Stella Rollig
At the outset, before entering into
any discussion of the individual works, their content and their formal
approaches, it should be noted – and emphasized – that Asta Gröting's series The
Inner Voice is an endeavour that makes its mark through its
determination and its consistency – and the courage of the artist.
Gröting's work with ventriloquists has now been
under way for over ten years, in itself a sign of the artist's staying power.
Experience shows that this kind of stubborn determination in artistic
production does not always mean that the art in question is enriched or
refined, or even periodically renewed. The opposite is often the case, as
witnessed by every new art fair with its obvious instances of signature styles
repeated – and watered down – ad infinitum. To this day, Gröting's series is
free of this kind of enervating déjà-vu, because she never stops developing
both the content and the form of her ventriloquist's dialogues. It seems that
Gröting draws constant inspiration from her work with various partners. Her
real interest in other ways of living and working, and in the experiences and
viewpoints of the performers, clearly influences and benefits her texts and
shows. The artists she works with include Germans, an Englishwoman, a Finn, a
French-Canadian, a Norwegian, an Italian, and again and again Buddy Big
Mountain, the first internationally recognized Native
American Master Ventriloquist Puppeteer.
In 2003, for Dead Air in Vienna, Gröting
worked with a professional author for the first time, the Englishman Tim
Etchells. Up to that point Gröting had always written her texts herself. Since
the performance of the first Dead Air, which was followed by
further versions, Gröting has come to prefer the medium of live performance to
her earlier method of producing for the camera and disseminating her work on
video. The performances are, however, still documented in high-quality filmed
versions.1
To this day, she still uses the same dummy – which she designed herself – in
every episode she produces. (The exceptions are the Zweitlinie (A.G.) – Second Line –
videos, in which the "false" ventriloquist Bodo Albertini talks to objects.)
So much on the artist's staying
power. And why courage? Courage is a strong word. The use of this notion when
referring to artistic decisions – albeit with the right feeling for the
relativity of the idea – implies that it would not be too audacious to define
certain ways of working in the context of a field of art and its time as
courageous, and therefore others as conformist and affirmative. To assess the
risks that Gröting has taken with the Inner Voice series, it is necessary to look in more detail at her career and the contexts
in which she works.
After studying at the elite
Düsseldorf academy, Gröting began a very promising career in sculpture, with
numerous shows in renowned galleries and art institutions, participating in
several biennials and other international group exhibitions. Her work was
acclaimed and received in terms of sculpture referring to organic bodies, with
its aesthetic mastery in questions of form, and distinctive selection and
working of material. Her sculptures are beautiful, out of the ordinary, and
unforgettable. Gröting penetrates to the inside of physical bodies, bringing to
light the organs that perform bodily functions. The question she is interested
in ambiguous: What makes us tick? Normally this question refers to our inner
motivation, and our goals, but Gröting is literally driving at the physical
mechanisms behind all life and all striving.
The Digestive System of a
Shark (1990), reproduced in glass. The Gorge (1992), made of pink silicone
rubber, an organ that cannot be clearly defined as human or animal, transformed
to an enormous scale. And truly clever, tongue-in-cheek creations such as the Highly
Intelligent, Truly Slim Sculpture (1999).
In all an elegant oeuvre that
for all its iconography does not use the kind of drastic means of Abject Art, a
genre that also works with the body. Gröting's work is simply more
sophisticated.
In 1993 Gröting made a film
that rather broke with the well-groomed appearance of her previous work. The
film is called The Inner Voice
By making a video Gröting
turned to a medium that enjoys a far more precarious status on the art market
than the manifest object. But this is only the material aspect of a daring
challenge to the very foundation of her career. With this short film the artist
exposed herself to the vulnerability of the Kleinkunst variety performer.
The film begins with an
establishing shot showing a kind of tropical botanical gardens. The setting
evokes rather the cheap artificiality of a hotel complex than any sense of an
idyllic refuge. An odd couple appears: an entertainer and his dummy signifying
his vocation as a ventriloquist. The entertainer bears the signs of the rather
tacky and yet confident dress code of his trade – the glitter and pomp of Las
Vegas combined with the aesthetics of multi-purpose entertainment centres in
provincial German cities. Blow-styled hair, a bulky ring on his index finger, a
cobalt blue show-suit. His partner, the dummy, however, bears no resemblance to
any of the usual clichés. She is not a clown, nor a cuddly toy, not a figure
from Punch and Judy, and not a child. Her long grey hair has female
connotations, and with her hooded gown she looks like a mix between a nun and a
witch, with a touch of the fairy-tale figure and another touch of a lady from a
bygone era. A pale face with no eyelids, and wide-open dark round eyes.
Characters like Pierre Bagée, the
ventriloquist in this film, are only accepted by German intellectuals when they
do pastiche, exaggerating extravagantly and playing this role as well as top
comedians such as Helge Schneider. But Asta Gröting does not even wish to
exploit the camp effect so as to gain favour with the art elite. She makes use
of the ventriloquist's skill for a collaborative work in which both sides are
competent. This kind of partnership and co-production between high- and lowbrow
artists was clearly destined to represent a considerable challenge to the art
world, particularly in Germany. It is true that the early 1990s saw a large
upsurge in multiple authorship, group formations and co-productions. But there
was a strong and undisputed consensus as to who the artists, critics and
curators saw as suited to working with them. Potential partners were defined
primarily via an interest in interdisciplinary project work, or in social
interaction and support projects with an emancipatory or political goal.
Given this context, how should we
view a serious artist who chose to work with a partner from the questionable demi-monde of
variety performance?
Asked, years later, by Marius
Babias why she did this kind of work, Asta Gröting answered that the variety
milieu was simply fun to work in.2
For me personally, when I read this, it was the most refreshing statement by an
artist that I had come across for a long time. It seems to me that this
criterion – joy – is still an important reason for working in the business of
art. It is not a good idea to neglect your own enjoyment and the fun that this
work can involve. This is the irrational side to artistic – and curatorial –
activity that resists control and repressive self-modelling in the name of flexibility,
self-exploitation, self-marketing and the like.
In a published e-mail exchange
Gröting gave more detailed reasons for her interest in ventriloquists and their
work:
"I am interested in the people I meet there and
they are interested in me. That's really the most important thing for me. The
people I associate with and the people I really want to work with and spend
time with. It was a liberating moment for me when I started working with
ventriloquists. It's been productive work and the reason may be that for me, it
hasn't been weighed down by all the things that belong to the art world,
especially since I felt quite inhibited when I was working as a sculptor. While
I was a student at the Düsseldorf School of Art from the early 1980s to the
early 1990s, most of the work being done in that part of Germany was concerned
with the formal aspects of art practice and there was a lot being done with
different materials. A whole language evolved out of this, but eventually a lot
of artists started to wonder if that was enough for them; they wanted to work
in a wider context. At the time, my interests shifted towards psychological and
social issues. By writing scripts for ventriloquists, I found a forum where I
could express my ideas."3
Gröting's first film is not typical of the
whole series. Firstly, it is formally distinct: the camera is deliberately used
to create a filmic style, moving with the action, and repeatedly swinging up to
a commanding position above the action. Then there are cuts, close-ups and shifting
perspectives – all techniques that Gröting later abandoned in favour of a
static style which always places the performance itself at the centre of
attention.
It is only in this film that three voices are
heard, whereas the following films use only two (or the first film uses two
voices instead of one, if the ventriloquist and the dummy are counted as one
voice only). The third (or second) voice comes from off-stage, and is named in
the credits as the inner voice, which only the dummy seems able to hear. This
voice's text is written in a rather antiquated language, with vague references
to classical drama and a literary tone that seems reminiscent of studies of
literature in school. In terms of content, this voice already displays the same
mix of formal language and nonsense, wisdom and empty babbling that will also
determine the laconic discourse of the later texts. First and foremost this is
a matter of presenting trajectories of approach and withdrawal, the patterns of
speech that all not directly goal-oriented conversations between people follow.
This is a fluctuating movement towards the other on the basis of true interest,
then back to satisfying the egoistical need to project oneself, and also
including a rather indifferent gliding between these two poles.
From this point on, the human organ which
interests Gröting is the inner voice. The aim is to
plumb social and psychological states of being, and so her work is always also
an analysis of our contemporary lives. Many of her works play out a
prototypical communicative situation. The main title is always The Inner
Voice, with an additional title that specifies the theme. The first sentence
in the manuscript indicates the matter at hand, in Gröting's typical dry and
direct way:
"The Inner Voice / DEATH
The dummy draws the ventriloquist's attention
to the fact that he is going to die; the latter's reaction is friendly, even
positive.
The Inner Voice / YOU ARE BAD
The dummy
explains to the ventriloquist that due to his faults and vanity he has no
reason to feel good."
As in her sculptures, Gröting has
no interest in trash aesthetics in her films, although this was very
influential in artistic photography and video in the early 1990s. Lighting,
sound and camera work all have to be perfect. But there are deliberate
exceptions here, in the above-mentioned series with Bodo Albertini, who
disguises his voice to imitate a ventriloquist and communicates with objects.
These include a red rubber glove and a rough work glove in The Inner Voice /
WORK and a toy car in Oldtimer. This sub-series is deliberately filmed out of focus. The
amateurish style of the intonation, the odd choice of props and the crude
camera work all create a disturbing contradiction with the contents of these
works, in which Gröting is directly political. The conversations all deal with
the brutality of the neoliberal world of work. Albertini's playful and rather
foolish performance is indicative of an important aspect of Gröting's approach
– her humour. What these sequences have in common with the "professional"
ventriloquists' dialogues, which focus more on processes between individuals,
is the subject of fear. This is the fear of being judged (negatively), the fear
of failure, of losing affection, of being disposed of and thrown out of the
world of work – and a number of other similar threats. Only the inner voice may
dare to touch on these fears and the shame they engender, and only the inner
voice can talk openly of them. Or rather the inner voice cannot be prevented
from doing so. The inner voice cannot be controlled, influenced or repressed.
In a Freudian sense, it is both the subconscious and the superego, a control
freak and a disciplinarian.
The central issue in ventriloquy clearly
revolves around the question as to who actually is speaking. Johannes Meinhardt
has written with great clarity and in some detail on the confusion of voices in
Gröting's work (although I would not agree that the dummy looks like Gröting
herself):
"The ventriloquist speaks the text written by
Asta Gröting, which also includes quotations, but the ventriloquist is speaking
this text for the dummy, which looks like Asta Gröting; the dummy for its part
does not speak as Asta Gröting, but rather as the inner voice, a peculiar
psychological Ôorgan' embedded in the body. This configuration gives rise to a
number of highly delicate questions: Who is speaking – is the author speaking
with two voices; or is the dummy speaking; or is it the ventriloquist; or are
the cited authors speaking; is it rather language itself that is speaking; or
is it the inner voice? Who does the voice belong to, a voice that is produced
by the body and its organs whilst the content of the sentences is produced by a
consciousness? Who does language belong to – are the sentences that I speak my
sentences, or am I just a plagiarist when I speak, someone who assembles
quotations, and merely reproduces what I have heard elsewhere or language
itself?"4
This uncertainty, and the fear of
violating taboos, of insult and injury, confessions and embarrassment, coupled
with the simultaneous pleasure inherent to speaking of all of these things –
this is what has always made ventriloquism so attractive.
Following her thorough searches through all-too
human domains, Gröting – the fearless investigator – then breaks into the
settled and cosy front rooms of the art world. Tim Etchells's text for The
Inner Voice/ DEAD AIR (2003) deals among other matters with the artist's
fear of public failure, and of not reaching any audience.
In her new film, Faster (2004), Asta
Gröting shows that she has not forgotten how to communicate in images without
words. The artist Maria Eichhorn and the museum director Kasper König are seen
in an absurd race in wrecked cars. What is at stake is pole position in the
grand prix of the art circus. Who is ultimately just ahead, the artist or the
art manager?
It is all quite simple, and yet nothing is more
difficult to grasp unless you take the plunge – if you come across ghosts they
transform themselves into a perfectly average self-confident sort of person you
can talk quite nicely with. This is something that Asta Gröting shows quite
clearly in her Inner Voice project. To bring this introduction to a close, I
will borrow the artist's comment on Tim Etchells's text: "I like his
unpretentious style. Tim calls it workman-like und human-scale."5
Übersetzung: www.tradukas.de
Stella Rollig is a curator and art publicist. Since 2004 she has been director at the Lentos Kunstmuseum in Linz
1 The first live performance staged
by Gröting, which was not part of the Inner Voice series, was Ice in Frankfurt in 1995. In 1997
Gröting staged her first live ventriloquist's show, with Pietro Ghislandi
(Milan). He and his dummy took turns to read from a newspaper that looked like La
Repubblica, but
whose content had been designed by the artist. She used interviews from the
German Taz
newspaper, in which inhabitants of East and West Berlin had been asked: "Are
you happy?"
2 "Was dumm herumsteht, muss wieder
weg", interview with Asta Gröting by Marius Babias, first published in Transmitter, catalogue on the exhibition of the
same name at the Bonner Kunstverein (1999). See also Marius Babias, "Ich
war dabei, als ... Interviews 1990 – 2000" (Frankfurt am Main 2001).
3 Asta Gröting and Stella Rollig: "'Ich bin doof' (Sokrates)", in Neue Review, no. 3 (Berlin 2003). English version in the catalogue of the Sydney
Biennale 2004, translated by Anglo-German Communication, Sydney.
4 Johannes Meinhardt, "Leibliche Sinnbilder: Asta
Grötings Skulpturen und ÔLebende Bilder'", in Kunstforum International, no. 148 (December 1999–January 2000), p. 248.
5 "'Ich bin doof' (Sokrates)", see
note 3 above.