Bertha Benz, Konstruktion, 1998
Wood, trestles, silk taffeta, 150 x 480 x 180 cm
Installation view, Barbara Gross Gallery, Munich, 1999
Bertha Benz, Konstruktion, 1998
Wood, trestles, silk taffeta, 150 x 480 x 180 cm
Hand print on wall, 40 x 30 cm
Installation view, Heart Gallery, Mannheim, 1998
Bertha Benz, 1998
Facial-ID drawing, print
Bertha Benz
In the installation Bertha Benz, Konstruktion (1999) the outline of a powerful “S-Class” Mercedes limousine is reproduced with a framework of wooden slats mounted on trestles and covered by a thin skin of flesh-colored silk taffeta. The surrounding space features a computer-generated facial-ID portrait stamp of Bertha Benz, its feminine traits distorted again because composed of male components. Michaela Melián’s work is a conflation of two anecdotal events connected with the word “Benz,” each having to do with forms of erasure. Perhaps this is why the space under the silk skin is empty.
On 12 August 1888, Bertha Benz walked out on her husband Carl Benz, driving the first ever self-propelled vehicle—the “Benzine”—built by him. Furious after a row, she drove from Mannheim to Pforzheim, a distance of 130 km. Hitherto the automobile had been considered as in a test stage and unfit to drive. It was the first long-distance automobile journey in history. Shortly afterwards, Carl Benz displayed “Bockige [feisty] Bertha,” the vehicle Bertha Benz had in effect test driven, at the Munich World Exhibition. No further details of Bertha Benz’s life have come down to us.
110 years later in 1998, Diana, Princess of Wales, met her death in an “S-Class” Mercedes. For an entire week Mercedes dealers draped this model in their showrooms in black, thus creating a direct link between the automobile and the deceased woman’s body. A different form of hysteria, that of the masses and of the media, is thematized here and translated into a static image. Woman and machine seem to have become interchangeable.
excerpt from
Frank Wagner, Low Tech–High Concept. The Reenactment of History and Personality in Michaela Melián’s Art Projects, 2003
published in Triangel, Lukas und Sternberg, 2003
© Michaela Melián / VG Bildkunst