HysterikerIn/Anna O., 1998
Installation view, Fleeting Portraits, NGBK, Neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst, Berlin, 1998

 

The portrait of Bertha Pappenheim was contructed on the BLKA (Bayerisches Landeskriminalamt – Bavarian federal state criminal investigation bureau) police computer‘s facial-ID program on the basis of the description of a photograph of Pappenheim by Michaela Melián. Since this program operates exclusivly with male facial types and features this portrait is only constructed out of male facial components.

 

 

 

 

In December 1998 the Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst Berlin mounted an exhibition titled „Fleeting Portraits—Flüchtige Portraits“, which included a work by Michaela Melián.

Portraiture and the portrait in the age of video was the theme, yet Michaela Melián’s surprising contribution was the best response to the exhibition’s title and topic, although it avoided all use of video technology. Instead, Michaela Melián took a trusty old slide projector and fixed a rotating mirror in front of its lens. The image this produced, at once static and in motion, was every bit as spell-binding as the many video images and computer animations projected in other rooms, whose brilliance and mobility are always impressive. The roving image easily beat all the static projections. Consisting of a cell-like cubicle of chamois-colored taffeta tacked to a square frame of wooden slats, and the projector and mirror on a pedestal at the center of the room, the installation was titled HysterikerIn/Anna O. (Hysteric/Anna O.).

Bertha Pappenheim
A good deal can be inferred from the artist’s decision to write the “HysterikerIn” of the title using a capital “I.” She does not subscribe to the medical profession’s historical, one-sidedly gender-specific construction of “hysteric” and the concept of identity resulting therefrom. Capital “I” in English is the first person singular pronoun, and thus represents the subject as a psychological category. The capital “I” in certain German nouns was adopted by feminists in their fight against sexist everyday language to preclude the linguistic discrimination of women and present them as equals. Yet the singular “I” makes no sense here, and the solecism calls into question the gender-specific concept “Hysterikerin.” This considered yet playful treatment of “I,” and the way it picks up current (not to say trendy) usage, cites, affirms and gently criticizes the humorously ironic character of pop aesthetics as well as taz newspaper house style.
Focal point of Michaela Melián’s installation was the portrait of Bertha Pappenheim, who went down in the history of psychoanalysis as “Anna O.,” and was thus deprived of a self-determining “I”.
Born in 1859 in Vienna, Bertha Pappenheim was treated for hysteria aged twenty-one by the Viennese physician Josef Breuer. Breuer described her case history and recovery in “Fräulein Anna O.” Anna O./Pappenheim discovered during one of their sessions that a particular symptom disappeared completely as soon as she described its first appearance. Grasping the value of this, she proceeded to describe to Breuer one symptom after another. Bertha Pappenheim called it the “talking cure.” Anna O. went so far as to reverse the doctor/female-patient relationship. It was she who decided what the subject matter was, asserting her right to narrate her sufferings herself. Breuer’s role became that of an interpretative listener. Apprised of the matter by Breuer, Sigmund Freud understood the significance of the new therapeutic set up, and he made it the foundation of psychoanalysis.
By making a moving slide projection of Anna O.’s face the focus of her silk taffeta installation, Michaela Melián raises the concept of projection central to psychoanalysis to the status of an artistic method. The portrait was constructed on the Munich LKA police computer’s facial-ID program on the basis of her description of a photo of Bertha Pappenheim. Since the program operates exclusively with male facial types and features the picture can only approximate the artist’s oral description. As in psychoanalysis, the final image is an abstraction mediated by language. The fact that this female portrait has been created from a description using male facial components also gestures at the physician/female-patient relationship.
Reconstruction and projection are the technical means by which a pioneering theory that radically changed bourgeois culture is imaged/reenacted. The impalpability of light, constant motion, and the way these brush the coordinates of a real-imaginary space that remains a mystery, function as metaphors for how personal biography is processed through language and memory.
The artist exploits the device’s technical simplicity and prima facie “correctness” to subtly imply that the procedure is perhaps simplistic and dangerous, as also—a criticism still frequently leveled against Freudian psychoanalytic treatment—that it fails to do justice to its patients. Bertha Pappenheim’s phantomlike appearance in the installation leaves us with the uncomfortable feeling that we are still laboring under the spell of a 19th-century Viennese therapy-success story as filtered through Anna O.’s eyes.
By setting the rudimentary Bertha Pappenheim portrait in motion and projecting it onto a soft, non-firm, translucent fabric, the artist also reenacts the way this particular acute female intelligence blurs and gradually crumbles into formulations for a therapeutic procedure and globally-recognized explanatory model of culture.
In the sequel, Bertha Pappenheim moved to Frankfurt, where she made a name for herself as a Jewish publicist, translator of feminist writings from English into German, and as a committed feminist. However, this political identity was razed from history in favor of her pseudonymic case history documented in Studien über Hysterie by Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer (Vienna, 1895). Not that Melián herself dispels the unclarity surrounding biographical details. But then it is precisely this de-clarification that interests her, and that she makes visible for the beholder.
The projection is permanently visible in duplicate, as a static image and as a back-to-front, moving one cast by the rotating mirror. The two images will never merge, even if, repeatedly, they overlap for a brief instant. A short biographical text on Bertha Pappenheim accompanies the installation.
Early on in their analyses of the attacks on the World Trade Center, the media came up with the military-technical term “low tech–high concept.” The principle is typical of Michaela Melián’s general working approach, and is one that she always strives to achieve in her artistic work as the end product of her researches into complex matters of fact and their interrelations.

HysterikerIn/Anna O. // Bertha Pappenheim, Projektion is one of several monumental installations Michaela Melián has created in the past five years dedicated to important female celebrities. They all function along similar lines, and the employment in each of the same materials—fabric, wooden slats and a portrait—underline their thematic kinship.
excerpt from
Frank Wagner, Low Tech–High Concept. The Reenactment of History and Personality in Michaela Melián’s Art Projects, 2003