Contradictions About to Break Loose: Radical Ambivalence in the Work of Annette Kleinfeld Lissaüer

It isn't uncommon when looking at writing and art work by women who came of age and developed their art identities in the twentieth century to see what might be characterized as a "trail of blood." In work after work women's silence implodes into violence. Society's definition of normalcy is represented as distorted or perverted. Home is no haven, but a dangerous place, a suffocating enclosure, a cage to fly from. The artists we know about did this by breaking taboos, to express their interior lives. And the audience to this arguably "confessional" work assumes the role of "witness" rather than "pardoner."

Leonora Champagne, Out From Under¹

Taking us far beyond the assessment of objects as merely "beautiful," Annette Kleinfeld Lissaüer uses the Surrealist technique of disassembling and reconstructing items of questionable value to transform them into disturbing and enigmatic mixed-media sculptures. Rooting through discarded underwear, broken furniture and old illustrated books to explore the expressive potential of garbage in a way resembles the process by which humans dream. Just as dreams can have a profoundly healing effect on the dreamer, resolving confusion and soothing emotional wounds, so the creative process transforms the identity of an artist at work. An awareness of the unconscious as a motivating force of art practice provides insight into the relationship between art and artist. At the same time, like a two-way mirror, the complex human urge to create is illuminated by our understanding of individual works of art.

The sources of interest and inspiration for Lissaüer's polychrome sculptures are historical events that occurred before her birth and material objects that exemplify the era and milieu in which they were generated—far removed from the land in which she was raised, and utterly at odds with its culture. The artist's mother, Eva, fled with her parents from Germany to Guatemala in 1939. There she married Leon Kleinfeld, a tanner, who later found out that the entire natal family he had left in Poland perished in the Holocaust. Annette, the youngest of the couple's five children, was born in Guatemala in 1953.

Figure 1.

After her mother passed away in 1977, Lissaüer found among her belongings large numbers of girdles and bras, and of cookbooks. Both collections inspired her artistic attention. One cookbook in particular, Kochbuch, published in Leipzig in 1919, especially stirred the artist emotionally. Within its pages she found, in her grandmother's fine handwriting, a precise record of her mother's weight gains as an infant. She writes in an essay included in the catalogue of her 2006 exhibit at Jerusalem's Antea Gallery:²

Girdles and cookbooks made sense. The girdles had constricted and contained the naturalness of my mother, and the cookbook disguised the natural product. Both demonstrated the "correct way" that women and their foods "should look." The book claimed through its thousand morsels an overflow of will and an abundant determination to expand. And the girdles functioned to contain, contract, hide this expansive power.

Figure 2.

Some examples of the Kochbuch's illustrations of flaying and dismemberment.

Additionally compelling were what she recognized as "the illustrations and photographs of an extinct world." To Lissaüer, the book presented:

Unusual culinary activities and instruments of work I could not recognize, and the food illustrated with so much attention was in many cases impossible to decipher and somewhat repulsive. Repulsion. Attraction.

Lissaüer goes on to comment:

A grand dish which can't be deciphered is crowned with the severed head of a rabbit and two miniature pitchforks, as if the pride of the cruel battle can add grandeur to the meal. Or, a whole pig is served complete with adornments of leaves and an assortment of vegetables showing in his open mouth. Cruelty is portrayed in the Kochbuch, together with its pretense of being cultivated or cultured.

For Lissaüer, these images (of dishes that, according to...