Female Identities?

She is one of the best-known collectors of contemporary art. Subjectively, instinctively and with an appetite for risk, she buys works by young artists, Ingvild Goetz herself said in an interview. “Art must always have something to do with myself. The constant confrontation with the new and the present is therefore a personal and collector’s concern for me.” This questioning of her own identity, which she repeatedly engages with through the art of her time, is also the starting point for the new selection of works from her extensive collection, which will be shown at the Neues Museum Weserburg starting in February.

Are “female identities?” reflected in Nan Goldin’s and Nobuyoshi Araki’s photographs, in Andrea Zittel’s clothing and living units, in Jessica Stockholder’s couch pieces, in Rosemarie Trockel’s and Rachel Whiteread’s body casts or fragments? This is the question, the confrontation, into which the visitors of the Neues Museum Weserburg will be lured again and again in 2004. The selection of photographs and photographers will change twice during the course of the year. Let us surprise you!

Rosemarie Trockel thematizes the female role play between power and powerlessness. In her video “Pausa,” a woman, Laura, enters a room, takes off her Chanel skirt, which is interwoven with woolen threads, and covers herself with it for warmth – taking a break in this game? A few years later, the artist lays Laura’s body cast in the film’s clothing belly-down on a space blanket, adds a Walkman, and ironically calls the whole thing: “Living means to play some records.”

The two small torsos of Rachel Whiteread, on the other hand, in their different materiality – one is made of plaster, the other of synthetic resin – seem like fragments of steely male and flowing female corporeality. They are presented in the same space as Jessica Stockholder’s installations, in which abstract imagery and the familiar everyday world seem interwoven, as it were, in a surreal way.

“Third World Blondes Have More Money.” This title alone of Daniela Rossell’s series seems like a provocation. In them, women and daughters of the Mexican upper class, to which the photographer herself also belongs, can be seen in their everyday surroundings. They seem to be part of the decoration and yet they consciously stage themselves as women in their world, which is characterized by machismo. Looking at the viewer, sometimes challengingly, they position themselves in the rooms of their social class, which is characterized by firm family ties and is equipped with all kinds of exuberant luxury. They are dressed like the models in the glossy magazines of the industrialized countries. Offering themselves in their sexuality, they simultaneously try to preserve their dignity in their role as objects of male desire.

In her series “Mulberry Lodge / Francis Place,” the English photographer Sarah Jones also focuses on young women between their teenage years and adulthood. She photographs them in the comfortable homes of their English middle-class parents. These women are without eye contact with the viewer. Unlike the Mexicans, they do not flaunt their female bodies. Discreetly made up and coiffed, they blend almost seamlessly into their “immaculate” surroundings, which are furnished in the style of English colonialism. They seem to be waiting for something and at the same time appear to be on the move. In the midst of puberty, they are on the threshold of adulthood and faced with the decision to continue the tradition of their parents’ homes or to embark on a new path of their own.

A separate room is dedicated to Andrea Zittel, whose color scheme, determined by the artist, most radically defies the museum’s white cube. Her rectangular “panels” resemble a constructivist painting and are at the same time intended by the artist for variable use, as a female garment or as a picture on the wall … The large living unit A-Z Cellular Compartement Units Customized By Sammlung Goetz, which the artist designed according to the wishes of the collector in a Japanese-influenced aesthetic, also invites visitors to enter. The only thing is that in the museum, living in it must remain a sensual concept in order to preserve it for the art world and the Goetz Collection in the future.