If you’re operating with the unconscious and the uncanny,
then you can’t, of course, escape Freud.
These are themes that have been heavily colored by psychoanalysis. I’ve
read that stuff too, but for me it’s more important, in order to be able
to make a work in the first place. I don’t think that psychoanalysis can
help the viewer to "decode" my works.
Markus
Schinwald, Mei Ling, from the series Contiortionists, 2003,
Courtesy
Galerie Georg Kargl, Wien
Yet you
frequently use motifs borrowed directly from psychoanalysis. "Children’s
Crusade," for instance, describes the phenomenon of mass hysteria. In the
photo works of your series "Contortionists" (2003), some of the ways the
figures twist are reminiscent of the 'hysterical bend.' During this
classical climax of a hysterical fit, the body bends backwards, supported
only by the head and feet...
Freud called hysteria a
conversion neurosis, which means that a psychic state is converted into a
physical one. That was a point of departure for the snake people
photographs and the film 1st Part Conditional, where you’re
supposed to think of a psychic state and then imagine its physical
equivalent. So someone reads a good book or their favorite poem, and the
body becomes contorted by this.
Markus
Schinwald, Rachel, from the series Contiortionists, 2003,
Courtesy
Galerie Georg Kargl, Wien
The cultural
constraints that form and deform the body have influenced your work from
the very beginning. Already in the nineties, you developed ladies’ fetish
shoes without heels, as well as "Pixies," high heels size 33, and the
"Jubilation Shirt" with sleeves sewn in backwards, forcing the wearer to
hold his arms aloft. What inspired you to these designs?
The Jubilation
Shirt was actually made for a conductor’s suit. Conductors need a
certain freedom of movement – that’s why the shirtsleeves were sewn in
slightly askew. Actually, I only exaggerated this effect for the Jubilation
Shirt, turning the arm hole around completely. When the wearer raises
his arms, the shirt fits, and when he puts them down again, it tugs. The
resulting pose signalizes both celebration and surrender.
Markus
Schinwald, Low Heels, 1998,
Courtesy
Galerie Georg Kargl, Wien
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The transition between freedom and subordination also
seems to inhabit your works involving bodily transformation. What
interests you about this aspect?
I can’t really say, exactly.
It all has to do with the human body, of course. Maybe it’s just the banal
fact that I "live" in a body myself, and that this preoccupies me.
This
'living' also includes clothing and the immediate surroundings. In your
works, the actors always behave in relation to their clothing or the
design of their surroundings, just as though their movements and attitudes
corresponded with the respective space and the form of things were
creating a certain choreography. You once said that you wanted to give
things 'a personality.'
I can agree to that right away. It’s
the same with the articles of clothing that don’t do what the wearer wants
as it is with small children. They don’t always do what their parents want
them to do, either, and sometimes they have to make up for what their
parents imagine they’ve missed out on. There’s a quote from de
Sade that parents make children for their own purposes, and not the
other way around. Sometimes they pinch, and sometimes they bite.
Markus
Schinwald, Dictio Pii, 2001, Film Still,
Courtesy
Galerie Georg Kargl, Wien
At the same
time, clothing often assumes a regulatory function in your work. In your
video work "Dictio
pii" (2001), the protagonists are engaged in compulsive acts or
forced by prostheses to assume certain positions. At the end of the film
comes the sentence spoken off-camera: "We are deranged.” How exactly would
you describe the state of these characters?
During the
filming, I actually tried to avoid allowing the mood to become too clearly
readable. The figures are neither terribly sad, nor depressed, nor
cheerful; instead, they are empty. All the figures are in the same place,
in the same building; they merely have "a kind of relationship" which is
not, however, explained further.
You often play with breaking
narrative constructions open – you don’t tell normal stories.
I’m
not interested in making something meaningless or something that creates
meaning. I really don’t believe that works in art. If I were to make a
movie, then it would probably tell a story. My films, however, especially Dictio
Pii, do not have a beginning or an end. They only really consist of a
middle part. It’s a kind of pseudo-narration in which certain acts are
alluded to, but not carried out; it’s a kind of artificial ruins, as
though one had removed the scenes from the script that were moving the
plot forward, just taken them away and left the rest.
And so the
only thing that connects it all is the place where it all happens.
That’s
right, and so the hotel is very important as a motif in many of my works. Siegfried
Kracauer once described the hotel lobby as a place where no
relationships are possible. Because a hotel is a place where a person
temporarily rents a piece of their homeland. The hotel is a complex
comprised of many homelands.
Both:
Markus Schinwald, Diarios (to you), 2003,
Sammlung
Deutsche Bank, Courtesy Galerie Georg Kargl, Wien
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