Lorenza Böttner’s Drawings and Performances Surveyed at Leslie Lohman – RisePEI

Lorenza Böttner gazes confidently and seductively over her left shoulder in a pastel self-portrait from 1989. Her hair is flowing; in the meantime, her bare and muscular physique displays the bands of rainbow gentle surrounding her. Although the surroundings lacks a horizon line, the rainbow fades right into a deep, darkish blue that helps floor the scene. Chalky, soiled footprints are scattered over the gradient, as if the paper had at one level itself been a floor—or extra particularly, a dance flooring. The portrait is a report of irreverent dancing in additional methods than one: Böttner is grooving, and it’s contagious.

If something about Böttner—a Chilean-German artist who was born in 1959, began presenting as feminine in artwork faculty, made many self-portraits, and died in her thirties of AIDS-related issues—you’ll recall that there isn’t a arm on the finish of that left shoulder she’s gazing over, nor on the finish of her proper one. Although it’s proper there, in the course of the five-foot sheet of paper, the nub on her shoulder is way from the very first thing a viewer notices on this work. The opposite hanging particulars embrace the deft, Degas-esque linework; the stainless vibe; and Böttner’s skillful dealing with of shade. The rainbow is each campy and delicate, gently refracted by the surfaces of her sculpted determine and windswept hair.

All this the artist pulled off by drawing together with her toes and her mouth. But slightly than depict herself as a freak able to feats, Böttner seems, within the 20 or so self-portraits on view in “Requiem for the Norm,” her retrospective on the Leslie-Lohman Museum in New York, engaged in numerous banal and tender acts: bottle-feeding a child or studying a e book as she turns the pages together with her toes. The self-portraits don’t invite pity or applause, nor do they conceal her incapacity. They’re joyful and exquisite, and decidedly not about “overcoming.”

Spanning Böttner’s 16-year profession, the present additionally highlights just a few sequence of photo-based works in addition to ephemera from performances, together with footage, pictures, and posters. A video of her 1987 efficiency Venus de Milo, a landmark work of incapacity tradition, exhibits Böttner coated in a positive layer of white plaster and standing on a platform with a material draped over her decrease physique. For greater than 20 minutes, she holds a pose resembling that of the titular armless statue. Earlier than descending the rostrum and exiting stage left, Böttner asks the viewers, in German, “Effectively, what would you say if the art work strikes of its personal accord?” This wry piece retools the politics of staring, calling consideration to how impairment can appear downright romantic as a metaphor, or when depicted in artwork or steered by ruins, whereas in every day life, visibly disabled persons are typically gawked at or shunned.

But for all that Böttner’s artwork did to boldly resist what artist David Hevey calls “enfreakment”—the ableist tendency to view disabled folks as oddities or spectacles—curator Paul B. Preciado undermines the artist’s efforts along with his irritating framing of the exhibition. He devotes substantial gallery house to archival footage and pictures of the artist at work alongside the works themselves. But Böttner’s portraits are so robust exactly as a result of they transcend the patronizingly simplistic thought {that a} disabled particular person can in truth do issues. Most perplexing is the inclusion of {a photograph} of Frida Kahlo portray in mattress, introduced in a vitrine with out a lot context, although the brochure informs guests that Böttner as soon as painted a unibrow on her face as an homage to her disabled predecessor.

Preciado’s angle appears echoed in a reminiscence that the artist remembers in a 1991 documentary by Michael Stahlberg on view right here: in artwork faculty in Kassel, a professor informed her that every thing she did was a efficiency. Böttner appeared unfazed—she was most likely used to such feedback—however I discovered the assertion maddening. The present, in actually placing footage of Böttner making drawings on a pedestal, elides distinctions between artworks and lodging. Among the many handful of works depicting slightly than by Böttner is a 1991 Faber Castell business through which she starred. In fact, Böttner selected to take part in these representations—Preciado even calls them “collaborations”—and he or she did stage performances of herself drawing, however we can’t know to what diploma every expertise was empowering, undertaken out of monetary want, or a fancy mixture of the 2. The curator says that Böttner “invoke[s] the age-old practices of disabled artists performing in public for financial survival,” however I’m unconvinced. Might she have had the requisite distance to “invoke” this historical past critically, or did she herself expertise stress to carry out, having lived in a context the place most disabled folks have been institutionalized and confronted extraordinarily restricted employment alternatives? Why not, I puzzled, focus solely on her self-representations, which, on the subject of disabled folks, are so few and much between in museums?

It’s straightforward to see how the essential notion that gender is all the time a efficiency resonates with each Böttner and Preciado. However the thought can’t be so simply transposed to incapacity, the place resistance to staring and to freak exhibits pervade the politics. In gentle of this curatorial framing, it’s no surprise that the overwhelming majority of disabled artists in the present day veer away from portraiture and figuration. Self-representation could be so simply undermined by institutional framing.