Artist Statement: The Deconstructed Pose
Project: Drag Collages by Tim Lienhard
This portal presents artistic works by renowned cultural journalist and filmmaker Tim Lienhard in his role as performance artist and drag persona.
The collages shown here are acts of socio-political deconstruction. Through the deliberate exaggeration of classical pornographic codes – symbolized by grotesque props such as transparent plastic bowls as breast prostheses and the provocative staging of the male body in fishnet stockings – Lienhard breaks with conventional viewing habits.
Artistic Intention:
The works are intended as a satire on the hypersexualization of our society. The visible penis, often shown in a relaxed state, does not function here as a tool for sexual stimulation, but as a demystified object within an artistic performance. The collages use extreme exaggeration to expose the absurdity of gender roles and media-driven body norms.
Legal Context & Youth Protection:
These works enjoy the protection of artistic freedom (Art. 5 Para. 3 Basic Law). Although the depictions are explicit, they follow a purely aesthetic and socio-critical logic that explicitly distinguishes itself from advertising or commercial pornography.
Tim Lienhard on Collages and Performance Art
These collages are an attack on a society that loves bodies – but taboos sex. They stand against it. They show what is hidden.
Older men are denied sexuality. Their desire is considered embarrassing, disgusting, or simply non-existent. The aging male body should ideally not be visible – if it is, then only as a desexualized shell. Desire in old age is not accepted as human, but defamed as a transgression. This is not morality. This is disempowerment.
Drag queens are degraded to a decorative surface. The penis is pushed away, taped over, erased – not only physically, but symbolically. What remains is an aestheticized figure without desire: consumable, depoliticized, defused. The drag queen may be seen – as long as she neutralizes her gender and defuses her sexuality. Visibility here becomes a disciplinary measure.
This desexualization is no coincidence. It fits perfectly into a time when Artificial Intelligence avoids, neutralizes, and erases sexuality from images – out of fear of errors, scandals, transgressions. What is sold as respect is, in truth, a new form of censorship. Prudery from Silicon Valley. The body may be shown, as long as it does not assert desire. As long as it does not claim gender.
We live in a pornographic present: nakedness is omnipresent, self-exposure is a commodity, the body is content. And at the same time, sexuality is tabooed, defused, erased. Gender is made invisible – precisely in a culture of total visibility. This is the central contradiction of our time: maximum bodily presence with simultaneous sexual emptiness.
These collages refuse this emptiness.
They bring gender back into the social space.
They insist that the body is not neutral.
That it desires. That it may be desired.
Even in old age. Even in drag. Even beyond norms.
The body is political.
Gender is political.
Desire is political.
These works demand visibility not as decoration, but as an imposition.
They show the body with what is systematically taken from it: its sex, its lust, its ambivalence.
Exhibiting here means: resistance.
Showing means: refusing to be neutralized.
As long as that is still possible.
A plea for the body – with its age, its lust, its ambivalence.
For gender – not as a scandal, but as a reality.