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Costuming and the Negation of Self of Bauhaus in Relation to VALIE EXPORT

Man is “incessantly seeking his likeness, his image, or the nonpareil”, so claims Oskar Shlemmer in his essay Man and Art Figure 1921 in the “Theater of the Bauhaus”. He puts forth the theory of the Bauhaus stage, in which man is simultaneously essential and nonessential in the grand pursuit of mechanistic theater. Indeed, it is difficult to think about anything but the role of the human in Bauhaus performances, in which performers execute the repetitive mimicry of ideal machines, their movements limited by cubical sleeves and cylindrical legwear. Working 50 years after the Bauhaus formulation was put into print, VALIE EXPORT similarly uses combinations of photography, performance, paintings, and essays to investigate a “situation in which man can only see himself mirrored in all things”. Her work has a certain disarming shock value, requiring the participation of sheepishly grinning audience members fondling breasts in a box or playing bystander as she rolls in glass shards that leave cuts along her back and trails of blood on a white canvas. The imagery lingers long after these performances are over, and her accompanying essays confront the moral weight and intensity of what she aims to do. In both Bauhaus theater and VALIE EXPORT’s work, there is an ongoing conversation about the role played by the human body, and deliberate choices in both how it moves and what it wears. By applying the Bauhaus formulation of costume to VALIE EXPORT’s work, we arrive at a conception of the body as a costume that oppresses and must be destroyed to achieve liberation. This liberation brings ultimate control, a process that the Bauhaus school conceives purely in the realm of the idealized aesthetic, and VALIE EXPORT realizes through suffering, violence, and vulnerability.

In Bauhaus, costume is that which transforms and reveals the laws that govern the human body. According to Schlemmer, “the transformation of the human body, its metamorphosis, is made possible by the costume, the disguise” (Shlemmer, 15). Three of the four “genuine stage costumes” that he outlines are designed to highlight the laws that govern the human body and the space around it, framed as “laws of the surrounding cubical space”, “laws of the human body in their relationship to space”, and “laws of motion of the human body in space”. The fourth costume type seeks to capture laws that govern the body itself, subtitled as “metaphysical forms of expression symbolizing various limbs of the human body”. There is a dichotomy in that a costume either “emphasizes the body’s identity”, revealing the truth, or “changes it” (15), subverting its nature to follow rules that are not inherent to it. He notably also equates costume with disguise, that which hides or misleads.

Taking this formulation of costume as a method for revealing the laws that govern its wearer, we find a similar costuming through the use of signs in VALIE EXPORT’s work. In her piece “BODY SIGN ACTION”, she explains that “the stocking strap as a tattooed sign shows the belonging to a class which asks for a certain behavior” (EXPORT, 60). The tattoo is a sign that reveals the laws that implicitly govern its wearer, and “demonstrate[s] the connection between ritual and civilization” (60). Her choice of using a tattoo, that which cannot be taken off, is deliberate, reminding us of the permanence of the rules themselves that this sign points to. Here, technology – like costume in Bauhaus – uses symbol to reveal the laws and structures that control its wearer. She claims that the technology of her “photographically frozen pictures” serves to “unmask the cultural body code and show the logic of the body within the social structure in a type of double exposure” (110). Similarly, in “HOMO METER II”, she ties a loaf of bread to her stomach, having passerby take pieces of it. The bread “serves as a symbol for motherhood just as cereal grain for seed and life,” in addition to giving “the appearance and aspect of pregnancy – a psychological experiment with symbol and behavior” (58).

In VALIE EXPORT’S conception of the body as a repository for symbols, the body itself becomes a symbol and therefore a form of costume. For her the body is “the place where civilization is applied to”, effectively a “sign and icon” (59). Returning to the idea of the permanence of tattoos, she sees the body as emblematic of the “national institutions which tattoo signs and symbols into our minds” (59). For her, the body is not “merely a theater for marks of a sexual, social, or rather nature”, but is instead “also a sign, one which our culture has heavily trimmed and made taboo” (57). However, the body is not simply a tool for transformation. She claims that the “needs of the body form a forbidden literature, one which embarrasses or oppresses” (57). It is this precondition that leads her to seek the transformation of the body as a mode of breaking its bonds of oppression. She views it as the “principle sign that allows the power of history to be experienced and to become visible and therefore changeable” (88). This enables her to arrive at the same dichotomy of revelation and transformation as outlined by the Bauhaus system, of a costume that can transform its wearer in addition to unearthing the truths about his or her fundamental nature.

For Bauhaus and VALIE EXPORT, costumes enable a transcendence that functions as a removal of the self as a body. For Maholy-Nagy, “man as co-actor is not necessary”, substituted by equipment that is “far more capable of executing the purely mechanical role of man than man himself” (Maholy-Nagy, 51), the automaton. In the same vein, Schlemmer formulates the stage as a mechanistic organism in which “man, the animated being, would be banned from view” (12). In VALIE EXPORT, we see a similar aspiration. She believes in the utter denial and rejection of the “classification of the body, whether of a biological, social or institutional nature” (54). In her formulation of the body as the receptacle of symbol that is a symbol itself, anything that is placed onto the body is absorbed into it. She sees “clothes as the second and architecture as the third human skin” and seeks to “initiate the liberation of the person, to discard the social rites, to renounce signs, their meaning and image” (48). Doing so involves undoing successive layers that enclose the self until she reaches the body, the kernel of oppression.

The ultimate purpose of this self-destruction is an attempt at liberation, which both view as a position of ultimate control. Schlemmer notes that this destruction of the self is an “endeavor to free man from his physical bondage and to heighten his freedom of movement beyond his native potential” (18). It is liberation coupled with conquest, a vision that sets forth a language of hierarchy and domination, in which “there will arise an enhanced control over all formative media, unified in a harmonious effect and built into an organism of perfect equilibrium” (55). This ultimate control manifests with man standing as the “‘perfect engineer’ at the central switchboard, from where he can direct his visual spectacle” (12). VALIE EXPORT uses similar language, noting that “the order of biology”, which is the “master in our society” can “only be extinguished if the power which is being held by the body over the mind is overcome” (60). Furthermore, it is the fact that, “the human being body” can subject itself to glass shards “without blooding to death” that serves as proof for her that “he is stronger than the system surrounding him because he overcomes the place of this fight, the body” (12). Crossing out the word “being” and replacing it with “body” is notable, an inverse of the transformation from body into being that she seeks.

However, while the Bauhaus vision of transcendence is marked by an aesthetic absence of emotion, for VALIE EXPORT this vision is a fundamentally violent one, requiring the insertion of pain and vulnerability. In “HYPERBUILE”, she moves through a corridor framed by electrically charged wire. She explains, “every contact with the wire hurts me”, but that “I conquer the pain and reach the end of the corridor”. In her view, society “rules and parcels out all human energy with painful barriers”, reducing man to a “tamed animal”. Thus, the destruction of the self requires self-inflicted suffering. She explains that “the meaning of the material – meaning and image as material – which society has prescribed for us, is here overcome on the body via the spirit” (54). There is something in the self that exists beyond the body, the liberation of which warrants the material suffering that she puts it through.

In the Bauhaus formulation, costume exposes fundamental laws governing its wearer and facilitates a form of transformation. Shlemmer and Maholy-Nagy view truth as a static fixture, something which costume either makes visible or transforms in an act of misdirection. Approaching the work of VALIE EXPORT through this lens, we find a similar conception of costuming via signs. The body, for her, is the receptacle of symbol and a symbol itself, a two-fold nature that makes the body its own oppressor. The removal of the body from this equation – a concern of both the Bauhaus school and VALIE EXPORT – is a destruction of the self that also gives the costume wearer complete control. However, VALIE EXPORT’s mixing of body with symbol makes the body’s meanings lived and changeable. Indeed, she is not concerned with truth because the truth changes as she lives it, the past existing only to the extent of the marks it traces out on the body. Her work is thus a radical act of continued transformation, a liberation without end that hinges on the repeated violence and vulnerability of bodily suffering.

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