| | | | | | | | Michaela Moscouw: Versuch zu Gähnen, 1997, 24 x 30 cm
© Michaela Moscouw | | | | | | Present Absent | | | | 10 February ‐ 14 May 2023 | | | | | | Francisco Carolinum Linz Museumstr. 14, A-4020 Linz
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| | | | | | | | | Michaela Moscouw: Der Besuch der Taube, 1989-2004, 114 x 72 cm
© Michaela Moscouw | | | | | | How does one write about someone who is absent? Someone whose work is present only in a fragmentary sort of way, because destroying it was part of the artistic process? We have not heard much recently about the photographer Michaela Moscouw (b. 1961). She has turned her back on the art market and lives in seclusion in Vienna. She is not available for interviews. Exhibitions are held without her. And yet her works, the result of incessant image production across the decades, have nevertheless survived in a few public and private collections.
"A day in which I don’t in some way find myself in front of the camera, that’s like a day that’s not documented and is wasted," Moscouw said as recently as 2001, talking to Joerg Burger in the film Moscouw. By then the artist, at the time forty years old, had already spent twenty years circling with uncompromising and excessive zeal, and with memorable results, around such themes as self-dramatization, self-image, self-exposure, and self-extinction—in the process also destroying large parts of her work. In the early 1980s, she completely eradicated all the early abstract works she had made during and after her graphic studies at the Höhere Grafische Bundes-Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt in Vienna. She captured the process on camera, ushering in her shift to the medium of photography. | | | | | | | | | Installation view: Michaela Moscouw Present Absent, Francisco Carolinum Linz 2023
© Petra Moser | | | | | | In her early phase as a photographer, she made mostly black-and-white images. The object of her interest here is her own body—as material and carrier of meaning in her art. The collage Lapislazuli, der goldene Löwe (Lapis Lazuli, the Golden Lion, 1984), for example, deals with themes such as beauty and female identity. By manipulating the image, she inscribed a second level into the work after the fact, revealing her proximity to Viennese Actionism.
Moscouw’s whole complex thematic cosmos unfolds in the large-format, static black-and-white photographs she staged in the early 1990s as individual conceptual images. With the help of clothing, accessories, and fetishes, she assumes different roles, embodying power and dominance or flirting with clichés, such as in the series Für Verwöhnte (For the Pampered, 1991), carrying on the tradition of artists such as Cindy Sherman and Francesca Woodman.
Her obsessive self-reflection becomes amply evident when she stages herself in the same pose forty times, repeatedly leaving the setting to activate her self-timer and then stepping in front of the camera to assume the same pose and gestures over and over again.
In Gusswerk (1989), her body becomes an object that is kaleidoscopically assembled into a pattern that can be altered. With a false nose as ersatz penis, she questions her womanhood and negotiates the binary gender order as a dual construct, long before the topic had arrived at the center of social debate. | | | | | | | | | Michaela Moscouw: Für Verwöhnte, 1991, 190 x 123 cm
© Michaela Moscouw | | | | | | When the sheltered space of her own apartment became too small for Moscouw in the mid-1990s, she carried her photographic staging out into public space. Taking off on her bicycle in full costume and with all of her photographic equipment in tow, she sought out abandoned places to serve as settings, for example in the series Bonsai (1997).
In the 2000s, Moscouw then switched to color photography and also adopted a new visual language, dispensing with elaborate costumes and staging and letting chance play more of a role. Now, the process of staging herself photographically came to seem almost cinematic. She included all images, even the blurred ones, in her series, now in a smaller format. She packs up and seals these series, each consisting of some 200 pictures, and gives them the humorous titles she is known for, such as Die lieben Tiere (The Dear Animals, 2004), Viagra (2001), Tee oder Kaffee (Tea or Coffee, 2004), Bosch (2003), and Bauknecht (2002).
Moscouw’s strong drive to constantly produce images has always quite obviously been a search for herself. She has shown little interest in dealing with those around her and with the art world. Instead, with obsessive determination, she has ultimately chosen to withdraw and repudiate. Engaging with her work means searching for the traces she has left behind—by turns fascinating, touching, and irritating traces of an extraordinary artist and personality. | | | | | | | | | Installation view: Michaela Moscouw Present Absent, Francisco Carolinum Linz
© Petra Moser 2023 | | | | | | unsubscribe here
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