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WIP [FOTZEPOLITIC]

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WIP [FOTZEPOLITICS] developed over the long lockdown of 2020-21, drawing inspiration from vintage dress patterns, radical painting, makeup compacts, protest signs, and the DIY attitude of the 90s RIOT GRRRLS. Playing around my studio in reconstructed hand-painted garments, silhouettes and vignettes emerged in costume drama photo sessions staged and styled with my teenage daughter.

 

This collective body of work borrows its title from a song by Cocteau Twins, opening with the lyrics “My dreams are low, they are sick and must be addressed, they are young girls’ dreams.” As defined in the Cocteau Twins glossary “Fotzepolitic” is: 1 n. [Germanic, vulgar] Literally “cunt politics” 2. Using, exhibiting, or proceeding from policy; Judicious. 3. Crafty; cunning. 

 

A crafty self-reliance sets the tone for a feminist Kammerspiel for the 21st century, inspiring us to fail better, more glamorously, more celebratory: celebrate the young girl on the ruins of civilization – celebrate the old hag that is the ruin of civilization!

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THE RIVER IS OIL]

PROGRESS IN WORKS

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All your favorite APOCALYPSTICK colors, now in one handy travel size palette! 

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Le Confort Moderne has the pleasure to announce the publication APOCALYPSTICK by Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist and writer Lise Haller Baggesen (DK 1969) to accompany the artist’s first major solo exhibition in France.

 

The richly illustrated publication focuses on two of Baggesen’s main bodies of works – Mothernism and WIP[FOTZEPOLITIC] – bookending ten years of production centering on intergenerational feminism, alternatively combining D.I.Y fashion, painting, science-fiction, disco, and care work, with body politics and philosophy, to fly a feminist freak flag, cleverly and tenderly inscribing its own story.

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For full text in PDF, click the image to the left.

Hear it straight from the Horse(girl)s mouth! 

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In her second solo exhibition in France, ChromAmour: A Metamorphosis, presented at Le Bicolore, Lise Haller Baggesen explores the transformative power of color. Curated by Kathy Alliou, the exhibition invites visitors to rediscover a lost beauty in a damaged world and to imagine new shared futures through the lens of color.

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Lise Haller Baggesen shares the reflections and inspirations that have shaped her work, as well as the meaning behind the title ChromAmour. She examines the connection between motherhood and creativity and revisits how the 2020 pandemic led her into a period of introspection in her Chicago studio. Together with her teenage daughter, she began experimenting with second-hand clothing and textiles. This collaboration gave rise to a series of fabric paintings that explore the transformative power of color and its ability to shape new, shared futures.​

APOCALYPSTICK

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WIP[FOTZEPOLITIC] was presented in the exhibition APOCALYPSTICK, at Le Confort Moderne (F) summer 2023.

 

The following is an excerpt from a Q & A with the exhibition's curator, Kathy Alliou.

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KA: Formally speaking, how would you describe your work in APOCALYPSTICK?


LHB:  [...] the work references and pays tribute to a gaggle of art historical ancestors, from the French rococo fluff of Watteau and Fragonard, through the immense and immersive American Color Field Painting of Sam Gilliam, Morris Louis, and Helen Frankenthaler (Mountains and Sea) and up to the mark-making of the 60s and 70s in movements such as the “Fundamentele Schilderkunst” (NL) and “Radical Painting” (US) — I guess as such, in the French context, you could sum it up as a Frivolous Supports / Surfaces… 

 

KA : Adding “frivolous;” it is funny to associate a regime of affect with the Supports/ Surfaces movement, affects that are in principles foreign to the radicalism of the avant-gardes, when this movement was precisely one of the products of the change in society that lead to the events of May 68 in France. There is, however, an echo between the crisis of society and the crisis of painting or pictoriality. And any crisis leads to affects. I guess we will come back to the concept crisis again, later on, but on the topic of  frivolity: what is the specific pleasure with working on textile?

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LHB: When I started working on the prom dresses – a typical American apparel, easily dismissed as kitsch – I found the polyester satin to be a super satisfactory surface. Silky smooth (like skin) but also very absorbent — it turns out it can hold a lot of paint (like makeup.) I love how there is already a color saturation and shine to contend with; in that way you paint “in reverse” from shiny to matte, into something that is more subtle, muddled, and troubled.
The “residual paintings” – the little canvases which accompany the dresses – are, in reality, their palettes inscribed with text fragments, lyrics, slogans, silliness – whatever took my fancy in the moment – and sometimes embossed with glitter or pearlescent powder; they reference protest signs and makeup compacts in equal measure. It is funny how it is only now, writing these words, that I realize the American term “canvassing” refers to, literally “the systematic initiation of direct contact with individuals, commonly used during political campaigns. Canvassing can be done for many reasons: political campaigning, grassroots fundraising, community awareness, membership drives, and more.”

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[...] WIP[FOTZEPOLITIC] is characterized by an air of frivolity – you might describe these ensembles as a “community of carefreeness.” (Not to be confused with carelessness!) As the title suggests it is a stab at an intergenerational feminism, which is not stagnant, but a perpetual Work-In-Progress. I wanted to emphasize that this, the care-work of feminism, is not a chore; I wanted to infuse it with a little “whistle while you work” attitude — as Emma Goldman put it: “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution!”

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Chromamour:
Une Métamorphose

​As above, so below;​ WIP[FOTZEPOLITIC] was also presented in the exhibition Chromamour: Une Métamorphose at Le Bicolore, Maison du Danemark, in Paris, France during the spring of 2025.
 
The following is an excerpt from a new Q&A, with Kathy Alliou reprising her role as both Curator and Interviewer.

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Kathy Alliou: "ChrOmAmOur", why?
 

Lise Haller Baggesen: The title ChrOmAmOur indicates that our collective chromophobia is over. We’re sick of being sick, we’re tired of being tired, we’re skin-hungry for the human touch, for the brush stroke. We’re ready for the color to return to our cheeks and to our streets. 
 

KA: ChrOmAmur presents as a landscape inhabited by chrysalis-forms, interweaving debutante dresses in brilliant hues and a multiplicity of shapes, with pop slogans and song lyrics inscribed in vibrant paintings. Could this embody possible ways of welcoming the worlds to come?


LHB: You were the first to point out to me that the works resembled chrysalises or cocoons, implicating the missing body as a site for transformation. This was an association which I had not yet thought of myself, but the moment you articulated it, it hit me between the eyes like "Duh!"; This is what I was trying to get at all along. Therein lies its transgressive, intergenerational, collective, and utopian potential.


KA: Would you like to tell us where this metamorphosis began?

 

LHB: This shape-shifting body of works first emerged inside the long Covid lockdown. Isolated in my studio and working with the materials at hand (vintage dresses and paint tubes left over from previous projects) new silhouettes emerged, which my daughter and I would stage in impromptu vignettes. I initiated these collaborative photo shoots as a tiny little bubble of our own, a cocoon if you like. There was a literal transformation, a metamorphosis, happening inside of us, in our bodies, alongside with everything that was going on in the world around us. In the very literal sense, the shredded "cocoons" – the costumes—are a both a remnant and a representation of that.


KA: Your sculptures are polymorphic, modular, dynamic, "almost alive", attractive. It is all about love. Do you share bell hooks’ idea that "Awakening to love can happen only as we let go our obsession with power and domination?"   


LHB : Hahah… you and your trick questions! At first, I was reminded of Sting’s pop hit "If You Love Somebody Set Them Free." I always found it kind of smarmy and disingenuous. It is so non-committal. But what if, instead, we turned the premise around and asserted that "letting go of our obsession with power and domination can only happen as we awaken ourselves to love." I think now we have something we can work with. It could be very pragmatic, like in Belle and Sebastian’s "Write about Love:"


I know a spell/

That will make you well/

Write about love/

It can be in any tense/

But it must make sense.


KA: Just like Love, we know that Color is political. How does this resonate with the exhibition?
 

LHB: Our response to color is emotional; it opens (us) up (to) the possibility of the profane, the ridiculous, and the sublime. In contrast of "things as they are" represented in stark black and white, color represents the utopian promise of "things as they could be." 


KA: This world as it should be, far from being a sweet dream, is based on an awareness of what the world lacks, and therefore on the hope that it can changed, be transformed...


LHB: So, it’s a world building project. Which means it is imaginary, transitory, modular, and instable. Which in turn means that it can be whatever we need it to be.

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