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 Towards a Better Future for Art. E & A Iliana Veinberga, Art Critic | |
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At about this time last year, Tallinn Kuntihoonne (Tallinn Art Hall) presented to its viewers works by the artist Orlan - this woman is a paradigmatic example in contemporary Western art and the issues related to body awareness and the application of the achievements in medicine for creating art. This year, from 21 April to 28 May, the same venue - Tallinn Kunstihoonne - is showing another chresthomatic example of contemporary art: Stereoeffect, a retrospective of the creative manifestations of Eva & Adele in the name of "living art". The curator of the exhibition is Harry Liivrand; a catalogue also has been published. Eva & Adele (E&A) are two beings who at the first zoom-in attract attention by their dazzling appearance. Shaved heads, heavy makeup, identical outfits, indefinable gender and an unfading smile on their lips - this is how Eva & Adele look when appearing in public, always and everywhere together. They could certainly be seen at the openings of major shows in Western European art centres and the venues of significant art events - two sweetly-smiling, extravagant-looking ladies, who will not refuse to have their picture taken with those who would wish to be photographed. | |
 Eva & Adele at the opening of the exhibition in Estonia Tallinn Kunstihoone, 21 April. Photo Annika Haas (Eesti Ekspress) | |
| It is not easy to speak about E&A, let alone to be brief. By their existence and creative efforts they directly or indirectly affront numerous significant aspects of art. The task is rendered particularly complicated by the fact that in their art, the act of creation and their own person are declared to be the same thing; they consciously resist the requirement to separate the subject from the object or to mention the doer's gender, believing this to be restrictive and irrelevant. As a result, Eva & Adele are described as a "living work of art", a "single-work person" and, on occasion, the notion of gesamtkunstwerk is also used. Since the late 1980s, the pair has been reflecting in a very democratic way on the tradition of art and on the prospects for its development, doing this through the prism of the relations between institutions and the artist, and the genesis of a work of art. As noted by Robert Fleck, director of the Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany in Bonn (Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland), in 1990s they were one of the most visible and most immediate presences in art.
Eva and Adele made their debut, in a manner which has now become their trademark, during the exhibition Matropolis at Valter Gropius Bau in 1991: the two creatures were not on the list of participants, but with their provocative and meaningful slogan: "Wherever we are is a museum" and with their distinctive looks and a choreographed entry they undeniably were something more than mere visitors. This practice continued during Europe's largest and most respected exhibitions of contemporary art, for instance the Venice Biennale, the Documenta in Kassel, and elsewhere. In their public shows they tear down the understanding about the materialness of a work of art and an artist's corporeality, about the physical boundaries of institutions and about other values essential for art appreciation, becoming as a result an agent which circulates freely between the avantgarde art of the outsiders and the "contemporary masterpieces" promoted by galleries, in other words - securing their own niche. It should be noted that the content of E&A's works is a very sensitive and sophisticated portrayal of the current art world and social reality in its numerous manifestations, which means that their creative activity depends on a specific context, and that, in view of the venues where they appear, leads to think that this is a typical Western arts market with all its virtues and faults. | |
 In the park. Photo from the private archive of E & A | |
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This aspect in fact also exposes their practices to criticism. For instance, a crucial role in the work of Eva&Adele is played by the media. News items, articles, critical reviews, interviews and the intensity with which these are presented to the masses of readers and viewers allows the artists to popularise their works, to construe concepts and principles and to mould a particular image, a "legend", a "myth", which by the way is still being consciously cultivated, as Eva&Adele in their interviews refuse point-blank to speak about life and art before the emergence of the duo, are reluctant to describe the methods of their creative practices, and avoid all comparisons which could present their existence in a more prosaic light, choosing instead to dwell extensively on concepts and theories. The media as the fourth estate was used for the legitimisation of art, this allowed to transgress the boundary between plainly marginal art practices to art noticed by institutions, and institutions - which have drawn sharp criticism for this ever since the mid-20th century - are still one of the decisive factors for a work to become "art" and an artist - a "distinguished" artist. E&A have reaped benefits from the very same system about which their works aim to provide a critical commentary, and consequently this is an issue of partiality. Was this carnival really staged in the name of a better future for art, or is it just a creative approach by smart artists to the issue of "breaking out", as it is undeniable that at the time when they started, many artists engaged in institutional criticism and pursued the genre of performance art, but it was E&A who became an icon and to a certain extent live off their popularity. It is true, this remark is only a detail and does not materially affect what E&A are doing in art, and the perception of it. Art institutions initially were appreciative of their performance art, but such creative expressions as photography, video, drawings and paintings, which due to the reasons for their emergence, contents and context are an integral part of E&A's creative process, were accepted with reluctance. Fairly meaningful are the implications brought to the performance genre and to art in general by shifting the accent from the artist, the doer who over a set period of time creates a static piece or implements a dynamic work, which is preserved for future viewers in the form of a static document, to the comprehension of the artist for whom the process of existence is equivalent to the dynamics of an art work. Evaluating this from the position of institutions leads to a reflection on the concept of an "art work" as a physical entity, and on the issue of displaying and documenting this work, as well as its ownership and copyright. This practice, in its turn, neutralizes criticism up to a point, as the existing analytical vocabulary is not particularly suitable for a fluid practice which ignores the categories of the realitycreation process, allowing instead to operate with theoretical references provided by the authors and to continue to sustain the myth academically. This approach allows Eva and Adele, on the contrary, to develop their "Futuring" strategy. This is a utopian and futuristic idea on the shaping of an artist's identity in a less frustrating way than it is practiced here and now: the most vivid example of "futuring" is the couple itself, with their life and works which bear witness about the human of the future, about future society and art. At a more abstract level, their living artwork, single-work person and futuring concept allows to draw parallels with the practice of institutionalising the primordial creative forces of nature. For instance, in the 19th century efforts were undertaken to standardise language. Non-literary language (dialects, certain sounds) was considered wild in contrast with universally applied literary language which functioned at the level of bureaucratic communication and allowed all people who had mastered it to understand one another (books and instructions were produced for teaching correct pronunciation, correct calligraphy befitting ‘humans' not ‘savages') disregarding their backgrounds. The ability to speak - language - is formed with the ability to reproduce sounds, because sound as such is meaningless, whereas as little as a simple repetition, like, for instance, ma-ma and ta-ta, etc. can be endowed with an arbitrary point of reference, in this case with meanings "mother" and "father", that is, a reference to people closest to the small child learning to speak. Thus a transition takes place from nature to culture, from sounds to language. Curiously enough, E&A have developed a perception of themselves as beings whose qualities and actions acquire meaning through duplication and reflection. In this sense one may speak both about artefacts and their own bodies. This reproduction, however, is not just a creation of one's own double (a double who would be a metaphor of one's identity, of the subconscious and of conscience). Likewise, this may not be only criticism of the gender issue, attributed to Eva&Adele in the world of art. E&A do everything to erase all indications as to gender, age, class and other categories to which these people, if they are people at all, belong. All points of reference are deliberately eliminated, which would allow us to recognise them and to incorporate them within our safe and cosy perception of the world. Yet there are two of them, who seek to be the same: the manner of making their appearance, movements and body language are duplicated. In repetition they refer only to themselves, or something outside the realm of the real world. This allows us to compare them to the repetition of sounds and leads to thoughts about the beginning of a new language. /Translator into English: Sarmīte Lietuviete/ | |
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