Born in 1964 in Hockenheim (DE)
Lives and works in Brussels (BE)
2000
Book, 2202 sheets, b&w laser printing, Walther König editions, Cologne
29,5 x 21 x 9,5 cm
Year of Purchase: 2002
In the radical SCUM Manifesto,1 Valerie Solanas, the woman Andy Warhol (after she’d shot at him) described as a ‘real disaster’, sets about mercilessly destroying this person ‘trapped in a twilight zone halfway between humans and apes’, i.e. the male. In the colourful style that characterizes her pamphlet, she writes: ‘the male is a biological accident: the Y (male) gene is an incomplete X (female) gene, that is, it has an incomplete set of chromosomes. In other words, the male is an incomplete female, a walking abortion, aborted at the gene stage.’ While Valerie Solanas’s incisive explanation gets a little confused, with several scientific approximations, however excessive it may appear through her choice of vocabulary, the idea nonetheless remains basically correct. To be sure, the male is more than just a ‘walking abortion’, but genetically speaking he is indeed to be defined by none other than an incomplete chromosome. The differentiation between the sexes appears first as the fact of biological determinism and second as one of cultural givens. And feminist arguments, in a chorus of Simone de Beauvoir’s well-known phrase ‘you are not born a woman, you become one’ were only partly right. For one might say, before being a construction, sex allocation is a datum.
Knowing whether in her private life Yvonne Trapp long sought after an eternal male is in itself only of minor importance in the fact that she ended up choosing to create him.2 The actual experience and the personal feeling brought to the forefront by feminist art in the 1970s (‘the private is political’) have no place in her work. The plastic artist, rather than commit herself to the endless undertaking of ‘the elucidation of a woman-artist’s identity: of her body, of her psyche … ’ (following Ulrike Rosenbach’s definition of feminist art)3 prefers to embark on a search for otherness. After engaging her thinking in the sociopolitical field by rightly pointing to the absence of a male muse in art and questioning what such a male model might be like,4 Trapp chooses to examine this basic difference behind the distinction between the sexes in the tremendously exhaustive fashion of the scientific tool. Her work The Human Y Code proposes to restore the entire genetic code of that Y chromosome responsible for maleness. The 2202-page volume goes through the male genes and protein. It is a faithful retranscription of information the artist picked up from the Inter-net, including what geneticists term Y ‘junk DNA’, i.e. segments that do not code for anything, with no known or imagined function, a kind of rebus of evolution making up the major part of the chromosome.5
Through her work, Yvonne Trapp decides to slip the aesthetics of biology into the field of plastic art. As she formulates this shift, she confers aesthetic value on scientific language and most of all she enables the world to be brought under scrutiny through its retranscription. ‘[For conceptual artists], for the sight of the world to have any meaning it can only exist through language. Better therefore to show the language rather than the world’, writes Michel Gauthier6. But this possible filiation soon reaches its limits. Indeed, what sets Yvonne Trapp’s work apart is how she emuslifies this conceptualization of the world. Through her use of scientific language, the artist hangs her work onto an unquestionable reality, that of the living.
Guillaume Mansart
1 SCUM acronym for Society for Cutting up Men. Valerie Solanas, SCUM Manifesto_, 1968, London, Olympia Press, 1971. Note that radical feminists themselves did not support this manifesto: ‘_SCUM Manifesto and the radical women’s liberation movement have always been in opposition,’ says Brooke, a contributor to Feminist Revolution.
2 Yvonne Trapp indeed developed a prototype of the eternal male (actually a small statue with simplified forms) which she placed at the centre of various interventions. This pretence served as a pretext for setting up various strategies for dissemination and information systems. It was a conceptualization of the male to be activated.
3 Ulrike Rosenbach, Köpersprache, Frankfurt, 1975, quoted by Mary Kelly, ‘Reviewing modernist criticism’, in Screen, vol. 22, n°3, London, Autumn 1981.
4 Cf. the video Les Pommes d’Adam (Adam’s Apples, 1999).
5 What you need to know: the original Y chromosome is thought to have contained, 300 million years ago, some 1500 genes. Since then, all those genes except about fifty have been disabled or have disappeared. There is nothing to prove that this process is over, so in a few million years the Y chromosome might no longer contain any active gene, and the male genes would have to migrate.
6 Michel Gauthier, ‘Christopher Reeve, Les coulisses du réenchantement’, in Fresh Théorie, Léo Scheer, Paris, 2005.