Sequences in individual booklets, with titles like: Labyrinths, Weibsbilder, Frauenzimmer,
At the Beginning of the End, Snow White and Rose Red, the way to make it is to be,
The Tooth of Time and or Sirens, Mysteries, Circumstances, fairy tales and other true stories.


A Dwelling for all these Thoughts...

These images from Where Ariadne Dances have become a dwelling for all these thoughts about my female relationship to architecture. The woman you find in the images is often rather lonely, but she does not mind. Among other things, it was a process, a way of imagining finding myself. A fantastic creation of spaces for free movement – mental and physical. To leave this constructed way of thinking that had been around me and in me during childhood, all that had been imposed on me. Dancing can be related to taking up space, taking your own space, also to offering yourself and taking part in the cosmic dance. >>>

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Renate Kordon in Conversation with Diane Shooman, Where Ariadne Dances, Schlebrügge Editor, Vienna 2016...

DS: Renate, who is Ariadne for you?

RK: Ariadne is an important female figure, a female side of mythology, the embodiment of wisdom and instinct. In this context I have been interested in labyrinths for a long time as they seem to represent coming back to the source, to the truth inside.
At the center of the labyrinth, knowledge and truth are unveiled. The difficulty here is to get out again and to return to the world with the experienced truth. Ariadne knew the secret of the labyrinth and came up with the idea of helping Theseus with a ball of thread, which he could unravel on his way in to kill the Minotaur in the depths of the labyrinth and use to find his way out again. That is the famous red thread running through everything.

DS: Ariadne was clearly determined to get away from home, so she cut a deal with the dashing hero Theseus, who served her escape fantasies well: “I’ll give you my red thread, and you find your way through the labyrinth to slay the bloodthirsty mino­ taur and free the young Athenians who were to be sacrificed to him. Then we escape from Crete and get married.”
Theseus and Ariadne fled to the island of Naxos. But if a steady relationship was what Ariadne wanted, it was probably not the best idea to fall in love with a hero, or someone going through a heroic phase. Heroes are fixated on heroism. When dawn broke, Theseus sailed off to perform the next feat of derring-do.

RK: At first I did not like that part of the story, where 93 Theseus abandoned Ariadne on Naxos. Later I found out that she was destined to lead a life at the side of the God Dionysus.

DS: When Ariadne woke up the next morning to discover that Theseus had left without her, Dionysus heard and was touched by her heartrending weeping. They fell in love and got married. It didn’t matter to Dionysus that his bride had slept with someone else the night before, that she was not a “virgin”. Considering how socially repressive ancient culture was with regard to women, this was quite a bold story. Perhaps it reflects another sense of what being “virginal” meant, which was to be autonomous, self-sufficient, at one with oneself. Ariadne’s dad, King Minos, was a despotic father and king, and she had succeeded in escaping from this double tyranny. At any rate, life was surely much more fun with Dionysus than it would have been with Theseus.
Dionysus was the good time god, but he was not like Bacchus, his Roman translation or interpretation. Bacchus was into excessive partying and total loss of self-control. Dionysus and his followers sipped wine and danced to open themselves to divine states of consciousness. And what is dancing for you? Why the title Where Ariadne Dances?

RK: Dancing for me can be related to taking up space, taking your own space, also to offering yourself and taking part in the cosmic dance. There is something very liberating, fulfilling, about both ritual dancing and about dance itself.
For me this series of watercolours was a conclusion, a way of handling all my architecture experiences. My parents were both architects and I have studied architecture for a number of semesters. My watercolours embody architectural structures that seem to function, but in reality are impossible because many are built upside down and disregard statics. But what is the right way, what is wrong? What is our reality? Somehow it fascinated me to push architecture to the limits of possibility, ad absurdum, and to juxtapose it with a female body.

DS: These pictures are anything but static. Ariadne and the labyrinths inspire each other to new acrobatic flights of imagination, to metamorphic forms. The spaces are moving bodies for a moving body. How did they move you?

RK: Among other things, it was also a process, a way of imagining finding myself. A fantastic creation of spaces for free movement – mental and physical. Spaces for sounding one’s own inner self, for following paths that lead astray or nowhere, finding peaceful places among the infinite possibilities of open space, sounding one’s own needs.

DS: The figure and the spaces try to adapt to each other, which stretches and expands them both. Actually, they dance together.

Classical architecture was based on the proportions of an idealized human body. Buildings were conceived as larger versions of ourselves that inspire us with our own soaring, limitless potential.
Temples to goddesses and gods were gendered through masculine or feminine forms of columns, or orders, as they are referred to. But the temples were not gendered according to the sex of the goddess or god, but rather according to that deity’s particular function. Dionysus was the only male deity also associated with nature and agriculture, and the only god to whom temples with female-gendered columns were dedicated. Athena is also a gender-bender: Male-gendered temples celebrated her as the goddess of war, and female-gendered temples as the goddess of the polis. Caryatids and atlantes are literal solidifications of a fluid process of creating varieties – offspring, so to speak – of gendered columns. It’s amusing by the way to see how effortlessly caryatids hold up heavy buildings, while atlantes visibly struggle under their burdens.

RK: Maybe, because atlantes should be seen as real carrying parts of the building, while caryatids despite their carrying function should be seen as decoration. Maybe I tried to leave this constructed way of thinking that had been around me and in me during childhood, all that had been imposed on me. My architect parents also urged me to study architecture, and I did for a while, but finally chose a different path. I always wanted to find images for inner processes: images for the invisible things that happen between people and inside of me rather than building walls and spaces around and for people. In this sense the images from Where Ariadne Dances have also become a dwelling for all these thoughts about my female relationship to architecture. The woman you find in the images is often rather lonely, but she does not mind.

DS: When Ariadne married Dionysus, she became a travel guide on the trip of life, leading girls on visits to Persephone, Queen of the Underworld, and guiding them back to Earth transformed into young women. These spatial images – the trip to the Underworld and back again, Ariadne’s red thread through the labyrinth – feel to me like metaphors for art. We disappear into the deepest depths of art, and resurface with an altered consciousness. And so, for you art was always your red thread.

RK: It is important to me that art opens up to invisible dimensions, to secrets. In this Ariadne series you find an image where the end of the umbilical cord is laid out on the floor in the form of a labyrinth. Another where the woman is pulling her head into perspective by her own hair – where the person herself acts upon the space, to change it and herself spatially. It is inter­ esting that towards the end of the series the woman becomes more and more invisible, once in a glass box, then in a kind of cocoon and finally there is no one at all – just an abstract form or an egg-like particle somewhere. With that the work was accomplished, the contradiction dissolved and the series came to an end.

DS: When did you do the Ariadne series?

RK: Over the course of two years, 1982 and 1983, after my scholarship in Paris. I felt good in Paris as a female artist, being able to really accept my femininity. My intense work with animated films also started in Paris with the film Hors d’œuvre. Thus movement and animation came into my drawings and I was very fascinated to see my drawings come alive. There is a lot of movement to be felt in the images of Where Ariadne Dances, and I have considered turning all the transformations indicated in the pictures into an animated film. >>>

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Otto Kapfinger: Unleashing the Labyrinth in: Renate Kordon, Were Ariadne Dances, Schlebrügge Editor, 2016 ...

The stairway capers have shaken off their houses, climbing the air,

walking across the atmosphere, vaulting the edges and sinking inside.

Platforms darting towards the clouds like slices of sausage from the rotating blade,

polemoniums connecting the cardboard disks pulled apart like a telescope.

Sirens spin in a cycloid waltz: toe-dancing across the tightrope over building-block dreams.

Stepped pyramids meditating on their hopeless eversions.

A sphinx is dismissing ill-mannered orders of columns,

accompanied by rolling stars and three dimensional silhouettes.

At the edges of the blue domes the ends of architecture y apart.

Out of high pedestals weightless body spirals wind upward.

Funnels without holes, sham doors in never populated grave chambers

reliefs – the remains of architectural grammar converge as archaic-surreal tableaux.

Chance archeology stacks smashed friezes, pieces of pillars and architraves

into illogical reconstructions, speared onto thin poles.

Arches and columns escorting the red woman, grates and cubes the white woman,

a circular temple, arcades and handrails the hair-woman.

Heaven, earth, water and horizon are the vanishing point-woman’s realm.

The walls of the labyrinth lose their substance and bow to the mystery.

Ariadne’s thread, the ritual’s wisdom, liberates itself from the art of the master-builder,

conquers the outer shell of petri ed memory.

The temple returns its halo,

emerging as the image of the myth of the separation of heaven, water and earth.

Stairways bare their teeth, mosaics like the folds of curtains,

covings uncoiling their umbilical cords.

Perspective blind alleys mark off the empty space,

law of gravitation’s pit – this time without net of physical rules of grammar.

Ariadne lends a twisted rope to the dancers as a choreography for fecundity’s round dance. >>>

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Kate Howlett-Jones: Frauenzimmer und Weibsbilder, Renate Kordon’s Ariadne Drawings...

‘Minos contrived to hide this specimen in a maze,
A labyrinth built by Daedalus, an artist
Famous in building, who could set in stone
Confusion and conflict, and deceive the eye
With devious aisles and passages...’

Ovid, The Metamorphoses ¹

‘All things would be visibly connected if one could discover at a single glance and in its totality the tracings of an Ariadne’s thread leading thought into its own labyrinth.’

Georges Bataille ²

Created mainly in her early thirties, Renate Kordon’s extensive series of Ariadne drawings throng with images of fantastical, exuberant women dancing, stretching and floating through space. They sprout wings and mermaids’ tails while their gravity-defying tresses of hair extend through and round space, and fleshy threads trail from their bodies in soft coils.

These Ariadnes are surrounded not by labyrinths but by a maze of classical temples, geometric architectures verging on the Escheresque: columns, boxes, impossible staircases, squares, triangles, tiers of arches reaching for the sky, pediments, paved floors stretching to the horizon. These women are finding their way in an incomprehensible, male-constructed space, ‘feeling’ their way through it. And yet this is not a narrative of limitations and restriction – rather, this is a joyful celebration of instinct, escape and a profound, instinctive wisdom that transcends the maze.

In her essay Architectureproduction, Beatriz Colomina observes that ‘Greek legend insists that Daedalus was the first architect, but this is hardly the case: although he built the Cretan labyrinth, he never understood its structure. [...] Instead it may be argued that Ariadne achieved the first work of architecture, since it was she who gave Theseus the ball of thread by means of which he found his way out of the labyrinth after having killed the Minotaur. Thus while Ariadne did not build the labyrinth, she was the one who interpreted it; and this is architecture in the modern sense of the term.’³ The implication is that, unlike building, architecture is an interpretive act that differs from the functional act of construction. In using her ball of red thread to read the labyrinth, Ariadne uncovered the precept of its design, its foundations, and unraveled the machinery of its conception. It is indeed Ariadne who grasps and defeats the labyrinth: Theseus is simply her tool for doing so. Far from being the victim of the story, it is Ariadne who, with her intuition and imagination, emerges triumphant.

In Renate Kordon’s drawings, Ariadne’s red thread also offers us an escape from two dimensions into three, four, and further dimensions. If we can manage to surrender ourselves to their playful fluidity, movement and energy, then they will lead us into the dismantling of dimensions, in space and in time, that runs throughout her oeuvre. Kordon’s works repeatedly confound and break down spatial and temporal limitations. In Trickptychon (Secession, Vienna,1987), a radiant threepart projection of celestial bodies in constant, unending motion, ruptures the boundaries that seek to contain our understanding of where time ends and space begins. Likewise, her large-scale installation in the village of Schottwien, Lower Austria (2008), stretched and slackened the passing of time by transforming a motorway bridge into a vast sundial whose shadow was cast across circles of vivid highway paint along the main street. The motorway bridge, a conduit aimed at accelerating modern life, was subverted into an anchor of moment and place and the serenity that this brings, even as the cars raced by overhead. The Ariadne drawings constantly shift and distort perspectives, generating paths into eternity and thus, one could argue, creating an invitation to escape the confines of philosophical constructions.

Renate Kordon trained as an architect, and both her affinity and dissatisfaction with architecture can be recognised in many of her works, not least here. The Ariadne series is a continuous investigation of Kordon’s own relationship with architecture, giving increasing expressive quality to the embracing of threedimensional form and the rejection of the limits this imposes. There is a sense of automatic drawing coupled with deeply considered analysis, a trance-like process that is also a working-through of personal history, relationships and events. Woven into the pictures are highly personal and intimate emblems: teeth, for instance, and the awkward stance of a teenager in front of a mirror.

The conflict between men’s and women’s typical approaches to space, between the creation of order and the freedom of instinct, also establishes a tension that seems to intensify as the comprehensive series progresses. Femininity opposes architecture, and yet at the same time there is the assertion of the possibility of a different kind of architecture defined by other values. Umbilical cords sprout into complex, circular labyrinths, while at times uterine coils infiltrate the classical temples that loom in the background. These Ariadnes are finding their way but with a dreamy confidence that suggests that these built structures are simply their playground. The red thread – specifically red, like the umbilical cord – implies female wisdom as something associative and connecting, a fluid, dance­like, celebratory thirst for a kind of knowledge that both rejects and transcends the ability to make structures that limit. It is Ariadne’s yearning for wisdom outside the narrow confines of her father’s home, a kind of lateral insight that enables her to make connections across the boundaries of dimension, logic and reason, thus breaking them down.

1 Ovid: The Metamorphoses (Translated by Rolfe Humphries), Indiana University Press 1955, p. 186
2 Quoted from Rodolphe Gasché: Georges Bataille. Phenomenology and Phantasmatology, Stanford University Press 2012, p. 151.
3 Beatriz Colomina: ‘Architectureproduction’, in Kester Rattenbury (ed.): This is Not Architecture. Media Constructions, Routledge 2005, p. 207 >>>