C108
Review
Munich:
Abigail O'Brien at Haus der Kunst
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Abigail O'Brien: Still-life
V, from Kitchen pieces - confession and communion,
1998, cibachrome photograph mounted on aluminium,
51 x 66 cm; courtesy Galerie Bugdahn und Kaimer
/ Steidl
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Do the Seven Sacraments
still possess a morally fundamental role in social life?
For almost ten years now, Irish artist Abigail O'Brien
has worked on a series dealing with the message of the
Seven Sacraments. In Munich's Haus der Kunst she has for
the first time shown in its entirety her radically feminised
and iconographically modernised interpretation.
Each day, the magical crystal goblet
in its display vitrine is replaced by another copy. For
very good reason: the transparent vessel may shine resplendently
each new Museum morning, but by the end of visiting time
it is a shrunken wreck surrounded by sad pools of water.
The Holy Grail is made of ice and thus by nature particularly
vulnerable to time's biting tooth. O'Brien has fitted
the melting-ice sculpture into a section of the show on
the theme of Ophelia, who, with her melodramatic love-death
represents Extreme Unction in metaphorically updated form.
Co-workers in the Haus der Kunst have had laid on their
shoulders the quasi-religious ritual of fetching each
morning a newly formed crystal sculpture from the fridge.
O'Brien leaves open - as is generally the case with her
symbol-laden artworks - whether the ice-goblet is an urn,
a container of unction, or even Ophelia's poison-filled
cup of love. Only in the individual but interwoven construction
of ideas, realised as Objects, photographs, installations,
sound- and handiworks, do the signs of the meandering
potential for meaning unfold. In this process, the Seven
Sacraments, translated into contemporary, everyday women's
lives, offer an ideal background for final questions such
as death, life, love, birth...
O'Brien, born in Dublin in 1957,
investigates the contemporary validity of religious rites
that were 'canonised' over hundreds of years by the Roman
Catholic church and which have long been anchored in social
life. At the Council of Basel in 1439 the doxy was set
down of the seven ceremonies of Baptism, Communion, Confession,
Confirmation, Marriage, Ordination and Last Rites or Extreme
Unction.
Artists such as Nicolas Poussin have
paraded mythological constellations in their painted Sacrament
series, but the thematic cycle acts for O'Brien as a catalyst
to examine artistically the survival of ritualised processes
in the everyday. The spirit of the corporeally absent
Ophelia thereby becomes a sort of precedent. In the close-up
photographs from the 'dead letter room' of a post office,
innumerable letters are arranged in their pigeon-holes;
like Ophelia's unheard feelings, they have never found
their sought-for addressee. Real needlework with flower
motifs, on the other hand, is intended to signify poetic
optimism. Ophelia acts as a figure of identification for
a craving for love that sways between a desire for death
and glimmers of hope. And, if one bears in mind exquisite
genre paintings from the seventeenth century, satisfying
parallels spring up with the historical tradition of a
woman, often love-sick, relegated with her handiwork to
an interior space.
Male personnel have totally vanished
from O'Brien's religious history made profane. In particular
it is with Ordination that this absence can be read as
a rejection of clerical authority in Catholic Ireland.
But O'Brien's allegorical fabric is too dense in its weave
that only one isolated meaning could filter out. One could
complain that O'Brien has pushed the use of her suggestive
material to the limit of the bearable. The sterile sharpness
of the photographed interiors deliberately take on the
look of advertising images - for example, of an in-studio
kitchen put together for demonstration purposes in a cookery
programme. Then again, silvered bonsai trees encased in
vitrines are celebrated as the pretentious creations of
silversmithing hand-work. And consciously employed, irritating
motifs, for example rose-coloured baby accessories, go
right to the edge of the painfully kitsch. And yet the
rhetorical overstraining of signs, above all in relation
to the mystery of the everyday, does make sense. O'Brien
plays with the medieval idea of disguised symbols. The
devil or, more likely, god is for her hidden in the details.
But if one wanted to take from the artist a declaration
of religious credo, she would probably lean towards a
belief in Buddhist reincarnation.
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Abigail O'Brien: Memento #2,
from Extreme unction - from the Ophelia room,
2000, hand-embroidered sampler, cotton, silk (16
x 14 cm) in glazed mahogany showcase (160 x 42 x
62 cm), base laid out on silk; collection VOLPINUM,
Vienna; courtesy Galerie Bugdahn und Kaimer / Steidl;
above right: Abigail O'Brien: The gardener,
I, from Garden heaven - holy orders,
2001 - 2003, cibachrome photograph mounted on aluminium
under acrylic glass, 80 x 120 cm; courtesy Galerie
Bugdahn und Kaimer / Steidl
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O'Brien marks out the stations of
a life along the achronological path of the Sacraments.
Her first shot at the Sacraments was in 1995. After Leonardo's
famous example, a table in a room is set for an evening
meal; hanging resplendently behind it are photographic
tableaux of a bride's wedding preparations. O'Brien oscillates
in her staged photographs primarily between the possibility
of a vita contemplativa and that of a vita activa, all
within a women's closed circle. Over the years it has
taken to complete the series, the female protagonists,
which recall Georges de la Tour's brightly illuminated
figures, have disappeared more and more from view, to
be replaced by the abstract: large-format images of yarn
rolls in a linen factory represent perhaps societal blueprints
sketched by the mechanical hand of the Fates. O'Brien
allows herself the leisure of executing her handiwork
herself, and she uses the phases of sewing, sawing, bread-baking
to introduce each time a new conceptual caesura into the
series. Ophelia may in the end have gone under, after
hours bent in sorrow over her needlework, on the rigidified
love for Hamlet, whereas O'Brien lends her figures moments
of manoeuvrability beyond any other's influence.
All O'Brien's Sacraments speak equally
of ways of death and models of survival, of rites of passage
within a person's life. Common parlance talks of a cat's
seven lives. O'Brien seems to have something similarly
transcendental in her mind with her radically modernised
and feminised teaching of the Sacraments. Even in the
Baptismal present, in the miniature glass pram filled
with salt, lurk thoughts of decay. With the years the
salt, traditionally seen as a sort of elixir of life,
eats unavoidably into the glass material of the holder.
O'Brien prepares anew highly complex iconographics for
media-schooled eyes. And this semiotic fiddling by a contemporary
artists seems just as odd as the doggedness required by
a series that has taken almost a decade to complete. Possibly
only a convinced islander can achieve such admirable forbearance.
Birgit Sonna
Abigail O'Brien: Die Sieben
Sakramente, Haus der Kunst, Munich, to 12 April,
2004; Kunstverein Lingen, 16 May - 1 August, 2004; Royal
Hibernian Academy, Dublin, 20 January - 6 March 2005
Translated by Peter FitzGerald.
