Meret Oppenheim - Shaman of the archetypes

Shaman of the archetypes – the bizarre, humorous, erotic and poetic oeuvre of Meret Oppenheim is on display in the Bank Austria Kunstforum in Vienna till 14 July 2013. An exhibition portrait produced by CastYourArt.

Meret Oppenheim (1913-1985) would have celebrated her 100th birthday next October. There is no suitable terminology to classify her multifaceted and idiosyncratic work. This first retrospective exhibition in Austria attempts a new view on Oppenheim’s life and work, showing pieces of all her creative periods. Curator Heike Eipeldauer managed to bring together more than 200 items from various museums and private collections.
However, Meret Oppenheim’s iconic object, the fur-covered teacup called fur breakfast by André Breton, is not among the exhibits, it remained in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
As is often the case with female artists, more attention has been paid to her biography, love life and personal appearance than to her creative work. This retrospective in the Bank Austria Kunstforum aims to allow for a new and thorough view on her work.
All topics and techniques that Oppenheim dealt with in her oeuvre are presented in chronological order: eroticism and androgyny, nature and the unconscious, fashion design, literature illustration, nature studies and graphic reproduction, collage, furniture design, jewellery, dresses and masks, photography as well as poetry.
Oppenheim did not adhere to any particular artistic movement; her works seems to be the direct result of an inspiration for which she serves as a medium through which unconscious contents come into being.
In her youth her worried father had sent her to consult the psychiatrist C.G. Jung, whose theories then inspired her all her life – like the one about the two sexes within the human being, the male spirit and the female nature. Nevertheless Oppenheim did not consider herself a “feminist” or even a “female” artist. As she stated: “In the intellectual realm there is no difference between man and woman, the only difference is in the animalistic – because the intellect is androgynous.”
Questions of gender identity as well as nature, dream and reality, Eros, myths and games were topics that Meret Oppenheim concentrated on in her artistic career.
In her artistic experimental set-ups there is a noticeable tendency to establish an archetypical order of the manifold conflictive forces of the unconscious, and to focus on the psychic contents that could lead to disruption and dissociation.
Aesthetic confrontations in her works clarify the details of Jung’s individuation process, arranging a dialectic exchange between consciousness and the unconscious, although without the conflicts that trigger pathologies. In Oppenheims work there are no signs of disruption, in spite of the energy of the complexes almost appearing as their own personifications.
According to C.G. Jung, not only the conscious topics can regress into the unconscious, there are also new contents that have never been conscious which can emerge from the unconscious. The unconscious is thus not only a depository of the bygone but is also full of seeds for upcoming psychic situations or creative ideas. Oppenheim owes some of her best works to inspirations that surfaced from her unconscious.
Just as the body needs nourishment, the psyche needs the meaning of its existence. The ideas and images that correspond to the psyche naturally, and evoke the unconscious, according to C.G. Jung, provide the archetypical form that is empty and un-representable as such. This mode of consciousness is nevertheless charged with similar pictorial material, thus becoming perceivable – in this way the archetypical images are always determined individually, by the respective place and time. The creation of a symbol is not a rational process, the mind cannot produce an image representing an unconceivable object; in order to conceive a symbol a certain intuition is necessary, a ludic drive comprehending the sense of this created symbol by means of a certain object, ultimately integrating it into consciousness.
This ludic drive that generated Meret Oppenheim’s original, still relevant work with all its inventiveness, its experiments and dead ends is perceptible to the viewer in the exhibition and its excellent catalogue. (written by Cem Angeli)