The Loneliness of Can’t Being Alone: Lassnig and her Dual-Shadow Body
30 October, 2024
Maria Lassnig: Happy Martin, UCCA, Beijing, September 2, 2023- January 7, 2024
The entrance to the exhibition is at the end of an inconspicuous white wall, to the right of the main hall. The only thing that stands out is a pair of eyes in the middle of the wall, looking at people with surprise and confusion, shock and helplessness. The eyes belong to an alien face, and this face belongs to Happy Martian, the magnum opus of Maria Lassnig. The Austrian artist Maria Lassnig used “body” as the “stoff” of her paintings.
Figure one. Happy Martian, c. 1986-1999, oil on canvas, 100 x 85 cm, ©Maria Lassnig Foundation, Photograph© Jorit Aust, 2023, Private Collection, Vienna.
Stoff is a concept from German classical philosophy. It is different from material, seen, selected or even decided by the artist. Is it an immanent quality of an artwork, instead of a structural constituent. “Body awareness” was her experiential medium to contact with, understand and display to the world in her work. She believed that only feeling was real, and feeling occurred just in the subjective-spirit-inhabited body. Holding this aesthetic consciousness with the intuition from phenomenology, she usually only depicted the body parts that she could feel at the moment of creation, ignoring others that were not perceived. The distinctive “body awareness” in her painting style highlights the great rupture between what she perceived and what others witnessed. The figures in her paintings are the objectivation of her feelings, which are also different embodiments of herself. This brave self-disclosure is not only a record of the traces of trauma brought by World War Two, the development of technology and the evolution of ideology, but also a refraction of everyday life and a trigger for human reflection.
Figure Two. Self-Portrait with Muzzle, 1973, Oil on canvas, 96.8 x 127.2 cm, ©Maria Lassnig Foundation, Courtesy Maria Lassnig Foundation.
The exhibition was divided into four stages according to the year of her paintings—‘Animals’, ‘Two Ways of Being’, ‘Body Investigation’ and ‘Object of Self-willingness’. These gradually exhibited Lassnig’s cognitive development from “the presentation of comparative body awareness” to “the anatomy of the body awareness of the id”, where the subject returns to the self-consciousness of reflection to the paradox of individual existence and obtained the spiral ascending of subjective spirit in the recognition and acceptance of duality. This accords with her own words that ‘the end of the brush must convey one’s heart, hands and thoughts.’
The first exhibition hall, ‘Animal’, was outlined by the huge syntheses of human and animal images. Lassnig often juxtaposed herself with birds, cows, wasps and other organisms. She portrayed animals in their natural forms but shaped her own image through her memory and “body awareness”. These dual self-portraits can be seen as the juxtaposition of spatial images, as well as her bold attempt to compare the cognition of others with that from “body awareness” of herself, and superimpose cognitive space to highlight the tension between cognitive differences generated by different perspectives.
Figure Three. Taking the Bull by the Horns, 2003, oil on canvas, 145 x 200 cm, ©Maria Lassnig Foundation, Courtesy Maria Lassnig Foundation
The following exhibition hall named ‘Two Ways of Being’ directly presented the motif of Lassnig’s paintings: self-depiction under the sign of Twoness. As early as the 1940s she wrote in her notes, ‘Fearlessly study nature, but at the same time seek the components of the supernatural (which is, after all, within me).’ The idea of transcendence is dependent on an understanding of nature, but the transcendental essence can only be presented in the juxtaposition of the subject and nature, in the tension between the subjective and the objective. When independent existence is coerced to be immersed in the powerful current of the historical process, when the essence cannot form a completely unified characterization in modern society, the soul and form of the subject become a compound complex with two faces, and the possibility of the communication between the two has thus become the only prerequisite for the existence of the subject. Lassnig often presented a dissociated self-portrait, multiple images on the canvas separate and juxtaposed, which is the best manifestation of Aristophanes’ most beautiful image: Once upon a time, being was a double of what it is today. Zeus divided them into halves, and both of them became people. Longing and love are the pursuit of the missing half.
‘Two Ways of Being’ seems to show her desire for her own existence and her struggle as a woman and a painter in the face of anxiety and desire, trauma and fantasy in the midst of great technological, cultural, political and social changes. She touched the body and then sublated it. The duality presented by juxtaposition reveals that the subject is not able to live alone, independently, and cannot realize her own freedom of everyday life under the double squeeze of identity anxiety and situation anxiety in the first half of the 20th century, when the world is changing rapidly. The dual self-description is not only the investigation of subjective cognition, the reflection of the relationship between human nature and the spiritual origin, but also her desire to find the other half of her own self.
Figure Four. Two Ways of Being (Double Self-Portrait), 2000, oil on canvas, 100.3 x 124.7 cm, ©Maria Lassnig Foundation, Courtesy Maria Lassnig Foundation
When Lassnig reflected on the duality of her work later in life, she said:
“I was already conflicted as an ovum: Shall l be blond or dark? My father’s coloring or my mother’s? Always the choice between two possibilities, in life and in art. [...] I prefer to take on both at once, hop back and forth between the two canvases.”
This has led to the third stage of interrogation, ‘Body Investigation’, which is a return from the supernatural transcendental subjective spiritual category to the connotation of life through the essential nature of human beings. It is also a deepened reflection and expression of duality from the perspective of “the origin of species”.
The consciousness of division is the starting point of the recognition of difference, and also the beginning of regaining self-recognition, because the subject needs to be aware of the difference to acquire the possibility of communication, the acceptance of duality, the willingness to acquire coherence and the intention to sublate difference. The juxtaposition of human and animal reflects the tension between the subject’s inner self-consciousness and their cognition to the external world. The depiction of the duality reveals the split of the totality. From cognitive conflict to self-deconstruction, this path presents the cognitive dilemma of modern social subjects and the thinking path of returning to their subjective spirit, but Lassnig was not satisfied with this. She found the critical point between the subjective world and the objective world with the body as the boundary and investigated the contradictory relationship between the body and the internal mechanism of artwork. She integrated memory and imagination, and sincerely transformed her “body awareness” into her work with her brush.
Influenced by Tachisme, in the mid-twentieth century, Lassnig began to fill her canvas with harsh color pieces, and constructed her “interior landscapes imagined within her body”, spreading through color. Lassnig once observed, ‘When, in my painting, I became tired of analytically depicting nature, I searched for a reality that was more fully in my possession than the exterior world.’ These abstract brush strokes full of emotions are the most concrete and true depiction and presentation of herself, which is also the most profound subjective self-analysis and self-disclosure. The body can be a complete and unified existence only when it is seen and justified in an objective perspective, in the vision of others, but this is not the real body. The real body is a conscious body, an independent body, a lonely body. Only in the essential intuition of the subject, in the true subjective awareness, can the essential body be realized. This is the moment of the separation of the spirit from the body boundary, which is also the moment of the manifestation of the existence of the body.
Figure 5. Soon I Will Be Above the Clouds, 1999, Oil on canvas, 72.2 x56.1 cm, ©Maria Lassnig Foundation, Courtesy Maria Lassnig Foundation
“Felt” is not a certain kind of feeling or a creation, but a self-discovery based on “body awareness”. The subject itself is thus the only object of artistic creation, and the duality realizes this “self-object” in the process of creation. Modernity sets the subject on a cold operating table, and the subject takes up the scalpel and walks towards the self under the astral lamp of the other. Every act of cutting not only proves that the soul and body must be separated from each other, but also advocates that a complete unity is just wishful thinking.
To be alone becomes an absurdity in modern society. We usually “enjoy” the company of the shadow that comes from (an)other. It is already too heavy when we suddenly realize its existence and power. We used to be afraid of loneliness, but being alone is now a luxury. We are not able to escape from the other, nor can we state a pure self in the world. ‘I found it waiting for me in the body which houses me, the realest and clearest reality,’ says Lassnig. Her single body with dual shadows becomes the final form of her own self.