SLOUGHT FOUNDATION | New Futures for Contemporary Life
4017 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104-3513, www.slought.org

Text by Aaron Levy, Senior Curator, September 2007

At an early juncture, more than twenty years ago, the German collector Lutz Teutloff began to develop a sensibility marked by a concern for the perpetual transformations that constitute the ‘human’ and the ‘body,' as documented in contemporary photography, film, and video production. The individual works of art in the Teutloff collection, as well as the collection itself, inform and constitute a critical commentary on the ‘condition humaine’ and the momentous changes taking place today. The collection thus exemplifies a thematic approach to collecting art, and it illustrates the ever-increasing fascination with and alterations to the concept of the ‘human’ in this age of technological and cultural transformation. It takes place at a particular moment when the human body is increasingly reduced to a supposedly self-evident and instrumentalized ‘thing’ under the all-pervasive gaze of commerical media and the biogical sciences, as well as the body cults and healthcare crazes that predominate amongst the public at large.

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The Concept
Prof. Klaus Honnef, Bonn, Germany, January 2006

Body-Affairs or bodyaffair or Bodies-Affair –
An idiosyncratic view of the Teutloff Collection

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.

Bonn, Germany
January 2006
Klaus Honnef

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The Lutz Teutloff Collection
The Teutloff Collection combines thematic consistency with a very high level of quality across an astonishing diversity of range

The human body, sensuality, the sexual element – these have been constant themes of painting and sculpture over the centuries whose depths painters like Leonardo, Rubens, Manet, Toulouse-Lautrec and Lempicka have plumbed in hymns of colour and vibrant form. Even though photography with its early black and white and distancing technique might have seemed more suitable for documentary and experimental works, we can see from its very birth how artists have constantly used the alluring nearness to the object of desire to transform it into a sensuous medium offering a direct expression of true delight.

The sensuality of the body is one of the aspects that the Teutloff Collection is focussed on; yet at the same time it also directs our gaze to the documentary, the political, the experimental and the ironic – in other words it is not a single style, country or époque that forms the bond unifying the whole Collection, but rather the wish to assemble as exhaustive a range as possible of ways of viewing the human body. Perhaps the word “inventory” is not misplaced in this context because the Collection covers both pioneers and stars, famous and successful photographers and artists whose work has more to do with painting (Albert Henning), sculpture (Erwin Wurm) or performance (Vanessa Beecroft) – just as much as photographers whose work has shaped our view of the world over the decades (Stefan Moses, Will McBride, Thomas Hoepker to mention but three).

Leading photographers with whose photos we are long familiar from the glossy magazines (Hilmar Pabel, Michael Ruetz, Barbara Klemm, Robert Lebeck, Evelyn Richter, Annie Leibovitz, Martin Parr etc.) feature on the exhaustive list alongside darlings of the art market (Rosemarie Trockel, Andy Warhol, Jürgen Klauke, Richard Hamilton etc.); winners of England’s highest art award, the Tate Gallery Turner Prize (Wolfgang Tillmans) and the Kaiser Ring award of the City of Goslar (Matthew Barney) appear next to photographers distinguished with photography’s highest accolade (Cindy Sherman); artists whose social commitment we value (Alfredo Jaar, Nan Goldin and so on) neighbour with the great and good of fashion photography like F.C. Gundlach and Horst P. Horst – not to mention the international masters of erotic photography like Helmut Newton and Nobuyoshi Araki.

What is striking is the enormous diversity of the different nationalities and domains of work covered. All major countries from Russia and China to America are represented with leading artists – in the best sense the Collection embodies a perspective that is truly international and global.
The Collection ranges over a timeframe of three decades, yet the diversity of its aesthetic attitudes, styles and signatures is even richer than this might suggest, as despite their apparent differences the older generation – photographers like Leni Riefenstahl, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Lucien Clergue and Robert Desnois –are all at a great remove from the younger one – artists like Una Szeemann, Ingrid Mwangi and Aurelia Mihai. They might be American, Chinese, Japanese, Russian or German, yet the majority of these contemporary artists are active on the global stage and can no longer be ascribed to any one country. They are as much at home in Berlin or New York as they are in London or Düsseldorf.

Another hallmark of the Collection is its lack of dogma. Leading names are represented with major works alongside the photos of younger more unknown artists which Teutloff feels to make a valuable contribution to the Collection. Given the particular focus of the domain he works in, Teutloff has made an astonishing number of surprising discoveries – again and again bringing to the fore young, fresh and novel ways of looking at the world.

As a collector he has succeeded in assembling a collection distinguished by vitality and vibrant sensuality, deep and abundant diversity, a collection that offers some of the most important works in the canon of photography yet is also equally alive to the shock of the new and unexpected, a collection that more than celebrates the overflowing riches of its chosen domain.

Prof. Dr. Wulf Herzogenrath
Director Kunsthalle Bremen 2007


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The Lutz Teutloff Collection
Sensationelle Körper / Sensational Bodies

There’s no such thing as the body. The unity we’ve grown accustomed to is an illusion. Existence by its very nature means multiplicity of form. Before scientists imprisoned them in test tubes, architects locked them in rooms and critics roped them on their Procrustian beds, bodies were diffuse, anarchical, diverse, subtle, multifarious - unutterably disgusting or beautifully sublime. That’s how they were in the past, that’s how they are in the present and that’s how they shall be in future as well. Bodies are basically awkward critters, refractory to the very techniques that seek to portray them.

The Teutloff Collection is uniquely special from a number of standpoints. It brings together works from radically different aesthetic positions like those of Christian Boltanski, Cartier-Bresson, Vanessa Beecroft, Dieter Appelt, Jürgen Klauke, Annie Leibovitz and Thomas Florschütz.. It creates encounters between young, aspiring and internationally unknown artists like Aurelia Mihai and Philip Goldbach with the great and good of the art world – names like Bruce Nauman, Gilbert & George, Nan Goldin, Mathew Barney and Cindy Sherman. The Collection is a movable feast for the senses holding way over 700 works in a huge range of genres and media from photos, videos, drawing and paintings to sculptures, ready-mades and complete installations.

But the truly unique feature of the Teutloff Collection is the single-minded dedication the collector himself has brought to the pursuit one sole theme, following it relentlessly for more than thirty years with all the excitement and curiosity of an explorer permanently entering unknown territory. His obsession is the human body and the infinitely fascinating multifariousness of its depictions in contemporary art. Teutloff never succumbed to the temptation to limit his driving passion to the confines of one standardized concept. In the world of real art there are no off the peg wares. He respects the human body manifested in art as something which can only be understood in all its dazzling difference and which needs continual celebration as pure sensation.

At a very early stage Lutz Teutloff also turned his attention to the generation of younger artists. From the very beginning he collected works of new media artists from a wide range of backgrounds and with a broad variety of signature, and thus provided effective and venturesome support for the first generation of artists in new media. The media art at the core of the Teutloff Collection is dominated by art photography and video.

For instance, the work of the Vienna performance artist and longtime Professor for Multimedia Performance Valie Export. In her provoking full body portrait the artist challenges the gaze of the viewer with Kalaschnikoff at the ready and legs spread wide to reveal a triangle of pubic hair above the jeans. The photo has now become a icon of female provocation. Her work has always dealt with major issues – the rebel body, the mutilated body, the body that still retains its erotic power despite precise anatomical mapping – and continues to do so as in her latest series of endoscopic photographs of her larynx and movement of her vocal chords in speech, or the inside of her vagina which Export exposed in an attention-grabbing performance at the Venice 2007 Biennale. In stark contrast to such works stand the audacious productions of the Japanese artist Nobuyoshi Araki with his photos of elaborately bound women which tread a fine and daring line between the stylization of pathological practice and bondage kitsch. Or, at another pole, the deeply unsettling works of the Russian photographer Boris Mikhailov. His photography brings to the forefront what is normally hidden from view – social outcasts, rejects, the ravaged bodies of alcoholics, homeless people, subjects despised by the mainstream, the oppressed. This artist is far from being a voyeur among the dregs of society; his portrayals of his chosen subjects endow them with respect and even dignity at least for the moment the photography was taken.

Teutloff’s fascination with new media led him very early on to collect digital photography and even C-prints, a risky business with which he generously helped many brave and pioneering young artists to find their way to the market. In the early 1990s Anthony Aziz + Sammy Cucher were already using digital technology to modify the surface of male and female bodies. Computer technology robbed their subjects of their gender identity or vital sense organs like mouth or eyes – obviously only in the photo. They are represented with works from the “Faith, Honor and Beauty” (1992) and “Dystopia” (1994) series. In the 1970s Lyn Hershman’s Robert Breitmore created an artificial female persona bearing the imprint of projected male sexual fantasies about women. In the 1980s and 1990s Hershman developed into one of the major trail-blazers of the art scene working with technical media, and became widely celebrated as its outstanding heroine. The Teutloff Collection allows us an impressive overview of the sweep of her creative work from the early Roberta photos and black and white montages of bodies and media apparatus through to the photos of her famous “digital Venus” work series of the 1990s.

The videographic works in the Teutloff Collection represent an intriguing and self-contained micro-world in which the whole spectrum of media art applications and performances in electronic visual media over the past ten years are given pride of place.

From its very beginnings one of the key functions of video was to record performances, transitory events, and Fluxus happenings which would otherwise be lost to posterity. The Collection contains a number of jewels which future art historians will pounce on in delight such as the complete recording of the 6-Day Play version of Hermann Nitsch’s “Theatre of Orgies and Mysteries” performed in September 1998 at Schloss Prinzendorf in Austria and featuring the godfather of Austrian avant-garde cinema, Peter Kubelka, in an unusual role as conductor of and singer in a “Choralschola” in the chapel of the Prinzendorf castle.

Nitsch’s staging of blood and sacrifice rituals involve the slaughter and gutting of animals and the draping of the human body – which remains inviolate – with their intestines. With her “Barbed Hula” (2001), Sigalit Landau formulated a radically different position which she captured on video. Against a background of waves breaking on a beach, a naked woman swings a hula-hoop ring round her hips, her head outside the picture frame like the woman’s head in Courbet’s “The Origin of the World”. Only the hula-hoop isn’t made of the usual smooth plastic but of rough barbed wire plaited like a giant crown of thorns. With each movements the barbs bit deeper into the woman’s tortured body in more than a nodding reference to the grande dame of video art, Valie Export, who achieved international fame 35 years ago with such self-mutilating performance art, but also to her male counterpart in the Vienna Actionists, Rudolf Schwarzkogler who died in 1969 and whose photography is also represented in the Teutloff Collection.
In such works the electronic camera is not primarily an art medium. It rather enables the transitory documentation of art played out in front of and for the camera. Phillip Goldbach, whose outstanding photography is now making its appearance on the national scene, vividly demonstrates this point in his video “Sprechen” – “Speech Act”(2001) in which his totally over the top recitation of verses by Rainer-Maria Rilke appears to contest the omnipotence of sound and image recording devices.

Performances like Tracey Emin’s “Sometimes the Dress is Worth More Money than the Money” invite easy comparisons with multiplex movies. The enfante terrible of the British art scene cavorts, flounces and dances in a luscious wedding dress to the music of Enrico Morricone’s soundtrack to “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly“. She moves through a bizarre southern landscape that could have been lifted straight from any low-budget spaghetti western. The expensive-looking designer dress she’s wearing has bank notes sewn onto it which turns the work into a kind of ironic comment on the art market and its prices which bear no relationship to the actual works themselves.

With her “Das ist die Stunde” – “This is the Hour” (2002), the young Rumanian artist Aurelia Mihai shows herself a skilled navigator between different artistic positions and the different cultural worlds of eastern and western Europe. With formally sophisticated precision, she takes an idiosyncratic venue as her setting – the library of bestseller author Lion Feuchtwanger in his villa in the hills over Los Angeles which once used to welcome the cream of the exiled German intelligentsia, and which now serves as a private school for highly gifted children. Two young girls assiduously pretend to be reading books – in a bewildering canon of discipline in the major key and rebellion in the minor. Rebellion is not a word that can be applied to Ingrid Mwangi’s video “Neger” – “Nigger” (1999) whose title alone signals its provocative intent. With great drama and a dancer’s sense of presence, the artist – herself a nomad between the cultures of Africa and Europe – stages her own physicality both in terms of the stereotypes with which she is daily confronted and as a search for a possible new personal identity.

Manipulation of the digitalized image is also a theme of a series of works on view in the exhibition organized by the Slought Foundation in Philadelphia from 12 December 2007 to 9 February 2008.Works such as Micha Klein’s inter-morphed portraits of women in “Classic Artificial Beauty” from 1998, for instance, or the singing, sighing lumps of meat swinging from butchers hooks in Patricia Piccinini’s “In Bocca al Lupo” (2003), but also, more specifically, Una Szeemann’s 2004 work “Thrill Me” in which the artist assembled an endless flow of film material covering the career of Michael Jackson from child superstar to the living mask of show business.

On the other hand, the breath-taking performances staged by the Chinese artist Zhou Xiaohu with his own real and much tattooed body create a world of their own. “The Gooey Gentlemen” (2002) is a movie animation played out on the skin of the artist’s own body where the viewer never knows for sure whether the images are merely superimposed by the animation or really have been inscribed in the living body. Equally stunning though based on a quite different emotional approach is Donigan Cumming’s “Karaoke” which shows film of an old man in extreme close-ups that reveal every pore of his dying body in stark contrast to the soundtrack of a Karaoke performance by a very young man. Now and then the dying man’s foot appears to tap in time to the bathetic melody.

The point at which one-channel video art, the single magnetic tape or DVD truly come into their own as a special kind of media is illustrated by two works which occupy radically different positions not just because there are separated by quarter of a century: Bjørn Melhus’ “No Sunshine” from 1997 and Peter Weibel‘s “Switcher Sex” from 1972. Both videos feature real life performers and both tell of a world in which identifiable autonomous individuals no longer exist. Melhus clones himself into four digital morphs and creates the imaginary inner life of a (mother?) body steeped in cheap pop culture where the only forms of relationships that can develop are superficial and deeply narcissistic. Weibel multiplies cross-fades them and arranges them as endless offerings to the male sexual a charming naked women apparently posing for the artist in front of the camera, ppetite in rough and often blurred black and white film – the video was produced at a time when the first affordable, semi-professional video recorders came onto the European market.

Berlin, October 07
Prof. Siegfried Zielinski


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/ / / / / / / / K / / / /
Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe
Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe

“Your Collection is indeed of the very highest artistic quality and offers a much richer and more comprehensive view of the human body and its dimensions
than other collections do.
I send you my sincere congratulations.“

Prof. Peter Weibel, director ZKM
November 2007

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