Lisa Glauer at Kang Contemporary

In Lisa Glauer’s recently released leparello comic book, Broaching the Next Man Suit Barrier, a cultural “top dog” queries the artist in the story: “. . . are you a social practice artist or a painter?” Glauer’s current show at Kang Contemporary in Berlin answers the question by rejecting the dichotomy altogether. Rather, she insists on experimenting in all directions. Her immediate purpose here seems to be to explore—one might say expose—the patriarchal territory of weaponry, drones and technical installations. To do so, she works with a delicate yet robust medium—human milk (provided by a cadre of donors)—milk that initially hardly manifests on the semi-transparent paper. Only after the drawings have been ironed, we are given to understand, do the ivory lines give way to the almost tender ochre and brown tones, which reveal in turn an array of military hardware and the figures of the self-assured men who seem to be managing it. Layers of these images are then backlit with LEDs in a lightbox, a device that itself can be read as an extension of the technology in the drawings. The drawings map territory, marking borders and depicting technological interventions that can seem threatening. Yet, as I looked longer, the images became more distinguishable, less menacing. The milky lines seemed to soften; standing before one piece, Vorstoss zum oberen Erdmantel, my focus shifted to the figures of men in the foreground, apparent spectators to their own barriers and devices, small and merely human against the sweeping curves and geometric forms of technological icons. In the short film piece, Skyjacking Across Borders with Toy Guns, a helmeted, military clad man holds up his hands in a gesture that could be helpless before the observed event. There is both fierceness and mercy here in the way the artist assembles, renders and transmutes these images.

Glauer shows a range of media for this exhibition: drawings in milk and pencil; comics rendered through wonderfully analog linoleum prints; a neon light piece called monument against patriarchy; a short film; and the installation piece, Landing Strip for the Milky Way. The latter is constituted by a wooden frame supporting two neon-lit layers of translucent paper laid across stepped rungs; the whole piece transects the gallery both vertically and horizontally and becomes a landing strip for milk, poured from above and cascading tranquilly along the gradients of the paper (see photo). The performance at the opening was a quiet ritual; the milk ran and slowed, streamed and pooled its way down the incline. I pondered the title that invokes the notion of the heavens as well as images of astronomy. I considered the medium of human milk associated with kindness and nurturance but also highly contaminated, as we learn, in the border region of Tijuana/San Diego, where national boundaries are drawn with military technology. Glauer exposes the hardware of violence, but she is not seduced by it in the process; she does not respect or love it, nor does she hate or even make fun of it. Instead, through her selection of materials and actions, she sets the paraphernalia of aggression into the context of our human condition, summoning material from the intimate act of nursing as well as conjuring the immensity of our surroundings, the vast Milky Way. Thus she makes known the destructive power of that paraphernalia, yet weakens its mystique.

— Carolyn Prescott