MARGARET RASPÉ (1933–2023)
FOR THE PAST FIFTY YEARS, artist Margaret Raspé has produced a sensitive, trenchant, and profoundly uncompromising body of work that has, until very recently, received only scant attention.
Born in Wrocław, Poland, Raspé grew up in southern Germany, studying art in the 1950s in Munich before settling in Berlin with her husband. Her budding practice came to a standstill as marriage and motherhood forced Raspé into the traditional role of the housewife. After a divorce in the late 1960s, she found herself with meager financial resources and began renting out her home to artists and theorists of the Fluxus and Viennese Actionism schools. Many of these figures became lasting companions and encouraged Raspé to resume her practice.
Raspé’s so-called camera helmet films, which date to the early ’70s, are among her first pieces of this period. Comprising point-of-view shots as the artist prepared schnitzel, washed dishes, or gutted a chicken, they overflow with anger at both the patriarchal structures that dominated her everyday life and her own failure to resist the oppression and alienation that so thoroughly trapped her. Raspé also worked with photography, performance, text, and drawing. For several years, she devoted four hours a day to “automatic drawing”—not to conjure the unconscious à la the Surrealists but to surrender to the absolute lack of intention, the numbing automatisms, that otherwise dominated her domestic labor under capitalism. In the ’80s and ’90s, Raspé began to explore nature as an artistic medium. At a time when ecology was hardly a buzzword in the arts, she placed wool in riverbeds to draw attention to water pollution and arranged sticks into sculptural trellises to support vines of blue clematis. Branches carefully gathered from her garden became columns that—in a reference to the wooden architecture of Mycenaean Greek architecture—linked heaven and earth.
Raspé’s keen eye for slow, hidden processes and automated actions and her unwavering efforts to make them visible in her art are at once gentle and disturbing. Engaging with her work, one finds one’s perception infiltrated—permanently.
You will be missed, dear Margaret.
