“Why is homemaking not a subject fit for art?” When Margaret Raspé raised this question in the early 1970s, she was ridiculed by her colleagues, and not only the male ones. Women, too, shook their heads. Domesticity and children, they thought, were just impediments to a successful artist’s career. Raspé was born in 1933 in what was then the German city of Breslau (now Wrocław, Poland). She studied art in Munich and Berlin but also trained as a seamstress. After getting divorced at the end of the ’60s, she was suddenly a single mother raising three daughters. Cooking, doing the dishes, cleaning, and housekeeping took up much of her everyday life—tasks she performed automatically, without thinking. She had become a machine. To escape this robotic existence, she mounted a Super 8 camera on a construction helmet and recorded the work of her hands. Watching what she was doing from a fresh perspective not only let her more consciously perceive it, but also established a measure of distance.
The films that resulted opened this exhibition, “Automatik.” One, from 1971, shows her whipping cream and bears the title Der Sadist schlägt das eindeutig Unschuldige (The Sadist Beats the Unquestionably Innocent). Another, Alle Tage wieder – let them swing! (Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow – Let Them Swing!), 1974, stars Raspé’s hands doing one of life’s most humdrum chores: washing dishes. Raspé’s penchant for the absurd—underscored by the absurdity of that work’s title—is palpable throughout her oeuvre and allows her to make light of the clash between the triviality of everyday life and the lofty aspirations of art.
The camera helmet also allowed Raspé to explore the ways in which her own body was a functional contraption. She called herself a Frautomat or “woman automaton.” In 1979, she began using the camera helmet to study her process of making paintings. She produced large abstract line drawings on canvas, explorations not (as in Surrealism) of the unconscious or (as in Expressionism) of the emotions, but of the physical automatism of painting.
This exhibition featured one of the canvases—Gelb, Rot und Blau entgegen (Toward Yellow, Red and Blue), 1983—together with the film of the same title and year. To restore the body’s autonomy—the antithesis of its automation—Raspé also painted portraits of several individuals, covering them with a cloth on which she retraced the flows of their physical energies in various colors. By this point she had also begun to take an interest in the healing aspects of art. Three of these works, all titled Körpertücher (Body Cloths), 1993, were on view in the show, hanging at the center of the first-floor gallery, exuding an aura of magic.
The attempt to escape automated perception is a concern in almost all of the artist’s works, be they films, performances, drawings, or sound installations. In Fernsehfrühstück (Television Breakfast), 1994/2023, four small TV sets sit on a round table, each facing a chair. The screens of the monitors are masked with sheets of honeycomb so that we see no pictures but only an abstract movement of light. This sustained effort to see things differently also made Raspé attentive early on to the threats confronting the natural world. In her performance Wasser ist nicht mehr Wasser (Water Isn’t Water Anymore), 1990, she investigated the pollution of rivers. But who understood what she was doing back then? Raspé was a pioneer in many ways—in her alertness to the healing properties of art and to the precariousness of natural life, not to mention the presentation of her work inside her home in Berlin as integral parts of her creative practice. Curated by Anna Gritz, the exhibition was Raspé’s first comprehensive institutional retrospective, and it made one want to learn more about this unconventional artist.
Translated from German by Gerrit Jackson.
— Noemi Smolik