Working within a popcultural framework that unites music, visual culture and art into one praxis, Michaela Melián constructs an oeuvre both haptic and conceptual-analytic out of everyday materials. “Soft” or “fluid” images, whose formal principles one might call Claes Oldenburgian, are combined with current critical methods of site-specificity and context analysis to subvert received readings of objects, symbols and history. Melián’s drawings, sculptural objects and installations frequently focus on themes relating to the construction of gender characteristics and identity. Collapsible or fluid surfaces evolve into materially and spatially sophisticated scenarios in which details of the history of emancipation inhere in a compressed form.

For the exhibition Dream City (Munich, 1999), which ran at numerous institutions as well as in public space, Melián designed Festung (Stronghold) – an inflatable sculpture that roamed twelve photogenic sites in Munich’s “museumized” downtown, its unstable, organic “soap-bubble” architecture a stark contrast to the monumental local edifices designed sub specie æternitatis.

How one perceived the object – familiar from its playtime leisure- society use – oscillated between monumentality/permanence on the one hand, and temporary, signal-like presence/absence on the other: between substance and expansion. Comparable in size to two standard containers laid side by side, the Festung’s inflated skin bore schematic paintings that identified it as a transportable accommodation container. It thus alluded symbolically to the refugees streaming into the “stronghold” of Europe, a reality that the tourist industry turns its back on. The invitation to the activist group “Kein Mensch ist illegal” (No one’s illegal) to participate in the exhibition – it went out at Michaela Melián’s instigation – turned this fact into a frame of reference, an interpretative scheme, locating it disrup- tively in the idyllic if virtual tourist landscape. Against the backdrop of migration and the politics of asylum, the object’s topicality gives it an alien, uncomfortable feel. Two further culturally-contextual works by Melián also explore appearance and disappearance, presence and absence – the twin slide projection HysterikerIn (Hysteric), and the sculpture Bertha Benz, Konstruktion (Bertha Benz, construction). HysterikerIn consists of two identical projections of a portrait, which overlap for a split second but never merge. The portrait is a “phan- tom” image of Bertha Pappenheim’s face, reconstructed using a police facial-ID program. Melián uses this forensic ID technology to generate rudimentary graphic portraits of women whose biographies gender-spe- cific historiography has repressed. Interrelations inherent to the very concept of projection also exist between the twin image – the mechanism of potential perception and interpretation, with its gaps, overlaps and transference – and the cultural history of the portrait as icon of psychoana- lytic history. Formally and thematically, the work pinpoints a key moment in intellectual history when concrete biography effectively is transferred to the domain of mythology by an act of collective repression. Remembered in the history of science for a pathological symptom and as the case history of Anna O., Bertha Pappenheim’s personal biography vanishes behind the doctor/female-patient relationship, analogized here by Melián in the artist-model relation. Redolent of a sickbed situation, the installation reformu- lates anecdote into the psychoanalytic space of a memory. Immediacy of appearance and direct readability as sign or character do not feature in the work Bertha Benz, Konstruktion, either. The skin-colored surface of fabric covering a frame of wooden slats presents no more than an out- line of, here, an “S-Class” Mercedes. Describing a shape and only schemati- cally hinting at a volume, the skin constitutes a figure devoid of mass. Collapsible, provisional in character, the structure establishes no direct link between sign and title. Montaging two anecdotal levels relating to the name Benz, the skin also functions as a metaphor for the veiling of explicit references. In 1888 Bertha Benz, wife of automobile pioneer Carl Benz, turned a machine into the first self-propelled long-distance road vehicle by using it to walk out on her husband, driving 130 km from Mannheim to Pforzheim. The so-called “Benzine”’s maiden cross-country journey amounted to setting a stamp of authorization on the patented device. Bertha Benz herself has survived in technological history only as the automobile’s nickname – “Bockige [feisty] Bertha.” When Princess Diana was killed in an “S-Class” Mercedes in 1998, automobile dealers around the world performed a discrete act of homage to the tragic “diva,” draping the model in their showrooms. By employing an impermanent, collapsible surface that negates the sculpture’s materiality, Michaela Melián also explores topical ideas concerning form in sculpture, ideas that first found expression in conceptual models.

Dirk Snauwaert, Under the Skin, 1999

Translation from German by Christopher Jenkin-Jones