Galerie Suzanne Tarasieve

“The reality of heterogeneous elements is not the same thing as that of homogeneous elements. Homogeneous reality presents itself with the abstract and neutral aspect of strictly defined and identified objects. Heterogeneous reality is that of force or impact.” – Georges Bataille.

Entering Jürgen Klauke’s photographs is akin to entering parallel and supernatural worlds such as the Red Room, or the Silencio club in Mulholland Drive. These are places of pleasure, timeless realms that ensnare the souls of characters and overturn their realities, their relationships with the world. Influenced notably by the avant-garde literature of the 1930s and 1940s with Bataille, Sartre, and Klossowski, Jürgen Klauke’s works have left a mark with the radical way they disrupted the conventions and social codification of gender and sexuality. Considered a pioneer of Body Art since the early 1970s, his oeuvre encompasses numerous experiments and intense reflections on the fusion between art and life. Parallel to the works of Molinier, Ulay, Urs Luchi, or Cindy Sherman, Klauke’s work foreshadows and accompanies research on queer theory conducted since the 1990s by Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.

With Jürgen Klauke, the body becomes material, and photography becomes the performative medium of staging. He liberates this medium, long considered a vector of reality and truth, through an explosive exploration of the intimate and its transgression. In a conversation with his student, Carel Fabritius, Rembrandt asserts that it is futile to seek beauty in the ideal, but far more serious to find it in “what is there.” After a hundred self-portraits, his work presupposes that art is also about looking at oneself, touching the flaw (Deleuze and Guattari) to try to approach the striking and troubling truth of human complexity.

In his series “Masculin/Féminin II,” the artist, like a character straight out of Levi Strauss’s “The Raw and the Cooked,” appears accompanied by his double, whose only suggestion of a female body is the very discreet chest. A sort of two-dimensional self-representation, two bodies are engaged in a carnal choreography, where all gender attributes are cleverly concealed by a play of positions. The two overlapping bodies seem to share only a single face, the only element inclined to escape phenomenality (Michel Guérin).

From the heterogeneous to the homogeneous, the punk “Venus von der Elsaßstraße” (1974), with her radiant white skin, fragmentation of attributes, and intense red and blue colors against a dark background, strangely recalls Saint Agatha, bearing her breasts on a tray, painted by Zurbarań around 1630. Here, it reveals itself as a photograph of rebellion, heralding the artist’s desire to transcend the social and sexual unidimensionality of being, deeply rooted in the bourgeois morality of the time. Like Jean Genet, who writes in “Our Lady of the Flowers,” “I will speak to you of Divine, according to my mood, mixing the masculine with the feminine,” Klauke invokes what is reversible in gender. By showing himself with a shaven head, black sunglasses, and dressed in a combination of fishnet and leather adorned with small exuberances, he creates a new non-sexual gender through a form of self-promotion that is completely assumed and frontal.

What captivates in Jürgen’s work is the notion of play, essential to his work. He explains that it is through a playful appropriation of the Other that he wishes to question not only the conceptions of the “eternal masculine” but also those of the “eternal feminine.” Now, by definition, play is an activity whose essential purpose is the liberation of the imagination and pleasure, but it is also “the easy, regular movement of an object, organ, or mechanism.”

A figure of deviation that almost becomes dominant in “Es war ein schöner Tag als ich dachte…,” the artist manifests himself with a confident gaze, in an almost virile posture and a very assured gesture. Playing with the active and passive, the body turned towards the viewer executes the gradual deflation of a blue balloon of phallic form. The motif of the triumphant autonomous organ transitions from hard to soft, the artist asserts himself, and the social body deconstructs itself. His own amused muse, Jürgen Klauke plays with pleasure, masks, movements, the fluidity of forms, and thus reveals the tangible relationship of the being to inversion, to reversal.

Volcanic in “Dr. Müllers Sex-Shop oder so stell’ich mir die Liebe vor” (1977), Klauke imagines love in a liberated and pornographic triatic ballet. All gathered in a sex shop, he marvels, with inflatable doll, lifeless parrot, and dildos galore. A series with kaleidoscopic instability, the performer is captured in multiple moments: sometimes in agitation, sometimes frozen, he moves in an orgasmic ritual.

When Walter Benjamin explains that Kafka, in the Metamorphosis, “spied in animals the trace of what has been forgotten,” he considers animal forms as manifestations of what has been repressed within the subject and resurfaces through the body’s symptoms. Faced with the impressive formats of the “Bodysound” series, the artist seems trapped in a shedding in action or a morbid chrysalis. Enclosed in an almost clinical casing, the artist’s body, seated on a chair, evacuates a large growth made of dark and organic matter. It is the interior that expresses itself, what is reversible emerges. Far from the noise and pleasure places pushed by color, the black and white, almost teratological, photographs unfold as a kind of silent study of metamorphosis, of the aesthetics of existence.

In Jürgen Klauke’s work, the fascination with the image also finds expression in painting. An experience of the in-between, the large gouaches on paper reveal a microcosm devoid of identification where figures liquefy and navigate through different worlds, genders, and fantasies. In an amniotic ambiance, non-identity, nothingness, death, humor, the subconscious, and the strange are contained in colorful and toxic masses, guided by the adventure of the line. Each one engages in actions of grotesque cycles and transformations (“Kommunikationsvehikel”) or ones full of tenderness. A struggle against the death of desire or a meditation on the perpetual inquiry that will never fully reveal the characteristics of a living body, Jürgen Klauke creates a work on the borders, where beauty must always be a little unsettling.

The exhibition ends with the video “IN DER TAT – KULTUR,” a three-minute erotic performance pushed to the limits of endurance. The first scene shows a meeting between two characters, embodied by the artist himself and Arno Steffen. Dressed in dark suits, their postures indicate that they are two politicians. They then engage in a cleverly orchestrated handshake under the flicker of flashes. The inevitable public ritual of major diplomatic encounters suddenly becomes intimate; the two men eagerly kiss, reposition themselves, and then slap each other.

The scene repeats in a repetitive movement that intensifies each time a little more, the action articulating itself according to contrary impulses to end where it began. The greater the desire, the stronger the violence. A symbol of the fragile and conflictual relationship between art and politics, between culture and public money? Certainly, but it is difficult not to find in it, as in “Funeral Rites,” the question of forbidden desire, of the love of the enemy typically Genetian.

Solo show of Jürgen Klauke

From May 4th to June 15th, 2024

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Group show of Marcella Barceló, Hugo Guérin et Isaac Lythgoe

“The Good, the Beast and the Weird »

Carte Blanche for Barbara Lagié

From May 4th to June 15th, 2024