s art gains complexity and relevance that reaches far beyond her Alps, even if she still directly addresses local identity issues, nostalgia and homesickness with her bugle-cracks on her back. Oberkofler's architectural lightweight constructions are made from wooden fruit and vegetable crates, as they are still used in her region. In urban contexts, wooden crates have already been replaced by cardboard boxes and those made of synthetic materials. The abstract constructions are made in such a way that they can be placed inside each other as building abbreviations—the church, the farmhouse, the school building, the inn, etc.—so that they can be transported on the back. Two photos also show the artist in Stuttgart and in the south of France, taking this entire village with her on her journey. In contrast to a Louise Bourgeois-like fusion of house and person, Oberkofler’s work is a burden that can be easily removed like a rucksack. The architectural structures can easily be set up anywhere and represent a village. It should be added that this is exactly what our miniaturized information technologies now allow: a permanent, space-independent connection with all the social and professional environments that make up our home, office or leisure time.
Another object in the exhibition that is in many ways suspiciously and uncannily related to a house is the bird cage. Birdcages are usually allowed in domestic areas for keeping domesticated birds. It is therefore a house within a house, inhabited by flying creatures that are alienated from nature in many ways, but not all, and do not have unlimited airspace. For her video Kleine Taube, Oberkofler borrowed a tourterelle from a bird store in France, which she in turn confronted with its natural habitat. Although she gave the little bird free rein, it did not accept this offer of freedom and only participated acoustically in the natural arbitrariness of its fellow species. The little pigeon’s walk with its cage ended at the starting point, the bird shop, as if the saleswoman’s initial warning that it would only survive in the wild for three days had also been understood by the bird. The bird theme finds its colorful, pointillist continuation in the drawings. Another animal habitat that the artist dramatically depicts in its destruction is that of ants. The altitude of her mountain village favors larch trees, which are susceptible to insects and are therefore a paradise for ant colonies, which explains the vast number of anthills in the open fields that pose an obstacle to the mowing farmers with their tractors. These dry, deep underground structures were simply torched by the farmers in 1975, which the artist remembered vividly and which she translated into a series of drawings.
There is something uncanny about Oberkofler’s drawings, which is not dissolved by the familiar themes or created by the unfamiliar, disturbed subjects. It is probably explained more by the quasi-absence of planes and lines and her unnatural, psychologically intense use of color. So many of her subjects dissolve like an anthill or a bee's nest into extremely colourful dots and short catatonic strokes, which has a destabilizing effect. Whether dog, bird, stream, bridge, church tower, horse, burning anthill or herself, everything is covered in an animistic-psychological eeriness animated in felt-tip pen, which Oberkofler’s remembered homeland wants to visualize in an abstract way. Although all those who only know the Alps from travel will always sense something folkloristic and naively abbreviated, there is a psychological unconscious at work here that is in no way inferior to the eeriness of these drawings and cannot be reduced to localities. Oberkofler manages to make home and art uncanny despite their childhood references, but without falling into the trap of alpine Heimatkunst. The secret that Gabriela Oberkofler carries around with her is called contemporary art and, like the goods of the poachers, must be enjoyed with caution.
Rainer Ganahl, New York, August 23, 2010