A security guard once tried to refuse them entry to the Louvre telling them that We don’t want people like
A security guard once tried to refuse them entry to the Louvre, telling them that “We don’t want people like you. The German artist Georg Baselitz ran away from them when Eva tried to give him a postcard at the opening of an exhibition of his work in Berlin. Other people looked at us very strangely.”It is not only mountaineers who react strongly to them. “Last summer,” says Adele, in her slightly accented English, “we went high into the Swiss mountains. “Oh no, very nice female shoes,” replies Eva, shocked that I could imagine otherwise. It shows them having breakfast on a campsite in Italy, dressed in silky red blouses and black skirts They are on holiday, but their “art” continues “And what do you wear to go walking? Hiking boots?” I ask. In the past three years, they have accepted several all-expenses-paid invitations to Japan, as well as travelling widely through Europe in a camper van (which is – surprise, surprise – apparently a work of art in its own right).During our first meeting at their apartment, a home video is playing in the kitchen.
They fly at least twice a year to New York, where they are so well-known in art circles that many believe they are based there. They do not spend that much time in Berlin, preferring to travel for at least six months of the year. Other reactions range from scowls to sniggers to a look of complete perplexity on the face of a little girl.Needless to say, they were at the museum’s opening in November, and its founder, Erich Marx, has sent them a photo which he took of them at the Venice Biennale. A little later, a Parisian couple come up to pose with them and a group of Germans, who recognise them, come over and ask why they are not dressed in their favourite colour, pink. Even before I have got my entrance ticket, a young woman from Amsterdam has pointed her camera at them. We are wandering among the Warhols, Keith Harings and Cy Twomblys.
On our second meeting, at Berlin’s new Hamburger Bahnhof museum, they are also happy to tell me that they met on a football pitch in Italy. What they themselves tell me is that they are both trained artists who studied painting, sculpture and electronic media. In fact, it is a single sheet of paper giving their names, heights and vital statistics.Karl-Heinz Schmidt, the editor of the German art newspaper, Kunst Zeitung, tells me that he believes that, before they started travelling to art parties, Eva was a painter and Adele a fashion designer But he’s not sure. “They come by often for exhibition openings,” I was told at Raab Galerie, “but they only ever make small talk.” Even elementary information such as where they were born is impossible to get hold of At the end of our meeting, they hand me their “biography” There are no surnames, no dates of birth. We talk about the future.”All the Berlin gallery owners I contacted knew of their existence, but none could fill in the blanks in their past. Ask them how long they have been showing their faces in the art world and they playfully say: “That’s a very good question, but we never talk about time or the past Old people talk about the past.
Ask them their ages and they’ll tell you that they come out of the future. This is almost certainly due to their refusal to talk about anything to do with the past. Strangely, however, nobody seems to know that much about them. “They just stare at them.” Indeed, the photo which accompanied the article in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica about the opening of the last Venice Biennale was not of a conventional work of art or of one of the official artists; it was of Eva and Adele wearing flamboyant silver wings.Their picture has appeared in publications all over the world, including Chinese and Russian dailies, and they love nothing better than to talk about themselves. “Nobody looks at the paintings when they are at an opening,” a Parisian friend of mine assures me. So far, they have an archive of more than 200 snapshots from as far afield as Australia and Japan.In most museums and galleries, they effortlessly upstage the art works on show.
On one side is a picture of them, on the other the legend “You have just made a photo of Eva and Adele, hermaphrodit [sic] twins in art.” It also asks recipients to send them a copy of the photo. After smiling for the camera, Eva hands the photographer a postcard from her clutch bag. “What they are interested in is not simply themselves,” says Turcat, “but the way that other people look at them.” They encourage art enthusiasts to take their pictures. They manage to highlight the uncertainty of sexual boundaries and our lack of identity.”They themselves see the most important part of their work as being their interaction with the public. Then, on a social level, art today should offer an answer to at least one question which society as a whole poses.