A few years ago, Judith Fegerl decided to temporarily deprive an art gallery of electrici- ty. But rather than simply unplugging things, she took the sockets themselves out of the walls. She then went on to remove the switches, lights, and light fixtures; still not satisfied, she stripped the wiring bare. By the time she was done, the gallery—Kunstraum Niederoesterreich, in Vienna—had become a lifeless shell, with no channel of communication with the outside world, no way to power a cell phone or computer, reliant on the sun for visibility inside. A place that, by everyday standards, was hardly better than a cave. This project, carried out in 2010, was titled Self.
By focusing on electricity—its generation, transmission, and effects—Judith Fegerl’s work cuts close to the heart of modern civilization. After entering the daily experience of the Western world with the spread of the telegraph, some 180 years ago, electricity gradually crept into every part of our lives. It illuminates our streets and buildings, moves our vehicles and tools, triggers chemical reactions, transmits sound, images, data.
Digital technology and the Internet—the most influential technological innovation of the last thirty years—would not be conceivable without electric power. (We‘re reminded of this at least once a day, when our smartphone batteries run low.) And the enormous power demands of technologically advanced countries play a crucial role in some of our planet’s biggest problems, starting with the question of energy sources, their environmental impact, and access to them. Fegerl’s sculptures highlight this chronic dependence on electricity in a very incisive way.
For instance, she creates metal works whose very cohesion depends on electricity. What holds their parts in place is the electro-magnetic field generated by spools of copper wire; if these are unplugged, the sculptures fall apart (moment, 2017).
Or she makes pieces that leech off the electrical interface of the exhibition venue: geometric solids of glass and copper whose cables plug into the sockets around them, forming closed, inaccessible systems (Encapsul, 2011) or turning into hubs for other devices (Lazy Eight, 2011–12).
Every aspect of electricity is explored by Fegerl: the materials associated with it, whether conductors (copper) or insulators (ceramic, glass, wax paper); its physical properties; last but not least, its destructive power. Her most impressive work in this sense is cauter (2012–on- going), a series of wall drawings made by running copper wiring through the plaster and then connecting it to a power source, so that it heats up and scorches the surface. Like a literal branding of the architecture, it leaves dramatic black streaks.
Starting with its title, cauter brings up a theme in Fegerl’s work that is less obvious, yet still fundamental: the body. Some of the artist’s early works evoked the human body by metonymy (the clumps of hair in Tension Object, 2006 and metronom, 2007), not without a shade of fetishism. Others, like prélèvement de flux (2005–2011) and revers (2010), directly engage the viewer’s own body: the former was an installation that gave off infrared radiation, invisible to the human eye yet perceptible as heat; the latter an active, fully functional blood donation unit set up inside an art institution (the Vienna Künstlerhaus). As Fegerl’s interests have come to center on electricity and its presence in the exhibition space (sometimes from a perspective of institutional critique, as in Self), the body— the organic sphere in general—has faded into the background, and a colder, laboratory-like aesthetic has taken over. But just as suppressed memories never stop haunting the conscious mind, the body has continued to be a troubling theme of Fegerl’s work: troubling, insofar as it is linked to an element of violence, or even sadism.
In works like cauter or stitching (2013, an incandescent wire that pierces the wall, “stitching” it), the titles suggest an anthropomorphic vision of architecture: the walls are flesh, the plaster skin—and both can be tortured by burning. In Fegerl’s drawings, a consistent part of her practice, it is sheets of paper or latex that stand in for skin, but the outcome is the same: copper wire perforates and chars the surfaces; the titles—cutane, suture, implanted space—once again evoke surgery, but one may reasonably question the benevolent nature of these operations.
(In passing, we ought to note that in Fegerl’s oeuvre, needlework takes on a vastly different connotation from the one given to it by many other women artists, who tend to associate the needle and thread—however critically—with femininity; this difference is a conscious and deliberate one on the Austrian artist’s part.)
Would it be going too far to say that from this standpoint, in its relationship with the body (and through the body, with architecture), Fegerl’s work forges a dialogue with an artistic tradition that is intrinsically Viennese? Looking at these drawings, with their allusions to surgical methods and electrical burns, it is hard not to think of Rudolf Schwarzkogler’s photographic tableaux or Günter Brus’s drawings from the 1960s.
It is fascinating to think of Fegerl‘s drawings as a laboratory version of these same corporeal obsessions: a version purged of all figurative elements, rendered antiseptic, filtered by the specific interests of the artist and of our time: the electrical infrastructure of today’s world, the growing human dependence on technological prostheses. And yet even in this dematerialized, abstract sense, even when seemingly absent, the body—in Fegerl’s work—is more present, more troubling than ever.