READING ALOUD FROM STOLEN HEARTS BY ARNE LINDE
READING ALOUD FROM STOLEN HEARTSby Arne Linde
Someone stole someone else’s heart. In the heat of the action, failing to look left and right, to think, to stop, to do something to prevent it: from breaking, from falling. The heart falls to the ground, bounces back lightly and then lies throbbing. The throbbing becomes a pain, the pain turns into a being, and this being is invited by VIP to be part of their next group picture. It resembles the person we all are — easy to break and easily tempted to break things.
For seven years Lysann Buschbeck, Grit Hachmeister and Kathrin Pohlmann have worked (not exclusively) together. Three biographies, three artistic subjects that would not inevitably need to form a unity. The decision to establish and maintain Venus in Panic beyond their individual work, is already one programmatic foundation of their cooperation. Trough a process of exploration and the shared development of ever new projects beyond their individual horizon, the three artists resist entropic processes of equalisation. The result is precisely not a synergy in the sense of social and capitalist strategies of exploitation, but rather friction and a divergent proximity, which are inherent in all works of VIP — both on the level of production and also in terms of what there eventually is to experience in the exhibition space.
The video Für Dich kleiner Stern (For You, Little Star, 2003) shows the three artists engaged in a fight, somewhere between brutality and friendly scuffle. They are wounded; the urban waste land where they meet to exhaust each other is so rugged, adventurous and mysterious as is their restrained boxing and the force with which a kick in the ass suddenly manifests itself.
Piet a (2005) shows Buschbeck, Hachmeister and Pohlmann in the arms of their mothers, women in the roles of saviours and triple mothers of god. Outrageous, excessive — the takeover (in the sense of an acquisition, not necessarily a hostile one, but an insistent and repeated one) of a traditional art-historical and social constellation. The very foundations of contemporary occidental society and the relationship of Venus in Panic to gender roles, spirituality, monolithic leadership figures and the role of art between individual and collective come into play.
The mothers of the three artists are also the focus of a further piece from the same year. In the video Trust the girls they sing the Lied der Caprifischer (The Song of the Fishermen of Capri, a popular tune in 1950s Germany, the quotes in italics below are part of the lyrics), while their three daughters perform a melancholic striptease on an old dilapidated stage. Wenn bei Capri die rote Sonne im Meer versinkt (When the red sun sets into the sea at Capri): the themes are farewell and return, the worries of the people left behind on the shore and the uncertainty, into which the fishermen embark each night anew. VIP exit the scene naked — Bella, Bella, Bella, Marie — as their mothers continue to sing the final bars into the empty space. The unprotected body against the untameable sea. Stormy and thunderous: an ‘outside’ that stands opposed to the subjective inside — without mediation and / or symbolically — as both antagonist and livelihood.
In all the works of VIP contemporary reality is focused and analysed in such an ‘outside’ setting. For instance with a silent striptease, that juxtaposes the average fantasies, bodies, and designs for life produced and intensified by the media with individual vulnerability. Or, in Misery is a butterfly (an ongoing project since 2004), where a collection of records of pain and private, structural, mental, and physical violence is arranged into a cabinet that syncopates common ideas — ranging between visions of horror and real events — of the roles of perpetrators and victims. A cabinet that describes a world both outside and inside, where everything becomes more flat and more indifferent, where habituation blunts perception and where an omnipresent society and the socialisation of privacy grind individual integrity into a quicksand of functional public order.
In between the handling of bodies, body parts, physical states of matter and this outside, that we as viewers are part of, VIP claim their space. They tap into the depths of consciousness, expose themselves to the dazzling reflection of the contemporary world of glamour and dig themselves into the abyss of their own existence as artists. Hearts and garments fall. The noise, the frenzy is growing stronger and louder; it is a turbulent world in-between, where VIP perform their work between outside and inside, between analysis and street fight, between sentiment and state of emergency.