Lorenza Böttner’s Drawings and Performances Surveyed at Leslie Lohman – ARTnews.com

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Lorenza Böttner gazes confidently and seductively over her remaining shoulder in a pastel self-portrait from 1989. Her hair is flowing meanwhile, her naked and muscular body reflects the bands of rainbow light surrounding her. Even though the natural environment lacks a horizon line, the rainbow fades into a deep, darkish blue that can help ground the scene. Chalky, filthy footprints are scattered in excess of the gradient, as if the paper experienced at a person stage itself been a ground—or extra especially, a dance ground. The portrait is a file of irreverent dancing in more techniques than one: Böttner is grooving, and it is contagious.

If you know something about Böttner—a Chilean-German artist who was born in 1959, started off presenting as woman in artwork faculty, built several self-portraits, and died in her thirties of AIDS-associated complications—you’ll recall that there is no arm at the close of that still left shoulder she’s gazing more than, nor at the close of her correct one particular. Though it is ideal there, in the middle of the five-foot sheet of paper, the nub on her shoulder is significantly from the initial point a viewer notices in this operate. The other hanging details consist of the deft, Degas-esque linework the immaculate vibe and Böttner’s skillful managing of color. The rainbow is both of those campy and delicate, carefully refracted by the surfaces of her sculpted figure and windswept hair.

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A triple portrait featuring an armless

A square composition depicts a nude person with long hair feeding a bottle to a baby who is positioned on her left knee.

Lorenza Böttner, Untitled, 1985, pastel on paper, 51 by 63 inches.
Courtesy Leslie-Lohman Museum of Artwork, New York

All this the artist pulled off by drawing with her toes and her mouth. But instead than depict herself as a freak capable of feats, Böttner appears, in the 20 or so self-portraits on perspective in “Requiem for the Norm,” her retrospective at the Leslie-Lohman Museum in New York, engaged in various banal and tender acts: bottle-feeding a infant or reading through a e-book as she turns the internet pages with her toes. The self-portraits do not invite pity or applause, nor do they hide her incapacity. They are joyful and beautiful, and decidedly not about “overcoming.”

Spanning Böttner’s 16-year job, the present also highlights a several collection of photo-based functions as effectively as ephemera from performances, together with footage, photos, and posters. A video of her 1987 general performance Venus de Milo, a landmark work of incapacity tradition, shows Böttner lined in a great layer of white plaster and standing on a system with a cloth draped more than her lower entire body. For much more than 20 minutes, she holds a pose resembling that of the titular armless statue. Right before descending the podium and exiting stage remaining, Böttner asks the viewers, in German, “Well, what would you say if the artwork moves of its personal accord?” This wry piece retools the politics of staring, calling consideration to how impairment can seem to be downright passionate as a metaphor, or when depicted in art or advised by ruins, while in day-to-day existence, visibly disabled folks are often gawked at or shunned.

A square composition depicts what appears to be the Venus of Milo against a pink background. An iPad to the right displays a similar figure against a black background.

See of “Lorenza Böttner: Requiem for the Norm,” 2022, at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Artwork, showing Untitled, 1985, and documentation of the performance Venus de Milo, Alabama Halle, Munich, 1987.
Image Kristine Eudey/Courtesy the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Artwork

Nonetheless for all that Böttner’s artwork did to boldly resist what artist David Hevey calls “enfreakment”—the ableist tendency to look at disabled folks as oddities or spectacles—curator Paul B. Preciado undermines the artist’s initiatives with his frustrating framing of the exhibition. He devotes substantial gallery room to archival footage and pictures of the artist at work along with the will work on their own. Still Böttner’s portraits are so robust precisely due to the fact they go over and above the patronizingly simplistic plan that a disabled human being can in reality do things. Most perplexing is the inclusion of a photograph of Frida Kahlo portray in mattress, introduced in a vitrine without having substantially context, although the brochure informs readers that Böttner as soon as painted a unibrow on her facial area as an homage to her disabled predecessor.

Preciado’s frame of mind looks echoed in a memory that the artist remembers in a 1991 documentary by Michael Stahlberg on look at right here: in artwork university in Kassel, a professor explained to her that every thing she did was a overall performance. Böttner seemed unfazed—she was in all probability employed to such comments—but I discovered the assertion maddening. The present, in literally putting footage of Böttner generating drawings on a pedestal, elides distinctions concerning artworks and accommodations. Amid the handful of is effective depicting rather than by Böttner is a 1991 Faber Castell professional in which she starred. Of training course, Böttner selected to participate in these representations—Preciado even calls them “collaborations”—and she did phase performances of herself drawing, but we can’t know to what diploma each and every experience was empowering, carried out out of financial need to have, or a sophisticated blend of the two. The curator states that Böttner “invoke[s] the age-outdated procedures of disabled artists accomplishing in public for financial survival,” but I’m unconvinced. Could she have experienced the requisite length to “invoke” this history critically, or did she herself knowledge pressure to perform, acquiring lived in a context where most disabled people were being institutionalized and confronted incredibly confined employment chances? Why not, I wondered, target only on her self-representations, which, when it will come to disabled people today, are so number of and considerably in between in museums?

It’s effortless to see how the vital notion that gender is normally a performance resonates with both equally Böttner and Preciado. But the plan can’t be so conveniently transposed to disability, in which resistance to staring and to freak exhibits pervade the politics. In mild of this curatorial framing, it’s no surprise that the large bulk of disabled artists today veer absent from portraiture and figuration. Self-illustration can be so conveniently undermined by institutional framing.

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