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"Innuendo" Lukas Duwenhögger In Lukas Duwenhögger’s installation codes collude, enabling explicit designations to be avoided in a verbose and opulent way. “Innuendo”, the title of the work, means the same as “saying it with flowers“. This happens, for example, when the prevailing morality disrespectfully describes gays with flower names, pansies, marigolds etc., which are painted on the duvet on the ceiling. Duwenhögger’s multi-faceted references to the turn of the century, and especially the figure of Eliza Doolittle, are also included in this ambiguity of beckoning knowledge. She came from George Cukor’s film “My Fair Lady” (1964). She was a flower girl and was supposed to be educated to become a “person” by the misogynist language teacher, Professor Higgins. One of the three women on the racetrack in the picture painted by Duwenhögger could be Eliza. With the picture, Duwenhögger produces a variant of a famous photograph by Jacques-Henri Lartigue from 1911: “Le Jour des Drags” – costume, or just “Drag”. In equal measure, the picture relates to Cukor’s “My Fair Lady”, in which Eliza is standing on the racetrack richly attired. The costume creator of this film, Cecil Beaton, was, in turn, inspired by Lartigue’s photography. Lartigue himself deemed robes and hats that were too flamboyant as a clear sign of “dubious morals“. The sounds from the radio again pick up the threads of this installation: a presenter speaks through the flower, when he announces the “Gaylords”, not without reassuring that, in the 60s, gay “only” meant “having a good time”. There follows a recording from “My Fair Lady”, in which Dr. Higgins is outraged by Eliza Doolittle: he brought her up to be his “own kind” and now she really desires him and his world. “Eliza” thus stands as a dazzling figure for the hierarchies, through which social acceptance and conditions of participation are regulated. At the same time, Duwenhögger’s installation is also a presentation of the necessity and the desire for ambiguity, the richness of codes and the excess of the decor. The butterfly formed from sand is also such a code, whose existence is put at risk by awkwardness and clumsiness. Artist, born 1956, lives and works in Istanbul. |
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