artwomen.org | Featured Artist

BARBARA GRAF: Statement from the Artist

My work is based on the scientific dissection of the human body, a process that evokes "dissection"-or analysis-of the mind, and its effect on the human condition. This is my central concern in my garments, sculpture, drawings and photography.

My sculptures emphasize the body as a mere empty shell: its interior is filled with emptiness. In several sculptures, the ribs become an actual cage, bars that define the internal void in a systematic manner. Themes shift: sometimes the garments seem to stress absence of the human form: the body leaves behind a shell. At the same time, it is the body's separate parts in relation to the whole that appears most important. Component parts fold into precise patterns and fit into special boxes or bags. Precise, acerbic written instructions and diagrams suggest a never-ending process of assembly and disassembly.

A key feature of my work is the melding and interaction between extremely serious concepts, philosophical thinking and bitter irony. While the work is painful to view, I hope that the meticulousness and intended beauty of its forms draw the viewer in, allowing for an acute sense of my intellectual challenges while confronting highly abstract philosophical concepts.

In my work, I seek to underscore the separation of consciousness from the materiality of the body. The relationship of human beings with their own bodies is ambivalent. My notion of the body as material "shell" and immaterial essence/identity helps to set in sharp relief the obstacle body can be in relation to important issues of human existence. I deploy contemporary art language to reaffirm the importance of human sensitivity and culture and the beauty of human existence.

In Pure Raiment: The Monstrous Has No Face

© Christina Lammer, 2001

Barbara Graf's anatomical garments fit into a logic of inversion and transformation, which challenges the notion of fixed bodily identity and even subjectivity itself. Her work juxtaposes positive and negative, turns anatomy inside out, and fragments that which belongs together. Nevertheless, her garments make sense. They fit as if poured on.

Anatomy is inscribed on flat surfaces invoking memory traces of the body's contours. What is monstrous is the method: the garments invoke the specific skin, the body of the artist. Whorl-stitched fabric patches become a second skin, covering Barbara Graf from head to toe. She cannot move her legs, she grows stiff, she transforms herself into a living statue.

In Graf's suits, the subject is constituted directly on the stitching. Her "anatomical garments" are made of patched and sewn inner body parts. Spine, muscles and sinews become the exterior shell.

While the face of the monstrous is masked in these works, it is at the same time revealed in the way the garments are produced. As stitches and textiles pile layer upon layer, Jacques Lacan's monstrous principle of the "suture" is made visible, evoking the cutting apart/stitching together of surgical practice while at the same time connecting the subject with the symbolic.

Graf's faceless sculptures combine, separate and recombine muscle, sinew, fiber and bone. But they also simultaneously collapse in upon themselves: folded and dismantled, packed according to detailed instructions. Barbara Graf "jumps out of her own skin," which she puts in its own sack.

Her strange, protean creations exist in many guises: packed away and ready for transport, unfolding to surface in different locations where they blend with local realities, whether as a piece of clothing, a box or some other form.

Christina Lammer lives in Vienna. She is a freelance sociologist and writer specializing in the relationship between art and techno-sociological issues. She is currently the director of the cultural-scientific research project Film/Art: Laboratory. Her most recent project is: The Doll: A Projection Model.

<< view sculptures of Barbara Graf

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