Cave
2024
Between Bettina Khano's curtain installation “Hemdchen” (Shirts) is the entrance to Judith Egger's cave installation in the DG Kunstraum. The cave has a main room from which three small niches branch off. The walls are difficult to see in the semi-darkness. It smells of earth and dried leaves. The artist has filled the niches with various video works and an installation. We discover beings drawn with light, reminiscent of cave paintings, telling us about hunting, gathering, fire and eating. But we also see the process of digging a real hole in the ground in the forest by the lake Staffelsee. The physical effort involved is evident; you can see how much material has to be removed so that you can enter this hole with your whole body. It is a processual approach. In a third video, a burning branch is installed as a chandelier in the cave, floating above a kind of altar made of fresh clay, which, on closer inspection, has the shape of a cervix. This installation consists of two parts, one of which is the cave installation in the DG Kunstraum, made of coconut mats, clay, metal rods and electrical conduits. The real earth cave is located in a hidden place in the forest and was dug by Egger a few months before the exhibition began.
Enveloped and surrounded by darkness, the smell of earth in my nose, I light a fire. My root hands grow deep, while my spirit wanders through vast spaces and times to the origin. It urges me out and I get to know day and night, the rain and the energy of the sun. I grow leaves, blossoms and fruits until everything rots away and I return to the darkness, ready for the next cycle.
Energy is necessary for the development of art or organisms, which brings us to the central theme of the installation. Egger refers to the discovery of fire, which enabled humans to take significant evolutionary steps forward. Energy in the form of heat is central to many growth and transformation processes and is therefore a very fitting element in the process of “being in between”. The cave can be interpreted as a larger pouch, a protective space, even a human organ; in any case, this earthen place is where things are collected, digested and incubated. A vessel, whether a pouch, a cave or even the human stomach, enables us to ingest food, collect or store important objects – this is a great achievement at the beginning of human development. Art nourishes this pouch. In this way, the artist ties in with Ursula K. Le Guin's thesis in “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (1989)” that the spear – i.e. the weapon – was not the first technology of humankind. This perspective elevates cooperation, gathering and nurturing above heroism and violence. For Le Guin, the bag is a symbol of stories based not on power and conquest, but on cyclical processes, care and connection.
Another important consideration that influences the work is the “cooking hypothesis” of anthropologist and Harvard researcher Richard Wrangham. In his book “Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human”, he attempts to prove that the consumption of cooked food led to changes in the physical appearance of our ancestors, with their teeth and digestive tract shrinking and their brains beginning to grow. This means that Homo sapiens only exists because it mastered fire and developed cooking. Since then, there has been a dependence on energy-producing substances. "We are bound to food that is adequate for us in cooked form, and the consequences of this fact permeate our entire existence, from our bodies to our minds. We humans are (...) creatures of fire." R. Wrangham Eggers' installation shows the emergence of the new from the combination of the dark cave and warmth that connects us to our origins.
The body is and remains the basis of our existence. That's why I dug the real cave. It's important for me to really do it, to get my hands dirty, to sweat, to get blisters and to be bitten by mosquitoes. It's about actually digging the cave and then sitting in it.
The cave should be seen less as a pit and more as a nucleus or space of transformation, whereby death and decay are naturally always considered in cyclical thinking and also form the basis for the new. We are living in a time when humans and other living beings are dependent on coming together in collaborative networks in order to meet the challenges of the Anthropocene. Judith Egger advocates a new relationship with all living things, one that is not characterised by dominance, separation and subjugation, but by an awareness of mutual dependence and a deep sense of connection and responsibility. In doing so, she also wants to remind us of our roots as living beings – due to increasing digitalisation, the internet and all associated media, most people live parallel or alternating lives in two worlds – the digital, disembodied world and the analogue, material world. Life is increasingly shifting into the digital realm, where our physicality no longer plays a role. As great and exciting as the advantages of this “disembodiment” may be, we are still physically connected to the one Earth. Bodies that, in their basic configuration, do not differ greatly from those of the first humans. We are still dependent on the soil, food and weather, and we coexist with all other organisms. We are deeply connected to this foundation. Only by being aware of this can we break new ground, because being human means inhabiting our bodies completely.
But gradually your eyes adjust to the darkness and you can see a little bit. I was in there for maybe half an hour. For me, it was a place of safety and security.
I think it's a kind of luxury cave. If I imagine it correctly, a family with two children could live comfortably in it.
RW: (...) Let's move on to your installation at DG Kunstraum, for which you dug – no – built a cave. I saw it while it was still under construction. And at the opening, I spent quite a long time inside the cave. It really moved me. From the entrance room, you slip through a low opening covered with grass into a walk-in cave. I didn't think it would be so pitch black when I went inside. But gradually your eyes adjust to the darkness and you can see a little bit. I was in there for maybe half an hour. For me, it was a place of safety and security.
I think it's a kind of luxury cave. If I imagine it correctly, a family with two children could live comfortably in it. You can see three cubicles, I would almost say three small exhibition rooms – cave exhibition rooms.
In the first room on the left, you can see line drawings, for example, a woman bending her hands down towards the earth, and then roots growing out of her fingers into the earth. They go down like lightning bolts and then, strangely enough, come out again at the top. That confuses me. Then you can see intestines, a brain that gets bigger and smaller again, and then there's also a man with a spear...
JE...
it's a woman with a spear, the man is gathering, that's a very important point. There are female hunters and gatherers in the cave.
RW
So this is the first cubicle exhibition space in the cave, and then further back on the right there is a place with a very special energy, it conveys something spiritual – perhaps religious. The sculpture on the floor made of damp clay is a cervix. Above it you can see a burning branch, which I find wonderful: it is a motif that often appears in art history. It plays a prominent role in one of Anselm Kiefer's early works (Anselm Kiefer, Man in the Forest, 1971, 174 x 189 cm, acrylic on cotton). It is a self-portrait: Kiefer stands in a long white nightgown with a huge burning branch in his hand in the middle of a dried-up coniferous forest. The flames of the branch lick menacingly upwards. The situation is dangerous and comical at the same time. Things collide that actually have nothing to do with each other, and the conifers are pine trees, of all things.
In the third bunk of your cave, the video shows someone digging a cave: first, you look inside. Then the view is directed from inside the cave to the outside – towards daylight and the canopy of leaves. Now I'm interested, Judith, in how you built the whole thing. You built the cave in your garden, which is like the reverse process of digging. How did you come up with the idea of the cave?
The theme of caves evokes many associations, not only birth and new beginnings, but also death, returning to the womb of Mother Earth, the cyclical nature of life and death, the beginnings of humanity, cave paintings, and the creation of fire by lightning strikes.