Dora Budor

“I am extremely ill, I am behind with 800 letters,” Marcel Proust complains in a letter to critic Louis-Martin Chauffier in January 1920, shortly after receiving the Prix Goncourt. This observation, which could very well indicate the current state of overload of the subject, exhausted by mail, social media, and the compulsion to constantly perform, leads back to the early twentieth century and the indirect history of the epochal and convoluted À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time) that was embedded in a no less complex network of missives. It is assumed that Proust could have written up to 48,000 letters, of which at most a quarter have been researched and catalogued to date. In letters to his parents, publisher, and friends, the posthumous publication of which Proust wanted to prevent at all costs, he often addresses the conditions of his illness, and in his last two years of life, it occurs in every letter. He was severely affected by asthma from childhood, but he also used it for all kinds of escapist and manipulative purposes in the service of life and work. Toujours au lit, or “always in bed,” is the title of an important essay by Reiner Speck, in which the place and “sleep” (or lack thereof) are not only at the beginning (and end) of Recherche. The title of this exhibition, which initiates a dialogue between six letters from different phases of Proust’s life and works by Croatian artist Dora Budor, is also indirectly connected to the bed, especially since the earliest letters shown are dedicated to two aspects of libidinal desire. On May 17, 1888, Proust, at the age of seventeen, asks his grandfather to lend him money for a visit to a brothel—and only a few weeks later writes to his close friend Jacques Bizet in a way that for the first time suggests Proust’s homosexuality, which represents a central subtext of Recherche. In May or June 1916, Proust writes to his friend Lucien Daudet, a writer, at length about the many facets of the fight against disease, in a letter that also contains the famous sentence “I hate correspondence.” Other letters reveal connections between episodes of Recherche and Proust’s comments on war and colonial history (1915 to Maria Hahn, a sister of Reynaldo Hahn)—as well as a connection to the title of this exhibition, as in a letter Proust writes to his mother in 1902 in which he mentions the sleeping pill Trional. Certainly also due to the fact that Proust’s father Adrien was a renowned neurasthenic and lung specialist of his time and his brother Robert worked as a gynecologist and urologist, he was in constant contact with the best practitioners in the country, which means that Recherche can be understood as an indirect compendium of medicine. The well-known pathologist Édouard Brissaud recommended to Proust that the mere presence of the sleeping pill Trional on his bedside table would induce sleep, which is why this placebo effect is referred to in a letter (not shown here) as the “Brissaud method.” While at the beginning of the twentieth century the liberation of the individual from the static corset of traditional ways of life and values was central, the “self-realization” and “market freedoms” that have now become a compulsion due to unbridled capitalist growth is reaching new limits. This is evident, for example, in the massive increase in the use of antidepressants since the 1990s, medications used in tablet form by artist Dora Budor in her frottage series. In Love Streams, sheets of A4 sandpaper act as a recurring background for rubbings made with atomized escitalopram against the floors and walls of the artist’s studio. Instead of being ingested, the substance is ground down by the hand; in a similar redirection of materials, the subtractive function of sandpaper becomes a tool for creating form. And while a madeleine dipped in tea sparks an endless stream of memories in the first-person narrator of Recherche, the particles of the drug’s serotonin reuptake inhibitor smoothen the intensity of perceived psychophysical impulses to softly bedding millions or even billions of present subjects in inner spaces, which can certainly be described as “mental architecture.” In Budor’s work, these are fundamentally placed in a sculptural relationship to “outside” conditions. The origin of antidepressants and barbiturates as industrially mass-produced pharmaceutical products goes back to the turn of the century, which, like the here and now, was perceived as a turbulent and crisis-ridden transitional period between loss and renewal. Technological and scientific progress generated fears and hopes, the world grew together, driven by patriarchal ideas of power and greatness: the housings of Budor’s series Autophones are modeled after so-called male moulds. Male moulds are used in industry to create a negative space for casting heavy machinery, war artillery, and infrastructure, as well as for producing cast sculptures. The artist had a musical instrument workshop to create the male moulds as hollowed wooden enclosures and then equipped the forms with vibrators, whose sonorous rumblings can be heard in the room, with some interruptions. The encounter between these objects creates a direct link between industrial production, invisible infrastructures, and sexual pleasure, as well as its privatization. One of these objects is fittingly Sleeper. This also fittingly matches a letter that Proust wrote to his landlord Jacques Porel in 1919. After complaining enviously about the sounds of lovemaking in the neighboring apartment, which are audible through the thin walls and bridge several octaves, resembling the cries of whales, along with the bodily cleansing that immediately followed, which he perceives through the water sounds of the bidet, Proust concludes, “I only know asthma.” Another wall piece by Budor, entitled Dominoes, is made with abrasive cloths used in industrial grinding, but now using placebo tablets as a frottage medium. By replacing the hand with the scale of the body, a process transfers the automatic writing and drawing of the Surrealists (whose heyday began in the last years of Proust’s life) to the industrial automatisms of contemporary artists. Brissaud Method, the first part of our new series Modernisms, is not only dedicated to the resonances of two different artistic practices that also have aspects of writing in common, since Budor is also active as an arts writer. Above all, the pathography in this exhibition transforms from the form of the ornament of an individual life (Marcel Proust) to an integral structure of the present (Dora Budor). Moreover, as a trained architect, Budor represents the other side of Proust’s own hierarchy of the arts: for him, the material arts of architecture and sculpture formed the first step of a hierarchy that led to literature via painting, acting, and music. — Martin Germann