opferblech: Toni Schmale at basis
basis e.V., Frankfurt am Main
17–07–2024
Exhibition Note by Carlotta Döhn

This text was written by Carlotta Döhn to accompany the exhibition opferblech by Toni Schmale at basis e.V., Frankfurt am Main.

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The comprehensive solo exhibition by Toni Schmale comprises a selection of existing works as well as new pieces produced especially for the exhibition. The large-format steel sculptures create a striking appearance in the otherwise reduced exhibition space. It is mostly up to the visitor to determine what the forms reveal about themselves and us. They can be understood both as highly aesthetic and technically perfected forms and as reflective elements that confront the viewer with their own physicality. At basis e. V., the sculptures become abstract representations of body-political discourses. They enable reflection on social and gendered processes of formation and transition.

The title of the exhibition opferblech relates to a metal sheet employed in the steel industry to eliminate unwelcome pressure marks and distortions that can occur during the bending or moulding process of a steel object. As it is placed between the press and the object, all the knocks and bumps, quirks and edges, in other words all the related damage that occurs during the moulding process, are inscribed in the sheet. As such, it is “sacrificed" and bears witness to the functional transition from material to industrial product. The sacrificial sheet serves as the prerequisite for the production of a supposedly perfect form. It is the counterpart to the industrial standardised object.

Toni Schmale has devoted the exhibition to these objects, which are both highly functional and deformed to the point of dysfunctionality. Despite the fact that the sculptures reference functional forms, they nevertheless resist becoming so. Her works inhabit an apparently permanent process of transition: they alter material qualities by turning soft forms into hard material, reversing proportions, oscillating between visibility and invisibility or transforming everyday objects into dysfunctional fetish objects. It is through the treatment of standardised steel tubes, their bending and recomposition, that the fragility and vulnerability in every object and material, just as it is in every body, becomes evident. The formal and material transitional status of her sculptures also extends to the perceptual level of the works. Without assuming bodily legibility, the sculptures activate physical relationships. The works become bodies themselves in the exhibition space, which in turn raise questions and draw in their viewers. What is perceived and decoded is dependent on the viewer. The works can be understood as allusions to sexual practices and queer bodies. By altering and rethinking existing categories such as hard and soft, inside and outside, visible and invisible, they dissolve fixed forms and break with simplistic ascriptions. In doing so, they reveal the relational nature of these states and emphasise the processuality of these supposedly dichotomous categories. The sculptures suggest a shift and complication of representative logics of physicality and sexuality. As such, they are situated in a field of feminist criticism of normative concepts of the body, binary gender categories and heteronormativity.

Through her abstract formal language, Toni Schmale contributes to unburdening the representation of real and marginalised bodies, which are otherwise at the centre of social debates about gender identities. Her works demonstrate that material, form, and content cannot be separated from one another, but are synergistically interdependent. The contradictory characteristic inherent in her sculptural forms reject any simplistic interpretation and representative logic of queer art and expand established notions of sculptural practice.

Toni Schmale, schlauch #6, 2023, forged steel, waxed , 282 x 145 x 34 cm. Image courtesy of basis e.V., Photography: Katrin Binner


Materiality: schlauch #6 (2023)

Is it possible to learn to perceive bodies differently through objects? Can they teach us to understand gender in another way? The artist and author Gordon Hall raises these questions and argues that sculptures are able to change the way we look at gendered bodies, not by pointing something out to their viewers, but by offering them a new perspective of themselves and their environment.

The three-meter-high sculpture schlauch #6 triggers exactly this kind of reflexive level of perception. Both the unanticipated movement of the sculpture and its perplexing inversion of material qualities raise doubts about its material composition and our ability to grasp it. Through its size and central placement, the sculpture creates a spatial impact and takes on the form of a body in the exhibition space. The hard material performs circular movements: the surface wrinkles at the bending and flexing points as though it had a skin. Like fabric, the ends of the tube lie loosely on top of each other. As a material used in the heavy and defence industries or in automotive and mechanical engineering, steel has always had a highly masculine connotation. Essentially, it represents hardness and resistance. The work schlauch #6 shows that every material, no matter how hard, has a melting point, possesses an inherent fragility and can take on forms that appear to be almost soft. By redefining material properties, Schmale’s work exposes the gendered associations inscribed in materials and it stimulates reflection on the perception and structures within our environment that are influenced by them. [...]

Toni Schmale, circlusion kleine metallarbeit, 2024, forged steel, waxed, 156 x 124 x 25 cm. Image courtesy of basis e.V., Photography: Katrin Binner


Sexuality: circlusion kleine metallarbeit (2024)

The word “circlusion”, which is derived from the Latin word “circumclusum", means to enclose, overlap or surround something. The political theorist Bini Adamczak proposes using the term “circlusion" as a counter-concept to penetration. This approach would have the potential to revolutionise the way we talk about sex. After all, why is the dildo or penis always regarded as active and as representative of power, even though the vagina, anus, or mouth are no less active and powerful in their capacity to enclose? Sexuality and gender and the way we refer to them are permeated by ideas of power and conventions that are predominantly constructed linguistically and symbolically. In order to redefine power relations, we need a linguistic and symbolic practice that allows power to be ascribed on an equal footing. “Circlusion" can be used to describe a practice that is otherwise repressed into invisibility and passivity. Toni Schmale’s work translates this linguistic practice into a physical form: during the act of “circlusion", just like in the wall relief of the same name, something happens outside our direct field of vision. Tubes protrude from the surface and disappear back into it. Where these tubes come from and where they lead to remains unclear. They are “swallowed" by the relief and apparently actively break with the two-dimensionality of the flat basic structure. The relationship between panel and tubes is charged with tension and in motion. Who is devouring here and who is being devoured? The idea of being either active or passive is questioned in the work. By acknowledging the simultaneity of penetrating and “circluding" movements in the work, the phallus is disempowered as a symbol of patriarchal domination. [...]

Toni Schmale, bend over your boyfriend, 2010, concrete, 50 x 80 x 50 cm. Image courtesy of basis e.V., Photography: Katrin Binner


Heteronormativity: bend over your boyfriend (2010)

The sixty-three-centimetre-high anal plug, cast from concrete, plays with an inversion of proportions and abstracts an “everyday object" into the absurd. The title of the work stems from a series of American sex education videos of the same name from 1998, that were intended to encourage women to penetrate their partners’ anuses with strap-on dildos, so as to discover a tabooed physical zone. This practice, which at the time was known as “bob" (short for “bend over your boyfriend"), has been commonly known as “pegging" (derived from the English word “peg") since 2001, coined by the American columnist Don Savage. As a sexual practice, pegging can represent a form of queering of heterosexuality by subverting and shifting heteronormative gender roles. Heteronormativity refers to the dominant system of thought and perception in which we live and which views heterosexuality and binary gender as normal and is structurally orientated accordingly. In a heteronormative society, we identify ourselves in terms of gender and sexual identity. Queerness and heteronormativity are therefore also relational to each other. Toni Schmale's sculpture can be read as a humoristic commentary on normative notions of sexuality and as an invitation to consider an expansion of physical sources of pleasure. [...]

Toni Schmale, schlauch #4 & #5, 2023, hot-dip galvanised steel, 110 x 20 x 210 cm. Image courtesy of basis e.V., Photography: Katrin Binner


Seriality: schlauch #4 & #5 (2023)

The works schlauch #4 and #5 are not intended to be symbolic carriers of meaning. Although the hose can be viewed as a phallic form, it is not necessarily a representation of power. The situation is, in fact, quite the opposite: the hoses are not in any way threatening. They kink, hang and lie about on the floor. Their aesthetic is one of rawness, but not of brutality.

Schlauch #4 and #5 form, like many of Toni Schmale’s works, is part of a series. Seriality and repetition are conventions of twentieth century art production and a central element of abstract sculpture. Her approach to artistic expression joins the likes of Richard Serra, Robert Morris, Scott Burton and Carl André, who are known for their aesthetics that range from the reduced to the brutal and sometimes authoritarian pointing gestures. Schmale’s formal language distances itself from that at a crucial point and takes the ideas of the canonised men’s club a step further: instead of providing her works with a dominant pointing gesture, she adopts humorous elements that include the absurd. She does so in order to infuse her works with a sense of lightness, without depriving them of depth. By allowing chance events to be part of her working practice, each work embodies an individual specificity. None of her works involve a pure concept. They generally cannot be produced or reproduced on an industrial level. Schmale’s works can be regarded as a form of revision of a male dominated genius narrative of abstract art production in the late twentieth century and can thus also assume a productive role in a methodological queering of art historical research.


opferblech

Toni Schmale

17/05 - 21/07/2024

Curated by Carlotta Döhn

basis e.V.

Produktions- und Ausstellungsplattform

Gutleutstraße 8–12

60329 Frankfurt am Main