Creatures of the natural world are a source of fascination for the German artist Raphaela Vogel, who frequently includes animal parts both natural and synthetic – cow, goat, lion, and elk hides, fragments of leather, toy dinosaurs, horse statuettes – in her ambitious multimedia installations. She often employs videos made with sophisticated editing techniques and digital technologies including scanners and drones, which are at times accompanied by screeching, dark metal soundtracks. In creating her obscure and enigmatic worlds, Vogel’s environments suggest myths, relics, and ritual sacrifice, drawn both from art history, literature, and the viewer’s imagination. Vogel’s manner of experimentation with the transfigured body appears in The Milk of Dreams in a colourful large-scale anatomical model of a penis, afflicted in cartoonish detail with numerous diseases and conditions – prostate and testicular cancer, genital warts, erectile dysfunction – as spelled out in a series of explanatory plates. Sitting atop a carriage, the sickly sculpture is led cheekily by a fleet of white giraffes, as if an aristocrat or member of an imagined royal family. Placed in the domain of the fantastical, the humour of Vogel’s composition proposes another effect: the fragmented body in Vogel’s vision has experiences all its own.
Madeline Weisburg
