DOMINIQUE GONZALEZ-FOERSTER’S VIENNESE VISIONS

In her new series of exhibitions, the first of which premiered this summer at Vienna’s Secession Building, the French artist has brought together all the heroes and heroines that inspire her, a personal pantheon to celebrate collective living after the is

At Vienna’s Secession Building this summer, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster unveiled the extraordinary first chapter of a new project whose next episode will appear this autumn at the Galerie Crousel in Paris before continuing, in 2022, at London’s Serpentine Galleries. In it, she calls on 235 heroes and heroines from her own personal pantheon – “friends who’ve inspired me, non-binary, trans, queer, fluid, hybrid, lesbian, gay humans and non-humans of today and the past,” as she explains – and sets them in a spectacular staging that places the visitor at the centre of this “beautiful, joyous, almost lyrical crowd, like a march, a demonstration, an excursion… with Loie Fuller and Subcomandante Marcos, Leslie Feinberg and Kathy Acker, Typhon and Rosa Luxemburg, Chico Mendes and Marielle Franco, Angela Davis and my daughter Ryo… and many others.”

In 2015, Gonzalez-Foerster designed a 176 m2 work for the stage curtain at the Wiener Staatsoper, reprising a famous photo of Helen Frankenthaler. At the Secession there’s also a sort of stage – vast, circular, materialized on the floor by artificial turf – and a set, comprising a 24 m-long, 5 m-high curved backdrop carrying a collage of all sorts of people disposed in a composition inspired by Diego Rivera’s Sunday Afternoon in the Alameda Central. The Mexican artist (1886–1957) excelled at large-format mural paintings, and made this one in 1946–47: in it he depicted 100 or so figures from Mexican history mixed with anonymous characters – street vendors, revolutionaries, etc. – as well as his wife, Frida Kahlo, and some of his daughters. Gonzalez-Foerster has taken up the idea, but also asks the visitor to take part by sitting on the lawn, which is strewn with orange cushions bearing slogans – “No justice no peace,” “Eat pussy not cows,” “Animals are not our use,” “White silence is violence,” “Queer and loving it,” “There is not chocolate on Mars” – that echo those held by many of the people in the image – “Stop Asian hate,” “Grève générale,” “Trans lives matter,” “Skolstrejk för klimatet,” etc. – in a sort of exhaustive panorama of all today’s worthy causes. As a result, this isn’t about any one cause in particular, but rather about the idea of militancy and the making of a collective. In tackling it this way, Gonzalez-Foerster takes “militant art” somewhat against the grain, exhibiting, with delicious irony, the very idea of militancy in a sort of homage to all sorts of magnificent figures – Louise Bourgeois, Josephine Baker, Klaus Nomi, Marlene Dietrich, Pina Bausch, Rosa Luxemburg and Bob Dylan, to name just a few.

Comprising a giant rectangular hall with three alcoves, the Secession Building offers a vast and open space that is the perfect theatre for Gonzalez-Foerster’s staging: the generous roof light reinforces the idea that you’re outside, creating a plausible landscape that you take in naturally, a tableau somewhere between the real and unreal, which, she says, came to her in a dream. “I woke up in the middle of the night and had a vision. We were near a little volcano down which lava was gently flowing, the vegetation was tropical, there were hummingbirds and llamas… My body became several apparitions: Lola Montez, Fitzcarraldo, Marilyn … It was an eruption of life, protest, activism and desire in a period of control, fear, isolation and time spent looking at screens. A liberating, transformative collective moment that generates a place, a landscape, a moment that is impossible to experience alone. A collective eruption, a slow flow of human and non-human lava filling the streets, our memories, the parks and time.”

This isreflected in the title –

Volcanic Excursion (A Vision) –, and the use of this term should be noted: a vision cannot be explained (except perhaps by psychoanalysis) and, since it’s a vision, was not preceded by any conscious intention. In this way, Gonzalez-Foerster foils the idea of the exhibition as a project and instead calls on her own fantasy – an affront to a time where everything is expected to make sense. This “vision” follows on from the “apparitions” that form the majority of her current work, and it’s no accident if her dream includes Lola Montez, Fitzcarraldo and Marylin Monroe, for she has played each of them in “appearances” that she has been organizing since 2012: for example, one evening in 2015 at Paris’s Centre Pompidou, she was first Marilyn Monroe, then Sarah Bernhardt, then Maria Callas, incarnating – rather than playing – the latter with stupefying plausibility. In these brief appearances, Gonzalez-Foerster becomes the medium for historic or fictional characters: Faye Dunaway in the Norman Jewison film The Thomas Crown Affair, Emily Brontë, Lola Montès in Max Ophuls’s movie of the same name, Helmut Berger in Ludwig and Professor Aschenbach as played by Dirk Bogarde in Death in Venice (both films by Luchino Visconti), or, from a 1922 photo by Man Ray, Marchesa Luisa Casati, an Italian patron of the arts, who once declared, “I want to be a living work of art!”, and whom Gonzalez-Foerster resurrected, in a long silver dress, at Paris’s Fondation Vuitton in 2014. “There are words I really don’t like,” she explained at the time. “Video, installation, performance. I prefer apparitions, phantoms, projections.” Though no apparitions were programmed in Vienna (but apparitions are by nature unpredictable), Gonzalez-Foerster nonetheless plays a new character, posing as the three Gorgons painted by Gustav Klimt in 1902 in the basement at the Secession.

Visitors can spend hours in Gonzalez-Foerster’s highly detailed environment, where each figure invites us to consider their biography, while the fact of their gathering together other offers vast potential for new stories. This extravagant artwork is an implicit portrait of the artist herself, made up of individuals who, through their work or presence, have imprinted their mark on her existence. It’s also an invitation to join the crowd, to take part in a collective event following the obligation to isolate. “In 2020 and 2021, we were forced to stay in our rooms, in front of our screens, fearful of an unknown virus accompanied by necropolitical decisions that divided our strength, desire, experience, songs, perceptions and pleasures, and which has now generated a profound desire for collective space and fortuitous encounters. We dream of faces, skin, bodies, contact, groups, of crowds without masks,” says Gonzalez-Foerster, who is planning a “Sensodrome” in the middle of Hyde Park for her show next year at London’s Serpentine.