The artist’s hand transforms what it touches; the male voyeuristic perspective in old paintings is dissected on the palette. Sound: reading of the names of major female artists.

Susanne Neuburger: In the Footsteps of the Hand; in: Lifelines Renate Kordon ...

In her film Paintress (1984/2008) Renate Kordon refers to the paintress as a female concept of subjectivity of the modern age. In this film she gives us a selection of more than 30 names of female artists recited like a text, offering a counter to the typically male-dominated narratives of the modern age. These artists include Marianne von Werefkin, Sonia Delaunay, Natalia Goncharova, Marie Toyen and Hannah Höch next to artists of the 1960’s such as Eva Hesse or Niki de Saint Phalle. Kordon also included Hildegard von Bingen and older artists such as Artemisia Gentileschi, Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun and Sabina von Steinbach, a thirteenth-century stone mason. Like the photographers Diane Arbus, Tina Modotti and Gertrude Käsebier, certainly not all of them are painters, but they seem to feel a rapport with a concept of art advocating modernity. As we know, modern artists sometimes maintained their status as painters even after working in applied areas or in new media for a long time. László Moholy-Nagy is an example of one who could well have called himself an engineer or film maker. Also Delaunay’s orientation crossed all genres in that she put fashion on par with art, and also Sophie Taeuber-Arp was involved with performance, theatre and fashion alongside painting and sculpture. Looking back, all the names on the list represent well accepted approaches, some of which had just been rediscovered in the 1980’s and had become pillars of feminist discourses. Of the great critics of painting, Warwara Stepanowa or Liubow Popowa, Popowa appears together with other Russian pioneers.

Having studied architecture and photography Kordon is by no means a painter, but works with films and drawings. In 1983-84 she attended the master class for experimental film with Maria Lassnig, the only Austrian to be included in Paintress. In those days, Lassnig was overshadowed by Arnulf Rainer and her later international career was not at all foreseeable. When the film was created, painting was again at the forefront of the art scene. In the 1980’s painting was still dominated by men who were tied up in virile subject constructions of which Rimbaud’s “I is another” enjoyed great popularity. Paintress is its counter concept, even though Kordon seems to have reclaimed a female version from the alter ego as well when in Walking on my lifeline (2001) she energetically strides along the lifeline of her hand as a small plastic figure in a blue dress with matching shoes and handbag.

In Paintress the image of the hand, the “right” hand that draws, paints or writes, is associated with the names of the female artists. One sees objects such as a pair of scissors, needles, paper or a clay figure that are presented on the palm of a hand opening and closing in quick succession, as though on a serving platter. In fact, no painting takes place in the film either, at most, a feminist interrogation of the palette as the traditional prop of a painter is put on stage. The hand in Paintress forms, creates and cuts and not only shows the corresponding props, but also the results, such as scissors made of paper or a lump of clay from which a figure is formed which in turn is cut up into several pieces. The hand is seen in front of a white backdrop, as though painting could still be forthcoming.

Actually female figures, extracted from paintings by Tizian and Manet, do appear and, placed on the palette, disappear into the mass of clay, from which again a figure holding a palette and paintbrush emerges. As referent the palette seems to have replaced the hand, the nude women from the old paintings are, to quote Kordon, „incorporated, taken into her heart at the end of the film by the paintress made of clay.“ Repeatedly Kordon assigns the hand—meaning her own hand—important roles in her works. Kordon is left-handed, therefore her “right” hand is her left hand, which is also the working hand. In Paintress this is the director’s hand behind the camera, the hand that releases the shutter, adjusts the focus, arranges the settings with all the necessary objects and forms the clay figure. The depicted (right) hand, says Kordon, “has to keep still in the animation film work and may not change its position during all the many single frames that are necessary, to be perceived as stillness or fluent movement in the film.” This right hand finds itself in the situation of a pose, so to speak, while the left hand is the apparatus.In Colourful Blood (1985) the hand is engaged in writing, in order to then become the carrier of colour. “First the hand forms a sign, an abstraction, then the sign superimposes the hand.” (Renate Kordon) Signs of the 1980’s generally stood in close relationship to letters and mutated to gestures or expressions. Kordon’s hands consist less in a movement of individual fingers than that they are such gestures as, different from the message or the sign, fulfil an inter-media carrier function. The Surrealists also loved the motive of the leading hand, isolated from the head in automatic writing. In Fluxus the pointing hand is called “direction” and can also be the carrier of texts. In Kordon’s Colourful Blood the hand is appointed as a trenchant but resting gesture within the course of the film. Painted with stripes, the reference to painting is given, although in Colourful Blood it is the body that is the carrier of painting and drawing. Other works such as the colourful Regelbilder [Period Paintings], projected onto the body, are derived from the body-image model; Kordon also calls them “dresses of light”. In her films Kordon brings movement into modernity’s repertory of forms. Their signs have abandoned the framework and static of the image for multiple overlay or even dissolution in the fluidity of film. In Colourful Blood longitudinal and horizontal lines measure up the body that is soaking up layers like a Wunderblock and that could serve as a model for a memory bank, in the same way as the sequence of names of female artists in Paintress.All these works deal with a new assessment of classic artistic categories which in turn supports and carries the feminist approach. This is also shown in the work Space Travel (1989), which might call to mind the fact that Roland Barthes calls the artist “by nature a maker of gestures”. This film deals with the gesture of the whole body, the hands mostly gaining ground. Kordon transfers all gestures into the film’s rapid pace, thereby augmenting the movement. She wants “animation” to be understood in the true sense of the word. In Weekend Houses for Souls of Deceased Artists we find the names of Paula Modersohn- Becker und Camille Claudel as well as Bosch and Kafka who, with their surrealistic vocabulary, can once again teach us the art of breathing life into the inanimate. >>>