Uta Neumann

(Thoughts on the exhibition When the Mountains Sway, I Hum by Uta Neumann)

"When the Mountains Sway, I hum" @ Artist Unlimited, Bielefeld, 09./10.2024

In my profession, I sometimes ask myself what good art is, or: what makes a good work of art?
Personally, I am most interested when an artist raises a question, makes a case for themselves, sets an example. It is quite obvious that many artists start out from their own person, their own fate or their own figure. This can be seen as vain or exhibitionistic, but it is often a service to the general public; a self-examination from which many can learn something.

In the exhibition When the Mountains Sway, we see a number of pictures that show the same person: Uta Neumann. Uta Neumann also took these pictures, so they could be considered self-portraits in the broadest sense. Or not.

What exactly do we see? We see a person read as more or less female, whereby both the ‘more or less’ and the reading lead right into the problem.

Uta Neumann thematises gender, the shimmering aspect of it, the ambiguity.
In doing so, Neumann not only depicts discussions that are currently taking place on a massive scale, but also updates a historical discourse that is at least two thousand years old and only took a decisive turn around 250 years ago. A turn that, incidentally, made things even more difficult. At least for women.

In antiquity, the concept of one gender had become established. And that was the man.His biological endowment represented the standard, the woman's endowment a somehow inverted, diminished version of it.Thomas Aquinas still referred to her, the woman, as mas occasionatus, the unfortunate man. In the Christian-Jewish world, the woman is a by-product of the man, Eve, taken from the - if you like, pregnant - Adam.
All the reproductive organs that protrude outwards in a man protrude inwards in a woman.Why?Because, it was thought, the woman's ‘vital heat’ was not sufficient to push these things outwards. Less heat, less vital energy, less procreative power, less intellect, less prestige, less capacity for abstraction, less creative will and possibilities.Although women were recognised as having their own seminal fluid, this was useless if it did not mix with that of the man.
The fact that the reverse was also true was apparently never an issue. Which is hardly surprising, since scholarly discussions were almost exclusively held between men:Until 130 years ago, women were not admitted to university, rarely to higher education, a few exceptions of highly educated privileged ladies confirmed the rule; political participation was close to zero.

A turning point seemed to emerge in the 18th century: in France, power-hungry mistresses dominated the king, the vast Russian Empire was ruled by a small-town German princess, and in Central Europe, the Habsburg Maria Theresa ruled - King of Bohemia and Hungary since 1740, as this office had no gender and could not be declined. In addition, more and more women were writing novels and more and more women were picking up brushes and palettes or meeting in salons for intelligent conversations.
And it was only around this time that the binary or dichotomy of the genders man and woman was ‘invented’ as we still know it today, and which has proved to be tenaciously manifest - from the toy department to the question of clothing.This invention was by no means based on a different or even new knowledge of human bodies, but resulted from the need for a more stable social order - as this threatened to dissolve completely with the revolutions of the late 18th century.
From then on, the woman was something separate and completely different: a being with a uterus, destined to be dependent on a man and have children. The reduction to this function creates the home as the only sphere of meaningful activity.

As the historian Thomas Lacqueur put it: ‘The nature of gender... is not the result of biology, but of our need to talk about it’. Strictly speaking, the human embryo is initially androgynous, open to one form or another.
‘Humans impose their need for opposites on a world in which there is a continuum of shades of difference and similarity’

These shades of difference and similarity have preoccupied Uta Neumann since her youth - and in the best of company, as the classical modernism of the 1920s and 30s is unthinkable without experimentation with gender, identity and eroticism, after the principle of masculinity was largely shipwrecked during the First World War:
The actress and writer Erika Mann, the photojournalist Annemarie Schwarzenbach and the artist Claude Cahun, for example, risked not only new hairstyles, but also self-determined lifestyles that could hardly be categorised.
The fact that Uta Neumann resembles these creatives in her habitus is just another interpretation; her use of the medium of photography is a reference to the pioneering women with the camera, many of whom tried their hand at the Bauhaus, for example.

During a residency in Prignitz, Uta Neumann photographed herself every morning, taking around 80 pictures.
What was intended as a warm-up routine developed into a meditative self-runner. The studio space with its sparse set pieces became a stage for experimentation, Neumann's body a proxy for dealing with the difficulties and complexities of being gendered, of being assigned a gender identity - even if you may not feel it that way or not at all.
According to Uta Neumann, it was ‘an attempt to be there without posing and to find the purest possible presence: performative - challenging - without judgement - as present as possible.’

Uta Neumann sees nature as a value-free place where humanity can unfold. For years, Neumann has roamed mountains, gorges and watercourses, inscribing herself in the landscape, inscribing herself in the landscape (the large poster motif shows the Swiss Gemmi mountain range, designed as a screen print in collaboration with Barbara Collé).

Neumann allows himself to be touched by the presence of the stones. Unperturbed and unimpressive, they lie in the area, defying time and the elements. Brought together from Switzerland, Brandenburg or southern France, stones form a circle into which Neumann places himself to perform a birth-like ritual:
Born by Pebbles & Stones; born of stones, born in a stone circle, the individual whirls into existence.

The Stone Age may seem eternal, but man's days are numbered: Rainer Maria Rilke wrote: ‘The leaves are falling, falling as if from far away, as if distant gardens were withering in the heavens; they fall with a negating gesture. We all fall. That hand there is falling. And look at others: it is in all of them. And yet there is One who holds this falling infinitely gently in his hands.

In the video work Falling is the Essence of the Flower, Uta Neumann holds this falling infinitely gently in her hands: what falls there are risographs with the same self-portrait over and over again. The constant repetition is a cycle of letting go and starting anew.

The reproduction of the self-portrait in the colour variations of the risograph is also the basis of the wall hanging 64 Ways to see my Father: we are familiar with the principle of variation in many ways from the arts: from orthodox icon painting to the 36 views of Mount Fuji by Hokusai to Warhol's screen prints; or in music, Bach's Goldberg Variations or Arnold Schönberg's Variations for Orchestra op. 31 and 43.
Neumann's dedication to his father shows that there are also variations in the parent-child relationship or in the relationship between ancestors and descendants: Variants and recombinations of the genome, the genetic material of the producer individuals.
With the appearance of a quilt, a quilt composed of pieces of fabric, Neumann chose a basic textile form that often marks biographical passages: traditionally, quilts are presented when moving out of the parental home or moving into a new home.

Finally, in the work the Echo of Stones, nature becomes an image again - which it always has been as a landscape seen by humans: Uta Neumann moulded stones from Ticino in clay and projected these bowl-like shapes onto the wall. In the artefact and its shadow, nature reproduces itself with the help of technology - a bridge to the beginnings of photography: around 1835, Henry Fox Talbot placed plants on light-sensitive paper and exposed them to the sun: The exposed parts turned dark in colour, the others remained light. He himself called these photograms shadow drawings or photogenic drawings.

In the end, we, our bodies and appearances are nothing more and nothing less than signs in a cultural rather than a natural order. As such, we, i.e. our images, can be staged and negotiated, and that is a good thing. The terminology is currently overflowing, creating new categories and distinctions and thus, unfortunately, also still creating variants of marginalisation and rejection.
So talking about it - and perhaps for the time being - remains associated with struggle, suffering and seriousness. Or do you see Uta Neumann laughing in one of the pictures?

Anna Zika