She came on a Friday. I can still remember it perfectly: it happened to be Good Friday, in 2000. I just got back to Bern with the night train, returning from Brussels where I had gone to see an exhibition by African artists. The appointment was already discussed: Andrea Loux would meet me in the editorial office of the Berner Zeitung, where, as she put it, she would “insert herself”. She even explained to me what that meant: more or less a half hour, taking photographs, and that would be that. I knew her previous work. In the Kunsthalle Bern and Gallery Kabinett, I saw her “Tracy” stories, which stimulated the imagination with that mixture of narration and construction, and the overlapping of immaterial, even literary elements, and solid furnishings for staging installations. I envisioned that assemblage of bedside tables dedicated to Marilyn Monroe – as an architecturally-structured installation, further proof of the artist’s decisive command of form, and her seemingly effortless game played with construction and deconstruction – that is, the kind of mixture that I remembered encountering so far in installations by Jessica Stockholder in particular, and which I saw as being an intelligent and convincing continuation of constructivist concepts. More about that comes later – in the temporal logic and absentmindedness of language, so much of what lies in the visual simultaneity and density of Andrea Loux’ work can only be rendered in stages.
In any case, she came as agreed upon. We took a look at the different storage spaces and shelving units in the office. A bookcase, one of those pieces of office furniture without any particular style, seemed just right. In no time the weighty art books were taken from one of the four shelves. In place of the books, Andrea Loux put herself on the shelf. She stayed that way. And I continued working – or I tried to. I found this rather strange: it was irritating and soothing at the same time having a visitor lie this way, in this form, in one’s own space – even if the space was an office space, or a large office space for that matter, in which no one else but the two of us were present on that holiday. She didn’t say a word. In that sense, she didn’t disturb my routine in any way. And yet someone was there; someone had taken over a location; someone had filled with still life what had only been the banal: storage surfaces for books. An image was created from this situation. Through the image-making process, I was now directly involved in this image as well, whether I wanted to be or not. Andrea Loux sent me the office photography. It was much later that I discover by chance, in the volume Women See Women. A Visual History of Women’s Photography[...]1, how the woman who named herself Claude Cahun created a self-portrait in 1932, in which she lies on the shelf of a piece of furniture, her body inserted in a narrow space. The furniture is the framework. In the same volume was the 1962 photograph by Ruth Bernhard: a (naked) woman lies inserted in a box. The photograph’s title, In the Box, Horizontal, obviously made Andrea Loux’s title, My Box is My Castle, seem, so to speak, unauthorized. Even though the nude study depicted here emanates life, this insertion act nevertheless brings to mind the other side of the matter: that male figure by Hans Holbein, the dead Christ in the coffin – a human being whose thoroughly-dead materiality stands for life itself, and does so beyond the dictates of Good Friday and every theology.
Andrea Loux, who I shared my photographic discovery with, knew as little as I did of photographs not found in the canon of the history of photography. Her concept uses models which, strictly speaking, could never be treated as such (because she doesn’t know them). She uses the less obvious idea regarding (image)staging, but nevertheless addresses how people and interiors, people and (rudimentary) architecture behave – and which stories these relations can arouse. They lead us to where someone unexpected might be found lurking in intimate private interiors – a situation, made of the material many crime novels are woven from, like the one for the nineteenth-century interior that Walter Benjamin describes in One-Way Street under the subheading Palatial Furnished Ten-Room Apartment – a description that surpasses styles of furnishing and pulls into view some of the terror of everyday life: “From the furnishing style of the second half of the nineteenth century, we receive the only adequate representation and likewise analysis of a certain type of crime novel, in whose dynamic center stands the terror of the apartment. The furniture’s arrangement is simultaneously the floor plan for deadly traps, and the suite of rooms determines the victim’s escape route.”2
“Look under the bed,” one told oneself as a child before going to sleep. Yet during the daylight hours, the same eerie, nocturnal location was a secret place filled with desires and fantasies; a place for hiding in, a place used for dreaming oneself away into another world, like Alice does in Wonderland, when she vanishes down the rabbit’s hole and finds herself in the strangest of situations – even inserted in a house too small for her body: “The bottle did, in fact, grant Alice her wishes. It did so indeed, and much sooner than she had ever expected: before she had drunk half the bottle, she found her head pressing against the ceiling, and had to stoop to save her neck from being broken. [...] Alice went on growing, and growing, and very soon had to kneel down on the floor: in another minute there was not even room for this, and she tried the effect of lying down with one elbow against the door, and the other curled round her head. She still went on growing, and, as a last resource, she put one arm out of the window, and one foot up the chimney, and said to herself “Now I can do no more, whatever happens. What will become of me?” 3
That childhood fantasy of unfamiliar spaces within familiar ones really does play a role in Andrea Loux’s Insertions, as she once noted: “As a child I can remember being fascinated by a robust cabinet made of dark wood. If I wanted to pull something out from one of its far corners, I had push myself deep inside the cabinet and then lean to one side or the other. The dark corners opened out into unfathomable spaces – they became caves, sucking me in with an odd quality all their own.”4
Not by coincidence is the installation composed of six pieces of furniture succinctly entitled Attic, suggesting that place in a house meant for storing what seems useless, but not as yet to be treated as rubbish – and why? because these objects connect with our memories, and because we reckon with the useless serving its purpose at some later date. What that purpose could be is shown in the best of ways in Andrea Loux’s installation, which awakens the remembering process and turns the attic into a stage, filling this intermediate space to the point where it nears an association with Kafka’s The Trial: “What’s this?” he [Josef K.] asked the painter. “What are you surprised at?” returned the painter, surprised in his turn. “These are the Law Court offices. Didn’t you know that there were Law Courts here? There are Law Court offices in almost every attic, so why should this one be an exception?[...]”5
The unexpected happens. The ordering of intermediate spaces is, so to speak, (meta)physical and a space in of itself, and it’s precisely through interventions like those of Andrea Loux that we first become aware of it, that it gains presence and establishes new orderings – orderings that clearly possess something architectural, including something bodily and concerning the body on the one side, and (also referred to through childhood reminiscing) that which unassumingly activates, in the Freudian sense, an ordering of the unconscious and conscious on the other.
With respect to Andrea Loux, whenever a reference to spaces and intermediate spaces is made, then always in a manifold sense. Through her conceptions the gaze is shifted to spaces. Especially clear in her installation Spatial Bodies I-III, for Kunsthaus Langenthal, she opens up the intermediate spaces of solid spatial constructions, which then condense to images that incorporate their viewers. Something happens without it being decided as yet what happens. One could call this the construction of the social: the interaction between art and viewing (art), the interplay of body and space, the being surprised about something happening only when the artist remains perfectly still, inserted in her foreign spaces. An occurrence set in motion in this way is a narration that refuses to be told to the end, but one which inevitably begins to occupy the intermediate spaces of the imagination and memory.
As unlike as the series of Insertions and the video installations for which Andrea Loux acts as only the director might be, the processes that she triggers are, in fact, comparable. Since what occurs in installations like Table Stories and Roulette is also the intrusion of the unusual on the usual order of things. In the works of Andrea Loux, this intrusion – unlike in crime novels – is never shocking. It, so to speak, tiptoes into position – in order to occupy more of the present, to generate more questions, and to evoke more images through sheer pictorialness.
Naturally the situation in the office was already such an image: a reclining woman enclosed by a cabinet construction forming the framework. I first realized how much there was to discover in this image while I worked on this text. And suddenly I knew: it has to begin with that Friday.
Konrad Tobler, art critic and head of the Kulturressorts of the Berner Zeitung, Bern
From: Andrea Loux – Räume, Geschichten – edition fink – 2004