Jana Euler, Press Conference 1, 2, and 3 (left to right), 2010, oil on canvas, each 36 5/8 x 27 1/2".

While Euler ranges widely across past aesthetics, however, her affect is more consistent. Her work—whether her paintings or her occasional forays into other mediums—typically inhabits a subtly comic register. This is perhaps only to be expected, since comedy is so embedded in the social—if tragedy in the classical sense bespeaks a rupture in the social fabric that puts the individual in direct confrontation with some sublime force (death, fate), comedy maps the social’s intense all-embracingness, the way it makes people internalize its rules and mores and absorbs even their drives and desires. One is reminded of Foucault’s much grimmer description of biopolitics as a historically specific technology of power that aims to penetrate people’s lives at the most intimate level. Foucault stressed how this regulating power operates not primarily through subjugation or discipline but through stimulation. Our desire and behavior are shaped in such a way that we want to cooperate. In Euler’s paintings The Body of the Exhibition 1 and 2, both 2012, figures bend in on themselves, willingly fitting themselves to the borders of the picture like contortionists squeezing themselves into boxes. Similarly extreme positions are adopted by the faceless clay figurines Euler presented as part of a 2010 solo show at Dépendance, Brussels (Form Follows Information Exchange 1, 2, and 3, all 2010). The figures could be said to illustrate, in comically literal terms, the flexibility the neoliberal economy demands of us. They strike unnatural poses in order to gaze at the screens embedded in their rears, which show videos of circles appearing and disappearing. Clearly, they are sparing no effort to get a good close look at their screens. The work stages the almost physical fusion with social media that is a characteristic of the networked society, as is the craving for meaningless information that has us staring raptly even at circles.

BUT THE QUESTION OF STYLE obviously can’t be treated separately from the question of substance—bodies, and the constructs that give bodies meaning within the social order. It is important to note that Euler’s 2009 portraits graft the heads of her art-world authorities onto the bodies of her male fellow students and colleagues, as indicated by the paintings’ titles. Diedrich Ceccaldi, 2009, for example, is a hybrid of Diederichsen’s head and the body of young Canadian artist Nicolas Ceccaldi (who had a solo exhibition in September at New York’s Real Fine Arts, where Euler has also shown). The pictures take literally the Oedipal-aggressive longing to supplant the father figure that is often said to drive ambitious young artists early in their careers. The young embody the established senior figures.

Men are not the only potential objects of Oedipal desire, as another picture from the series demonstrates—a portrait of Ruth Noack, cocurator of Documenta 12. Surrounded in the Pro Choice show by male heroes, Noack was pressed into the role of the token woman, as though to illustrate once again the structural law that, for every artistic formation, there can be only one woman in Germany who garners institutional recognition. Her head, however, has been fused with a body identified as male by chest hair and broad shoulders. We may read this misbegotten chimera with its exaggerated masculine features as hinting at the fact that Noack’s contribution to Documenta 12 was nearly eclipsed by the media’s fixation on its male director, Roger M. Buergel. The large male body that supports Noack’s comparatively small head symbolically recodes her—it is the precondition of her visibility. While the series reproduces the dominance of male art-world luminaries, it also points critically to the structural sexism still prevalent in this social universe.

Of course, the symptom the portraits identify—the rising value of social connections in what Boltanski and Chiapello have called a “contact world”—is also their problem, for they attest to the artist’s desire to be part of this network of visibility and power, to leave her mark in the club of the established and the renowned. In that regard these works are comparable to Andy Warhol’s celebrity portraits, which in parallel fashion speak of Warhol’s desire to be seen as interacting eye-to-eye with his famous subjects. But unlike Warhol’s idealized pictures, Euler’s portraits capture the monstrous aspect of these overpowering father figures (and one mother figure) as well. Depicted in a way that is hardly to their advantage, the subjects, one suspects, are as likely to find their likenesses offensive as flattering.

Euler does not exempt her own image from this pictorial universe of ambition. In an untitled self-portrait from 2008, she has wrapped her right arm over her head so that it reaches the left half of her face. The pose recalls a formerly widespread procedure used by German primary schools to test whether a child was ready for school: The candidate’s hand had to reach the ear on the other side. Euler paints herself a certificate of maturity and membership but also stages the artist’s life as a perpetual performance test. The detail of the hand clutching a cigarette in a deliberately awkward pose identifies her as a member of the bohemian segment of the art world, the more so as it imitates a habitual gesture of her professor Michael Krebber. And at least since Francis Picabia’s Espagnole à la Cigarette, 1921–22, the female smoker has been an art-historically overdetermined trope, signifying transgressiveness, meditativeness, and autoeroticism.