written August 26th, 2009 · 0 comments

Olga Desmond … a very interesting woman indeed. I saw an exhibition of her work in Berlin a few months back, and shame on me, I haven’t posted about it until now. But I definitely wanted to post this. It was really incredible. Sometimes you get glimpses of pure raw art in the most unexpected places, such as in this small gallery I stepped into. Only spent 1 Euro too!

The earliest photographs in the show were from 1907, which would have made her only 16 years old! She started posing in these photographs after starting acting school and posing nude for life drawing sessions to help her family out (cash wise). She joined a group called The Seldoms, her partner in creativity being Adolf Salge and the photographer was Julius Standt. The exhibit did not mention who came up with the concept for the Living Marble idea, but this was the time when Loie Fuller, Saharet and Isadora Duncan were performing worldwide. They could have been influences on Olga.

The Living Marble photographs of Olga and various male models posing as famous sculptures were also performed live (staged to Chopin even)! The idea was to take an inspiring sculpture and recreate the poses, covering their bodies with white powder and wearing white (looked like cotton) wigs. So if you think about it, the idea is quite twisted. A sculpture is a block of stone, which has been carved so that the figures feel alive. Their movements are often exaggerated and their bodies are perfect and beautifully composed. And Olga and her partners used live models (themselves) and posed them to look like hard cold sculptures. It is twisted because a sculptor infuses his work with movement and this group of artists froze the movements (in some cases with much aid from the fast shutter of a camera). Twisted, but fascinating!

The photographs were beautiful, and at times, the wrinkled cloth that Olga wore around her waist really looked like Phidian folds. The only (major) detail that really makes the photographic sculptures human, is the natural and unperfectness of their bodies (Olga’s flat feet, the men’s large bunions and their obvious non-Greek faces). Besides that, there were really some poses, such as the Rape of Sabiner Woman, which really captured the pose of the original, but perhaps not the whole emotion, because our bodies cannot physically do what a sculpture makes his stone do.

The photographs that I saw exhibited here, were being shown in Berlin for the very first time since Olga Desmond fell out of the limelight (she lived a good portion of her later life cleaning houses, completely unknown and forgotten). She was in many performances on stage in Berlin and cast in films, before she was considered too scandalous to perform her nude acts anymore. She published her own form of Rythmographics (notating dance) when she was 28, and wrote about physical exercises for women.

I was really inspired by these photographs for some reason. I think it was because of the intermingling mediums and blurring distinctions between photography, sculpture, modelling and performance.