Born 1943 in Kliding, Germany, residing in Cologne
No other artist has confronted sexual obsession in such a radical way as Jürgen Klauke in his drawings and photography – and this was at the beginning of the 1970s! This is what makes Klauke so unique. Amidst suburbanite, western German society that was bigoted and rigid, he shattered perhaps all social, ethical, and aesthetic norms relating to sexuality, and this literally with an enviable passion.
The French intellects, Georges Bataille and Jean Genet, and especially the Viennese actionists, are artistic mentors for Klauke. Similar to them, he uses his own body as a surface to project multiple identities and sexes. Instinct is a central idea for him, which, as he himself says, “eradicates this eternal agenda of guilt and repentance. Desire and its expression in images are decisive. Uninhibited free will coming into contact with uninhibited aesthetic will.”
Klauke appears in photos nude or only in women’s stockings, or as in the series “Self-Performance” from 1972/73, in a woman’s dress, a veil, and white lilies with a frivolous expression, painted face, and obscene crotch padding. In provocative photos, he is dressed in seductive women’s lingerie with a suspender belt, though with a bishop’s mitre on his head and a staff in his hand. Similar commotion was created by his series “Dr. Miller Sex Shop oder So stell’ ich mir die Liebe vor” (Dr Miller’s Sex Shop or This is sort of how I imagine love) from 1977, where he dresses in accessories and sticks various objects from sex shops in his mouth and other orifices. Confirmation of his expression can be found in the theories of the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari relating to the “lust machine”, which Klauke understands more as a machine of deficiencies, or as he puts it, “most of my yearnings are the result of infinite prohibitions as well as hopeful, prying fantasies. What would happen if I could do what I desired? To put it in formal German: ‘Immediately fuck the whole world, from the front and the back, and when I am finished, I’d do it again.’”
And this is what his art is about even today: to break through all imaginable boundaries in search of some authentic “I”. In the process, however, it seems that this “I” has plunged deeper into aesthetic norms and lost its individuality. “What remains is a lot of flesh. An external surface. The body becomes a requisite.” This is how Klauke himself characterizes this development, which he understands as a parallel to what is happening around him.
Text by Noemi Smolik
