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Lorenza Böttner

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Lorenza Böttner
Self-portrait of Böttner
Born(1959-03-06)6 March 1959
Punta Arenas, Chile
DiedJanuary 1994 (aged 34)
Munich, Germany
Known forMouth and foot painting

Lorenza Böttner (6 March 1959 – January 1994) was a disabled transgender multidisciplinary visual artist. Born in Chile, she later moved to Germany following the amputation of both of her arms, where she studied and began a career in art. Using several art media, including performance pieces, she depicted social outcasts, and she portrayed Petra during opening and the closing ceremonies at the 1992 Summer Paralympics. She died of AIDS-related complications in Munich. Following her death, little of her art was publicly shown until documenta and Paul B. Preciado began showing her work from 2016 onward.

Early life

Little is known about Lorenza Böttner's early life.[1] She was born on 6 March 1959 in Punta Arenas, Chile, to parents of German descent.[2] At the age of eight, both of her arms were amputated after she received an electric shock from power lines.[3] The Chilean children's magazine Mampato [es] depicted her as an exemplar for other children:[4] Despite losing her arms, the magazine said, she was able to use Christian language with others, persevere through her difficulties, and draw with a pencil in her mouth.[5] Six years after her amputation, she moved with her parents to Lichtenau, Germany, for better health services. She refused to use prosthetics and had a series of surgeries beginning in 1973.[6]

Career

Böttner regularly depicted the Venus de Milo in her work.

Böttner attended the Kassel School of Arts,[7] and while there, began publicly identifying as a woman.[8] Art school allowed her to begin a series of photographs, where she would wear makeup that modified the appearance of her face, following a comment from a professor that she was a "walking performance".[7] She graduated from school in 1984 after completing a thesis called "Behindert!?"—literally meaning "Disabled?!"—which used historical and medical motifs of disability in its accompanying performance piece.[9] She also studied art in New York.[10]

Over the course of her career, her art widely varied in style and form, ranging from drawings to paintings to performances.[11] Describing her approach as "transition and not identity", the philosopher and art curator Paul B. Preciado says that while she used her feet and mouth to paint, the unique habitation of her body (transgender and disabled) allowed her to create an interdisciplinary movement, not only visual or performance.[12] She depicted herself in art, as well as the armless Venus de Milo and what Preciado describes as "subaltern" persons: prostitutes in Europe, African Americans experiencing police violence in America, and lesbian and gay sexuality.[13] In the work depicting herself, she is shown as both sexual and maternal, and as the art critic Prathap Nair says, this works to unsettle one's understanding of the gender binary.[14] Similarly, documenta said her "dissident transgender body" allowed her to become "a living political sculpture, a sculptural manifesto".[15] She explained in 1991 that the purpose of using armless statues, especially the Venus de Milo, was to "show the beauty of a mutilated body ... despite not having arms".[16]

In 1992, after making a series of connections in the artistic scene of Barcelona and joining the Disabled Artists Network, she portrayed the mascot Petra at that year's paralympic games held in the city.[17] Her performances—where she handled artistic equipment between her toes—were displayed in cities throughout the world, such as in New York.[7]

Death and legacy

Böttner died of AIDS-related complications in Munich in January 1994.[18]

The Chilean writers Roberto Bolaño and Pedro Lemebel wrote about Böttner in their novels Estrella Distante (1996) and Loco Afán (1996), respectively.[19] Both of these writers used her life to advance a political theory of Chilean artistry.[20] For her early life, Bolaño indicated that while still in Chile, she held secret street performances to save money to leave for Germany, even though she had left with her parents at 14; for her adult life, he said that she attempted to commit suicide, even though such an attempt never took place.[21] According to Latin American studies scholar Carl Fischer, Bolaño's writing focused more on "what she failed at and hid" than "what she revealed", and he used her to demonstrate the types of people he thought were excluded from the Chilean literary canon.[21] For Lemebel, Böttner served as one of his crónicas (chronicles) of LGBT life in the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, able to resist heterosexism and militarism through her "unfolding" of gender expectations.[22]

She was a central character in scenes of Frank Garvey's film Wall of Ashes (2009), where she easily cleaned and refilled a pot using her feet.[23] According to Fischer, Böttner saw carrying out normal actions (such as cleaning dishes) as her principal art form, since ones perception of her disability forced her to become a kind of exhibitionist in doing everyday tasks.[24] She wished to "open people's eyes and show them how stupid it is to hide behind a bourgeois façade" through her life.[24] In Michael Stahlberg's documentary Lorenza (1991), she orders cheese from a clerk, only for the camera to cut out when she is due to take them.[25] For Fischer, this precisely demonstrates Böttner's artistic milieu: She exhibits "quotidian" actions, while also leaving some questions entirely unresolved.[25]

In 2016, documenta in Kassel, Germany, began a public showing of her art.[26] From 2018 onward, Preciado held a series of events showcasing Böttner's work in locations such as La Virreina Centre de la Imatge in Barcelona[27] and the Württembergischer Kunstverein in Stuttgart.[19] The exhibitions of documenta and Preciado marked the first time much of her work had been publicly seen in decades.[28]

References

Citations

  1. ^ Fischer 2016, p. 204.
  2. ^ Fischer 2014, p. 751; Fischer 2016, p. 204; Preciado 2021, p. 3.
  3. ^ Fischer 2021; Greenberger 2021.
  4. ^ Mateo del Pino 2019, pp. 40–41.
  5. ^ Fischer 2014, p. 752; Fischer 2016, pp. 205–206.
  6. ^ Fischer 2021; Greenberger 2021; Preciado 2021, p. 18.
  7. ^ a b c Greenberger 2021.
  8. ^ Musselwhite 2021; Preciado 2021, p. 19.
  9. ^ Preciado 2021, p. 7.
  10. ^ Díez 2018, p. 203; Fischer 2016, p. 205.
  11. ^ Preciado 2021, p. 5.
  12. ^ Preciado 2021, pp. 6, 11.
  13. ^ Greenberger 2021; Preciado 2021, pp. 10–11.
  14. ^ Nair 2019.
  15. ^ documenta 2016: "in der Lorenzas dissidenter Transgender-Körper zu einer lebenden politischen Skulptur, einem skulpturalen Manifest wurde".
  16. ^ Mateo del Pino 2019, p. 46: "quería mostrar la belleza de un cuerpo mutilado y me di cuenta de cuántas estatuas se admiraban por su belleza a pesar de no tener brazos".
  17. ^ Fischer 2021; Preciado 2019, p. 7.
  18. ^ Fischer 2012, p. 2; Fischer 2021; Preciado 2021, pp. 3, 18.
  19. ^ a b Fischer 2020, p. 261.
  20. ^ Fischer 2016, pp. 210–212.
  21. ^ a b Fischer 2016, p. 211.
  22. ^ Fischer 2016, pp. 210–211: "desdoblamiento".
  23. ^ Fischer 2016, pp. 206–207.
  24. ^ a b Fischer 2016, p. 207.
  25. ^ a b Fischer 2016, pp. 207–208.
  26. ^ documenta 2016.
  27. ^ Barcelona Cultura 2018.
  28. ^ Gyorody 2019.

Bibliography

  • Díez, Diego (2018). "10+1 cosas que aprendí en documenta" [10+1 things I learned at documenta]. Umática: Revista sobre Creación y Análisis de la Imagen (in Spanish). 1: 195–206.
  • Fischer, Carl (3 February 2012). Lorenza Böttner: Capitalist success and (queer) failure in Chile's dictatorship (Speech). UCLA Thinking Gender Conference. Archived from the original on 26 October 2021. Retrieved 15 October 2021.
  • Fischer, Carl (2014). "Lorenza Böttner: From Chilean exceptionalism to queer inclusion". American Quarterly. 66 (3): 749–765. doi:10.1353/aq.2014.0054. ISSN 0003-0678. JSTOR 43823428. S2CID 144290807. Archived from the original on 30 October 2021. Retrieved 15 October 2021.
  • Fischer, Carl (2016). Queering the Chilean way: Cultures of exceptionalism and sexual dissidence, 1965–2015. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 9781137562487.
  • Fischer, Carl (2020). "The international (un)intelligibility of Chilean trans* film". In Barraza, Vania; Fischer, Carl (eds.). Chilean cinema in the twenty-first-century world. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. ISBN 9780814346839.
  • Fischer, Carl (2021). "Lorenza Böttner". Archives of Women Artists Research & Exhibitions. Archived from the original on 17 October 2021. Retrieved 15 October 2021.
  • Greenberger, Alex (16 June 2021). "How Lorenza Böttner's prescient art created space for disabled and trans people". Art in America. Archived from the original on 28 October 2021. Retrieved 15 October 2021.
  • Gyorody, Andrea (October 2019). "Lorenza Böttner". Artforum. Archived from the original on 15 October 2021. Retrieved 15 October 2021.
  • Mateo del Pino, Ángeles (1 September 2019). "Subjetividad transtullida. El cuerpo/corpus de Lorenza Böttner" [Transcrippled subjectivity. The body/corpus of Lorenza Böttner]. Anclajes (in Spanish). 23 (3): 37–57. doi:10.19137/anclajes-2019-2334. S2CID 203158519.
  • Musselwhite, Olivia (2021). "Overcoming history's limitations: Lorenza Böttner's, Requiem for the Norm". Art Toronto. Archived from the original on 15 October 2021. Retrieved 15 October 2021.
  • Nair, Prathap (30 April 2019). "A 20th-century artist who de-sexualized the trans body". Hyperallergic. Archived from the original on 15 October 2021. Retrieved 15 October 2021.
  • Preciado, Paul B. (2019). "Lorenza Böttner: Requiem for the norm" (PDF). University of Toronto. Archived (PDF) from the original on 15 October 2021. Retrieved 15 October 2021.
  • Preciado, Paul B. (2021). "Lorenza Böttner: Requiem for the norm" (PDF). Université Concordia. Archived (PDF) from the original on 17 October 2021. Retrieved 14 October 2021.
  • "Réquiem por la norma". Barcelona Cultura (in Spanish). 2018. Archived from the original on 5 January 2022. Retrieved 5 January 2022.
  • "Lorenza Böttner". documenta 14 (in German). 2016. Archived from the original on 28 February 2021. Retrieved 8 January 2022.
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