Ein Text von Prof. Klaus Honnef, Bonn im Januar 2006

Body-Affairs oder bodyaffair oder Bodies-Affair ?
Ein besonderer Blick auf die Sammlung Teutloff


Whilst the material body threatens to become a mere chimera under the all-pervasive influence of commercial media, interest in the physiological side of human life is on the increase both in art and science, and in private and social spheres.

A host of exhibitions and publications bears testimony to the new attention accorded to the body by the arts and science. Body cults and healthcare crazes demonstrate the interest of the public at large, while the interest shown by artists in issues of corporeality seems to have grown in proportion to the pace at which technical and electronic media have conquered the domain of art ( or vice-versa).

Much earlier than anybody else, the collector Lutz Teutloff developed a special sensibility for aesthetic endeavours – particularly in the immaterial media of photography, film and video – that aim to exemplify corporeality under attack, and at the same time to place the numerous challenges with which the body is confronted in a contemporary context. Media-generated images serve here as a rich and often fractured mirror which delivers a kind of status report on the situation and condition of the body in a post-modern world.

The “BODY AFFAIRS” project consists of a wide-ranging exhibition and an independent accompanying book. It brings together exemplary works from the Teutloff collection under one key standpoint. The works assembled here do not exhaust themselves in the self-referential gesticulations of modern art, but rather envision the dominant social, political and cultural contexts and concerns of the present age in terms of a “transgression of mediality by mediality” (Jacques Derrida). As artistic-aesthetic considerations were the sole factors on which selection was based, the project is not intended as a mere illustration of issues extraneous to art but should rather be seen as reflecting them exclusively in the medium’s stylised vanishing point.

Taken as a whole, these works of art constitute a critical commentary on the “condition humaine” against the backdrop of the momentous changes occurring in the transition from the second to the third millennium. As works of art, they assume a strong political (but not party-political) stance. This is what chiefly distinguishes the “Body-affair” project from all previous projects dealing with the same theme.

The scope of the project is ambitious, ranging from existential to social inscriptions of the body, from its private to its public roles, from birth and maturation to death by natural or unnatural causes. In an exemplary manner the body appears as the object (and plaything) of politics and history, society and culture, but also as the object of everyday violence whether in family or social life. As an object of the subtle violence exerted by mass media, as the font of sexual desire and narcissistic pleasure, as the goal of yearning for closeness and security, as the victim of an immanent but also external will to destruction, as both expression and object of the desire for perfection, and, not least of all, as a motif in art.

This does not imply an eschewal of its social situation and architectural environment. Because the body’s appearance on a scene is always specific. Its image is reified in the widest variety of visual forms and media. A number of specially selected works from painting and sculpture – those most material media – sharpen our “physiological” sense of the specific visual forms it assumes in the immaterial media of photography, film and video.

Individual works are juxtaposed in an associative manner so that the interludes between them give rise to surprising insights, whilst with the installations the body of the viewer him or herself becomes an actor in the graphic Body Dramas these works so compellingly play out. One of the cumulative effects of the “BODY AFFAIRS” project is to bring a new and idiosyncratic viewpoint to contemporary art, especially as the project comprises of works of the widest cultural provenance, from all five continents of this earth..