Birgit Jürgenssen. I Don’t Know
by Natascha Burger

From Birgit Jürgenssen. I Don’t Know, Prestel, Verlag, Munich, London, New York, 2018

White. A blind pupil. Inside the optic vault, desires roll out their rime. For the first time we had gone to the north or the west; the clearing awaited our first steps ... ¹ 

I Don’t Know was the title Birgit Jürgenssen gave to her last solo exhibition at Galerie Hubert Winter in Vienna in 2001. Two years later, in September 2003, the artist died at the age of only fifty-four, leaving a large and impressive estate. Based on her inexhaustible wealth of ideas, shrewd observation, and an incessant internal monologue, Jürgenssen created a multidimensional work that to this day exudes refreshing irony, provocative elegance, and a self-effacing presence.
To manage an estate, and particularly this estate, is a very sensitive challenge. It means understanding and decoding the complexity of a real person (or trying to do so), seeing her in terms of her local and aesthetic history, and gradually coming to understand the contexts in which she operated. I Am.² as a confident artistic statement by Birgit Jürgenssen and the title of this retrospective, the comprehensive precision of this sentence stands symbolically for the obligations that managing this estate entails. Who is Birgit Jürgenssen?
This privileged view of an artistic oeuvre and its complex image, which Jürgenssen’s multifaceted approach certainly deconstructed, has to be reconstructed and then made visible. And she bequeathed us a remarkable image, a strong imprint. As Georges DidiHuberman puts it:
“It is not possible to understand a technology—and thus also not an art—unless one attempts to grasp its anthropological dimension. In terms of its procedures and uses, the imprint is doubtless a product of ›that science of the concrete‹ of which Lévi-Strauss writes in the first chapter of The Savage Mind. Why? Because making an imprint always means creating a network of material relations, from which a concrete object emerges [...], but which link up with a whole array of abstract relations, myths, phantasms, knowledge, etc.”³
Jürgenssen’s “savage mind” and the “net of material and abstract relations” she spun, her system of coordinates consisting of references, ideas, traces, resources, reversions, and preemptions, were not all immediately apparent in her final solo exhibition. Shifting meanings and enigmatic overlaps can only be grasped after a second look— as so often in this artist’s work. Jürgenssen knew how to manipulate the gaze and the act of seeing, and how to surprise. Defining her way of working and her emancipated thinking in terms of this (final) moment reveals connecting lines right through her entire oeuvre and all the way back to her earliest works. This creates a framework that we can use to sharpen our awareness of her work and thought processes, allowing us, first and foremost, to explain them. It is right here that the irresistible quality of this artist becomes apparent; the art of multilayered transformations and the poetic transfer into her own language, her visual idiom, run through her entire work and clearly distinguish her from her contemporaries. Jürgenssen realized very early on that she did not want to create any kind of trademark or clearly recognizable brand: “I was not interested in complaining. I did not want to join any feminist group as the opportunities there seemed too one-dimensional to me. The only thing to do seemed to be to use all the media that were available.”⁴
Substituting boldness and curiosity for simulation and strategy, Jürgenssen made use of “all the media that were available.” She began to draw at the young age of eight, and she soon also became interested in analogue photography, which she would pursue right to the end of her artistic career. “All the media that were available” also included painting, various photographic techniques,⁵ sculpture, and installations, culminating in the “new media” of video and digital photography. For Jürgenssen, “new” technologies and the new opportunities they presented as a means to implement her ideas artistically, preferably independently, were a permanent stimulus for almost four decades, and they were, above all, a constant challenge to the artist herself. It thus seems noteworthy that in the early 1980s, while a student in Franz Herberth’s graphic arts class, she became assistant to Maria Lassnig, subsequently taught in Arnulf Rainer’s master class, and also established the teaching of photography at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, before eventually teaching there in the media class.
Regardless of the artistic medium employed, much comes together in the last exhibition that Birgit Jürgenssen designed, entitled I Don’t Know, initially suggesting doubts but in fact making her approach and mindset crystal clear. “Everything begins with seeing. The secret is what is visible, not the invisible.”⁶ Jürgenssen developed her ideas in series, constantly referring back to earlier work. The two-part photographic piece Zebra is an excellent example of backward references in her oeuvre, both temporal and in terms of content. A work from the 1970s, clearly influenced at the time by surrealism, is taken up anew nearly three decades later and further developed for exhibition. Jürgenssen worked in the “loop”, everything was in motion.⁷ Motifs could be put aside, repeated, rejected, reinterpreted.
The surreal approach to the mask in a computer-animated digital photograph of 2001 represents a clear return to one of the icons of Jürgenssen’s work, and in fact one of her earliest self-portraits: Untitled (Self with Little Fur). Back in the 1970s, and heavily influenced by French surrealism as a result of her early trips to Paris (which acted as a form of inspirational poetry),⁸ she photographed herself as a hybrid creature. Half human, half animal. Jürgenssen did not, however, fully implement this apparent shift of identity. The transformation was restricted to her face only, as a medium of expression, with a clear formulation of a human-animal antagonism. This comes across both in the performative photograph itself and also very consciously in the work’s title: “Self” (human), “with Little Fur” (animal). Years later, the feminine, elegant, and surreal fur⁹ was transformed into a “stubborn and untamable” zebra.¹⁰ The framing is again constrained by the vertical format, with the grid pattern showing the head and torso of the artist in the clear act of transforming once again into an animal. The difference is that this time the transformation is not restricted to the face and a mask, as Jürgenssen includes her whole upper body in the transformative masquerade.
Twenty-seven years of creative output lie between these two works. Whenever we speak of a unifying thread or rather a web interconnecting the works of Birgit Jürgenssen, then contrasting these two photographic works is a good way of understanding the organic principles of her work. Determined and consistent testing of the limits, by means of experimentation, questioning, and reworking.
It is not surprising that Birgit Jürgenssen revisits the theme of metamorphosis in a digitally reworked version, and in the form of an analogy to the “little fur,” as this photographic work was particularly important to her. Compared to many female artists of her generation, who seemed to be bolder, more expressive, and louder in drawing attention to themselves, Jürgenssen saw herself more akin to Meret Oppenheim and Louise Bourgeois, who were “more poetic, less direct, and more subversive.”¹¹ She expressed her personal appreciation and conceptual kinship in the form of a dedication to Meret Oppenheim.¹²

Horror Vacui: The White Surface

“I Don’t Know.”
What does Birgit Jürgenssen not know? What is making her unsure? She announces her doubts very directly, deciding on an exhibition title that makes us, the audience, ask questions, and gives rise to confusion and curiosity. The works shown in the exhibition at the time did not seem to offer any clear answers. Their apparent insecurity may relate to her choice of the “new media” of video and digital photography, which Jürgenssen used for the first time in an exhibition in this show. Is it the new forms of expression that perhaps made Jürgenssen doubt? Asked in an interview whether she liked to focus in her work on one or several themes, she answered that she was working on the theme of analogue and digital photography for the exhibition at Galerie Hubert Winter, and for the first time was using digital photography in combination with 16:9 film in an exhibition context.¹³
Notwithstanding this formulation of insecurity and expression of doubt, quite intentionally referencing Socrates (“I know that I know nothing”) and perhaps Kierkegaard, who saw irony as a means of creating distance, this doubting and ignorance that Jürgenssen attempts to have us accept by means of a careful choice of exhibition title nonetheless culminates in irony. In fact, the artist operates skillfully and free of doubt between the media of analogue and digital photography.
Even if Purkersdorf, Venice, and Madison Avenue (to name the titles of just a few works) initially appear to have no connection with each other and seem to be shown as autonomous pieces within the exhibition, akin to Foucault’s concept of heterotopias, which bring together at one and the same location several different spaces that are actually irreconcilable,¹⁴ there could be no mere experimenting and certainly no coincidences and uncertainty whenever Birgit Jürgenssen planned an exhibition. Every presentation was thought through down to the very last detail in advance, and meticulously sketched and written down. In this process, Jürgenssen’s notebooks were of great importance. As someone who never ceased thinking and working, she put down a large corpus of ideas in her many notebooks and sketchbooks. Alternating between drawing and writing, she formulated rough concepts for current works, ideas for her students at the academy, and even fully developed plans for upcoming exhibitions. There are more than eighty of these notebooks, workbooks, and sketchbooks in Birgit Jürgenssen’s estate today; they are remarkable documents of her way of working and thinking, permitting subjective and personal insight into her mental processes. Reading them, it quickly seems “as if the notebook provides the ›inside story,‹ the ‘inside track’ to the soul of the person keeping the notebook, and likewise the inside track as to the genesis of their ideas and achievements. It is like being privy to the secrets of an alchemist’s laboratory, enlivened by their all-too-human foibles and weaknesses.”¹⁵ These notebooks define Jürgenssen as an incredibly well-read, book-loving thinker, and they show her individual way of accumulating knowledge. Looking in depth at this personal archive reveals Jürgenssen’s incessant exploration of literature, philosophy, ethnology, and theory. Citations and poems are noted down alongside passing thoughts. For Jürgenssen, literature was an insatiable passion and it was an essential part of her art: “I started very early to spend my time with surrealistic literature and art. My work emerged from an exchange between literature and daily life. It was impossible for me to draw without keeping a piece of literature in mind.”¹⁶
Today, these personal notes are an impressive source giving a remarkable picture of the complexity of Jürgenssen’s intellectual and artistic interests. Readers can sense how the artist’s thinking developed and gain insight into her evolution and “rituals” as an artist. This was a free, chaotic, and poetic process, evidence of Jürgenssen’s sharp mind and great sensitivity.
For the exhibition I Don’t Know Birgit Jürgenssen began by noting a seemingly fleeting idea, which ultimately led to the title: “die Farbe WEISZ,” meaning both “the color white” and “the color knows,” whereby the German word weiß/Weiß is “misspelled” as “WEISZ”. Jürgenssen was always working with puns and shifting meanings, aphorisms and homonyms, a surrealist approach that utilized different levels of meaning in words and terms for her artistic work. As well as the theme of analogue and digital photography (as “one” possible strategy), Jürgenssen also took the color white as a key starting point in her thoughts on planning this exhibition, and a clear “intermediary” that would directly interconnect her discursive works. “Isn’t white that which does away with darkness?”¹⁷
The color white gains a special value, creating a vade mecum for visitors to the exhibition. In connection with this, one very noticeable motif in the images in the exhibition is snow, a medium that cloaks and conceals, a frozen transparency. It appears directly in the title of the video Snow Storm or as a leitmotif in the digital photograph X-Mahl, which is printed on linen and directs and misdirects our gaze. We can see two snow-covered “white” birch logs, forming an X on the ground. They are photographed from above, presented tilted up and in large format, with the perspective confusing the viewer’s gaze. This digital photograph assumes a painterly quality, as it is printed slightly out of focus and can only really be seen as a whole from a certain distance. This is a snow sculpture, as Birgit Jürgenssen commented,¹⁸ with two perspectives. A forked path, offering two options, but no direction. Uncertainty? I Don’t Know. To Jürgenssen these were “new” media and her use of them is manipulative. She creates unclear digital photographs, deliberately out of focus, with a disturbing dynamism and impossible to clearly define. A lack of clarity in motion, reflections—which Jürgenssen was fascinated by and whose deceptive illusion of doubling had an alienating effect, as for example in Venice.
There is a further note made in the context of preparing this exhibition: “Yves Klein, the empty surface.” In 1961, Klein used empty white surfaces to create a radical white-walled space at Museum Haus Lange in Krefeld. A room that also irritates and confuses our seeing, even to the point of snow blindness. A white cube that dissolves the borders between walls and corners and makes it only possible to experience what is seen or not seen in the void through pure emotion alone. Horror vacui, the fear of nothingness, of the void. Jürgenssen was clearly fascinated by the idea of the white empty surface and derived her own version of a white “pictorial surface” from this, developing it in her video Snow Storm. Looking out from the protected space of her studio, she filmed the snow falling, heavy, cold, and loud. The window “offers protection, on the one hand, and gives rise to feelings when we open it and gaze out of the protected space; on the other hand, this is the deep repeated experience that has become our chosen image of the other, of the outside, of the new.”¹⁹

Tactility, Textuality

Video emerged as a medium around 1970—Birgit Jürgenssen first used it in 1997.²⁰ “The picture we see, of course. It is a moving picture; but just as with movies, the motion isn’t apparent, an optical illusion and not real. This motion is produced by the rapid succession of slightly different still frames. In television, according to PAL standard, these frames succeed each other at the rate of 25 per second. In other words, 1 second 25 individual pictures pass before the eyes. At this rate we are left with the impression of continuous motion.”²¹
In her video Snow Storm, Jürgenssen seems to completely reverse the technical achievement of “the rapid succession of slightly different still frames” to produce the illusion of movement: instead, she deliberately provokes a contrary effect. The frame remains fixed, and movement only takes place as the flurry of driving snow. The image shown remains unchanged. In the exhibition, this video was projected onto a white curtain, an installative element the artist used to construct a further visual layer through which the impression of the white image surface was reinforced. A static frame, a still image, street noise, a white snowstorm, filmed from the artist’s studio window. Eight minutes long. After around four minutes, a voice-over. We hear Friedrich Hölderlin’s poem Winter:

When past, unseen the season’s images are, Winter’s duration comes to us again;
The field is bare, the view seems milder far,
And gales blow round about and showers of rain.
A day of rest, such is the year’s conclusion,
A question’s tone that seeks a complement.
Then to our eyes the Spring’s new growth is lent— So nature shines on earth in her profusion.
Your humble and obedient servant Scardanelli
April 24th 1849²²

The poem announces the halt of time, a temporality that is completely absent from the video. The viewer stares out of a window onto a white wall of snow. Nothing happens. There is no story to follow, no narrative. “It is the peace of nature,” of which Hölderlin writes in another poem, the peace of nature in snow-covered birch logs on the ground, the peace of the forest that we can also find in Jürgenssen’s photographs Purkersdorf and X-Mahl, shown in this exhibition. The “exchange between literature and daily life”²³ cited above, an important tool in the thought and work of Birgit Jürgenssen, is recognizable in this video.
By presenting the video as a projection on a white curtain, Jürgenssen elicits a tactile (textural) pleasure, while the male voice gives the video an additional textual layer.

Seeing, Hearing, Feeling.

Work with different layers was an important means of expression for Jürgenssen. Using light and dark, projection onto the body, liquids, or collages, she overlapped different layers. Covering a photograph with latex or textiles creates an optical, erotic, and above all tactile stimulation. Covering a photograph—the cool surface of photographic paper—with transparent gauze engenders a voyeuristic element and creates illusion in the face of reality. It would be good to push the curtain aside and take a look behind it.
Physical contact is the basic precondition for touching. “What we touch appears to be our sole reality. In this regard, the sense of touch has more significance for our belief in an external reality than the other senses. To touch is to make contact, do not touch is the greatest temptation.”²⁴
For Birgit Jürgenssen, the use of several layers and levels leads to a focus of perception onto the nucleus.²⁵ One of these “condensed” photographs (which was also on show in the solo exhibition and still retain an air of mystery) is the digital photograph Untitled, which refers specifically back to an earlier series of works. Rankings was made three years previously and shows naked women fighting; it is repeatedly drawn upon and cited in performative photography. In the new work, Jürgenssen does not project the fighting via overhead projector onto the wall and then photograph the projection; this time she herself enters the picture. Her white overalls turn her into a neutral “screen,” and the women’s fighting takes place on her back. This is an agglomeration of levels and projection surfaces. In addition, Jürgenssen underlays the fighting scene with a comic strip showing pairs of eyes open wide in astonishment. Horrified, suffering, and afraid, these eyes mirror the emotions of the fight and stare directly at the viewers. Projections laid on top of one another, a collage technique that is ultimately concentrated into one photographic layer.
Interpretations and meanings of images and a narrative thread are not really clearly recognizable in Jürgenssen’s final solo exhibition; hidden clues surprise viewers and develop initially an unexpected multifacetedness, both in terms of media and in terms of content. A diversity of media, the color white, and nature are the interconnecting elements throughout the exhibition, and the visual presence of the works and the restless gaze that Jürgenssen prompts are both quite powerful. “Art from the intermediary realm, privacy as the stumbling block, games as the challenge, symbolism with the key given only later and then taken away again.”²⁶ One key in the work of Birgit Jürgenssen is no doubt nature.

Can You Hear the Grass Grow?

If we take Lévi-Strauss’s principle that archaic societies are superior to their Western counterparts due to their connectedness to nature, then it can be noted that this very awareness is an important and constant point of reference in the work and thought of Birgit Jürgenssen. Nature is not simply a connecting element in the exhibition: it is rather also the narrative, the inspiration, and the constant—the beginning and the end in Jürgenssen’s work.
In 1968 Jürgenssen created, Can You Hear the Grass Grow?, one of her very earliest works. Untitled, the last photograph by Birgit Jürgenssen, was taken just six days before she died in 2003. These two works can be seen as the parenthesis within which the artist’s oeuvre sits. In the collage Can You Hear the Grass Grow? we can already see Jürgenssen’s formal interest in bringing together different levels of image, a practice that she was to explore right to the end of her career. In later years, this no longer manifested in sticking together images from her rich store but in bringing individual image layers together on one and the same visual level—the level of the photograph. The collage, one of modernism’s most characteristic and influential techniques, was already used in synthetic cubism in 1912—a stylistic means initiated by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. A connection between Jürgenssen and Picasso is not in any way surprising, as she got to know his work at an early age and began to imitate it. In her childhood she drew her first sketches in a school exercise book, the fascinating work of an eight-yearold that she light-heartedly called BICASSO Jürgenssen (see p. 117). As a child she had the nickname “Bi,” enjoying a playful symbiosis with the name Picasso, and she filled the pages of this thin school book with visual citations from the work of the Spanish painter. This was the first Jürgenssen sketchbook, later published as a facsimile.
The multilayered nature of the collage together with the absolute silence implied by the title Can You Hear the Grass Grow? is a very clear illustration of Jürgenssen’s connection to and inspiration from nature. A self-portrait alongside various other cutouts, put together from her own stock of images, allows us to sense the artist’s points of reference and interests at this time. It is the “the morphological features, the accidents, and the individual solutions”²⁷ that Jürgenssen’s artistic work brings forth, making any reading of it highly complex. The burning candle can be seen as an iconographic symbol of life, the flying crane is a holy bird in Japanese mythology and honored as a symbol of happiness and longevity. Stones are seen as symbols for endurance, strength, and power. Jürgenssen opted for a favorite stone of Georgia O’Keeffe, which the latter displays in her open palm. This American painter and her symbolic and deep relationship with nature must have greatly impressed Jürgenssen, and O’Keeffe figures a second time on the lower margin of the picture.
Human palms are unique and mysterious. Drawn by nature. In O’Keeffe’s case covered over by nature. Birgit Jürgenssen was also fascinated by these so-called lifelines and brought these lines to life in her drawing Lifelines – Little Trees. Little blossoming trees that are planted in nature grow from a sensitive spot. The inside of the outstretched hand remains empty and open. These lines, which are supposed to reveal a person’s fate, are passed on and over to nature. The drawing of the lines of the hand follows no logical pattern. In the black-and-white photograph these fateful lines seem to be covered up by nature, and in the fragmentary drawing of 1978 Palm Lines / Lifelines / Map for the Fortune Tellers the work’s title gives a name to this mythical place.

The Savage Mind

“What I have defined as the ›savage mind‹ cannot be specifically ascribed to anyone in particular, be that any part or type of civilization. It has absolutely no predictive use. I would rather say that I intended the idea of the ›savage mind‹ to identify the system of postulates and axioms that are needed to justify a code that would permit translating the other into our and vice versa, with the least possible loss—the entirety of conditions, therefore, under which we can best understand each other; of course there remains a residue.”²⁸
Birgit Jürgenssen’s “savage mind,” which she used to justify her own codes, can be explained in terms of her talent for detailed observation, her highly reflective critical approach, and her explorative way of working. Throughout her career, Jürgenssen was fascinated by Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques of 1955 and The Savage Mind, and she used these ideas in her work as a recurring source of inspiration. Her system of coordinates, discussed above, consisting of a strong bond with nature, poetic visual layers, her unique and inspired collage technique and her fascination with ethnology and anthropology, photography as her strongest medium, the motif of the human-animal, and the mask as a recurring means of expression—also as a symbol of the camera taking a photograph—can be clearly seen in a hitherto unpublished digital collage in the artist’s estate. Jürgenssen wrote about this in one of her notebooks:

Cat portraits: Olga+I+camera Olga+mask
I+fox mask
C.L.Strauss > child + monkeys THE CAMERA AS MASK – Fichte

One starting point to be found in Jürgenssen’s large collection of materials is a set of photographs documenting Claude Lévi-Strauss’s journey to the Amazon in 1939. A detailed view of a black-and-white photograph shows a small girl from the Nambikwara people²⁹ with her pet, a small woolly monkey, on her head.³⁰ Jürgenssen also portrays herself with her own pet on her head, her cat Olga, which features in many other works as a transmitter of the artist’s uncanny hybrid creatures. She also notes down “I+fox mask” as a further focal point of her 2002 collage. Did she perhaps mean her self-portrait with the little fur? That is certainly a starting point for her “savage mind,” but here she really is referring to a self-portrait with a fox mask. Preparing her exhibition I Don’t Know, Jürgenssen once again deployed the digital grid graphic technique she had used for the image of a zebra in an experiment that was not to end in a finished digital photograph and in this case, too, was merely to serve as a written guide for the “use of masks”. The final comment, “THE CAMERA AS MASK – Fichte,” opens up a further trace that can be pursued Jürgenssen’s work. This leads to Hubert Fichte, a German author and ethnologist. Jürgenssen was interested here in a photo portrait by Leonore Mau showing Fichte with an African mask. His face is half covered, and he is holding the mask in front of it like a camera. The ethnologist presents himself half masked, his identity thus not completely gone. Jürgenssen does not use the mask as a camera but rather the camera as a mask, the piece of optical equipment that is inserted between the observed and the observer. The camera as a key competence in her work is deployed selfreflectively and self-ironically. The subject is reminiscent of early Jürgenssen photo series, taken in front of the bathroom mirror and intended as a means of self-analysis. In this late work, she is more interested in the act of masking, hiding oneself behind the camera, and it is also “interesting to reflect on the identity of photography.”³¹
The comparison of these two photographs does not merely illustrate Jürgenssen’s interest in Lévi-Strauss; “it is also the confrontation of a reality with another version of the same reality.”³² Integrated into nature, the two photo excerpts attain their common level, basis, and origin. As had been the case in Purkersdorf, made for the I Don’t Know exhibition, Jürgenssen concentrates solely on the presentation of a section of forest, and here, with an interest in different vanishing points, confusion, and an anthology of seeing, she uses the “piece of forest” for further computer-generated collages. With erotic and voyeuristic moments, Jürgenssen applies an ironic and critical eye as she integrates her black-and-white images into the forest scene.
“But, whether one deplores or rejoices in the fact, there are still zones in which savage thought, like savage species, is relatively protected. This is the case of art, to which our civilization accords the status of a national park, with all the advantages and inconveniences attending so artificial a formula; and it is particularly the case of so many as yet ‘uncleared’ sectors of social life, where, through indifference or inability, and most often without our knowing why, primitive thought continues to flourish.”³³
Birgit Jürgenssen’s last exhibition is “sure” evidence of her irresistible quality and the multifacetedness of her use of media and means of expression. Unpredictably and knowingly, Jürgenssen operated in her own time. What remains is: “I am.”—”It is personal achievements that count. In the end, there is only the good drawing, the good photo, the good piece of work.”³⁴

1. From the invitation card for the exhibition I Don’t Know, Galerie Hubert Winter (Vienna, 2001); from Michel Butor, Fenêtres sur le passage intérieur (Bois-de-Champs: Aencrages, 1982) [translated].
2. On Jürgenssen’s work with this title, see the text by Gabriele Schor in this publication, p. 67.
3. Georges Didi-Huberman, Ähnlichkeit und Berührung: Archäologie, Anachronismus und Modernität des Abdrucks (Cologne: DuMont, 1999), p. 17 [translated].
4. Rainer Metzger, “Birgit Jürgenssen: ›Wie erfährt man sich im anderen, das andere in sich?‹:Ein Gespräch mit Rainer Metzger,” Kunstforum International 164 (March– May 2003), pp. 234–47, here: p. 245 [translated].
5. On this, see the text by Ninja Walbers in this volume, pp. 223–50.
6. Birgit Jürgenssen, “Pulsschlag einer Sinnlichkeit,” in Schmuck: Zeichen am Körper, ed. Linzer Institut für Gestaltung (Vienna: Falter, 1987), p. 234 [translated].
7. Birgit Jürgenssen in conversation with Doris Linda Psenicnik on December 21, 1998, unpublished, Estate Birgit Jürgenssen, Vienna.
8. See ibid.
9. On this, see Dreamers Awake, exh. cat. White Cube (London: White Cube, 2017), p. 10. The significance of fur in art history is characterized there as follows: “Obsessive use of fetishistic objects or materials (hair, stockings, gloves, velvet and fur) to empower the female self and queer desire, as well as their irreverent playful dare to the spectator to ›please touch.‹”
10. S. Thäsler, “Metamorphose,” Wechselwirkung: Technik Naturwissenschaft Gesellschaft 7, no. 25 (May 1985), accessed September 11, 2018, www.e-periodica.ch/cntmng ?pid=wsw-001:1985:7::303. Thanks to Melanie Wagner.
11. Metzger, “Birgit Jürgenssen”, p. 245.
12. See the cover of this book, which shows a further multilayered version of Birgit Jürgenssen’s “little fur.”
13. Unpublished interview with Christine Braunersreuther on the exhibition Product Mother’s Day in the Museum of Ethnology, Vienna, 2001.
14. See Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,” in Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory (London: Routledge, 1997).
15. Michael Taussig, Fieldwork Notebooks / Feldforschungsnotizbücher, 100 Notizen – 100 Gedanken, no. 1 (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2011), p. 8
16. Felicitas ThunHohenstein, “›Alles fließt, bedingt und durchdringt einander ...‹ Felicitas Thun-Hohenstein spricht mit Birgit Jürgenssen”, in Carola Dertnig, Stefanie Seibold (a cura di), Let’s Twist Again. Was man nicht denken kann, das soll man tanzen. Performance in Wien von 1960 bis heute, Gumpoldskirchen/ Vienna, D.E.A. Kunstverlag, 2006, pp. 272–279.
17. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on Colour / Bemerkungen über die Farben, Berkeley, University of California Press, Los Angeles 2007, p. 15; trad. it. Osservazioni sui colori, Torino, Einaudi, 2000.
18. From a Birgit Jürgenssen notebook: “Three Subject Notebook,” 2000, Estate of Birgit Jürgenssen (sk43), n.p.
19. Bernd Behr, Eckhard Diesing, Vito Orazem, and Peter Zec, eds., Welt als Pattern (Drensteinfurt: Huba, 1984), p. 96.
20. Angel, 1997, video; made for the exhibition Angel:Angel at Kunsthalle Wien, 1997.
21. Wulf Herzogenrath and Evelyn Weiss, Kunst bleibt Kunst: Aspekte internationaler Kunst am Anfang der 70er Jahre; Projekt ’74 exh. cat. (Cologne: Kunsthalle, 1974), p. 70.
22. Winter is part of a six-poem cycle of poems on winter by Friedrich Hölderlin (here translated by Michael Hamburger). In Birgit Jürgenssen’s video the poem is read by Simon Frearson.
23. Cited in ThunHohenstein, “Everything Flows”, p. 15.
24. From a text by Birgit Jürgenssen, “Dolce Tocco,” 2002, Estate Birgit Jürgenssen.
25. Birgit Jürgenssen in conversation with Doris Linda Psenicnik.
26. From a conversation on the art of Birgit Jürgenssen, “Birgit Jürgenssen: Kunst aus dem Zwischenreich ...,” in 9 & 9, exh. cat. Galerie Hubert Winter (Vienna, 1982), n.p. [translated].
27. Didi-Huberman, Ähnlichkeit und Berührung, p. 28.
28. Claude Lévi-Strauss, in Adalbert Reif, ed., Anworten der Strukturalisten (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1973), pp. 118–19 [translated].
29. An indigenous tribe in the Amazon.
30. See Claude Lévi-Strauss, Saudades do Brazil: A Photographic Memoire (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995).
31. Birgit Jürgenssen in conversation with Doris Linda Psenicnik.
32. Birgit Jürgenssen, in Manfred Schmalriede, Erfundene Wirklichkeiten, exh. cat. 2. Internationale Foto-Triennale, Esslingen, 1992 (Stuttgart: Cantz, 1992), p. 19.
33. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (London: Wiedenfeld and Nicolson, 1966), p. 219.
34. Birgit Jürgenssen in conversation with Heidemarie Seblatnig, in Seblatnig, Einfach den Gefahren ins Auge sehen. Künstlerinnen im Gespräch (Vienna: Böhlau, 1988), pp. 158–61, here cited from the website Estate Birgit Jürgenssen, accessed September 7, 2018, https://birgitjuergenssen. com/bibliographie/ interviews/seblatnik1986.