Pigment prints each signed in black ink on the reverse, dated, numbered 1-12, vertical and horizontal formats in pergamine sleeves, one text double sheet, one title page, in original linen case with magnetic clasp.


Coloured light embraces the body
like non-woven fabric
her clothes fit so well
when the woman dances


Natalie Lettner: Renate Kordon’s photo performance Light Clothes
based on the menses series “Shifting Colours of the Mind”:...

A self-experiment that sparks a fascinating metamorphosis: the artist’s menstruation spawns colourful menses monsters which are transformed into clothes made of light, in which the artist swathes herself – a project comes full circle, a multi-stage transformation has taken place. Renate Kordon plays with various media: watercolour, slide projection, performance, photography. The Fotohof Edition prints – a further step in the transformation process – show a selection of these transfigurations of blood, colour, form and light.

But first, back to the point of departure. The artistic process begins with the menses monsters. A fitting name for the artist’s subjective experience of this monthly recurring period because monsters abide by no rules, know no order, cannot be forced into categories. They are hybrids between humans, animals and plants, between the sexes, and sometimes – as in Hieronymus Bosch’s work – between even the organic and the inorganic. Monsters are inherently ambiguous and ambivalent and they cannot be controlled.

Renate Kordon’s menses monsters are in essence an affront because it is menstruation itself that is actually interpreted as a violation of the rules in the patriarchal world. It is tabooed in most societies and religions and considered “impure” – a fact that is increasingly annoying the artist. She is just under thirty when she begins working intensively on this topic.

The second women’s movement of the 1970s had meanwhile also spread to German-speaking countries. Renate Kordon read The Wise Wound by Penelope Shuttle and Peter Redgrove, a now an (out-of-print) feminist classic that was first published in German in 1980 (English edition 1978). At the time, it was one of the few books that dealt with the female menstrual cycle without treating it as an illness. For Kordon reading it was a deeply liberating experience. And she realised that she, too, wanted to use her specific artistic means to counterbalance the negative fantasies and myths with something new and different. The topic took on an urgent sense of immediacy for her – not just for sociopolitical and feminist reasons, but for very personal ones as well. She had already recognised the fact that her menstrual periods were at the same time her most creative periods. An exciting phenomenon – now it was high time to find out why.

For two years, from 1980 to 1982, Renate Kordon explores what menstruation does to her body and her mood. She translates her physical and psychological states as she perceives them into colourful aquarelles in A5 format – “with a very special lightfast watercolour ink that doesn’t fade.” Kordon discovers this ink by chance in Holland: “It was only available there and was fantastic!” Paper and ink are always at the ready so that she can react as spontaneously as possible to intensely felt moments.

Over two hundred pictures are created in this way, and it is through this process that the artist becomes aware of the incredible range of shifting forms and colours emerging from her body and her unconscious mind: “I always found that my pictures helped me understand things better” – art as an instrument of insight. The artistic transformation also gave menstruation a new quality: “There’s something lighter about it now! It’s easier to live with.” And indeed, these small watercolours are both cheerful and deeply vulnerable, something that is often missing from the usual discourse on menstruation. Renate Kordon creates colourful creatures, hybrids and magical beings. Her monsters are not evil and demonic, but funny, touching, fantastic, childlike, powerful, devouring, expansive, explosive or system-crashing – depending on her mood that particular day.

She creates strawberry fir creatures, tentacled monsters with fringed hands, cloud animals with hallucinogenic spiral eyes, dragon cats with bulging breasts, ovarian creatures, and so on and so forth. The menstrual blood from which they emerge fills the entire colour spectrum with radiance. But though red plays a key role, the other primary colours are strongly represented, too, sometimes blending together, sometimes becoming transparent or turning into delicate shades of pink, light blue or orange.

Some of the works evoke the processes of pupation and unfolding, others, explosive volcanic eruptions, still others, fantastic underwater worlds. Some forms appear again and again: snail-like spirals that are, at the same time, also intestines and snakes; jagged dragon wings reminiscent of pelvic bones and ovaries; mouths of fire, tentacles, tassels, jellyfish, protozoa, vegetation. In short: like a journey to distant galaxies, Kordon’s research expedition into her own body reveals a completely unknown cosmos. What’s more, through her benevolent and curious gaze the artist brings all these creatures, which are also her own self-portraits, to life, animates them and allows them to exist.
In her studio, she hangs the pictures on a clothesline – like Tibetan prayer flags they surround her, creating the atmosphere of a cabinet of wonders, in which she lives and works day in, day out.

Renate Kordon began the cycle in Vienna and continued working on it abroad during the winter semester of 1980/81 when she received a scholarship for animation and video at the ENSAD (Ècole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs). What’s more, she planned a further metamorphosis of these graphic manifestations of her body experiences. The Menses Series which emerged from her body was to be cast back onto her body as a projection. After the menses monsters took on a life of their own, the artist rounded them up again and (re)appropriated them in a further transformation step. She decided to wear the images, slip into these creatures, which had emerged from herself or her body, to feel them on her skin, to play with them, to don them like costumes: clothes made of light – Light Clothes.

For the photo cycle, she selects around thirty of the two hundred small watercolours, photographs them and has slides made. She sets up a projector and casts the images onto the wall. She mounts her analogue SLR camera on a tripod. Naked, she then moves between the projector, screen and camera. When she activates the self-timer, she has ten seconds to find the right position, to put on the light clothes, to feel her way into the colour: “I would slip into the projection. The image enveloped my body and fell perfectly into place on my skin. The colours were beautiful, I felt my way into the right positions.” The artist responds to the slide projections on the wall, communicates with them, perceives resonances. The small mythical creatures in the watercolours are thus transformed into expressive pieces of clothing that visualise the invisible. They turn what happens inside the female body outward – “body awareness” à la Renate Kordon. This is a term borrowed from Maria Lassnig, with whom Kordon studied animation for a year following her semester abroad in Paris.

Depending on the “garment”, the artist repositions her body and tries out different poses. The many-footed tentacled animal in one of the watercolours becomes a swinging skirt that dynamizes the centre of the artist’s body. In the projection, the elements swirling around an extraterrestrial creature are transformed into giant yellow gloves, symbols of female empowerment. A thorny jellyfish becomes a starry dress that hugs Kordon’s body and turns the artist into a mythical figure, a descendent of the Egyptian night goddess Nut, who devours the sun in the evening and gives birth to it again the next morning. A serpentine creature morphs into a constricting but also supporting corset on Kordon’s body. At the same time, this corset has something rebellious about it: Eve’s serpent from paradise seems to coil around the female body, while at the very bottom two unruly arabesques flutter out and lessen the severity of the corset.

The Light Clothes series thus creates an independent and autonomous cycle, a “second-degree pictorial reflection”, as Renate Kordon herself calls it. By returning the pictures of the Menses Series to the body that spawned them, the resulting Light Clothes take on a spatial dimension. Projected onto the body, the wondrous creatures of the Menses Series become not just clothes, but states of energy, reiterations of the same energetic states that gave rise the Menses Series in the first place. And so it comes around full circle: a “period” in the truest sense of the word. A body’s condition became a picture, and this picture was projected back onto the body in a performative act. In between both series the artist uses the medium of photography as a tool to provoke transformations: the first time by photographing the watercolours and having them made into slides; the second time by photographing the slide projections on her body.

Both cycles, the Menses Series and Light Clothes, reveal Renate Kordon’s typical playful approach. Her artistic appropriation combines the feminist agenda with wit and humour – a rare combination. This is again something that Kordon shares with Maria Lassnig. Renate Kordon succeeds in celebrating the female body in a subversive way, manages to appropriate it through transformations and her own female gaze and to free it from a millennia-old patriarchal iconography. >>>