Ute Vorkoeper: Anna Oppermann -- Being different (Why is she so different?)

Flyer anläßlich einer Präsentation des Ensembles Anders sein ("Irgendwie ist sie so anders …") im P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center (New York), vom 20 Juni bis 29. August 1999
What differences? Short notes on work, form, process and the current installation

There is a degree of isolation that normally nobody can stand. Like this Senegalese woman whom Theodore Zeldin reports on, who has hardly spoken a word to anybody but her family since she came to France ten years ago. Her husband who is both quiet and sad, her two children and a TV relate her to the world. The family has become her cave, her prison and shelter -- the only reason for life.

Anna Oppermann experienced a sense of this unbearable lack of communication in the late 60s when her private situation 'forced' her, as she said, to stay at home -- hiding and hidden. The feelings of isolation and deprivation, of imprisoning privacy, of sub-sequently becoming an outsider -- somebody not only forgotten by others but visibly standing outside from any form of public life -- were main starting points of this ensemble. They continually unfold in a wide range of motifs throughout all stages of the evolving work. Again and again we find women hiding behind their hair or their hands next to a warped corner concealing a cave-like basket, some strange objects reminiscent of masks or very simple houses. And even the 'perfect dream home' is to be found: a very American, now dusty plastic toy for girls materialising one of the most horrifying versions of the room traditionally reserved for the 'private woman'.

But Anna Oppermann did not miss the problematic ambiguity of privacy itself. Her investigations do not simply follow the feminist slogan of the personal being political which emerged in the late 60s. Whereas here the fundamental right of liberal societies -- the right of privacy -- was systematically questioned, Oppermann's approach also took into consideration both the dark and the light sides of privacy and secrecy. Of course, secrets often enclose some and exclude others; some of them also might become mythologies. But what is the best hidden secret of secrets themselves is that most of them are neither great nor important, but sort of banal, poor, common and embarassing. Made public they might affect or injure the identity of those to whom they belong.

Oppermann's walk along the border of enclosure and exclusion also emphasises that one who hides him/herself always takes an active part in this process -- running, of course, further and further into the dead end street of isolation. The multiplication of self-hiding figures in the ensemble points to this frightening possibility. It points to the edge of sanity, to the border between self-maintenance and self-destruction which the artist intensely examined by integrating narratives as well as theoretical texts on this theme.

But however sad or scary the stories of different outsiders may appear, the whole ensemble at last insists on the fundamental need for disruption of the norm, for outsiders of the order. Hereby, the artist has also been influenced by the dangerous turnout of a declared 'normality', of any form of 'normalisation' claiming to know how to separate right from wrong. Therefore she expanded her view on one of the most 'perfect' insiders of a certain order: the concentration camp's Kommandant Franz Stangl, whose portraits we find in between some photographs and notes taken during visits to the German countryside.

Finally, the ensemble stresses a being-different, which is, of course, nothing 'positive', nothing we could ever describe or declare. We can see a striking symbol of this sort of difference with the artist portrayed in the center of her installation, hiding her face behind her own hair: visible and invisible at the same time.


Form / Process

Oppermann declared 'from the personal to the general' as a main tendency in her visual thought process. Over 60 large works by her remain -- assembled from hundreds of little pieces based on themes such as 'being a woman', 'being an artist', 'being different', 'love, eroticism, and sex', as well as the thematic areas 'oil on canvas', 'myth and enlightment', or 'the economical aspect'.

Far from being mere reproductions of our information-swamped realities, Anna Oppermann's ensembles guide us into selected interspaces of reality, into spaces of unfinished evaluations and discussions. One could describe them as endless images expanded into the room or, more poetically, as pictorial landscapes. They visualise the artist's ongoing and always changing perceptions and thoughts on a specific aspect which she encountered during certain periods of her life.

The artist's chosen term 'ensemble' describes both the form of her work and the process of its construction. Always begun with various found objects arranged as still-lifes, they subsequently grew over years, sometimes decades, becoming living sites of collection, recollection, modification and continuation.

Hence, the form of the ensemble is an extraordinary reflection on 'the image', on the interdependencies of materiality and content. It does not only point out meaningful differences when doing paintings, drawings, sculptures, texts or objects for imaging the same motif, but also the floating differences within all media themselves when using the most varied modes of execution. But it is the way all of these formal differences are interwoven and reflected in one another which creates a very specific, telling panorama of the motifs/motives.


Current installation

One of the first large ensembles created by Oppermann and exhibited publicly, 'Being different' was first shown in 1972 at the Hamburg Kunsthalle and was last shown fully assembled in 1986. This presentation of the ensemble at P.S.1 introduces Anna Oppermann's work to the American public, but also makes this important piece from her early oeuvre accessible for the first time in thirteen years.

It should be mentioned that the current version of the ensemble is a careful, but nevertheless differing re-arrangement and interpretation of Oppermann's last installation of the piece. Mere reconstruction is made impossible not only by missing documentation, but even more by changing exhibition spaces, contexts and their particular demands. Presenting an ensemble after Anna Oppermann's death, the curators have to accept the works as what they were during the artist's lifetime: living and changing works in progress.


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