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Frank Apunkt Schneider
Angela Dorrer
UCD – United Collection of Dorrer
“United Collection of Dorrer” documents a “family sculpture” project by the artist Angela Dorrer, for which she searched for people around the world who share her last name, and asked each to contribute a personal piece of clothing. This collection was exhibited in an empty storefront in the inner city of Amstetten in Lower Austria, the place with the world’s highest density of Dorrers, in November 2004, and presented in a series of fashion shows. Acting as models were some drummed-up Dorrers as well as characters from the local subculture. Most of the more than 100 garments were delivered with commentaries offering insight into their stories and therefore into the subjects formed by the clothes: memories, important biographical events or general inner relationships (numerous favorite sweaters, jackets, T-shirts, etc.) represent the immaterial half of the clothing’s “fabric”. Such emotional references create not only these subjects but also a family structure … that again weaves back into the subjects.
“UCD” deals with what Joseph Beuys called the “social sculpture”, a complex, self-dynamic formation (in opposition to static traditional sculpture) of people, terms and ideas. Via this dynamic, the social sculpture can release seemingly simple (i.e. always assumed) quotidian events and the subjects elicited from them – like set “facts” – from their weighty reality, and transform them into the material of a playful debate – in the present case things like name, identity or “the family.” Even Cicero considered the family the nucleus of the state whose miniature version and extension into personal relationships it represents. Its legitimate, preferred form is the (small-family) bourgeois marriage, in which patriarchal family laws are reactualized. For this reason, the marriage-family-model from late-bourgeoisie society is still valid as a legal interest to be protected, promoted and preferred, as it contains society’s construction plan, so to speak. Since the historical bohemian movements and early socialism, marriage and family have thus been identified and attacked by the subculture – as a constraint and disciplinary form of social practice. For many years, however, the idea of the family has slipped back into counterculture models’ field of vision, as Diedrich Diederichsen determined in 1999. In connection with the TV family “The Simpsons”, he concluded that the family had replaced the rock group – both a corporate form and a consumer good – as a kind of desired location in the micropolitical sense.
The tendency to refamiliarize is also a reaction to the social catastrophe of late capitalism. To the degree that the war of “everyone against everyone” has crept into every heretofore overlooked nook and cranny and baked itself into our consciousness, what is needed is at least an illusion of a refuge, a level of security that limits the conflict zone in that it maintains that it lies outside of it. The idea of family (less its practice) strives for such a non-competitive societal idyll; a retreat from the unsettling exterior. Counterculture’s idea of family does not, however, aim to reorganize the old or new family of origin created by marriage; although this tendency is presently increasing. It rather strives to actively create voluntary families, which oppose bourgeois society’s involuntary families and possess the advantage of selection, with both high permeability and free choice. In order to function as well as to connect and organize the subjects relatively freely, it must be based on something besides the “family of origin,” which is a destined society tattooed in blood. And because one can decide for or against such a family, its offerings must be attractive: love and warmth, like-mindedness, security, affection and cooperation – all threadbare promises of the classical family models have to be at least halfway upheld in order to secure a certain commitment. Voluntary and involuntary families glean their meaning, above all, as social authorities of order. They are mentally structured from within, and from this structure, help to order the exterior. They familiarize the world; make it a safe place. This is achieved through a cooperative, comprehensive reference to tradition that guarantees stable patterns of interpreting the world and can therefore generate possibilities for action. This means that the voluntary family’s traditions must be negotiable in order to avoid withering into a purely forced relationship. And that, in opposition to the forced traditions of the involuntary family, in which “family traditions” also continually evolve, but usually very slowly.
Angela Dorrer’s family sculpture stresses the coincidental aspects of its emergence. Those possessing the family name, found randomly on the Internet, are bound – voluntarily and based on their readiness to participate – into a system that outlines “family” in its essential dimensions: discursive, phenomonological, emotional and energetic. Here, both family models are superimposed over one another: While it may be based on freedom of choice, it does not have to stand out as a better model via higher morality. And as a moment of connection, the actual connective tissue of the family of origin – the name – is introduced, not overshadowed by any contextual differentiation. Therefore both reactionary motives (“patriotism” or a military family tradition unable to be passed on due to a lack of successors) and progressive motives exist in the stories behind the donated garments. Both can peacefully coexist without commentary, like in a real family, in which the members must somehow get along with each other. Whether in chosen or forced form, what family creates, first and foremost, is a sense of belonging and identity.
And it is exactly this identity that is touched by the conceptual formulation: It’s no accident that most of the contributed garments address this issue in one form or another. With the presentation within the context of “UCD”, this is dissolved again in that the objects of identity are worn by others and used to represent themselves. The garments’ identity-driven contexts and subtexts (age, gender, group affiliation) are not reproduced in a precise way. For the show, men slip into women’s clothing, etc. “UCD,” writes Stefan Lindl is his catalogue essay, “evokes the feeling of foreignness” – as these garments are samples. They become what they were before they were interwoven with their wearers and their wearers’ consciousness of individual stories: a product. And as such they are empty forms, which, while they let themselves been filled in with history in an individual act of adaptation, contrast to a product’s indifference. Nothing is left of this identity, apart from, at best, criminal-technological ascertainable remnants. Thus rearranging fragments of a family history into fashion in the form of a boutique is in no way to be understood as just a gag.
The reference to the brand identity of the Italian clothing corporation Benetton, given in the title and aesthetically spun further in the photo spreads, corresponds to this game of setting an identity. Fashion corporations’ marketing strategy strives to create expansive “families” or communities connected via visual characteristics that emerge by wearing and representing brands … and exactly through this, create a solid component of processes of class differentiation. In a society that imagines itself as classless (from class interest), wearing certain brands signals group affiliation as an element of class affiliation, which must repudiate yet still affirm itself. This works via a complex system of primary (stylistic reference, materials) and secondary (price, image, myth) characteristics of clothing. Such “processes of creating families” are also supported through advertising iconography and topology. Advertising messages function by producing or reproducing images of classes or levels of society as cultural family associations. The small family of advertising is by necessity always the bourgeois – except when it intends to make fun of the downmarket and the petit bourgeoisie. “When I grow up I want to be square, too,” is the slogan of a building and loan association, stuffed into the mouth of a child of a clichéd construction-trailer squatter. Delineated from the clothing industry’s offensive, if often gladly misappropriated class character, Angela Dorrer’s game formulates an open community with it – bound solely by an arbitrary name. It excludes no one, no matter what his or her social status or background might be. It is vehemently different from a controversial Benetton ad representing the socially disenfranchised in order to “provoke” with its allegedly artistically innovative discursive expression – to provoke with advertising’s eternal goal of garnering attention to sell products, but not to those pictured. Angela Dorrer’s half-voluntary, half-involuntary family portrays family as something highly complex and at the same time very simple – it is both contextually and substantially empty. And in the process, the artist backs away from the production of meaning in her work. She does not portray herself as its creator in the sense of male art patriarchs. She, rather, more portrays herself as a networker who initiates a social event and keeps it alive. This could, for all intents and purposes, refer to a central, if very subliminal role aspect of the woman in the traditional family system: Family is, as a rule, run by the relational work of women. They maintain the connections and contacts between the members; they call and invite, only to disappear into the kitchen on these occasions. Because Angela Dorrer simply organizes the social sculpture “Dorrer”, she does not have to discursively unravel things; she must explain nothing. The chill of her strictly phenomenological view holds the project’s “warmth” in check –something that seldom works, especially where art dares to approach pathos, and in the catchment area of such dangerous words as “home” and “heritage”.
[UCD – United Collection of Dorrer: 160 pages, Nuremberg 2005, Verlag für moderne Kunst, ISBN 3-936711-80-1, 27.00 €]
from: Frank Apunkt Schneider in: "Testcard #16", Jahres-Zeitschrift, Ventil Verlag, Mainz 2006
translation: Kimberly Bradley
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