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| Tabea Blumenschein, photographed by Wolfgang Müller, 2018 |
Meeting artist, actress, model, author, filmmaker, costume designer Tabea Blumenschein was not without trepidation, her looks being so impressive and her reputation too. But Tabea was soft-spoken. She had prepared little sandwiches in triangle shapes and let me pick out a drawing in carefully arranged folders.
Yet, on that Friday afternoon, September 11, 2020, when Wolfgang Müller and I visit Townes, we are talking about a Tabea who no longer is. It is the day of the exhibition opening "Tabea Blumenschein: Matriarchat Marzahn,” which she had planned with Fetisch and Shoko Kawaida before she unexpectedly died in February. The exhibition title is also the text on one of the drawings that she did for Townes where she had become a regular over the past year.
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| Drawing by Tabea Blumenschein for Matriarchat Marzahn exhibition at Townes |
It was Shoko Kowaida who sought contact with Tabea Blumenschein after creating a dress together with Claudia Skoda’s Fabrikneu, which will be shown in the upcoming Claudia Skoda show at the Kunstbibliothek. The Goldenshowerbondageeveningdress is hand knit in mohair so that it makes you feel hot and tight. It is inspired by a collaboration of Claudia Skoda, Rosie Müller and Tabea Blumenschein on the EP Die Dominas of 1981. “Did Tabea like the dress?” I ask. “She tried it on immediately,” Shoko Kowaida smiles.
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| Goldenshowerbondageeveningdress by Townes / Fabrikneu |
Going through the selfies, Shoko Kowaida draws my attention to Tabea’s lipstick. Pink was her favourite color. Bubblegum pink. It is also the color of the big roses that are in the gallery space when I return a few days later. A visitor pointed out to Shoko Kowaida that these roses are quite special. They are called “Barbie Roses.” Shoko laughs about the coincidence. Tabea would be so thrilled. She loved kitsch or as Dolly Parton said it, “it cost a lot of money to look this cheap.”
But Tabea Blumenschein might have had platinum blond hair, a preference for pink, and a love for dressing up, she would never be a doll. A magazine article in Mode und Wohnen, 1983, reports in a four page spread about Tabea Blumenschein’s many transformations from a Brigitte Bardot to a vamp or a Bayern child: “And tomorrow she will appear in a dress of ankle length and made of hair. Like in the chic ‘Paris bar’. With a red turban out of which the artistically matted hair protrudes in prickly tufts. Around the waist and shoulders heavy cartridge belts, around the calves perforated leggings and on the feet dice cups. ‘It’s going again,’ she says softly, ‘in more rebellious direction.’”*
By then, Tabea Blumenschein had turned into a cult figure. She worked together with Ulrike Ottinger on several films for which she designed costumes and in which she acted, most famously in Bildnis einer Trinkerin of 1979. And she herself made super-8 films, of which many are now rare to find or completely lost. In 2019, Das Haus der Tödlichen Doris, which I run together with Wolfgang Müller, showed her collaboration with Udo Kier in Sportliche Schatten. Kunst in Krisenzeiten, 1982, which was recovered from its archive.
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| Tabea Blumenschein's Crucifix-Dress for Die Tödliche Doris, 2017 |
In 1980, Wolfgang Müller of Die Tödliche Doris had become aware of Tabea Blumenschein. The German offshoot of Andy Warhol’s Interview published her costume designs with the motto “Fashion is World History without Politics.”* Her sketches were so out of tune with the current beauty standards that the editorial staff called to ask her: “Are you serious?” That is what Tabea Blumenschein told Wolfgang Müller when he met her in the Westberlin café Anderes Ufer where he was working at the time.
Tabea Blumenschein became, as critic Chris Bohn put it in the New Musical Express of 1983, “Doris’ most radiant child, a peroxide beauty called Tabea Blumenschein who works as a high society model, designer and face around town when she is not servicing Doris’ needs.” Still in 2018, she contributed with 31 illustrations of sex tools to the reinterpretation of Die Tödliche Doris’ first cassette in Reenactment. Das Typische Ding, consisting of the humming sounds of dildos and vibrators.
Since 2014, Tabea Blumenschein had been living in one of the Plattenbauten of Marzahn in the outskirts in the East of Berlin. Glamour and imagination hadn’t left her there. In the documentary Glow about the Austrian model Irene Staub, she is standing at her window, looking outside: “This is a suburb of Paris, those huge dark rain clouds, these high rises, and over there the park… One wouldn’t know that one is in Berlin. In Paris one could stand and see just the same (laughs). At least, that’s what I think. Il pleure (sic)…”*
Glamorous people had always surrounded Tabea Blumenschein. Fetisch recalls being sixteen in 1979 and meeting Tabea at her apartment, together with Nico, Iggy Pop and David Bowie, who lived just around the corner in the Hauptstraße in Schöneberg. Patricia Highsmith is said to have been desperately in love with her for years. Martin Kippenberger was fascinated. And when the John Waters actress and NY City it-girl Cookie Mueller visited West-Berlin, she reported: “I fell in love with Tabea Blumenschein, a woman who was Berlin’s underground celebrity film queen.”*
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| Aloha Knickers, underwear series by Townes / Tabea Blumenschein |
The show must go on. Shoko Kawaida is launching a latex underwear series that she designed together with Tabea Blumenschein. Also a series of T-shirts is in the making. As Tabea Blumenschein commented in the Irene Staub documentary: “I’m not going to wear black, because something black is now just too sad.”
For updates on the underwear series, check Shoko Kawaida. For a visit to the exhibition at Townes until October 30, make an appointment at: info@townes.de
* "Und morgen wird sie in einem knöchellangen härenen Gewand erscheinen. In der schicken “Paris Bar” etwa. Mit rotem Turban, aus dem kunstvoll verfilzte Haare wie stachelige Büschel ragen, um Taille und Schulter schwere Patronengurte, um die Waden durchlöcherte Leggings und an den Füßen Knobelbecher. 'Es geht,' sagt sie sanft, 'jetzt schon wieder mehr zum Rebellischen hin.' In: “Sie spielt die Kleider, die sie anzieht”, in Mode und Wohnen, 1983.
* "Mode ist Weltgeschichte ohne Politik”