Artist: Vanessa Conte
Exhibition title: BREAKNECK
Curated by: Eva-Maria Raschpichler
Venue: kunstbunker forum für zeitgenössische Kunst, Nürnberg, Germany
Date: November 11 – December 22, 2023
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and kunstbunker forum für zeitgenössische Kunst
Misunderstanding sticks to Vanessa Conte’s practice like shit to a shoe. This is partly her own fault; after all, she doesn’t make it easy for audiences to avoid the word “provocation” when talking about her practice. While her works were always too much for the faint-hearted, long-overdue societal debates around misogynistic violence and the sexual abuse of power have created a climate that, unfortunately, has barely any place left for Conte’s kink and jet-black humor. Her most recent foray into the medium of painting seems to take account of this development. For while it still sees flesh thrown about, bent, slapped, crushed, kneaded, and teased, there are none of the kicks and punches that usually rain down on the female form in her work. Here, it seems instead to be the frame whose effect on the bodies produces their corporeality, by reducing each image to the body in question. A shift that amusingly avoids the tiresome perpetrator-versus-victim readings that are otherwise semi-automatically imposed on Conte’s works, sadly closing off more than they open.
There is now an undisguised humor in seeing contorted bodies being beaten up by black outlines, an orgy of violence whose comedic quality is further reinforced by the trashy optimism of the ’80s pastel tones. It’s totally ridiculous, of course, but perhaps the ridiculous can allow us to engage with and accept phenomena that earnest speech might be incapable of grasping in the same way. Hence we have Conte’s serial misappropriation of Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, that perfectly proportioned male figure whose geometric structure is emblematic of a staid and centrist stability. With Conte, by contrast, the line is swung until it becomes a whip. For what use is the homo bene figuratus if he can’t be an object of desire?
In his book “On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored,” the British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips formulates a thought-provoking interpretation of perversion. According to him, “we could say that we are being perverse whenever we think we know beforehand exactly what we desire.” In Phillips’s opinion, we relinquish any possibility that difference might have something to offer us if we believe we already know in advance what this is. Phillips isn’t only interested in sexual deviance, and I don’t think Conte is either. At least not exclusively. Instead, her works speak of finding yourself on slippery ground, well aware that experiencing such confusion is likely to trigger feelings of ambivalence. Similar to Phillips’s argument, Conte’s paintings try to show us that we are not really alive for as long as we spend our time avoiding potential ambivalences. Instead, they offer us a counterproposal: to leave routine knowledge behind and embrace the uncertainty of the encounter with others, or with the Other. So, who’s the pervert now?
(Text Moritz Scheper / Translation Ben Caton 2023)
