Berlin. Hannah Cullwick, who called herself »the maid of all work«, made use of the bourgeois media of portrait photography and diary despite her class status in Victorian England. But when Cullwick uses them to express her unusual praxes of work and desire, they undergo a significant modification. They no longer serve to self-constitute the bourgeois subject, but instead allow a mesalliance to be lived that not only crosses class boundaries, but also interrupts the established concepts of »natural«, reproductive heterosexuality and thus circumvents central criteria of »normal love«. Cullwick stresses the interaction of work and desire that organises her long love affair and, later, secret marriage with the bourgeois lawyer Arthur Munby: she lives out S/M scenarios with him that feed on the eroticisation of her hard and dirty work and her powerful, masculine body, and presents various forms of gender, ethnic or bourgeois drag.
The exhibition »normal love. precarious sex. precarious work«, curated by Renate Lorenz (assisted by Pauline Boudry and Wibke Straube«, takes up both the media and the thematic challenges of the historic material and extends these into contemporary art works that also focus on differently sexualised and ethnicised gender and work relations. The exhibition is based on the theory that the historical material contains suggestions of a »love of work« that anticipates current ways of dealing with neoliberal, precarised work situations: it causes us to work more and longer than demanded, to adapt to given social hierarchies, but also to invent practices that reject work, that interpret it differently than the way it is envisaged in the contract or that circumvent established constructs of difference. Lorenz takes the stance that all these practices are sexualised and that »sexual work« has to be done to fulfil, challenge or change demands.
In this account, sexual work demands the ability to not just take up different social positionings, but to »traverse« their conflicts and rivalries. Such »traversals« of social positions and hierarchies in the interwoven fields of sexuality and work are the central theme of the exhibition. Lorenz says that they are also present in the works by Cullwick and Munby. The short film »normal work« (Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz, 2007) makes this apparent by having four photographs, in which Cullwick poses as a worker, a bourgeois woman, a bourgeois youth and a black slave, reenacted by drag performer Werner Hirsch, so that historical and contemporary forms of sexual work intertwine. It becomes clear in the film that everything that happens is based on »interpellations« that nonetheless have the paradox effect of creating a subject – of self and government technologies – that itself also issues interpellations and constitutes itself actively as sexual bodies (plural) that become comprehensible within the frameworks of race, class and gender.
The word »traversals« also describes the form of movement that the exhibition suggests to the visitors. Most works involve the viewers in fantasy scenarios that go beyond the picture space of the individual work and extend it into the exhibition space. Runa Islam’s video installation »Room Service« (2001) gives a plastic insight into how sexual work can annul gender-based working relations: the two chambermaids, lolling about in the hotel bed that they are meant to be making, do not enjoy themselves with the imaginary male, heterosexual guest, but take pleasure in the homo-social delights of being together and the intellectual stimulation of their shared reading. For the visitors, this can become a traversal when they use the bed that is provided for looking at the work to interrupt their own social positioning as man, black lesbian, upper-class kid in such a way that they approach the two service providers in an identificatory fashion. In no way is the sacred space of the former hospital chapel in which the Künstlerhaus is situated today profaned through the presence of »normal love«. Rather, the leather-upholstered benches equipped with studs, suspenders and buckles in the »nave« and the curtains made of heavy, black strips of rubber or bright plastic crystals (Pauline Boudry/Angie Anderson 2007) arouse associations with voluptuous elements of religious rituals of punishment and atonement. The S/M fetishes not only bring the history of Cullwick and Munby up to date, but also remind us how well Christian sexual morals and the Puritan work ethic combine. The naked, firm breast that can be seen by anyone allowing their gaze to drift up from one of the benches seems even more provocative. For the breast is not used as a symbol of female fertility in Oreet Ashery’s photographic work »Self Portrait as Marcus Fisher« (2000), but is revealed from amidst the garments of an orthodox Jew.
Sexual work is obviously also work directed against the normative demands of the two-gender order. The four large coloured photos are amusing in which Alexandra Croitoru interrupts the work of representation being carried out by prime ministers, body-builders and TV stars by having herself photographed, dressed and sized like a girl, patronisingly laying her hand on the gentlemen’s shoulders (Untitled 2004/04). In the video »A Loser« (Kai Kaljo, 1997), mocking laughter ringing out from off screen breaks up the confessional discourse of biographical speech, makes every element of professional success seem banal or implausible, but, with paradoxical logic, still constitutes the biography of the loser. Ins A Krommingas’ »Abject Careers« (2007) puts the viewers in a state of epistemological uncertainty when it becomes apparent that various social situations are not decodable as soon as the premise of two genders is called into question – and it only takes a few drawn lines to bring this about. These are some examples of the powerful role of sexuality in the field of work. Anyone prepared to »traverse« the exhibition on the basis of Lorenz’s theories will doubtless gain surprising insights and possibly find themselves involved in praxes of »queering normal love«.
Translated by Tim Jones