Michaela Melian
Barbara Gross Gallery,, Munich, Germany
It’s been a while since a Mercedes S-Class limousine hit a pole in a Paris underpass, but the accident was to Mercedes Benz what chicken has been to Belgium. The company launched a desperate attempt to not only express condolence but also take away the tragic spell from the vehicle and cash in on the interest. As if to repeat Christo’s magic transubstantiation trick (wrap bloodstained historic Reichstag, unwrap new Germany), S-Class types displayed in the Mercedes showrooms were covered with a grey cloth wrap.
The charged tale of the princess as bird of prey amongst power-mad S-Class Royalties and finally crushed by the wheels of bigotry, is just the starting point for Michaela Melián’s take on the motif of the cloth-covered Benz. It may show that there is a gender-related dynamic involved in the polarisation of victimised woman and death driven testosterone car, soft cloth and hard steel; but there’s still more to the story of engines and en-gendering.
Michaela Melian placed a model of a Mercedes Benz S-Class beneath a satin cover into the gallery. Life-size, it made the spacious room look comparatively small, yet was actually a simple wooden skeleton of the body-work on wooden trestles instead of wheels. It looked as if it was built from a child’s drawing rather than the throbbing, bulky bullet of the original design. Something is purposely raw about this skeleton - it’s dysfunctional and can’t move and blocked the way like a stubborn mule. Flesh-coloured, the delicate, airy material that covers it is reminiscent of a slightly suggestive underskirt, expanded to XXXLarge size to cover a brutish rococo crinoline. The reference to women’s clothes is emphasised on the side of the car in a kind of pleated skirt of the same fabric which is wrapped around a horizontal, white canvas suspended from the ceiling, which (thanks to a small engine) slowly turns around - a dream-like contraption, it looks like a peep show display for consumer goods, as if a father had taken his geeky, blank daughter to a garage to show her some real man’s labour.
The title of the piece - Bertha Benz, Konstruktion (1998/99) - hints at the historic background to this vested libidinal construction. A leaflet informs the viewer that it was on August 12th, 1888 when Bertha Benz took history’s first selfmoving car, left the German town of Mannheim - and her husband Carl - and drove 130 km to Pforzheim, the longest trip ever taken in a car. Bertha was furious that Carl had put all of her marriage dowry into constructing the ‘Benzine’ without managing to make it run properly for more than a hundred meters. So her 130 km statement of separation (in which she managed to keep the car running against all odds) actually contributed the missing link: the motor was now run in, and Carl Benz could proudly present the automobile shortly afterwards at the World exhibition. He christened it Bockige Bertha (Mulish Bertha).
Over the last years, Michaela Melián has investigated the histories of important women who have been written out of a male-dominated picture. Whereas women-as-dead bodies have been visualised compulsively (romantic poetry, pop video, war, sex, nobilities, you name it), women-as-creators have often remained invisible. But instead of claiming to rewrite history by presenting a supposedly authentic counter-image, Melián makes visible the invisibility itself: phantom pictures of criminals made after verbal description for example.
The phantom technique has a double impact with Bertha Pappenheims more materialist counterpart, Boxcar Bertha Benz: with her masculinised image stamped onto the wall behind the wooden construction, 19th century Mrs. Mercedes becomes a serialised ghost in the 20th century machines that were built after she had proved that they could run. Melian’s no-tech car overtakes the many souped-up vehicles which have populated art sites lately, on the road to mapping the sexual implications of the drive to drive.
Jörg Heiser
