Lea Lublin

Lea Lublin (born October 9, 1929 in Brest , then Poland ; died November 17, 1999 in Paris ) was an artist who became known for her large-scale installations, artistic interventions and deconstructivist analyzes. Her work is characterized by references to feminism and psychoanalysis .

Life

Lublin was born into a Jewish family who emigrated to Argentina in 1931 , where she grew up in Buenos Aires . She attracted attention at school because of her extraordinary talent for drawing, and from the age of twelve she attended courses at the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes , where she graduated in 1949. Since the late 1950s she traveled to Paris again and again, in 1965 she moved to France for several years, from 1968 she commuted between Paris and South America and was closely networked with artists from both cultures. From 1977 to 1994 she was a lecturer in fine arts at the Sorbonne in Paris .

She had a lifelong close relationship with her son, who manages her estate .

plant

Lea Lublin studied painting and was first known for paintings that were influenced by Expressionism . In 1963 she wanted to draw attention to the nuclear threat with the pictures in the exhibition Bêtes et explosions . She exhibited other expressionist series of pictures under the titles Prèmonition and Incitation au massacre . At the same time, she says she was frustrated by the success of the exhibitions, because her existentialist pictures were bought by wealthy collectors and hung in elegant living rooms. She perceived this discrepancy as the limits of painting to conveying political, ecological or social messages. It became impossible for her to “lock herself in a studio and take beautiful pictures there”.

In 1965 she radically changed her style and created installations that were supposed to activate the viewer and force them to look more intensely. In the works of the Voir claire series , she used cheap reproductions of iconographic images that are so familiar that they are no longer really seen. She placed the Mona Lisa behind a pane of glass that was painted over with perspective elements. Visitors were asked to splash the picture with water, which was then removed by an installed windscreen wiper . Other motifs in this series were portraits of the heroes of the Latin American struggle for independence , as they were in South America everywhere in office rooms, school rooms, but also in large format in public.

In May 1968, when the student unrest in Paris was at its height, Lublin took part in the 24th Salon de Mai in the Musée d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris , the Parisian artists and their associations. While her colleagues still exhibited almost exclusively painting and sculpture, Lublin put her 8-month-old son's cot under the title Mon Fils (My Son) in the exhibition and lived there with him during the opening hours under a self-made wall decoration with childish motifs Plexiglass. She carried out the normal everyday life of the mother of a baby with breastfeeding, changing diapers and singing goodnight songs. That was precisely what made her radical. Both against the patriarchal art world, which artists reduced to the role of women, but also in the context of a debate within the feminist art scene. Because the role of the mother with her responsibility for the child clashed with the assertion of the autonomy of the artist and the (childless) artist and the attempt to separate the private from the artistic world. Lublin questioned these demands for limitless individuality and autonomy and presented herself as an artist who is “involved” in society.

Returning to Buenos Aires in the autumn of 1968, Lublin was confronted with Argentine society in the military dictatorship under Juan Carlos Onganía since 1966. Until then, the field of the arts, unlike the universities, had remained largely free from interference by state power. The fine arts program at the privately funded Instituto Torcuato Die Tella , led by Jorge Romero Brest , had become an influential center of socially effective art. At the beginning of 1969 Lublin implemented its first large Environment Terranautas near Brest . The visitors had to go through a labyrinthine walk in the dark, equipped with a mining helmet and headlamp, through an environment with artificial and natural elements. Natural products gave off an odor, and electronic music played. Instructions appeared in neon letters: “Take your time to look around”, “Choose something and hit it”, “Get naked and think”, “Art will come to life”.

At the end of 1969, due to the success of the Terranautas , she was invited, again in cooperation with the Instituto Torcuato Die Tella , to realize another, even larger installation entitled Fluvio Subtunal . This took place in the official art program of the largest infrastructure project in Argentina to date. A new motorway tunnel crossed under the Río Paraná and thus connected the two economically important provincial capitals Santa Fe de la Vera Cruz and Paraná for the first time permanently. With the extensive and technically demanding construction project, Argentina wanted to place itself in the first row of industrial nations.

She had 900 m ^{2 available} in a former supermarket in Santa Fe and built a kind of course that was supposed to convey the contrast between nature and technology. While walking through nine zones, visitors explored the elements of water and air, used heavy construction machinery, perceived impressions with different senses and crossed the symbolic road tunnel before they reached a petting zoo in a natural zone . The event concluded with an area of ​​creative participation where visitors could try out various activities. Here Lublin used explicit sexual motives for the first time, visitors entered the tunnel by forcing themselves through a "vagina" made of two vertical lips made of inflated plastic tubes, the tunnel itself made of a plastic cylinder represented a penis. Lublin himself later explained this part of the work as a representation of the “double sexuality […] that we carry within” and dealt with its symbolic and direct power throughout his life.

In the artistic framework program of the state-run Exposoción Panamerica de Ingeniería in 1970 she showed an acrylic painting of a naked couple in sex; Due to complaints, the picture was first imposed and then confiscated, and proceedings were initiated against Lublin for causing public nuisance. She avoided the Chile Salvador Allende and was able to implement another, completely new concept in the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Santiago de Chile : Cultura: Dentro y fuera del museo (culture: inside and outside the museum). Lublin looked for a group of advisors from the country's leading social scientists and worked with them for months to create large-format display boards on sociology, economics, chemistry, philosophy, psychoanalysis and other fields. On the outside facade of the museum, she projected news photos and thus attracted visitors who found knowledge about the background and connections to politics and society in the exhibition. The only way to get to the museum exit was by penetrating familiar images from art history projected onto parallel strips. For Lublin, this installation was the replacement of traditional art with socially responsible activity by the artist.

When Lublin was invited the following year to participate in the Art / Video Confrontations exhibition at the Musée d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris in Paris , she offered a new implementation of the Cultura project. Because her suggested experts were rejected by the museum, she switched “from the written to the spoken word” and designed her interrogations sur l'art. Discours sur l'art. The setting was that of a psychotherapy session. Visitors to the exhibition lay down on the couch and were asked questions about the function and role of art from Lublin, on which they made personal contributions. Lublin filmed the participants with a television camera, the picture was shown on a monitor in the field of vision of the speakers so that they could see each other live while speaking, so that a psychoanalytic feedback was created that corresponded to Jacques Lacan's communication concept .

Lublin implemented this concept several times in various French and European cities in the following decades. When she became a lecturer at the Sorbonne in 1977, she again took interrogations as the basis of her relationships with students. However, the focus of the questions shifted. At first she asked “Is art a desire?” Or “Is art a commodity?” In the 1990s she questioned art: “Is art senseless?”, “Is art appropriation?” Or “Is art inevitable? "

From 1976 to 1980 Lublin was part of the short-lived Femmes / Art collective . Together with her fellow campaigners, she set the performance Dissolution dans l'eau in 1978 . Pont Marie, 17 hours at. On March 11th, a group of women moved from the studio of one of the artists to the Pont Marie together with Lublin's now ten-year-old son . Lublin carried a large standard on which she had written typical misogynistic statements in the form of questions: Is the woman a sexual victim? Is the woman an image of the Immaculate? Is the woman private property? Is the woman the proletariat among the sexes? She threw the banner into the Seine, the water-soluble color immediately began to fade. In the same year Lublin took part in a series of events at the Center culturel du Marais , in which artists meet with scientists and theorists for lectures, discussions, presentations, but also exhibitions and music performances.

literature

• Stephanie Weber, Matthias Mühling (eds.): Lea Lublin: Retrospective . Snoeck 2015, ISBN 978-3-86442-128-0
• Isabel Plante: Between Paris and the 'Third World': Lea Lublin's Long 1960s . In: Artl @ s Bulletin , Vol. 3 No. 2 (2014), also online (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Unless otherwise stated, the description of life is based on: Isabel Plante: Between Paris and the 'Third World': Lea Lublin's long 1960s . In: Stephanie Weber, Matthias Mühling (eds.): Lea Lublin: Retrospective . Snoeck 2015, ISBN 978-3-86442-128-0 , pp. 146–157
2. ↑ ^{a b} Stephanie Weber: Lea Lublin - Retrospekulum . In: Stephanie Weber, Matthias Mühling (eds.): Lea Lublin: Retrospective . Snoeck 2015, ISBN 978-3-86442-128-0 , pp. 13–37, 25
3. ↑ Lea Lublin: The umbrella of the real , interview with Jerôme Sans. In: Stephanie Weber, Matthias Mühling (eds.): Lea Lublin: Retrospective . Snoeck 2015, ISBN 978-3-86442-128-0 , pp. 172-192, 173 f., 182
4. ^ Stephanie Weber: Lea Lublin - Retrospekulum . In: Stephanie Weber, Matthias Mühling (eds.): Lea Lublin: Retrospective . Snoeck 2015, ISBN 978-3-86442-128-0 , pp. 13–37, 13 f.
5. ^ Stephanie Weber, Matthias Mühling (eds.): Lea Lublin: Retrospective . Snoeck 2015, ISBN 978-3-86442-128-0 , p. 219
6. ^ Stephanie Weber: Lea Lublin - Retrospekulum . In: Stephanie Weber, Matthias Mühling (eds.): Lea Lublin: Retrospective . Snoeck 2015, ISBN 978-3-86442-128-0 , pp. 13-37, 24