Lorenza Böttner

Self-portrait of Lorenza Böttner

Lorenza Böttner (6 March 1959 – January 1994; born Ernst Lorenz Böttner) was a transgender and disabled multidisciplinary visual artist. Born in Chile, she later moved to Germany following the amputation of both of her arms, where she pursued both an education and a career in art. Using a wide array of mediums, including performance pieces, she depicted social outcasts, and she represented Petra at the 1992 Summer Paralympics. She died of AIDS-related complications in Munich. Following her death, little of her work was publicly shown until Paul B. Preciado organized a series of showings from 2019 onward.

Early life

Lorenza Böttner was born in Punta Arenas, Chile, under the name Ernst Lorenz Böttner to parents of German descent. At the age of eight, both of her arms were amputated after being electrocuted by power lines; six years later, she moved with her parents to Lichtenau, Germany, for better health services, refusing to use prosthetics. That year, in the Chilean children's magazine Mampato, she was depicted as an exemplar for other children: Despite losing her arms, the magazine said, she was able to use Christian language with others, persevere through her difficulties, and draw with a pencil in her mouth.

Little is known about her life in general, but there have been attempts to recast her childhood for political purposes. For example, Roberto Bolaño indicated that while still in Chile, she held secret street performances to save money to leave for Germany, even though she had left with her parents at 14. This was meant to invoke an image of a struggling, exiled Chilean artist—a theme he had observed in Chile at the time.

Career

Böttner then began to attend the Kassel School of Arts, and while there, she began publicly identifying as a woman. Art school allowed her to begin a series of photographs, where she would wear makeup that modified the appearance of her face, following a comment from a professor that she was a "walking performance". She graduated from school in 1984 after completing a thesis called "Behindert!?"—literally meaning "Disabled?!"—which used historical and medical motifs of disability in its accompanying performance piece.

Over the course of her career, her art widely varied in style and form, ranging from drawings to paintings to performances. She painted using her mouth and feet. Describing her approach as "transition and not identity", the philosopher and art curator Paul B. Preciado says that while she used her feet and mouth to create artwork, the unique habitation of her body (transgender and disabled) allowed her to create an interdisciplinary movement, not only visual or performance. She depicted herself in art, as well as what Preciado describes as "subaltern" persons: prostitutes in Europe, African Americans experiencing police violence in America, and lesbian and gay sexuality. In the work depicting herself, she was shown as both sexual and maternal, and as the art critic Prathap Nair says, this worked to unsettle one's understanding of the gender binary.

In 1992, after making a series of connections in the artistic scene of Barcelona, she depicted the mascot Petra at that year's paralympic games held in the city.

Death and legacy

She died of AIDS-related complications in Munich in January 1994.

The Chilean writers Pedro Lemebel and Roberto Bolaño wrote about Böttner in Estrella Distante (1996) and Loco Afán (1996), respectively. From 2018 onward, Preciado held a series of events showcasing Böttner's work in locations such as La Virreina Centro de la Imagen in Barcelona and the Württembergischer Kunstverein in Stuttgart. This marked the first time much of her work had been publicly seen in decades.

References

Bibliography

• Fischer, Carl (3 February 2012). Lorenza Böttner: Capitalist success and (queer) failure in Chile's dictatorship (Speech). UCLA Thinking Gender Conference.
• Fischer, Carl (2014). "Lorenza Böttner: From Chilean exceptionalism to queer inclusion". American Quarterly. 66 (3): 749–765. ISSN 0003-0678.
• Fischer, Carl (2016). Queering the Chilean way: Cultures of exceptionalism and sexual dissidence, 1965-2015. New York, NY. ISBN 9781137562487.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
• Fischer, Carl (2020). "The international (un)intelligibility of Chilean trans* film". In Barraza, Vania; Fischer, Carl (eds.). Chilean cinema in the twenty-first-century world. Wayne State University Press. ISBN 9780814346839.
• Fischer, Carl (2021). "Lorenza Böttner". Archives of Women Artists Research & Exhibitions. Retrieved 15 October 2021.
• Greenberger, Alex (16 June 2021). "How Lorenza Böttner's prescient art created space for disabled and trans people". Art in America. Retrieved 15 October 2021.
• Gyorody, Andrea (August 2019). "Lorenza Böttner". Artforum. Retrieved 15 October 2021.
• Musselwhite, Olivia (2021). "Overcoming history's limitations: Lorenza Böttner's, Requiem for the Norm". Art Toronto. Retrieved 15 October 2021.
• Nair, Prathap (30 April 2019). "A 20th-century artist who de-sexualized the trans body". Hyperallergic. Retrieved 15 October 2021.
• Preciado, Paul B. (2019). "Lorenza Böttner: Requiem for the norm" (PDF). University of Toronto. Retrieved 15 October 2021.
• Preciado, Paul B. (2021). "Lorenza Böttner: Requiem for the norm" (PDF). Université Concordia. Retrieved 14 October 2021.

External links

• Every Life Matters: The Work of Lorenza Böttner by Paul B. Preciado at the 2018 conference "Hold Me Now – Feel and Touch in an Unreal World".