EMPEROR ME

EMPEROR ME. The title of Marc Bauer’s latest series of drawings is taken from a tradename for an industrial glove, the EMPEROR ME108 Heavyweight, produced by Marigold Industrial. The inspiration for the drawings, by contrast, is rather more sentimental: the two-hundred-year-old amorous correspondence, written in French and only recently published, between Johannes von Müller, custodian of the Imperial Library of Vienna, and a younger man of his acquaintance posing in the letters as a ‘Hungarian count’.

What do these startling opposites—the ‘Emperor of hand protection for industrial use’ and a historical case of aristocratic fraud at the dawn of the Austrian Empire—have in common? One would think very little. But in Marc Bauer’s hands they represent power, absence, and the objectification of love and desire

The drawings feature fetishized articles of clothing: a latex glove, a leather Chap, a shirt. These objects are isolated and alienated from their original function. They are even, one could say, alienated from their secondary function as fetish-wear. (For seen without a human leg, it is initially hard to recognize the Chap for what it is.) It is very unlikely that the glove, the ‘emperor’ of the series, has ever been put to ‘industrial use’. The manufacturers state its possible applications as being in ‘the chemical industries, fishing, agriculture, mining’. But this is an art gallery, not a pig-shed, and the majority of present viewers are probably more familiar with its ulterior use in the practice—or rather, at least, the dark signification of the practice—of fisting. In this regard, Bauer’s choice of subject might be called camp. He invites us to understand these objects through a shared, ironizing code. He suggests sex, or at least, a certain type of sex. But there is nothing camp about these images. There is nothing camp about their rendering—which is anything but playful—nor their meaning, which is about the signification of love in general, not just in secret between a certain type of men. The gloves, the sleeves, the strangely rigid leg-covering should be inanimate objects. But somehow they are not. Larger-than-life and viewed from the same perspective, they seem to resonate with the memory of their wearer. They are more than clothing. They are like the dead skin shed by their wearers, the remnants of… affection? desire? submission? One is almost tempted to read a narrative into them, as markers that symbolize different stages in a relationship or affair. In this they are similar to the quotes from the letters transcribed in the portfolio. The artist has taken each quote from a different letter. Each quote captures a different point in the unusual story of love and betrayal in early 19thcentury Vienna. They plot a descent from sentimental (frankly naïve) ardour, to betrayal, then melancholy and shame. The letters are fragments of desire, just as the objects in the drawings are. Marc Bauer seems to suggest that we can only desire or love a person in fragments, that we can only ever grasp a person in fragments, in snippets of sentiment, and that for desire or love to exist it must persist in the person’s absence, through objects they have touched. From these fragments of longing—letters, slowly dying flowers, a crushed shirt—one construes a love affair; in the drawings it is a modern one, in the letters it is historical.