Overlooked until recently, Lorenza Böttner deserves a place in twentieth century art history. Paul B. Preciado — former curator at Documenta and transgender activist — made a valuable contribution assembling the monographic exhibition, the most comprehensible presentation of Lorenza’s work, ranging from academic works to the ones produced just before her in Munich, in 1994, and includes works from other artists who portrayed Lorenza, such as Joel-Peter Witkin, and a documentary that was broadcasted on German TV, a very important piece to bring context tho Lorenza’s oeuvre and a fundamental tool to help visitors in their quest for meaning.
Born as Ernst Lorenz Böttner in 1959 into a German family in Chile, lost both arms as a child. After the accident, her mother decided to go back to Germany so that he could have access to specialized therapies. Ernst was institutionalized along with the Contergan Children — babies born with modified limbs after their mothers have been treated with thalidomide. This was crucial for Ernst, as Contergan Children have been detached from society, “they were considered neither human nor children of their mothers” and were “spectacularised as invalids and deformed individuals”. Ernst didn’t fit in and this led to Lorenza’s birth as a cry for a disruptive life, truly apart from the protocol where, in rare cases, they were allowed to make sporadic appearances in society, always in minor conditions, performing limited activities, and living from people’s compassion. Lorenza opted to live away from the cripple paradigm, away from the freak show that placed the imperfect body in the center of a pity gaze, looked at as an exotic object. Lorenza became an artist and entered Kassel’s art school.
There is no point emphasizing any particular work in the show because Lorenza’s work stands as a whole or, to be accurate, Lorenza’s person and her oeuvre are an indivisible unit, a political artistic tool in which a body apart from the norm — the gender norm and the perfect body — reclaims the right to be visible, to become subject instead of object, the ultimate right to represent humanity.
The exhibition covers four families of works than span across Lorenza’s career: Painting, made with her feet and defying the hegemony of the hand that ruled the entire history of art, something that shouldn’t be regarded as sterile exhibit of outstanding skills of a cripple gifted painter but, instead, as a complex political gesture, specially if we take into account that most of the paintings were part of an intricate performance that included dancing; Drawing, mostly made with her mouth in an exercise of intimacy and delicate precision — we must remember they were drawn a few inches from the face; Photography, which was mostly a mind game of auto-expression where Lorenza uses the body simultaneously as medium and a subject, creating personas frequently based on characters recruited in the history of art; and, finally, performance, that convenes her entire body and goes a step further than her photographic works.
Trough art Lorenza Böttner managed to bring to the foreground the dissident body — a double dissident body — that the norm have maintained hidden until then.
Lorenza Böttner
Requiem for the Norm
Württembergischer Kunstwerain, Stuttgart
23|02|2019 to 28|07|2019
Curated by Paul B. Preciado
Reviewed by
António Castanheira
Lisboa, Portugal
Image credit: Lorenza Böttner, Untitled, photography