The Human is a Trample Animal
Notes on the work of Marielis Seyler
A naked woman's body scantily covered with withered leaves, surely a sex crime, right? No, it's art but also not harmless and certainly not art that simply hangs decorously on the wall.
The supposed crime scene photo, at the same time shocking and fascinating, inexorably cast its spell on me in a gallery not so long ago. It had itself lain in the open for a while defencelessly exposed to the weather and nature in turn strewn with earth and autumnal leaves, the picture (from the series Open-Air Pictures) trying to imbibe the image. Human beings and nature, the vulnerability and transience of both, life and death, these are the themes of Marielis Seyler's enhanced photography. It is photography that is conceptual in restrained black and white, expanded into collage, painting or performance because: "Classic photography is too documentary for me. A pure photo only replicates."
Not that a replication has no effect. In one case the photo artist let one of these, showing a bird's nest, "after-ripen" outdoors and "some critter" just tore open the egg. Was it an egg thief (or an obstetrician) fooled by the appearance of the real like the sparrows that one day supposedly wanted to peck the painted grapes with which the anecdote shrouded ancient painter Zeuxis is said to have fed them? Hey, wouldn't it be a very tempting thought if in fact something had hatched out of the photographed egg because the replication had been fooled by itself?
Marielis Seyler travelled a lot, was in Paris, Cologne and New York. In Japan she heard of the ancient custom of stepping on pictures. In the Edo period when Christians were still being persecuted in the land of cherry blossoms, as a test presumed Christians had to prove their "innocence" by stepping on representations of the Crucifixion and images of the Virgin Mary, Seyler: "otherwise it was their death sentence". This inspired the photographer to create her "trample pictures", which have become something like her trademark.
While nature leaves its mark on the Open-Air Pictures, here it is people with (mostly urban) dirt on the soles of their shoes. Seyler wants to draw people's attention to "what they unconsciously trample on". She lays pictures in front of their feet (in plazas, in a coffee house as a hurdle in front of the entrance ...) whereby, for example, you can only continue on if you use a naked woman scared or freezing curled up in an embryonic position as a doormat. Is it a test? Do I out myself as an anti-feminist if I move on? Or am I a philistine if I don't go any further? Because after all, it's an interactive artwork, and if I refuse based on concerns about women's rights it might never be completed.
Moreover, the artist herself is a woman and she wants me to "enter" her opus. That's why with my dirty boots I expressed my abundant solidarity with her -with Marielis Seyler- and hopefully passed the test with distinction. Seyler: "People don't want to step on it, but once they have made up their minds ... woe! if they let loose". You can tell from a butterfly collection that had made it back from the floor of a hairdresser to the wall.
Speaking of dead animals, they also find their way into Seyler's art in her calm and sensitive compositions. Or Marielis Seyler finds them: in the garden, at a farm or on the street. At some point people even started bringing them to her or pointing them out as roadkill, because word got around that she photographs dead critters. In a kind of ritual, she tends their wounds with bronze, wax, or caresses the feathers or fur with pastel chalk or blauwurz (hyacintho radix). Art atones for death. Anyone who expects a voyeuristic coroner's inquest will be disappointed. ("I love nature and I love animals and I suffer with them".)
Seyler saw a brochure about the legendary Beuys performance work "How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare" (on November 26th 1965, the man with the felt hat and an expanded concept of art for once without a felt hat but with a completely gold-plated head and a dead hare marched through his own exhibit). She was so impressed by how poignant Beuys was with the hare that she knew straight away: "I need a dead hare"! She asked a restaurant owner who was also a hunter if he could lend her one. “Three days later I had a dead hare lying in front of the door. With a bay leaf in its mouth". And afterwards she so to speak explained her art to it. That was in the early 1990's. She compassionately doctored it, carefully bandaged it. Another hare was obviously not killed by a hunter but by an auto (at least one), which had veritably ploughed it into the street. Seyler had certainly also learned restoration, but there was obviously nothing more to be done. At least she could give the carcass, which had been flattened almost to the point of total abstraction, a little warmth with a whisper of red thus bestowing consolation on the viewer.
These intimate works in large formats surely leave no one cold. Zwei Rehe (Two Deer) (2018): In reality just one in a double exposure that ghostly echoes or fades away (death - the echo of life?), first it was laid under a larch ceremoniously mourning with its needles trickling down and a yew tree tossing its red berries (burial objects?). Even a sparrow ("it probably flew against a window pane") receives its devotion: Vogelkehle II (Bird Throat II) (1998). And if Seyler lays her Blauwurz coloured hands on its portrait, is it an attempt to grasp death? Obviously she has no fear of contact in this regard, as death is a product of nature like every life.
What do a woman and a fish actually have in common? If a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle (according to this feminist saying), what is a woman with a fish? In 1987 in her austerely composed series Körperfische (Body Fish), Seyler precisely placed a mackerel on the female body, the tail fin and slippery abdomen becoming something like a pubic triangle. It is well known that all life began in water. In the womb, the human being is also still a water dweller (the uterus: a potential aquarium so to speak) before he or she crawls ashore at birth respectively pulled out and dried off. And unlike the fish, the human being survives in the air.
Even a harvested corn field can give wings to the imagination (in the most fluttering sense of the word). Suddenly the corn dreams of flying, the left behind bizarre twisted leaves transform into elegant angels, butterfly creatures and dancing birds of paradise (Flying Corn, 2013). Marielis Seyler knows that "If you look, you can find hundreds of things". And she doesn't just look, she also sees.