Jana Euler, Omnipresent Instincts Overpainted, 2012, oil on linen, 55 x 42".
A recent critical rereading of Neue Sachlichkeit, and in particular its verist subgroup, allows us to better grasp the significance of this rebarbative figurative language. When art historian Graham Bader looked at verism in an essay published in these pages in January 2007, he argued that it was far from being a retrograde rejection of avant-garde strategies such as abstraction and montage. What verism sensed and diagrammed, with its violent, decadent, or macabre figuration, was the Weimar Republic’s historically unprecedented biopolitical obsession, its relentless efforts to control its citizens’ bodies via any available means. Bader’s text reminds us of the necessity to situate each instance of figuration historically by relating it to its social conditions. In Euler’s case, it is the biopolitical subtext of network capitalism that is not merely hinted at but taken to the extreme. If we are supposed to work the room, to communicate nonstop and to stay mobile (between openings, fairs, and biennials, in the case of much of Euler’s audience), our bodies, our gestures and expressions, and our psyches will be affected and shaped accordingly. Yet the body depicted by Euler is far from a site of resistance, as it was for many feminist artists of previous decades who used their formerly repressed bodies to express opposition to patriarchy, and in so doing ran the risk of being reduced to that body once again. On the contrary, Euler’s work recognizes that formerly private matters (our bodies, social and cultural reproduction) are nowadays far from being repressed—they have risen to the forefront of the economy. Indeed, it is the formerly reproductive sphere that the new economy is busy absorbing, since it targets our behavior, our deepest feelings, and our most private interactions. The bodies that we encounter in Euler’s paintings are therefore not just biological matter but also sites on which this economy works.
Bodies are indeed ever-present in Euler’s work, in all their abysmal carnality, their genderedness, their posturing and vulnerabilities. Yet they are also and increasingly caricatures, cartoon personages. Zodiac signs notwithstanding, Euler is obviously less interested in personal motives or individual psychologies than in a structural analysis of social interaction and behavior, one that may turn us again toward the project of understanding how power works on and through bodies—yes, that old question, but wittily and incisively attuned to the contemporary factors that inflect it anew. That is especially evident in Euler’s pictures of the past two years, such as The Emotions Discuss in the Postmodern Side-Room About the Transformation of Their Bodies 1 and 2, both 2010—graffitilike paintings of grimacing talking heads with stick-figure bodies seated at conference tables. Twisted with pain, carved by physical exhaustion and emotional isolation, their faces remind us of the way in which networks are everywhere inscribed on the body, articulating a near-complete and decisive instrumentalization of the subject. There is no way out of this social hell, or so it seems in Euler’s art. In Anonymous Powergame, 2011, muscular bodies bearing Dubuffet-like balloon heads try to stay afloat by performing gymnastic exercises but ultimately lose altitude. The picture suggests a certain pessimism, to say the least. Yet this visualization of new compulsions—right down to the physical-fitness imperative—strikes me as a strength of Euler’s work, as does the way she presents these compulsions so grotesquely and in such exaggerated form that the possibility of new positions of distance and critique seems within reach. Her power games may be anonymous, but we are more than likely to recognize ourselves, our friends, our networks, in their painterly gambits.
Isabelle Graw is a Berlin-based critic and the publisher of Texte zur Kunst.
Translated from German by Gerrit Jackson.
