If one were to look in Birgit Jürgenssen’s artistic career for a strong image suitable as a logo for three decades of masquerade in the art world, it would be an apron. In 1975 she buckled on a cardboard model of a gas cooker. Early »Austria Email«. In the oven was a bread roll. The picture of the young woman with her »good-girl« hairdo, her flowery print dress and bar shoes first appeared in the journal »domus« in the context of architecture and design; and since then, no publication about female rebels in the art world would be thinkable without it. The housewife’s apron, created for VALIE EXPORT’s legendary exhibition »MAGNA – Feminismus: Kunst und Kreativität« (MAGNA – Feminism: Art and Creativity), is almost prototypical of Birgit Jürgenssen’s ironically informed strategies, which were directed against the social cement that still weighed heavily upon the aggressively opposed feminist terrain in Vienna in the seventies.

The drawings from this time, like »Scrubbing the Floor«, »Ironing« or »Wifely Duties«, show the weaker sex in pursuance of its »true« destiny, but with a touch of »travesty and performative subversion of sexual identity«, which Judith Butler, too, employed to wear down the rigid essentialist set-up. Jürgenssen stated her objections to the socially dictated constructions of femininity with untiring energy, obstinacy and passion. The field of argumentation used by the trained dancer was: her own body. A projection surface for cultural codes, a carrier of linguistic messages, a place of images, an interface between reality and illusion.

From 1968 to 1971, Birgit Jürgenssen studied at the Hochschule für Angewandte Kunst (University for Applied Arts) in Vienna. She taught there under Maria Lassnig, later at the Academy of Fine Arts under Arnulf Rainer, and, last of all, in Peter Kogler’s media class. Her first exhibition, in the Graz Forum Stadtpark in 1972, was a collaborative effort (with Ingeborg Strobl); and it was to be followed by many such cooperative projects, with Lawrence Weiner, among others. She exhibited in London and New York, in Edinburgh, Berlin, Munich, and repeatedly at her Viennese »home base«, the Galerie Hubert Winter. She participated in group shows at venues ranging from the Museum of Modern Art in Vienna to the alternative Thread Waxing Space in SoHo, New York, and was perfectly cast in the gender hit »Oh boy, it’s a girl«.

Jürgenssen, who worked as a curator at a time when this occupation was not a mandatory part of every artist’s CV, showed a disregard for well-meaning academic interpretations even in her own retrospective at the Upper Austrian Landesgalerie in 1998. Her personal selection unearthed a variety of works that astounded all those who had associated Jürgenssen predominantly with the medium of photography, with a pyrotechnical display of drawings, paintings, installations and montage. A block of works from around 1980, for example, that contains photography, performance, text works and body works, takes its place easily within the field of reference of international body art. In the spirit of »expanded photography«, Jürgenssen changes her own body topography using collages of image and text, and asserts her feminist viewpoint on her own skin with almost agitational clarity. Exercises on identity transfer that use camouflage-like body painting, masks, ligatures and covers illustrate a very private political awareness and forego pamphlet-like demagogy. The picture of her ivy-covered body sinking into a meadow, vanishing in a hedge, tells of a synthesis of nature, body and landscape, as poetic and disturbing as that found in the works of Ana Mendieta, for example.

As a member of the only relevant group of female activists in Austria in the late eighties - who, as »Die Damen« (»The Ladies«), put on parodic events and elaborate performances, taking their audience sometimes to the Secession in Vienna, sometimes to Ankara in Turkey -, Birgit Jürgenssen made a contribution that should not be underestimated to promoting an assertive form of women’s art. With Ona B., Evelyne Egerer and Ingeborg Strobl, Jürgenssen, perfectly styled, hypermotivated and yet playful, breathed new life into the genre of »tableau vivant« in its post-modern »anything goes« format. Effective costuming and the theatricality of the »Damen« informed a piece that could have been called »Culture and Its Make-Up«. When Strobl left the foursome, Lawrence Weiner took over as fourth »Dame«. He was so exceptionally authentic while feeding the pigeons in St. Mark’s Square that he qualified for further work with the group. For the artist’s book »I Met a Stranger«, Jürgenssen sent some of her body projections to New York. These were subjects such as stiletto-heeled shoes, written characters or sphinxes projected onto parts of the body with an episcope. The light-tattoos are recognisably ephemeral, not Lacanian inscriptions of the real sort. Weiner responded to the mail from Vienna, and played the conceptualist, commentator and voyeur who contributed texts and punched holes in the pages of the book.

»Birgit«, the poet Reinhard Priessnitz once wrote, »pictures, pictorial, good to the eyes, useful to the sense, comfortable to communication, everything keeps running, and the wondrous picture structures that you conceived in your painting mill and enriched through the machine of the emotions, allusions and supplements allow poor, flour-covered, melancholy millers like me to offer this shy thanks and greeting, expressed in timid words. Till the next time!« [Translator’s note: In the German original, there is an untranslatable word play on »Mal«, »time«, and »Mahl«, »grind« or »repast«]1

 

Translated by Timothy Jones

 

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