The Vitruvian Feminine
JBK Ransu
Franz Graf is one of Austria´s finest living artists, who along with his countryman Helmut Federle and neighbourhood Swiss artists John M. Armleder and Gerwald Rockenschaub was labeled as one of the European Neo Geo artists in the 1980s. Still Graf has never reached the commercial heights as the other three artists have, but rather stayed slightly under the surface influencing mainly the local Austrian art scene as an artist and professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.
Graf´s installation Flag/Love my dream at the Living Art Museum in Reykjavík, Iceland, is a continuation of his show "Love my dream" held in Georg Kargl Fine Arts in Vienna earlier this year, and bears witness to his detachment from concrete geometry to a more physical and architectural language, while staying true to geometrical shapes but not necessarily to its laws.
In the center of the exhibition Graf has placed an army camouflage mesh, otherwise looking like a limp cloth or a flag hanging from the ceiling down to the floor. As a flag it does not symbolize anything specific but rather represents illusory images, since the function of this sort of mesh is to hide war machines and weapons that visually stand out in nature. As a column the mesh represents the spinal cord of the space, also illustrated in Graf´s graffiti. Yet this column contradicts the very rules of architecture set by the Roman architect and army engineer Marcus Vitruvius in the first century BC, that architectural space must be strong, useful and beautiful: "Firmitas, utilitas, venustas." Graf´s center column is weak, useless (in this context) and unattractive, as it is designed to blend in, not stand out in beauty. It does however coincide with Vitruvius´s idea that architecture is an imitation of nature, but as such the mesh a pictorial imitation, not objective or proportional. In Graf´s installation it however functions as a central object inside the architectural space surrounded by drawings, texts and photographs.
Graf´s fascination with the female body is apparent in his photographs that he combines with tacky texts and drawings of mandalas, circular geometric shapes that in many religions symbolizes the cosmos and microcosmos and are interpreted as illustrations of universal order. This combination of the human body and cosmography is in a direct link to Leonardo da Vinci´s illustration of Marcus Vitruvius’s famous proportional description of the human body that appeared in his third volume of De architectura, where Vitruvius made distinct proportional criterions between the architectural orders and the human body. Leonardo da Vinci´s canon of proportions, known as the Vitruvian man, is his most famous drawing, showing a naked male figure standing with limbs spread in the middle of a square and a circle, representing the human body as an analogy for universal order. The Vitruvian man is in fact the same as Vitruvius´s architectural space: strong, useful and beautiful.
Graf´s representation of the human body is yet again contradicting these rules, showing the human body in a more fragile and sensual state–nude women posing for party pictures, some that may well be categorized as pornographic. Yet many of the angles he chooses show a proportional interest in the forms and shapes of the female body that makes one think of the Vienna secession, artists such as Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele. Graf also covers the faces of his models with geometrical forms, replacing facial images with cosmographical images, thus representing the female as an analogy for universal order or the Vitruvian feminine, without making her into a godlike figure. He rather shows her primal humanity combined with the purity of form.
Standing inside Franz Graf´s installation, one is therefore caught between Apollonian and Dionysian struggles and continuously reminded of one’s humanity as well as one’s divinity with a slap in the face. "Flag/Love my dream" is a show of contradictions as if the artist is denying anyone the pleasure of placing himself on one side or the other.
