Why Lulu Makes Me Draw Her

When I listened to Berg's opera Lulu (synopsis) for the first time I was deeply moved by the sensitivity, violence and eruptive compassion of the multi-layered and secretive language of the music.

Observing my own fascination I discovered the paradox of an apparent vulgarity on the surface of the plot on one hand and beneath it a depth and subtlety that seems tangible to me as a possible and powerful treatment of the structure of male projection. Lulu has been often described as the dangerous type of the seductive Female who archetypically pulls men 'inevitably' into her/their eclipse. I don't look/listen at/to her imagery in this way, it is not the imagery of her body that seduces me at first.

Rather, I feel that she - a product of the male mind- carries (with her staged gestures of seduction, the leather or cocktail dresses, the nighties, guns, flowers and relicts of a childhood that never took place) the secret shame of a man with his confusion about a vague knowing that the other, the female side of himself, starts to rebel, to disturb from within. So she merges with a common phenomenon: the part of the establishing process of gender images that extends the gap between the genders into alienation. The violence and malediction against the female (here the particular image of Lulu on different levels), is as well an act against the inner female just as Jack The Rippers killings in the opera can be seen as a rebellion against the gap which has evidently become an abyss – he acts from within the abyss, after having already lost a feeling for its existence.

By making these drawings and analyzing why I am drawn to the subject I had to ask myself these questions: how do I deal with ‘her’ myself and how does she seduce me into her world that is mere reflection, and how does she communicate with me out of my images with the image/me she has created in order to perceive herself.

In the opera the Countess Geschwitz is the only figure that loves Lulu against all odds, ‘truly, madly’. After her decision to go to university and join the womens’ rights movement she is murdered like Lulu by Jack the Ripper. But she has been given (by Berg) the last words: Lulu mein Engel in Ewigkeit…/ Lulu my angel in eternity…. and it seems as if only she is in possession of the passwords to transcend the image - maybe because she had to learn to transgress before what had been expected of her as a woman. Like Lulu she functions as an image, but her words and the underlying ecstasy of the music suggest that her death, and the opera’s end, won’t affect her. Only she is allowed to discover and to own the concealed truth of the concept of the ‘Lulu’ figure or her/his/my own desire.

The following drawings are a selection of a work in progress, an expression of my admiration for Alban Berg and his treatment of the subject and, as Henry James put it, they ‘should ... plead its case with some shyness’.