Taboo subject of blood - representations in art | NDR.de - Culture

Status: 20.08.2024 14:25

Blood is a symbol of life and death – and a taboo subject, especially menstruation. This has been taken up in art many times, sometimes extremely provocatively, to draw attention to a socially repressed topic.

by Anette Schneider

No artist has used as much blood as Hermann Nitsch: In his “Orgy Mystery Theater,” the Viennese actionist had his white-clad disciples rummage through animal carcasses, carry crucified naked people around, and pour hectoliters of blood over them. The director of the Austrian Nitsch Museum, Michael Karrer, puts the art in context: “When the blood is poured into the mouth and slides down the naked body, it’s not about denying the disgust, but about showing the disgust. About showing the monstrous energy that is present in such situations.”

Blood in Christian depictions

The exhibition “Läuft” in Berlin focuses on female menstruation.

With this “monstrous energy”, Nitsch provoked half the country in the 1960s. Later, he ended up at the Vienna Burgtheater. Compared to the blood that Christian painting has caused to flow for centuries, however, Nitsch’s actions seem like amateur theater: Saints are riddled with arrows, tortured with red-hot irons, beheaded, quartered, women’s breasts are cut off – the blood flows in streams.

The blood of the crucified Jesus is collected by believers in chalices to drink and strengthen their faith! To this day. “As priests, we are allowed to say the so-called words of consecration over the bread and wine,” explains Pastor Thomas Rauch from Kempten. “This great miracle happens: the small piece of bread becomes the body of Christ, and the wine becomes the blood of Christ.”

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190s: Making the repressed lives of women visible

In the 1970s, the feminist women’s movement finally shed light on the mystical-patriarchal blood-murmuring: feminist artists transformed the irrationally charged blood into a rational material with which they – often on their own bodies – addressed current social grievances such as sexism, racism and violence and celebrated their self-empowerment.

In 1971, Judy Chicago photographed a woman pulling a bloody tampon out of her vagina. Chicago made visible for the first time a part of socially repressed women’s lives. The image became an icon of feminist art. Judy Chicago said of her art: “I don’t believe that art can change the world. I believe that art can educate, inspire and enable people to act.”

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What has now been removed from the taboo in sports is hardly an issue in science. Menstruating researchers therefore have a hard time. more

Female artists raise their voices – with art

Ana Mendieta uses disturbing photographs of bloody female bodies to demonstrate violence against women. Valie Export comments on the market-dominating Viennese Actionists with her paint-dripping action painting, by letting her menstrual blood drip onto a virginal white wall.

Artists are charging blood with ever new political meanings: in the heyday of AIDS, it becomes a symbol of deadly danger. In 2015, Tameka Norris makes the invisibility of Black women visible: in a gallery, the Black artist cuts her tongue, runs it along the white gallery wall and leaves a trail of blood and spit in which the racist trail of blood against Black women is manifested.

Still a taboo subject in 2024

The show “Läuft. The exhibition on menstruation” at the Museum of European Cultures in Berlin is open until March 2025.

In Germany, the topic of “menstrual blood” is currently popular – in 2024! Some artists use it to paint. Susanne Schulz, for example, uses it to create portraits based on photos on request: “When I have received the blood, I create a proper, ceremonial space for it here at home. It is a loving ritual. It is about the woman honoring herself – or me honoring the woman in that moment,” says the artist Schulz.

In order to remove the taboo surrounding the topic, an exhibition in Berlin is lining up menstrual objects in a clinically clean manner. In Lübeck, a swab of menstrual blood on toilet paper and a short statement are intended to raise awareness. It seems so forced to be correct that it hurts.

Pipilotti Rist played with theme in 1993 video “Blutclip”

Yet Pipilotti Rist played with the subject so enthusiastically and inspiringly in 1993. In her three-minute film “Blood Clip”, a camera follows the blood that runs down a naked woman’s thighs, is wiped away by her hand, and tasted by her tongue – until the camera suddenly tilts, the woman circles wildly around herself, then jubilantly floats around the moon, the earth, through space – as a natural part of everything. A rousing celebration of life.

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