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About Rebecca Warren and her art

By Beatrix Ruf

Large-size figures of unfired clay, which grotesquely exaggerate the characteristic traits and trademarks of female sexuality such as breasts, claves and buttocks, have made a name for British artist Rebecca Warren.

Titles, quotations and references all stand for Rebecca Warren's cosmos of associations and deferrals, which her works can and should trigger and through this create new images and stories. Her oeuvre references a veritable array of male masters from the history of art: Degas, Rodin, Boccioni, Picasso, Fontana, the German Expressionists, and Neo-Expressionists as well as Robert Crumb. It also brings to mind the works by a younger generation of artists such as Martin Kippenberger or Fischli & Weiss, and the hostile and striking aggressiveness but substantive subtlety by artist colleague Sarah Lucas.

Rebecca Warren's art likewise unites popular and high culture, feministic and psychological debate. All this is not primarily some ironic statement or the offended criticism fired by the traditional male portrayal of the female body. Warren is not actually concerned with these male artists as such, seeking rather to position herself directly as the next in the traditional lineage - maybe the way Kathryn Bigelow can do a Hollywood thriller and at the same time intelligently misrepresent male clichés. Her large "women" seem to confidently and brazenly flaunt the insignia of their desirability. Her work is akin to an exciting thriller on the topics of figurative portrayal, representation and fiction.

In 2003, the artist exhibited a group of six large-sized unfired clay figures entitled She. Once again, Rebecca Warren took the title from the world of the silver screen, or rather a novel by author H. Rider Haggard, which has, since the silent movie era, inspired numerous film scripts, and was used for various screen adaptations. Warren references the 1965 film production in which Ursula Andrews plays Ayesha. Moving in a post-apocalyptic world in which she depicts the epitome of breathtaking female beauty and strength, she helps two brothers recover their kidnapped sister. The picture for this exhibition showed Sigmund Freud surrounded by his male colleagues. The six gigantic She figures stand on their own wooden trolleys, a classic means of transport ("She Devils on Wheels" as Sylvie Fleury would probably call them.). The sculptures' surfaces have a coarse, unworked appearance; at times you feel you have before you the original lump of clay. The absence of heads in the figurines is offset by their enormous breasts, undulating, arm-like ornaments, generous calves, and above all the abundance of flesh and clichés originating from the artificial world of bosom wonders. By contrast, another gigantic unfired clay sculpture biends the fantasises of Robert Crumb and Helmut Newton: Helmut Crumb (1998). The female bodies are reduced to their legs. Two pairs of legs together with the lower torso are positioned on a single pedestal like perverted double bridges; the Robert Crumb version is aggressive, the Newton-inspired legs aesthetically sexualised. Also "male" figures find their way into the work of the artist such as the small, here exceptionally cast as bronze, cube on wheels, which can easily be pushed around in the room, or the large, heavy and shapeless clay figure Private Schmidt from 2004, where the phallic symbols have been made comically grotesque.

Alongside these enormous women in clay, Warren creates smaller-sized clay works in her studio, some of which she paints with coloured glaze. All stand on pedestals, which in many instances are painted in a saccharine hue that advances the idea underlying the work. This group includes, for example, the Totems made in 2002, unfired clay figures, smaller versions of the She works and groups of figurines, from whose undefined mass of clay erotic scenes, figures and landscapes evolve. These are often applied with a sweetish colouring, an intervention which, interplaying with the opposing and often drastic and aggressive content of the scenes, creates an intense contrast.

In the artist's three-dimensional vitrine-collages featuring pieces of wood, wire, cotton wool balls, neon lights and paraphernalia of diverse origins, the same mindset unravels as in the clay figures infused by "female" perception and interpretation. In the three-dimensional collages, the pedestal is again an integral part of the work, as is the case in Bitch Magic: The Musical (2001-2003), in which an enormous Perspex hood is placed over a collage of objects - pedestal included - and is thus transformed into a new "pedestal" for a gold-painted plaster form. All vitrine-collages are accumulations of items, which exude an intimate fiction and defy the logic of composition. Every Aspect of Bitch Magic (1996), for example, combines a glass containing a dead bee, an elastic hair-band, a shell, a green piece of glass, a pair of panties and a safety needle on a pedestal. A wooden frame, which was to serve as a model for a Perspex cover, was never replaced - instead, a white envelope leans against it, and over this another pair of panties has been pulled crotch of which has been lovingly decorated with washing machine fuzz.

Rebecca Warren sees her collages as "magical objects". Like her crudely made figurines they also evoke a sense of the ever present doubtful authenticity of the artist's studio. One believes one is in the studio or almost sensing the presence of the "model" in the room, but all of this is a more fictional, maybe virtual situation, a dense universe of possibilities, which composes itself for the purpose of transitory, continuously regenerating contents.

In all of Rebecca Warren's works the feasibility of the representation of the body as well as of the creative act per se becomes manifest as a monstrosity.

This article is a reproduction of the Introduction that features in the 'Rebecca Warren' catalogue produced by Kunsthalle Zürich. Homepage at: http://www.kunsthallezurich.ch/

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