Angela Grauerholz stages the way in which language allows both to say and to betray the reality of the world.
In her most recent exhibition, a variation of an installation presented at Artexte in November 2019, Angela Grauerholz highlights the way in which our knowledge of the world passes through words and the cultural references of which they are the signs. But words are both tools for understanding and grasping the world, while also sometimes revealing themselves as instruments that allow reality to be betrayed. Language is both a medicine and a poison, an instrument of freedom and a prison.
Angela Grauerholz has undertaken a creative dialogue here around a text by Franz Kafka entitled Report for an academya heartbreaking story of alienation, such as there can be in this Jewish writer, born in Prague, an Austrian who spoke Czech but who wrote in German, an author torn between various cultural heritages.
This is a text that is both very different and very close to his famous story Metamorphosisfrom 1915, which recounts the slow transformation of a young man into Ungeziefer… As the literary critic Pierre Deshusses points out, this German word was interpreted by translators as being a “monstrous insect”, a “cockroach”, a “vermin”… This “enormous critter”, this gigantic cockroach – whose German expression would perfectly embody the strange status -, has often been perceived as the metaphor of the exclusion, in a normalizing society, of a different individual, of whom one is ashamed, whom one rejects or whom one hides. In this Report for an academy of 1917, it is somewhat the opposite movement which is described, with however a similar reflection. A chimpanzee tells how he transformed into a human, copying his actions, but especially his words, his expressions, which he learned to use in order to avoid the zoo, thus becoming a trained being.
In this installation where words take possession of the space of the gallery — and symbolically of the world — language is revealed as a mask allowing to pretend, to conform in appearance to others. But ultimately, it turns out to be a tool to make everyone conform to the group. On one wall, a quote from Walter Benjamin allows us to deal with this aspect of things, the theorist explaining how, “very early”, he learned to “disguise himself in words which were in reality clouds”, thus echoing an “old compulsion to become like others, and to behave like them”, to the point of disfigurement. In the presentation text, it is explained that even artists sometimes tend to conform through mimicry, whether linguistic or visual. Sad finding. An exhibition that attacks this idea of a given and fixed identity, deconstructing it, breaking it up into a movement on which social pressures are exerted. A video, featuring snippets of sentences, embodies this dynamic well. Given the imperial context in which Kafka lived, this story will of course lead us to think of languages as a weapon of assimilation and acculturation.
A work that will also push us to question the distinction between animal and human, a distinction that has long been the basis of the very definition of humanity…