Visceral but lifeless: violence + the value of the image in Venice Biennale winner Anne Imhof’s Faust
by Hadden Manhattan
Anne Imhof the artist emerged in the libidinal shadows of the European financial project in Frankfurt. Before entering the city’s famed Städelschule art academy, her first improvised work happened in its red light district — a boxing match in a strip club. A band played. Noses were bloodied and broken.
Barely a decade later, the news that Giessen-born Imhof would be representing Germany at the 2017 Venice Biennale initially divided critics — from different corners she was claimed too young, too queer or too fascist. The artist responded with a proposition, equal parts provocative and epic: a seven-month long choreographed scenario encompassing the whole German pavilion, with sculptural and painterly interventions, and daily five-hour performances for the duration of the show, called Faust.
The architectural history of the building has long proved challenging for exhibiting artists. Replete with square columns, it was designed by Ernst Haiger in 1938 under the Nazi regime. Imhof encloses the kitsch palatial structure with temporary steel security gates. A couple of Doberman Pinschers are being calmed down by their handler, a muzzled aggression that foreshadows the action inside.
As well as being the German word for ‘fist,’ the title is borrowed from Goethe’s restless protagonist who sells his soul to the devil, later inspiring the overture by 19th century composer Richard Wagner, whom Adolf Hitler famously admired. Can the latent allusions to fascism implicit within Imhof’s work maintain criticality, or do they encourage a dark public fascination with the totalitarian theatrics of power?
Within Haiger’s original knave-like interior, the artist has constructed a platform in toughened glass, a material motif of an investment bank. This architectural mise-en-abyme — sharp transparent geometries set within an austere neoclassical interior — offers a disturbing read of contemporary Germany. The nation’s dominance within today’s neoliberal framework was itself born from the uterine shell of an autocratic regime.
Around the space is a considered disarray of ambivalent objects — tubes, an electric guitar, concrete sinks, sodden towels — that evoke Imhof’s personal history working as a bouncer at Frankfurt’s legendary nightclub Robert Johnson. It’s the world of nocturnal violence with the lights turned on. Performers move languidly but with precision. Hands are on throats, tenderness contorts into aggression; simple gestures of walking are slowed down, glances become gazes. The dynamics of control pervade these actions. The micro-movements demonstrate how organic beings buckle under abstract powers and systems, evoking the current political tensions as right-wing ideologies start to take hold.
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