Bluebeards Castle

23.06 - 15.08. 2023

Kunsthalle Bratislava - A Window
curated by Jen Kratochvil

Bluebeard and Hugh Hefner, a murderer and the founder of Playboy, meet on a porch to discuss women and their favorite weapons of choice. Beatriz Colomina and Paul Preciado walk through Villa Müller, discussing how raumplan is just a witty way of transforming a building into binoculars of the male gaze, and how such singular patriarchal elements informed the current pharmacopornographic system of societal domination. Jane Mansfield woke up from a nightmare about Marylin Monroe. Fred Astaire realized he was no longer sure why he had entered the room, and the ghost of high modernism finally understood that its heart beats for fascism. Melanie finds herself juxtaposed against the backdrop of a 1950s medieval dungeon, and who’s to say if she’s posing for a cheap romance book cover or actually getting closer to finding Norman Bates’ mother?! Impossible to say, at this point. The scene is too densely populated for all this to be simply just a series of random anecdotes. There are too many voices and the web of intersectional relationships is too complex. The suspense grows, and the cat has yet to enter the room. So wait for her, and let’s see what actually happens. And maybe, by the end of the day, someone turns on the light. Click. Here we go...

Melanie Ebenhoch’s mis-en-scène is populated by both fictional characters and real figures from the history of architecture, contemporary art theory, critical theory, and the collective popular imagination of old-time Hollywood. Melanie gathers and collects her characters one by one over the course of time, gradually drawing an intricate mental map of their relations. The core
clusters of such a composition encompass strategies of critical feminist theory to deconstruct, decolonize, and re-access male-dominated fields, namely those of modernist architecture and the golden era of 20th-century cinema, all in order to formulate new narratives. Melanie’s approach is direct and puts nothing in between the selected focal points and herself. She de-
liberately steps into the shoes of one of Bluebeard’s wives. [trigger warning] The one who takes the key and unlocks the forbidden door to find the torn, blood-covered pieces of her less curious predecessors. The severed limbs of murdered women are not the source of true horror here, though. Nor is the buildup of suspense while searching for them. Instead, comes the living nightmare, with a fancy packaging of luxurious houses, rooms, and furniture, all clean and polished to cover up for a murder of potential in the
hetero-patriarchal society.

The show opens five views of various architectural contexts. It doesn’t matter if one of them is a result of an avant-guard ego of high modernism, or an over-decorated man-cave of conservative historicism. They all are connected by stories of women entrapped in their walls, corridors, stairs and carefully carved stones or endless transparencies of glass walls and ceilings. The cat is not home right now. Or is she? Her house, a simple scratching tree house, has been petrified in concrete and the exquisite craftsmanship of Italian mosaic time-traveling masters. Is the cat monumentalized? Is her house a memento for future generations? Why, though? Did the cat save all the imprisoned women?

The topic of replication, transformation and translation of forms directs another key red thread seamed through the show. Jane Mansfield, a small-time Hollywood star from the 1950s, a Marilyn Monroe look-alike, or copycat, yet another captive of male history, walks up the stairs in her house, passing a wall of fame with endless records of her encounters with powerful men. If Monroe was a projection screen of the properly curated male gaze of the post-war Western world, Mansfield is her carefully crafted replica. If the cat house is not a cat house anymore but a sculpture conceived from materials for outdoor decorations, and if the outdoor sculpture finds its place with in the interiors again, where does Mansfield’s staircase actually lead? Closer to the Kardashians? Or just to an empty living room? What’s private and what remains public…or vice versa? And is the cat really not around? Playboy magazine, still surprisingly for many, is the main reason why most of us admire modernist architecture so much. Playboy, not the profession-
al architectural magazines, promoted modernism in architecture and design, while exponentially raising their financial and cultural value to create a backbone of the consumer-oriented economy of the second half of the 20th century that led to our current state of capitalist realism. It is not surprising that Hugh Hefner, the founder of Playboy and an avid promoter of modernism, lived in a mansion designed as a 19th-century romantic castle with an artificial grotto and other historical ornaments. The transformations
of styles and their translations to general accessibility might often be one-directional.

The horror lies in sobre subtlety. The horror lies in the high-carpeted extra vaganza. The horror creeps in from under the floor, from behind the walls, it’s embedded in the bulbs so it can shine around like beacons on a stormy sea. And you know what? Curiosity didn’t kill the cat. The cat is alive and well, more energetic than ever, exploring further and killing all that would want to
stand in her way ... just kidding. The cat is not the murderer in our story. Just find and talk to her, and you will see. I think I last saw her in the fireplace…

Jen Kratochvil

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