What happens when Maria Lassnig’s concept of “body awareness” is set in motion? In New York, where she lived from the late 1960s to the late 1970s and completed a course in animation at the School of Visual Arts in 1971, the artist began to explore her engagement with the body, perception and identity further through film. Blurring the lines between drawing, animation, performance and observation, she created an idiosyncratic body of film work that is now recognised as a distinct part of her oeuvre. Films such as Selfportrait, Iris and Couples have long been part of the Lassnig canon. Alongside these, however, there existed a largely unknown collection of works left unfinished during her lifetime: these “films in progress” are not merely preliminary stages of finished works. They show an artist thinking through the camera – spontaneously, experimentally and, at times, astonishingly directly. Documentary footage of friends, fellow artists and her New York circle is interwoven with drawing, animation and staged self-observation.
In 2018, these materials were preserved by the Maria Lassnig Foundation in collaboration with the Austrian Film Museum and, where Lassnig’s notes and original concepts allowed, completed and digitised in collaboration with Hans Werner Poschauko and Mara Mattuschka (both of whom studied under Lassnig). The fragmentary legacy thus offered a new insight into an aspect of her work that had long been overshadowed by her painting.
BE AWARE, BE AWARE, BE AWARE! is a new publication on Maria Lassnig’s cinematic oeuvre in INDEX Edition’s current format, encompassing all her canonical films and combining them with seven selected works from “Films in Progress”. The essays by Erika Balsom, Esther Buss and Rhea Tebbich focus on historical contextualisation, a close reading of the individual films, and the connection between film, painting and drawing. Here, one can trace the consistency with which Lassnig not only painted her own body but also explored it cinematically.