Eiko Grimberg “Madwoman in the Attic”

Shedhalle / Exhibitions / Dump Time / Artists

Eiko Grimberg (D): “Madwoman in the Attic”, 2006 (Videostill)

Madwoman in the Attic
Video, 2.40 min

“One day, Ida Stieglitz Heimann decided to stay in bed. She was 36 years of age.” She remained in bed for 37 years. Eiko Grimberg’s black and white video plays with total reduction: The story is told in five sentences, the material consists of a series of photographs. In the beginning, we see, from different perspectives, hands, peeling potatoes, hands painting, writing. The woman “creates”. Then, there’s this withdrawal, and we see her only lying in bed. No noise, no colour, no movement. A standstill.
Eiko Grimberg takes up a much talked-about topic: a woman’s withdrawal into the deafening silence of an ailment for which no somatic cause can be found and that had been only inadequately described by the term “hysteria”. The end of the 19th century saw quite a number of women bodily demonstrating their withdrawal from society, demonstrating the inwardness bourgeois society demanded from them, by staying in bed. Feminism judged hysteria positively, as resistance against the established perception or image of women. This non-compliance, however, was possible only at the cost of a fulfilled life. Eiko Grimberg’s video, by superimposing several lives, insinuates new possibilities: he uses photographs Alfred Stieglitz took of his wife, artist Georgia O’Keefe. Georgia O’Keefe, in contrast to Ida Stieglitz Heimann, did not comply with her predefined role and became a public person. By superimposing one woman with the other, Grimberg succeeds in emphasising the aspect of resistance involved in the withdrawal. He, furthermore, stresses this by the title he chooses. “Madwoman in the Attic” is the title of a book of secondary literature on feminism investigating female roles and ways of writing two hundred years ago, pleading for resistance and breaking with traditional roles.