AC

Beret Norman, Fall 2005

 

‘Avant-femme’ or Futuristic Frauen:

Collaborative Art by Women in the German Democratic Republic

 

Beret Norman

 

 

 

“Each woman is the melody of herself and the echo of others”

—Gabriele Stötzer on collaborative performance art in Bätz (1993, 77)

 

            In 1983 a group of young East German women defied repressive laws and artistic conventions to form an unassumingly renegade collaborative group with a naive mission: to create an alternative meaning in their lives through art, beauty, and camaraderie.  In this way they presented a subversive resistance to the one-party state’s authoritarian regime that dictated the role of art in the German Democratic Republic’s (GDR) society. The group,[i] founded in the small city of Erfurt in the German state of Thuringia by ambitious dissident Gabriele Stötzer,[ii] began without high expectations of rebellion, and yet eventually grew into a performance art collaborative that focused on self-expression and social disruption.  Before creating their performances, Stötzer and these women expressed themselves through paintings, weavings, photography, pottery, amateur 8 mm films, and sewing clothes. By 1991 they founded a space, the Kunsthaus Erfurt (Art House Erfurt), for contemporary art exhibits, workshops and studio spaces. The Kunsthaus Erfurt still thrives today and symbolizes the legitimacy of their six-year (1983-1989) resistance against the GDR’s directives.

Stötzer formed this collaborative art group of women, which she later called the Künstlerinnengruppe (women artists’ group). In 1989 the women named themselves Exterra XX, in order to fashion an indirect resistance to the GDR and its limits upon artistic expression.  This artistic culmination is bittersweet: by establishing the Kunsthaus Erfurt, a recognized institution at which to display art in the newly re-unified Germany (1990), and by not having to work against GDR restrictions anymore, these artists’ drive to produce collaborative art seems to have  dissolved.

            While Gabriele Stötzer’s early artistic oeuvre exhibits a mode of subversion within a one-party society, one finds in Stötzer’s collaborative art new insight into the struggle of women, as well as (unofficial) artists within the GDR, who were trying to find their voice, practice their craft, and establish their identity. Stötzer’s larger project with the women of the Künstlerinnengruppe characterizes her personal resistance that overflowed into public space, a movement similar to the general dissatisfaction and desire for change in the citizens of the GDR that stirred them to overthrow their government peacefully in 1989. Through collaborative art, Stötzer discovered what the GDR’s political and social system never allowed her to find: the vast space and potential for individual agency.

            This article provides an overview of this German group’s collaborative performance art  that materialized around the writer, artist, and nonconformist Gabriele Stötzer.  First I describe Stötzer’s background and tell some of the story that motivated and made possible the dissident artist in her. Then I portray the beginning of the Frauengruppe and trace its artistic evolution from photography and film to its development of performance art within the Künstlerinnengruppe Exterra XX, best known for its international symposium on performance art in Erfurt, November, 1992.  The culmination of Stötzer’s collaborative art was born at the same time as the citizens’ revolts brought an end to the GDR, and her art escalated throughout the early years of re-unified Germany.  However her collaborative work disappointingly fades with the women’s hurried adjustments to life in re-unified Germany.  The one enemy—the GDR, with its repressive laws and restrictive artistic conventions, was gone; the individual agency, which Stötzer and the women in the Künstlerinnengruppe found in collaborative art and which buoyed them from 1988 through 1993, now refracted as their energies split to follow varying goals.

Born into the GDR in 1953 in the eastern state of Thuringia, Stötzer learned, according to an interview, “an orderly theory of socialism: everything was historically clear, we were anti-fascists” (Dahlke 1997, 326).[iii]  This statement reflects the underpinnings of the GDR, a system of government that “promoted the broad-based anti-fascist agenda” (Fehervary 1997, 396) and that became the foundation for Stötzer’s formal education. But this ideological training did not prepare her for the boredom and lack of creative outlets she experienced as a student at the Erfurt Teacher’s College. “The college presented a future in which I should only function”—not participate in any meaningful way (Stötzer-Kachold 1992, 23).  In 1976, after she gave a public reading of a banned political text, she was expelled from the college and labeled a class enemy. Soon thereafter she was sentenced to one year in prison when she refused to remove her name from a letter that protested the November 17, 1976, expatriation from the GDR of the controversial singer and songwriter Wolf Biermann. Already expelled from her college, Stötzer was seen as a challenger to the GDR’s social order—still a serious crime in the GDR in the 1970s.

The prison experience stripped from Stötzer any remaining faith in socialism she may have had, and she turned toward art to find a meaningful identity. Her release from prison and subsequent divorce one year later severed her remaining connections to her past and allowed for her full immersion into a different identity. At this time, and after declaring her job status as self-employed—a suspect and marginal definition in a country of workers—she semi-legally occupied an apartment and started an unofficial art gallery in it. She modestly called it “Gallery in the Hallway,” and the Stasi, or GDR state security force, subsequently closed it in 1981. She continued to foster relationships with other artists during the late 1970s and early 1980s, and more significant contacts came when she met several women through the Erfurt punk music scene in 1981. It is with these women, in particular Verena Kyselka, Monique Förster, and Ina Heyner, that Stötzer began an artistic journey; the end product of which—the Kunsthaus Erfurt—still exists decades later.[iv]

By 1983, Stötzer and these women deviated from the (very male-dominated) punk music scene and gathered in Erfurt as a group of women specifically interested in art and, significantly, without any ties to the secret police.[v]  According to Monique Förster, curator of the archive at the Kunsthaus Erfurt, Stötzer invited Förster and several others to meet, and upon finding they had a multitude of topics to discuss, they decided to set pre-arranged topics for each subsequent meeting. This was the beginning of what they at first called simply the Frauengruppe or women’s group (personal interview, May 1998). The group changed their collective name to Künstlerinnengruppe (women artists’ group)—and specifically to Exterra XX in 1989, which identified them more directly as artists.[vi]

The women in the fledgling Frauengruppe shared Stötzer’s ambition of working as unofficial artists—artists who were self-taught and who did not attend the established GDR art schools—even though the distinction of unofficial artist was considered asocial and thus punishable under the laws of the GDR. At this point the group remained a small collective of admittedly amateur artists:  they individually created artworks which were characterized by unity of vision; and their individual efforts—aimed at creating an alternative meaning in their lives—united them on the margins of GDR society.  The group served as mutual inspiration and a support, since the GDR cultural ministry did not allow unofficial artist collectives.  Later the women actualized their joint enterprise, in the form of the Kunsthaus Erfurt—based on the principles of collective ownership.  But these women were at first able to hide their art behind a domestic veil—creating “women’s art,” such as weavings and clothing—and thus they avoided direct censure for a time.  They could get away with their art because they produced it in their own apartments, and worked on “women’s things.”  Only Stötzer sold her unique—hand-knitted and hand-dyed—sweaters, which provided Stötzer her main source of income.  Although these sweaters were not seen as a political statement—rather they presented the buyers with distinctive items not available in the GDR stores—one notices how such purchasers may have consciously supported Stötzer’s artistic, implicit resistance to the State.  Traditionally undervalued, even in a socialist society, this women’s work was not of particular concern to the police, the Stasi or the cultural censors.

But Stötzer moved these women away from just a collective—a group that wanted to create alternative meaning in their lives—toward an art collaborative that created socially critical art works in the form of rebellious outfits and eventually bewildering performance art productions.  The difference between the collective and the collaborative lies in the women’s common effort in the latter:  together they made films, created costumes, masks and surreal garments, and choreographed performances for their figurative expansion of their geographic limitations.  Where the collective brought them together and provided inspiration to continue, the collaborative work—joint and cooperative work in the realm of visual art—allowed these women to free themselves of the state’s dogma and create their own ideals of, at first, beauty and camaraderie, and later, of artistic, political expression.  Due to Stötzer’s early political problems, the group avoided art with direct social relevance or commentary; rather, the group’s work remained indirect, but the members still confronted the social limitations that prohibited their freedom of creative expression.

The collaborative work of Stötzer and the founding group of women began with conceptual photography, moved into Super 8 films, and continued its evolution into performance art.  Stötzer’s first photographs consisted of series of women and can be interpreted as her reaction to the GDR’s social confines for women. Worth mentioning are two series that portray isolated women: one set of twelve photographs portrays a woman being wrapped from head to toe in white muslin—like a mummy; a second set of nine images depicts a woman looking directly at the camera, as if into a mirror, as she applies and misapplies makeup—a stream of black liquid runs down the static expression of bored visage and resembles tears, but there is no sadness in her expression.[vii]  Both the progression of the images and the potential of implicit critique within each of the series motivated Stötzer to start working with film and its moving images. Again she remained behind the camera, and by 1989 Stötzer had become camerawoman, director, producer, and editor for ten films. The films’ subversion resided in how the women could act out anything they wanted, especially in the 1986 collaborative film Frauenträume (Women’s Dreams).  In this film, each woman brought one idea to the project.  The avoidance of any type of political expression in the film surfaces as one finds women dancing, running, or pantomiming domestic scenes, e.g., cleaning a house or rocking a baby.  By capturing these women’s imaginings on film and by mixing them together in rapid succession, Stötzer validated the women’s experiences and presented a different combination of daily life—a combination that deviated considerably from the state-sanctioned employment-based routine.  But again, these films remained abstract in content and private or “unofficial” in use, and were thus politically acceptable, as GDR citizens were allowed to buy and use Super 8 cameras to make home movies.

Yet, starting with her work on film, Stötzer reappeared on the Stasi’s radar.  After the closing of her unofficial “Gallery in the Hallway” in 1981, and following her second attempt to exhibit her paintings in 1984, the Erfurt police and the Stasi kept track of Stötzer’s activities.  For this first attempt in 1984 she was punished with a small fine of 50 Marks.  By 1987, as she continued to venture toward a quasi-public space in the arena of filmmaking, the authorities intervened when she stepped directly into the public sphere. The authorities did not seem to care about the films themselves, most likely because they contained neither plots nor dialogue—Stötzer’s Super 8 camera was not equipped with a microphone.  However, in March of 1987, at which time she had seven films to her credit, Stötzer received her second, more substantial fine of 200 Marks for the crime of scheduling a screening at a cinema in Erfurt, which the police stopped from happening.

None of this persuaded her to curtail her artistic activities.  Stötzer was determined to continue her collaborative work with the Frauengruppe.  In response to the fine of March 1987—a clear indication of Stötzer’s confidence and relentless spirit—she wrote the following note to the women: “Achtung, the new film calls: [bring] Ideas, Sketches, Concepts—indeed, we will proceed . . . Give Gabi K. suggestions before the women’s group meeting on April 29, 1987.”[viii] Stötzer has written about the pluck these women had: “the women had to be infected with my way of seeing, with my marginal experiences. It took courage, to work with me, but this brought forth a special form of warmth or happiness even after the filming—like being in search of the other in oneself” (Stötzer 1996, 76).  Thus a penalty and public censure failed to halt Stötzer’s and the Frauengruppe’s work; the relatively low fine—and lack of imprisonment—may even have served to encourage them (i.e., the risk of showing one’s art was worth such a small fine). And as the note Stötzer wrote implies, their collaborative work continued.  The sense of private accomplishment the women achieved through the collaborative films spurred the expansion of these women’s visual artwork into a series of moving images; and thus their live, performance art was born. In the summer of 1988, Stötzer, Monika Andres, Förster, Kyselka, and Heyner–after having worked on eight films together, boldly invited other women in Erfurt to participate in a self-made fashion show under the social safeguard of the “Erfurt Church Days.” The creative concept began as a collective act and resembles the previous film project, as Förster says, “each woman sew[ed] her own illusion, her dream” (letter to author, Sept 2005).  The Frauengruppe used this semi-public space for a display of the women’s talents, and the show featured fifteen women who sewed and modeled the items displayed—mostly inventive dresses and pantsuits in colors and shapes that were unavailable for purchase in GDR stores.  The women gave the event the simplistic title “Fashion for Women by Women” (Mode für Frauen von Frauen) (See figure A.)  As with the photography and films, this first fashion show provided a certain amount of gendered protection in that the women were ‘just sewing clothes’ and not claiming to be making art. 

The women designated the event as a “fashion show” as opposed to an “art exhibition,” and they even sold some of the outfits through the subsequent auction.  This emphasis on fashion enabled the Frauengruppe to attract many women who may not otherwise have been willing to participate had the affair been about art.  Merely one year after her latest public fine, Stötzer did not shy away from confrontations and censorship; rather, she tucked her aspirations into a women-centered project that they—the women in the Frauengruppe and the Erfurt functionaries or censors—did not call art.  Not yet.

As they experimented with self-expression within the framework of the fashion show, the women’s understanding of their own work changed and, as with the films, they moved toward collaborative art, in that they produced the art work—here the outfits and costumes within the larger fashion show—collaboratively.  It was during the unstable political climate in the summer and fall of 1989 (peaceful political protesters regularly filled the streets in the neighboring city Leipzig, beginning that previous May), that the women enhanced their visual displays by adding costumes with masks and dresses made from recycled materials.  Some of the masks contained political undertones, such as the “Nachrichtensprecherin” (Female News Anchor) whose face was covered by a metal plate.  The Frauengruppe fashioned a new title for their hodgepodge happenings, now calling them “fashion-object-shows.” Using a bricolage technique—putting together what was ‘at hand,’ such as fabric, cloth, newspapers and garbage bags, Stötzer and the women together shaped and created singular designs that were otherwise not ‘at hand’ or available to purchase in the GDR. They cut symmetrical and asymmetrical lines into dresses and forged masks out of mesh, wire, paper, and wool. The socially critical use of materials ‘at hand’ came in the forms of dresses made out of plastic yoghurt containers and out of the thin cardboard Coca-Cola containers, with aluminum soda cans attached—such recyclable items had not previously been available in the GDR. This latter outfit drew popular attention and carried the title, “Latin Corset.” (See figure B.)

When the fashion-object-show moved to a public library, the Stasi no longer looked the other way. At the group’s second fashion show (now called a fashion-object-show), the Stasi held off the ticket-holders from being able to enter this city-owned library turned performance space.  Perhaps the beguiling poster for this June 1989 event—showing an abstract face with one

eye, a tooth-filled open mouth, a jagged arrow and the futuristic title “Avantfemme”—made the authorities look closer than their previous simplistic idea, ‘it’s just women sewing clothes.’ (See figure C.)  Beyond the ticket- holders not being admitted, there were no other direct consequences for the women performers; this lack of punitive action remains another sign of the changing times in the months before the Berlin Wall was opened.  Eventually Stötzer added readings of texts to the fashion-object-shows on stage; in this way the fashion-object-shows grew into the group’s first performance art pieces, which they then called literary performances. These performances relied less upon the outfits than upon a mingling of moving bodies, colors, and language.

It is not just the new materials used that marked the transition from photography and film to performance art, but the women’s common effort behind the fluid images and the fact that they brought these images to a live stage.  This development occurred against the backdrop of the unparalleled historical and political change that marked the end of the GDR. The Berlin Wall was opened on November 9, 1989, and soon thereafter, in early December, members of the Frauengruppe became the first citizens to storm the Stasi offices in Erfurt. As Stötzer became much more politically active during this time, she gave up the artistic control she had exercised in editing the photo series and the films, and opened up the control and planning to the group. This change occurred in response to her experience of the artistic concert of bodies on stage, which spoke to her belief in “mechanisms of liberation” through art (Stötzer-Kachold, 1993, 36).  And without the Stasi presence in the GDR after December 1989, the women had open access to all stages and could perform freely.

Together the Künstlerinnengruppe planned and choreographed the simultaneity of events within the fashion and fashion-object shows, which anticipated the group's performance art pieces as well as Stötzer’s more innovative writing.  The texts within Stötzer’s 1992 publication, grenzen los fremd gehen [without borders, going astray], were written during the influential and busy years of political change, travel, and collaborative performance art.  And instead of a rebellion, as in her 1989 publication, zügel los [unbridled], these texts contain calls for action and for women to explore, experience, and change the world. In the program to a 1990 exhibit by the (then called) Künstlerinnengruppe, Stötzer foretells of the Kunsthaus Erfurt:

What will come is a higher sensibility and rigorousness of the outer world, because [it has been] group-immanently experienced and lived out [ . . . ]. What will come and can come is a workplace for women in art—away from the lonely monuments and toward democracy and patience for the other, for the others, for the development of woman into Woman in the public space. [It is] a search for truth and for finding beauty as a value and not as a corrupt means of calculation, which brings woman under the instrument of another’s power. What will come is a woman who becomes aware of her power and makes it sensual. (Kachold, 1990a)

 

In the 1992 collection of texts, grenzen los fremd gehen, Stötzer also describes her vision of female agency, which reflects the intense subjectivity and self-expression of so many of the Künstlerinnengruppe’s performances:

there must be innately female contents, energies and strengths

that have not been reflected in the forms of communication

of the last 2000 years

[ . . . ]

but the self-reflection of a woman is also a coming to terms with life

first the space in us must be expanded

in order actively to enter the outside realm (Stötzer-Kachold 1992, 138).

 

As the national politics rapidly turned toward re-unification (the majority of German citizens voted to re-unify East and West Germany in March 1990), the women in the Künstlerinnengruppe decidedly contained their energies within their local region and within the realm of art where they could influence change and continue to collaborate with one another. In May 1990 they formed the official entity “Kunst-Kultur-Kommunikationszentrum, e.V.” [Art-Culture-Communications Center, Registered Association]. The women of the Künstlerinnengruppe then applied to purchase a badly maintained inner-city building in Erfurt, in which they installed an on-going art project in its empty rooms. After superficial repairs, they opened a coffeehouse on the fourth floor, coincidentally named Café Rapunzel, to the public in March 1991; at this time they were legally allowed only to have this fourth floor space on a rental basis. When they finally purchased the entire building in 1992, they moved the café to the first floor, showcased a gallery on the second floor, and kept a space for fashion and textile workshops on the third floor. In addition, a small office on the second floor contains the Kunsthaus Erfurt archive.  The entire house would still have to be completely renovated, which the women started in 1993.

The group’s transition into an established art group and into the realm of performance art was rapid, as the Kunsthaus Erfurt archive details. From 1988 to 1994 the Künstlerinnengruppe appeared in thirty-eight fashion-object shows—which the women called fashion-performances as of 1991—and twenty-two literary performances. As described above, the first fashion show was in 1988, and already one year later the group followed with five more events. In 1990 they gave four fashion-object-shows and four literary performances. Then in 1991 they doubled that number with sixteen stage appearances—five of which were labeled performances, the remaining eleven were fashion-object shows. In 1992 the group had fewer appearances—four fashion shows and seven performances—but they sponsored a week-long international symposium on performance in November, the Performerinnenwoche (Women Performance Artists’ Week) in Erfurt. In the following year, 1993, the group focused on performance art; they had six fashion shows but they appeared in eleven performances—the largest number of individual performance pieces in the Künstlerinnengruppe’s history. The considerable increase in performances was a direct result of the Performerinnenwoche. But in 1994 the number of performances recorded in the Kunsthaus Erfurt archive drops to two; there are no more records of collaborative performance art by the group after 1994. This sudden decline in stage appearances happened for two main reasons: Stötzer and Monika Andres left Erfurt; and Stötzer and painter Verena Kyselka chose to focus more on their individual artistic work and stopped working on the collaborative performance art.  Details from the international symposium on performance art, which follow below, allow for a further exploration into the Künstlerinnengruppe’s collaborative art.

The fashion shows and fashion performances initially grew into literary performances through additions of material and changes in format, not necessarily through a change in purpose or even an adequate comprehension of performance art, its history or its theory.  Uninformed of other movements in conceptual art, Stötzer and the women of the Frauengruppe simply started expanding their fashion shows into performances, by changing the format and adding voices. They were performances and not ad hoc events. As Förster states, each performance was “strictly choreographed according to a plan that was created by the group” (letter to author, Sept 2005).  Yet the famous names of other conceptual art groups, such as Fluxus or Viennese Aktionismus in the 1960s, the ground-breaking work of Pina Bausch and her Tanz Theater in West Germany in the 1970s and 1980s, or even the feminist performance art and films of Valie Export in Vienna in the 1960s and 1970s, remained unknown to Stötzer and thus to the Frauengruppe (personal conversation, June 1998).  The only influence they had from contemporary performance art was one smuggled album, America, by Laurie Anderson, which Verena Kyselka received from a relative (personal conversation, December 1997).

The planned sequence of events of a Künstlerinnengruppe Exterra XX performance often focused on free association, self-expression and on individual actions; thus the performances did not distinctly correspond to historian RoseLee Goldberg’s significant discussion of performance art as “a way of appealing directly to a large public, as well as shocking audiences into reassessing their own notions of art and its relation to culture” (1998, 8).  Certainly the women no longer appeared as models who systematically returned to the stage in new outfits; rather, in the group’s performances most of the women were on stage at the same time and some interacted with each other, for instance, repeating a gesture or miming one another; others had little or no direct interaction with their co-performers.  Within the structured plan of events, in which the music signaled changes, the women could move however and perform whatever they wanted, according to Stötzer’s imprecise description: “each woman creates her own task and transports this task outward through a substantial moment of an essence that lies hidden within her” (1992b, 8).

The women artists’ theoretical knowledge of their work with performance art reached its pinnacle during the week-long interactive symposium these women held in the yet un-renovated Kunsthaus Erfurt, November 14–22, 1992.  Verena Kyselka, after a performance workshop in Spain earlier that year, took the initiative and invited sixteen female performance artists from France, the Netherlands, the US, Brazil and around Germany—plus any interested participants from Erfurt’s community. Along with the twelve to fourteen current members of the Künstlerinnengruppe, this large group interacted on the topic of performance art and—even without knowing of Goldberg’s work—questioned and reassessed how performance fit into their notions of art. The book Multimedialistinnen (Multi-media artists)(Kyselka and Stötzer, 1993) was published as a record of this unique symposium.

The goals of this symposium were not only for the Erfurt performers to witness international performance art, but to enlarge each participant’s understanding of performance art.  Stötzer wanted performance art to consist of intentional effort but also be a part of one’s way of life, as she states here: “Art is a word and a way of life [ . . . ]. Art is a means to play out our lives and make them transparent, even in a temporally accepted role” (1992b, 8–9).  Yet two other principal scholars of performance art suggest that this complex field should focus on the individual body and its conscious, social awareness (Carlson 1996) and should be a meeting point of politics and art (Martin 1990). The Künstlerinnengruppe’s lack of clear reflection about their society in the performances illustrates one limitation of the group; but after November 1992 they made progress toward more specific social involvement in their art. 

The visiting artists’ site- and context-specific work about the former GDR becoming part of newly re-unified Germany during the Performerinnenwoche greatly influenced the women of the Künstlerinnengruppe and the results were profound. Although they continued to perform their popular fashion-shows five times in 1993, the group’s innovative work intensified as the women created at least six distinct and new performance pieces.  The titles of four of these carry unambiguous resonances of the socio-political landscape their art previously avoided: “Once upon a time . . .,” at the Kunsthaus, Erfurt; “Stasi Problem,” at the Main Post Office, Erfurt; “Relic of Germany Greets Rusted Germany,” in Kassel; and the performance for the opening of the outdoor, city-wide exhibit “Rifts/Cracks,” in Erfurt. These titles speak to how the women associated—among other things—their relatively powerless position in the newly re-unified Germany with their confidence and ambition.

Their ambitions and confidence were tested, in their most political piece, the “Stasi Problem” performance in January, 1993.  This performance was unannounced and took place in a public space that connects all social classes.  Standing in Erfurt’s main post office on a weekday, Stötzer and Förster read the names of official and unofficial Stasi collaborators who worked in Erfurt. Three other masked performers moved amidst the people, standing in line at the post office, and pretended to eavesdrop on them as these names were read; in essence this performance reconstructed the constant and omnipresent condition of surveillance that the Stasi used to maintain control over people.  In an interview five years after this piece, several of the performers recalled how unnerving the performance had been for them and declined to discuss it thoroughly (personal interview, May 1998). What has already become a popular topic for historians, the Stasi story in the GDR, remains a difficult topic for the victims—like these performers—to relive. Even though their six or seven subsequent performances in 1993 are noteworthy for their distinctiveness and originality, none of the remaining performances in their repertoire included such a contemporary and controversial topic. Instead Stötzer and the women moved into the realm of the abstract. For example, they performed as if each woman represented an element of nature in “The Birth of Fire,” June, 1993, and they entered a fantasy realm in “Nymphs, Elves and Goddesses,” December, 1993.

The rousing week of interactive performance that the symposium provided, influenced each of the women in the Künstlerinnengruppe and conversely led to the group’s eventual demise. To paraphrase Verena Kyselka, the women in the group did not know much about performance art; the more they learned [e.g., about performance art theory and its history], the more they realized how difficult it was to work with so many different people at once and with their previous naiveté (personal conversation, December 1997).  The group worked hard on new performances after the international symposium. Individually the women excelled artistically after the symposium—for instance, Stötzer’s 1992 book, and Kyselka’s 1994 book of her art, Dschungelgöttinnen [Jungle Goddesses], and as the Kunsthaus Erfurt drew so much of their talents and energies into the administration and maintenance of the gallery and the café, the women in the Künstlerinnengruppe faced the renewed and now critical difficulty of scheduling and of being creative with so many people and so many conflicting schedules; plus there was the comprehension—after the symposium—that their art should also articulate a social awareness. The individual women in the Künstlerinnengruppe may have realized that at least one line of their manifesto had a twofold meaning—one meaning which did not advance the group effort: “Individually women are good but together they are mystifying” (Kyselka and Stötzer 1993, 3).  They also stumbled upon the difficulties of collaborative performance art and why so many performance artists worldwide work alone and not in groups.  

Stötzer’s collaborative work within performance was in doubt even as early as 1993—which was one of the Künstlerinnengruppe’s most successful years. Only four months after the riveting Performerinnenwoche, and as a clear example of her movement away from collaborative art, Stötzer states in March 1993, “I only want to write now. That’s it.” (Dahlke 1997, 318). This transition remains surprising when one reads a quote of Stötzer’s published a few months earlier, in December 1992, that resides firmly within a context of many women working together: “We have placed our feminine laughter up against the seriousness of the GDR period and now against the ‘Wendezeit’ [time after the Fall of the Berlin Wall]. This made us relatively active and self-confident and gave us the strength to buy a house—even though most of us are single mothers or artists, and are not worthy of bank credit—and to make art applicable and considerable” (Stötzer 1992b, 8).  But due to her success as a writer, as well as the problems she had trying to keep the Künstlerinnengruppe organized, she decided to leave Erfurt and focus on her writing.

One example of her turn away from what she saw as the laxity of the Künstlerinnengruppe’s collaborative art can be seen in the 1995 conference she organized, called “Crystal-Sugar: Seeing/Speaking Conference.”[ix] The subtitle of the conference demonstrates Stötzer’s intended focus, “The Image of Women in Contemporary Literature and Art.” Under the listing of her presentation in the brochure, Stötzer defines herself first as a writer and second as an illustrator.  By limiting her visual art to the realm of drawing and illustrations in this particular label, “Zeichnerin” (Illustrator), Stötzer avoids the oft repeated and much more general word, artist, which she had used to describe herself before this time.  This change in Stötzer’s self-description coincides with her change of mind regarding collaborative art.  The conference brochure lists the speakers as German literary scholars, art historians, philosophers, directors of galleries, as well as authors and one painter. Thus, although she still recognized the creative independence she had in using the spaces of the Kunsthaus Erfurt, Stötzer’s focus in organizing this symposium was of an academic nature, which noticeably reflects her turn away from the increasing lack of focus in the group toward a deliberate and scholastic tendency.  It is this disciplined voice for which she also strives in her most recent writing—for instance in her memoir about her year of imprisonment published in 2002, Die bröckelnde Festung [The Crumbling Fortress]. 

Overall one must take into consideration the socio-political changes around Stötzer and these women in the years 1992 to 1995 in order to comprehend the dissolution of the performance group.  Specifically, the influence of re-unified Germany’s free market economy, its focus on the individual, and the absence of the GDR’s real-existing-socialism, within which many people had lived cheaply, changed Stötzer’s ideas of collaborative art greatly; they changed so much that she identified herself more and more as a writer (individual, independent) than as an artist working in a collaborative group of women.

Although numerous reasons contributed to the end of the Künstlerinnengruppe’s collaborative performance art, the epic—and ultimately successful—task of renovating the Kunsthaus Erfurt, which was finally finished in 1994, turned out to be the main cause for the end of the group’s collaborative work.  And instead of needing to create an alternative meaning for themselves or to beautify life through art, as they did during the last years of the GDR, the women of the Künstlerinnengruppe in 1994 successfully established a space for art, and they have fewer boundaries to their individual discoveries than they had under the GDR regime.  After 1990 and German re-unification, these women artists can travel, explore and be consumers in the world.  But the end of these women’s collaborative art does not mean their collective of artists no longer exists.  Of the original founders of the Kunsthaus Erfurt, three women are still actively working there:  Monique Förster is the archivist and administrator; Tely Büchner runs the gallery; and Verena Kyselka, an extremely active, multi-faceted, and successful artist, still lives in Erfurt and keeps her ties to the Kunsthaus Erfurt through a studio there.  The café, remains a ‘hotspot’ in Erfurt’s nightlife, but is no longer run by the women in the Kunsthaus Erfurt.  One would hope the individual excursions might also lead these women back to collaborative art, where they certainly made a substantial mark.  Fortunately the Kunsthaus Erfurt continues to extend its innovative ideas into the Erfurt community, as its 1999 exhibit, “Licht-Türme” (Light-Towers) demonstrates:  five women artists[x]—among them Verena Kyselka, projected slides and videos upon five medieval towers within Erfurt’s inner city.  This wash of color and images created an historic and interactive nighttime event:  medieval towers become magical art works with 21^st century technology.   The women of the Kunsthaus Erfurt still know how to invigorate their city.