Capital and Corpus

Collectors and gallerists gather for dinner after a Stockholm art fair. They throw kisses at each other and heartily grip shoulders; swap gestures of business-level familiarity and acquaintanceship; cast routinized, roving glances at paintings and sculptures dispersed throughout the room. Hostesses in elegant evening wear carry shimmering pink bottles of sparkling wine, refill drained glasses and also allow guests to pour champagne directly into their mouths. The poses the three women assume—squatting on the floor, arms folded behind their backs, gaze raised and fixed on that of their counterpart—have an unmistakably fetishist quality. The three repeatedly convene to perform a choreographic routine that, owing to the deep bending and widely outstretched arms, equally recalls both yoga exercises and submissive gestures. In the background, a soundtrack: the faint feedback sounds smartphone apps use to signal functionality and reliability.

Anna Uddenberg is best known for her sculptures, but her career began with performances like this one from 2011, a piece titled ›Body Mind (Stretch and Submission)‹. It featured the Swedish artist herself as a participant, attired with a corsage and pencil skirt. From the start, she has focused on consumer-cultural forms of gender-performative play and the diffuse concepts of power that constitute their regime. For the 2011 performance ›Truly Yours‹, Uddenberg hired young hostesses to behave as they would imagine an It girl might behave at an exhibition opening. The golden fleece—i.e., the metre-long hair extensions the young women posed in front of—would later materialise in the smooth, epoxy resin bodies found wrapped around (almost hysterically entwined with) selfie sticks, sporty prams, and Rimowa suitcases at the eleventh Berlin Biennale. Curated by DIS, a New York-based collective, the epochal show opened at the height of post-Internet art. Uddenberg’s sculptures were among the most highly photographed works in the exhibition.

The pull of these figurative sculptures, the fascination they command owes partly to Uddenberg’s flair for the markers of contemporary trends, but it is also an effect of their sculptural precision—her adroit ability to capture beauty-standard-conforming bodies in poses caught between euphoria and agony. »Many of her works have to do with a libidinous submission to capital«, notes Samuel Staples, curator of Uddenberg’s forthcoming exhibition ›Fake Estate‹ at Schinkel Pavillon. BDSM culture, its playful rituals around power and submission, are a core metaphor and hold a key place in the artist’s practice. In her autofiction ›Aliens and Anorexia‹ Chris Kraus describes the crucial role of fetish in the sadomasochistic act: »S/M’s another flip around the immanence of objects in the theater: the objects aren’t blank and waiting to be filled by the presence of the actors and the play. The objects here are meaning-cards, they hold all the information.«

Uddenberg’s sculptures with seating furniture, featured among other places in her 2019 exhibition ›Power Play‹ at Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn, blur the performative charge of everyday objects Kraus describes with the commodity-linked promises of late capitalism. Formations fusing microfibre, faux fur, leather, imitation wood, and plastic cup holders, complete with such marketing-dada titles as ›Psychotropic Lounge‹ and ›Cuddle Clam‹, evoke gaming chairs, massage tables, and sports car interiors—seating elements often found in transit zones, objects whose body-norm-adapted ergonomics gently coax users into assuming the optimal posture. The sculptures appear on the one hand inviting, as if beckoning us to sit down. And yet that urge is tempered by a sense that accepting the invitation might leave us torqued in the same, overextended poses found in Uddenberg’s figurative works.

The artist’s exhibition at Schinkel Pavillon, on view during Berlin Art Week, features a new series of sculptures recalling high-tech exoskeletons, although they might just as easily have sprung from avant-garde gyms or dentists’ surgeries. Uddenberg’s choice of industrially manufactured materials was inspired by the façades of the newly-built, high-rise housing developments surrounding the octagonal, neoclassical art venue. The past decade has seen a slew of high-priced residential complexes replace nearby vacant lots and treetops in the area, a site that is also close to the controversial Berlin City Palace replica. Now their window blinds, glazed façades, and panoramic balconies have found their way into the exhibition as well. Uddenberg—who recently had to leave her studio due to the strained rental situation in Berlin—prepared for the exhibition by taking a close look at the hyperreal aesthetics of the luxury real estate market. Reference points include, among other things, the many shiny-surface interiors we encounter in our social media feeds and the luxury villas pushed by real estate agents on the Netflix reality show ›Selling Sunset‹.

Uddenberg’s solo show, her first institutional exhibition in the city in which she is currently based, also marks her return to performance. Bodybuilders in the show test the affordance of the sculptures (i.e. what a user can do with them based on the user’s abilities), bringing two crucial elements of her practice together for the first time. Uddenberg’s interest in bodies that have been athletically and cosmetically modified to reflect viral trends has expanded in recent years, moving beyond various kinds of hyperfemininity. Accordingly, the performance also includes male, female, and non-binary performers. In an echo of ›Body Mind (Stretch and Submission)‹, spectators interact with performers, becoming party to a non-verbal contract. Participants also dialogue with sculptures, finding what amounts to the ultimate ecstasy in Uddenberg’s commodity fetishism: a role reversal, whereby subject becomes consumer object.

SCHINKEL PAVILLION
Anna Uddenberg. Fake-Estate
15 SEP—30 DEC 2022

Opening 15 SEP, 6-10 pm