Ausstellungsdetails (52)
Noële Ody
‘Embrace the shit’
21er Raum at 21er Haus, Vienna
15 January — 23 February 2014
Noële Ody makes sculptures. They often look like minimalist, even industrial structures and follow a logic that lies beyond pure aesthetics. Their functional appearance is not meant as a sculptural gadget, but is a central element: most of them process-oriented, they always seek to involve the spectator and both adapt to situations and create new ones.
Ody’s exhibition in the 21er Raum looks like a waiting room. It is a room within a room: a railing surrounding the walls, benches in the middle with a book on them, and a drink vending machine. The double railing encircles the room, ending in two oversized hands on either side of the entrance. This work shares the title of the exhibition Embrace the Shit and literally embraces both the other works and the visitors. Ody created the installation especially for the exhibition, making everything except for the nuts and bolts by hand and then painting it in shiny black lacquer. The drink vending machine is called “Hallo” and has its own story to tell. Ody hired it and installed it in the sculptors’ studio at Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts in Kurzbauergasse, providing drinks for people working there. Similarly, at Ve.Sch Kunstverein in Schickanedergasse she often placed it in the exhibition space at evening events. Now in the 21er Raum, it serves both as a pedestal for two hands and a machine so visitors can quench their thirst. Benches titled Coretto al Banco have been placed beside the machine. Ody made these for the restaurant Victus und Mili in Neustiftgasse. Placed upon them there is a Book of Bills documenting the financial side of the exhibition.
Based on the many “Book of + noun” titles, this amasses receipts for the work the exhibition required without passing any judgment. The railings with the giant hands were produced and the bills paid for from institution funds. The benches were commissioned and are under suspicion of being labeled “design.” The beer vending machine was bought on hire purchase and paid off during the exhibition. It represents one extreme: the real deal. You put money in and a drink comes out – arguably the most direct of transactions. The benches, too, are the result of a direct transaction based on work rendered paid at an hourly rate. Only the economic status of this product is uncertain, as it could have been manufactured more cheaply and its character as both functional object and artwork becomes even more blurred by its integration in the exhibition.
These conceptual backgrounds in production conditions accompany the exhibition and are juxtaposed with the sculptor’s approach to problem solving. The relationship of form to space and people and the surface fetish, which can scarcely be overlooked, are characteristic sculptural qualities in Ody’s work. It is just as important to mention how the artist plays with visitors, offering them an incentive to stay longer and appreciate cycles intrinsic to art.
What is art? What does artistic work mean and how do artists define themselves through this? These are questions that Noële Ody neither can answer nor wishes to. She calls her exhibition Embrace the Shit, dons a party hat and does a dance for us.
Noële Ody was born in Starnberg, Germany, in 1982 and lives and works in Vienna. A selection of recent exhibitions: Bussi Baba, Elephant Art Space, Los Angeles; Grundfrage, CRAC Alsace, Altkirch (2013); caprihosenzeit (with Gabriele Edlbauer), VMU art gallery 101, Kaunas; Wir treffen uns am Abend, Galerie Kamm/COCO at Rosa, Berlin (2012).
Exhibition catalogue:
21er Raum 2012 – 2016
Edited by Agnes Husslein-Arco and Severin Dünser
Including texts by Severin Dünser, Simon Dybbroe Møller, Paul Feigelfeld, Agnes Husslein-Arco, Lili Reynaud-Dewar and Luisa Ziaja on exhibitions by Anna-Sophie Berger, Andy Boot, Vittorio Brodmann, Andy Coolquitt, Simon Dybbroe Møller, Iman Issa, Barbara Kapusta, Susanne Kriemann, Adriana Lara, Till Megerle, Adrien Missika, Noële Ody, Sarah Ortmeyer, Mathias Pöschl, Rosa Rendl, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Anja Ronacher, Constanze Schweiger, Zin Taylor, Philipp Timischl, Rita Vitorelli and Salvatore Viviano
Graphic design by Atelier Liska Wesle, Vienna/Berlin
German/Englisch
Softcover, 21 × 29,7 cm, 272 pages, numerous illustrations in color
Belvedere, Vienna, 2016
ISBN 978-3-903114-18-0
Martin Walde
‘From Moment to Moment’
Kunstraum Dornbirn, Austria
11 April — 2 June 2013
What immediately strikes you as you enter Kunstraum Dornbirn is an enormous funnel. It is black and hangs from the ceiling, tapers off towards the bottom, where its opening points to a small plate. And this plate stands on another construction that dominates the room: a platform that takes up a large part of the exhibition floor. It is just as high as the windowsills of the industrial building, which is thus given a pavilion-like character.
If you proceed to the walk-on floor level, other elements of the exhibition become accessible. Through a trap door a video projection can be seen; objects hang from long poles; an indefinable substance lies half-unwrapped in plastic foil on a pedestal; black amorphous objects quietly send up a rustling sound, while orange ones waft through the room. But what is all this good for?
The black plastic funnel, for instance, was a consequence of the following observation Walde made: “In a labyrinthine corridor at the airport in Rome, I see something disconcerting but at the same time deeply functional. A funnel-shaped, glued-together industrial foil construction is attached to a ceiling segment of approximately 650 square feet. Under this construction stands a small container, into which the debris and dust collects that directly trickles from the ceiling through the funnel and into the container. [...] Therefore, the construction is a hyperbolic funnel. Such funnel shapes are part of the standard vocabulary of bionic forms in nature.” Walde hypothesizes that there are no qualifiers behind the function of dust conveyance other than simple material logic. He therefore modifies only slightly what he observed and plans his own version of an irregular hyperbolic funnel. It not only tapers off, it even forms a vortex much like the ones you see whenever water is siphoned off. The fact that this functionality is reproducible is very important to Walde, especially in order to assure a margin of interpretation if the work should be set up under another name, in another context, and with different meta-functions and characteristics.
In Dornbirn the work has the title Stardust and thus leads to a number of associations and evokes certain narratives. Is it really dust from the universe that is collected in the soup plate under the funnel? It reminds you of Grimm’s fairytale of “The Star Money” while you try to discover the origin of the dust on the ceiling. And the presence of the dish transforms the wooden floor, elevated about 50 inches, into a set table at which we can eat whatever Mother Earth provides. However, what remains in any – also future – version of the installation is a metaphor that allows the hyperbolic funnel to be recognized as a universal model for singularities in a diagram language, i.e., for space warp and for the depiction of dark matter and black holes. Thus it represents an abstract view into the cosmos, a reach for the stars. “Pure Science Fiction,” as Martin Walde thinks of Stardust, “because from a singular space, matter has no escape.”
The door sunk into the middle of the floor looks like a trap or a dead end. It stands open and steps lead downwards. You can sit on the steps and watch a video: From Moment to Moment, the work that also gave the exhibition its name. You see shots of a summer meadow. The camera is handheld. It moves in slow motion and always onwards. Not wielded in a linear fashion, it follows no continual choreography. At the same time there is perceptible movement in the meadow, occasioned by the wind, the change in light, and insects. What at first seems static, with time becomes visible as a gradually changing segment of the meadow. Since the mid-1990s, Walde has worked continuously on a series of film takes. What they all have in common is the attempt to compile sequences of almost imperceptible camera movement without cuts over a period of time that is as long as possible. Against the dominant narrative pattern of our time that no longer pauses but only hastens from action to action, Walde holds up the prospect of a seemingly timeless progression “from moment to moment.” Yet, the work is not only about deceleration. As it subverts our habits of looking and media-watching, we can digest what is processed in a much more differentiated way. The unfocused ramble across the meadow thus becomes a meditative journey into a microcosm and, in relation to Stardust, to a reflection on what is infinitesimally small in a gigantic space.
You also feel relatively small standing in front of the next work located alongside the trap door. Flowers loom 30 feet high. But it is only a stylized bouquet and the blossoms are made from waste material: plastic bags, sticky tape, blown up latex gloves, foil, and so on. The stalks are carbon fishing rods; they weigh little and are highly elastic and stable. But why are they mounted on steel springs? You quickly discover that the springs allow you to pull the rods down easily. When you let go, they move back up on their own. The higher up the weight is at the top, the gentler and slow the movement. If the weight is too heavy, the stalks remain grounded by the leverage. The title of the work, I-Point, alludes to the concept of “information points,” (i.e., information centers). The work was planned for outdoors where, in public places, it may also have a signaling effect. Messages and slogans, lost-and-found articles, or objects of barter can also be brought into circulation in this way, and the flower bouquet can become a communication center.
The interaction lends form and character to the artwork and expands its spectrum. A series of black, oval objects spread around the floor has a similar effect. The objects emit a soft rustle, and cables jut out of them. Here, too, you soon notice that you have to pick them up in order for something to happen. Nothing happens unless you walk around with them: With a bit of luck you find a position that is both agreeable and allows the reception of a pleasing radio program. Walde has covered small radios with silicon, therefore making the tuner unworkable. If you want to hear something clearly, you must actually take matters into your own hands and physically search for a reception. Here, too, the artist arouses our curiosity and desire for play.
As early as 1992, Walde had given in to a strong urge and produced Forever sticky, forever wet. For this he crumpled up a silicon puddle measuring several dozen square feet. He used then-standardized industrial substances and, by deliberately misinterpreting the instructions for use, hoped to arrive at unexpected results. By ignoring the package insert, a physical state between fluid and solid was produced. And removing the wrapper and its natural drapery yielded an object that might recall a flower, but which, just like a flower, could not perform any standardized function (except an aesthetic one). Forever sticky, forever wet is part of the series of Hallucigenia Products. Within their framework, the material properties and their uses are manipulated in a way that, through calculated serendipity – the observation of something which was not originally sought and turns out to be a chance and happy discovery – results in quite new possibilities for their usage. Hallucigenia, an animal species similar to velvet worms that lived 500 million years ago, triggered a long-lasting discussion on its physical appearance. For his series Walde took over the “principle of parallel fictions of a creature with different manifest forms,” which also yielded many “abortive results,” which in turn “found an equal place among the Hallucigenia Products, since Hallucigenia themselves are creatures whose possibilities are not exhausted by being right or wrong,” as Walde remarked.
The last items in the exhibition are also the results of a “wrong reaction” of specific kinds of material. Alien Latex is made up of neoprene, latex, air, and helium, but the helium and air supplies gradually lessen. The sun and the atmospheric conditions cause the material of the weather balloons to deteriorate. The skin becomes porous; the balloons go increasingly limp, until in the end they only creep along. At this time they are taken down from the rods and begin their second life. As indefinable creatures they crawl through the exhibition, each bit of air and each little bustle breathes life into them. Likewise dependent on interaction, they scrape out an existence as a planned, but quite simpatico, obsolescence.
Since the 1980s, Martin Walde has been engaged in expanding the concept of art and of nature. In his exhibitions we can immerse ourselves in microcosms and macrocosms, experience the transformation of objects, and witness the metamorphoses of materials. The floor level is not only a platform for Walde’s art, but also a stage for us viewers. With From Moment to Moment, Walde goes beyond merely assembling art objects: He creates a trail to follow, along which we complete his artistic work – via playful processes that often recall natural ones. Martin Walde transforms the Kunstraum into a garden full of cultures that strangely resembles an artificial world.
Martin Walde, born 1957 in Innsbruck, lives and works in Vienna. More information on him here. The exhibition catalog can be ordered here.
Vittorio Brodmann
‘Ups and Downs’
21er Raum at 21er Haus, Vienna
20 November 2013 — 6 January 2014
Currently, the odds for painting are anything but favourable: art is presently negotiated post-ideologically, post-categorically, and post-classificatorily. It is produced in a post-avant-garde fashion and in post-studio practice. “I’ll be off then,” art whispers to modernism while it checks on Facebook where the town is being painted red. So what has happened? The belief in an artist’s genius already disappeared from the scene in the 1960s, and since the late 1990s it has become extremely difficult to agree on least common denominators when it comes to ideas and ideals. Instead, the motto is “anything goes”. In any event, it now takes the greatest effort imaginable to discuss the individual art disciplines separately from each other – artists stopped limiting themselves to a single medium, let alone a permanent studio, a considerable while ago. Under these prerequisites, one would assume, the endeavour of painting should long have been dismissed.
Yet today the very contrast between our daily lives, permeated with digital media, and the physical world seems to make painting attractive again. It is no longer expected to represent reality and is therefore above any suspicion of manipulation. And, what is more, it has remained direct and authentic. It is the actual proof for the existence of an acting subject: it seems that through it one is able to catch a glimpse of a paint-smeared artist’s psyche. As nostalgic as this understanding of painting may be, the desire for closeness appears to be all the more real. Nevertheless painting seems to embody all the resentments one might harbor towards art today: it is like a poor parody of art. These are the circumstances under which art is produced nowadays, especially that of Vittorio Brodmann.
His paintings are small, rather not meant to be viewed from a distance, and they depict anthropomorphic creatures. Would it be necessary to assign them to a genre, it would probably be fantasy – if only because of the colors. His characters walk, lean, sit, look around, stand upright, and recline within a picture’s space, with figurative and abstract elements creating an equilibrium between the respective pictorial worlds. The artist produces little narratives with his protagonists making use of the space of color as a stage for totally ordinary postures.
An exaggeration of everyday life to the degree of dysfunctionality is the specialty of daily cartoons and comic strips. It can hardly be overlooked that Brodmann has appropriated their language. His artistic practice relies on comedy and is potentially linked to slapstick. Situation comedy always requires a space for action – in Brodmann’s art, this starts with equating the figures depicted with painterly gestures and extends as far as performance, which the artist increasingly allows to accompany his pictorial work. He has thus begun to enlarge the sum of gestures referred to as painting.
Within the pictorial space as such, though, he limits himself to painterly narration. His anthropomorphic figures are character heads one readily associates with certain traits. The colors also leave room for speculative conclusions as to the states of mind of the figures and the artist behind them. The artist suggests and imitates emotional worlds that encourage interpretation.
Brodmann plays with the allegations made towards expressive painting and with the expectations towards the medium in general. He exaggerates the gestures of painting in order expose them as projections. He does not paint stereotype paintings, but uses clichés from the everyday life of art as a meta-motif.
The representation of creatures in combination with the display of gestures related to them results in pictures that do not give an atmospheric impression, but rather appear to be characters themselves, with their own peculiarities. They are complex types presenting the various aspects of their personalities. In fact, they are nothing but the wider circle of friends one primarily perceives via postings on the Internet.
In the end, Brodmann’s fantastic images subsume the essence of what painting is capable of accomplishing today: they are friable in their presentation of reality and at the same time representative in their reference to a system of visual signifiers.
Vittorio Brodmann, born in Ettingen (Switzerland) in 1987, lives and works in Vienna. Most recently, his works were shown at the Leslie Fritz Gallery, New York (2013), the CEO Gallery, Malmö (2013), the Galerie Gregor Staiger, Zurich (2012), Graff Mourgue d’Algue, Geneva (2012), the Halle für Kunst Lüneburg (2012), the Kunsthalle Bern (2012), the Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (2011), the Kunsthaus Glarus (2010), the Galerie 1m3, Lausanne (2010), and New Jerseyy, Basel (2009).
Exhibition catalogue:
21er Raum 2012 – 2016
Edited by Agnes Husslein-Arco and Severin Dünser
Including texts by Severin Dünser, Simon Dybbroe Møller, Paul Feigelfeld, Agnes Husslein-Arco, Lili Reynaud-Dewar and Luisa Ziaja on exhibitions by Anna-Sophie Berger, Andy Boot, Vittorio Brodmann, Andy Coolquitt, Simon Dybbroe Møller, Iman Issa, Barbara Kapusta, Susanne Kriemann, Adriana Lara, Till Megerle, Adrien Missika, Noële Ody, Sarah Ortmeyer, Mathias Pöschl, Rosa Rendl, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Anja Ronacher, Constanze Schweiger, Zin Taylor, Philipp Timischl, Rita Vitorelli and Salvatore Viviano
Graphic design by Atelier Liska Wesle, Vienna/Berlin
German/Englisch
Softcover, 21 × 29,7 cm, 272 pages, numerous illustrations in color
Belvedere, Vienna, 2016
ISBN 978-3-903114-18-0
Mathias Pöschl
‘you must learn’
21er Raum at 21er Haus, Vienna
17 April 17 — 12 May 2013
Black culture, hip hop, basketball: these are the elements from which Mathias Pöschl forms his exhibition you must learn at the 21er Raum. The title derives from a song by KRS-One, who also uses the pseudonym The Teacher in calling out for struggle against the discrimination of Afro-Americans. Gil Scott-Heron also makes an appearance in the exhibition; as one of the inventors of spoken-word performance, he was known for concerts reminiscent of lectures on social issues. The title of a 1992 song by Eric B. & Rakim has also been integrated in the exhibition: Don’t sweat the technique is a reminder not to waste time on the details. Right next to it is a picture of shoelaces, whichappear three times in the exhibition as a unifying element. They are red, black and green after the colors of the Back-to-Africa movement founded by Marcus Garvey in the 1920s. These are also the colors dominating the exhibition as a whole, while the shoelaces themselves reference another figure: Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf. Beginning in 1990, he played basketball in the NBA under his original name Chris Jackson, which he changed upon converting to Islam in 1991. The basketball player became more widely known on account of his refusal to stand for the American national anthem, and also on account of his style. According to sport theorists, he played like a white man – allegedly whites, in contrast to blacks, play less creatively but more precisely, because they tend to do more of their training alone. Abdul-Rauf trained alone because he has Tourette syndrome. And it was on account of this condition that it took him forever to tie his shoes. Pöschl is dealing with issues like time and order in disorder, a parallel to the Minimal Art of the 1960s and to Robert Smithson’s concept of entropy. This artist appears as a quote at many points, and he is set in relationship with sociopolitical content, for instance when Pöschl forms a (basketball) hoop out of Smithson’s Heap of Language, or when he relates the theme of mirrors and glass to photos of shot-out storefront windows in the context of the Black Panthers. The artist lets the organization’s female icon, Kathleen Cleaver, collide with Wade Guyton’s Color, Power & Style, while also stylizing pictures of the Nation of Islam in allusion to the reduction of their member’s surnames to an X.
Mathias Pöschl employs characteristic forms of Minimalism in describing a subcultural system. He translates into sculptural qualities ideas like striving against entropy, perfectionism, the development of structures, pivot leg and free leg, enduring to raise endurance, or the methodical doing-one-thing-after-another of training practices. Mixing the political and the cultural, he makes from them the entity of a literally social sculpture. And yet at the same time he goes against the grain of Minimal Art’s pretenses relating to the absolute. The attempts at producing order miss the mark in the end, dissolving into an unstoppably advancing entropy.
Mathias Pöschl, born in 1981, lives and works in Vienna, where he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts until 2008. His recent exhibitions include: FAcES, Burgenländische Landesgalerie, Eisenstadt (2012), Galleri Ping-Pong, Malmö (2011), Fine Line, Georg Kargl Fine Arts, Vienna (2010), Confligere, Kunstverein Schattendorf (2010), heute geschlossen, morgen geöffnet, swingr, Vienna (2006).
Exhibition catalogue:
21er Raum 2012 – 2016
Edited by Agnes Husslein-Arco and Severin Dünser
Including texts by Severin Dünser, Simon Dybbroe Møller, Paul Feigelfeld, Agnes Husslein-Arco, Lili Reynaud-Dewar and Luisa Ziaja on exhibitions by Anna-Sophie Berger, Andy Boot, Vittorio Brodmann, Andy Coolquitt, Simon Dybbroe Møller, Iman Issa, Barbara Kapusta, Susanne Kriemann, Adriana Lara, Till Megerle, Adrien Missika, Noële Ody, Sarah Ortmeyer, Mathias Pöschl, Rosa Rendl, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Anja Ronacher, Constanze Schweiger, Zin Taylor, Philipp Timischl, Rita Vitorelli and Salvatore Viviano
Graphic design by Atelier Liska Wesle, Vienna/Berlin
German/Englisch
Softcover, 21 × 29,7 cm, 272 pages, numerous illustrations in color
Belvedere, Vienna, 2016
ISBN 978-3-903114-18-0
Susanne Kriemann
‘RAY’
21er Raum at 21er Haus, Vienna
2 October — 10 November, 2013
"In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni" is not the title of this exhibition, but of the series from which the works on display at the 21er Raum derive. The phrase is a palindrome, meaning the same when read from left to right or right to left: “We wander in circles at night and are consumed by fire.“ The exhibition, too, makes us move in circles, among several lines of narrative.
It is obvious that most of the photographs on view were not made during Susanne Kriemann’s residency in Vienna. They show some vertical reddish rock, the interior of a cavern, and a landscape that seems more or less American. The pictures were taken during a research trip in Texas. The archive of images resulting from this journey is huge, whereas the selection made for the exhibition has been narrowed down and is extremely focused: five landscape views piled on top of each other, showing the region around Barringer Hill. Kriemann’s pictures were taken with the vision in mind of shooting the images of the Barringer Hill photographic collection again in our day. In 1887, a number of minerals were discovered in the region, including fergusonite and gadolinite, both of them rare-earth types. When the Westinghouse Electric Company acquired the patent for Nernst lamps in 1901, the mine became the chief supplier of glowers required for these lamps and made of the rare-earth minerals in question. By 1910 Nernst lamps were already out of date, with light bulbs having found their way into most every household. In 1937 the mine was flooded with water, which now extends beyond Barringer Hill as Lake Buchanan. In the meantime the demand for rare-earth minerals have increased more than ever before. In LEDs they are once again used for emitting light, and neither LCD screens nor plasma displays can do without them. Currently, China is in control of the market for rare-earth minerals and in 2011 delivered 97 per cent of the global production. In the USA, mine sites are presently being redeveloped in order to reduce the degree of dependency on China for the urgently required minerals.
Kriemann herself employed a technology based technique on rare-earth minerals in order to solarize her landscape images – the light of her iPhone in the production of her photographs. For the picture of cave walls, which creates an anthropomorphic impression, LED spotlights illuminating Longhorn Cavern near Barringer Hill were implemented.
One of the larger pictures was not taken in Texas, but in the Museum of Natural History in Vienna. To create it, gadolinite, a radioactive and rare-earth mineral, was used in combination with large-format film, in a process that lasted about 20 days. The artist describes the result as follows: “The stone looks as if it were flying towards you directly from the cosmos. You can truly lose yourself in this image. The cave landscape, on the other hand, looks as if you were able to recognize something but the longer you look the less you know what you see. It’s as if the moment of confusion has prompted you to move in two directions: in the first, you don’t know what you see and try to define it and in the second, you know exactly what you see but get lost and eventually know nothing at all.”
The last picture in the exhibition was also taken during the Texas research trip. It is a digital photograph showing a monolith of red granite. It occurs naturally in the place where it was installed: near Amarillo Ramp, the last land art project by Robert Smithson. In 1973 the artist died in a plane crash when surveying the site, and his wife, Nancy Holt, had the rock installed in this very place.
Smithson borrowed a term from physics in order to use it for societal and universal phenomena: entropy. According to Smithson, the second law of thermodynamics is the fact that it is easier to lose energy than to conserve it, so that the degree of disorder (in social sciences also referred to as uncertainty) is constantly increasing. He sought to create moments between decay and renewal or chaos and order while everything is subjected to continuous change.
Entropy also meanders through the exhibition: a mine that is now a lake and a lake that is also a mirror and simultaneously represents the potential of a mine cavern to turn into an eroded landscape with rocks transforming into a kind of sculptural process. That Smithson has slipped into the exhibition metamorphosed into a rock underscores Susanne Kriemann’s almost mystical approach to the subject of entropy. The rare-earth minerals constantly change their appearance and meaning as the exhibition progresses with the invisible radiation of the stones turning into a metaphor for the radiation of the screens by which we are surrounded today wherever we go, and for the many things we only believe to see, but actually do not.
Living in a permanent exchange of information leads to a constant verification of potential knowledge, which is as repetitive as the impressions of the photographs from the artist’s series, all of which resemble each other closely, although they are not the same. Similarly, the phrase “we wander about in circles at night and are consumed by fire” has different connotations in different languages. “While we stroke the skin of light bodies in order to roam the realms of information, we permanently look into the light. What is in between is glass, so that the devices are actually showcases and the images and texts have already been archived and turned into museum exhibits, i.e., they are no longer alive,” Kriemann maintains. We can only hope that entropy will soon be on the decline again and we won’t end up like moths attracted to light.
Susanne Kriemann was born in Erlangen in 1972 and lives in Berlin and Rotterdam. Her works were recently included in exhibitions at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2013), at Arnolfini, Bristol (2013), at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2012), at Kunstverein Braunschweig (2012), at the Kunsthalle Winterthur (2011), at CAG Vancouver (2010), at KIOSK Ghent (2010), at Künstlerhaus Stuttgart (2009) and at the Berlin Biennale (2008).
Exhibition catalogue:
21er Raum 2012 – 2016
Edited by Agnes Husslein-Arco and Severin Dünser
Including texts by Severin Dünser, Simon Dybbroe Møller, Paul Feigelfeld, Agnes Husslein-Arco, Lili Reynaud-Dewar and Luisa Ziaja on exhibitions by Anna-Sophie Berger, Andy Boot, Vittorio Brodmann, Andy Coolquitt, Simon Dybbroe Møller, Iman Issa, Barbara Kapusta, Susanne Kriemann, Adriana Lara, Till Megerle, Adrien Missika, Noële Ody, Sarah Ortmeyer, Mathias Pöschl, Rosa Rendl, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Anja Ronacher, Constanze Schweiger, Zin Taylor, Philipp Timischl, Rita Vitorelli and Salvatore Viviano
Graphic design by Atelier Liska Wesle, Vienna/Berlin
German/Englisch
Softcover, 21 × 29,7 cm, 272 pages, numerous illustrations in color
Belvedere, Vienna, 2016
ISBN 978-3-903114-18-0
‘Sign – Image – Object’
Marc Adrian, Ei Arakawa & Nikolas Gambaroff, Richard Artschwager, Josef Bauer, Martin Beck, Mel Bochner, Marcel Broodthaers, Gerard Byrne, Heinrich Dunst, Jenny Holzer, Lisa Holzer, Johanna Kandl, Michael Kienzer, Joseph Kosuth, Hans Kupelwieser, Thomas Locher, Oswald Oberhuber, Michael Part, Gerwald Rockenschaub, Anja Ronacher, Gerhard Rühm, Allen Ruppersberg, Stefan Sandner, Daniel Spoerri, Josef Hermann Stiegler, Josef Strau, Thaddeus Strode, Peter Weibel, Lawrence Weiner, Heimo Zobernig, Leo Zogmayer
in the context of ‘Collection #3’, 21er Haus, Vienna, 2013
21er Haus, Vienna
21 June — 10 November 2013
A museum collection reflects more than the historical vicissitudes of art purchasing policy: it also brings the programmatic direction of an institution into focus. At the 21er Haus, Austrian art is shown in an international context. Contemporary work is at the center of attention, supported by historical artworks which together with it represent a line of argument for its relevance in the here and now.
In order to make visible the diversity of the museum’s holdings, to rediscover artworks and think toward new relationships, the collection is reorganized at regular intervals. In the third presentation of the collection at the 21er Haus, the artworks are grouped into three areas, each of them centering on three concepts narrating localized histories of ideas that extend into the present.
Under the title ‘Freedom – Form – Abstraction’, works of Austrian postwar modernism are juxtaposed with contemporary artistic positions, demonstrating commonalities in both content and form. A second area directs the gaze toward the blurring of boundaries between ‘Sign – Image – Object’, thereby focusing attention on the structure of reception and its translation into language. Finally, ‘Body – Psyche – Performativity’ addresses social norms and their transgression in art since the 1960s.
The area ‘Sign – Image – Object’ attempts to capture the fruitful moments in which the boundaries between image and sign, writing and language, object and idea are transgressed.
What happens when image and sign collide, both being seen and read at the same time? What happens when an object no longer coincides with the beholder’s idea or mental representation of it? Is an image an object, a space of illusion, or itself a sign? When does a sign become an ornament, and can it completely lose its meaning when it is isolated or recontextualized? Can language be depicted without writing, or does it then remain a mute visualization?
To be explored is the interplay between signified and signifier, in other word between that which labels and that which is labeled, and the ambiguous status of sign, image and object, which has been thematized in art since the Conceptual movement of the 1960s. Not only do these queries address art and its reality; they also direct attention toward the process of perception. Outlines emerge of the ways in which we translate what we see into language, and of the interactions that are triggered in our thoughts by what we have seen.
- 21er Haus
- Marc Adrian
- Ei Arakawa
- Nikolas Gambaroff
- Richard Artschwager
- Josef Bauer
- Martin Beck
- Mel Bochner
- Marcel Broodthaers
- Gerard Byrne
- Heinrich Dunst
- Jenny Holzer
- Lisa Holzer
- Johanna Kandl
- Michael Kienzer
- Joseph Kosuth
- Hans Kupelwieser
- Thomas Locher
- Oswald Oberhuber
- Michael Part
- Gerwald Rockenschaub
- Anja Ronacher
- Gerhard Rühm
- Allen Ruppersberg
- Stefan Sandner
- Daniel Spoerri
- Josef Hermann Stiegler
- Josef Strau
- Thaddeus Strode
- Peter Weibel
- Lawrence Weiner
- Heimo Zobernig
- Leo Zogmayer
»Zeichen – Bild – Objekt«
Marc Adrian, Ei Arakawa & Nikolas Gambaroff, Richard Artschwager, Josef Bauer, Martin Beck, Mel Bochner, Marcel Broodthaers, Gerard Byrne, Heinrich Dunst, Jenny Holzer, Lisa Holzer, Johanna Kandl, Michael Kienzer, Joseph Kosuth, Hans Kupelwieser, Thomas Locher, Oswald Oberhuber, Michael Part, Gerwald Rockenschaub, Anja Ronacher, Gerhard Rühm, Allen Ruppersberg, Stefan Sandner, Daniel Spoerri, Josef Hermann Stiegler, Josef Strau, Thaddeus Strode, Peter Weibel, Lawrence Weiner, Heimo Zobernig, Leo Zogmayer
im Rahmen von »Sammlung #3«
21er Haus, Wien
21. Juni — 10. November 2013
Eine Kunstsammlung spiegelt nicht nur die Geschichte einer oft wechselvollen Ankaufspolitik wider, ihre Präsentation verdeutlicht gleichzeitig auch die Programmatik einer Institution. Im 21er Haus wird österreichische Kunst im internationalen Kontext gezeigt. Zeitgenössisches steht im Zentrum und wird unterstützt von historischen Arbeiten, die gemeinsam eine Beweisführung für ihre Relevanz im Hier und Jetzt darlegen. Um die Vielseitigkeit des Bestandes sichtbar zu machen, Werke wiederzuentdecken und neue Nachbarschaften anzudenken, wird die Sammlung in regelmäßigen Abständen neu aufgestellt. In der dritten Sammlungspräsentation im 21er Haus umkreisen die Werke in drei Bereichen jeweils drei Begriffe, die lokale Ideengeschichten bis in die Gegenwart erzählen.
Unter dem Titel »Freiheit – Form – Abstraktion« werden Werke der österreichischen Nachkriegsmoderne zeitgenössischen Positionen gegenübergestellt und inhaltliche wie formale Gemeinsamkeiten aufgezeigt. Ein zweiter Bereich lenkt den Blick auf das Verschwimmen der Grenzen zwischen »Zeichen – Bild – Objekt« und verweist dabei auf die Struktur der Rezeption und ihre Übersetzung in Sprache. »Körper – Psyche – Performanz« handelt schließlich von sozialen Normierungen und deren Überschreitung in der Kunst seit den 1960er-Jahren.
Der Bereich »Zeichen – Bild – Objekt« versucht den fruchtbaren Moment zu fassen, wenn die Grenzen zwischen Bild und Zeichen, Schrift und Sprache, Objekt und Idee überschritten werden. Was passiert, wenn Bild und Zeichen aufeinandertreffen, zeitgleich gelesen und gesehen werden? Was, wenn ein Objekt nicht mit der Idee oder der Vorstellung, die man davon hat, übereinstimmt? Ist das Bild ein Objekt, ein Illusionsraum oder selbst ein Zeichen? Wann wird das Zeichen zum Ornament, und kann es überhaupt seine Bedeutung verlieren, indem man es isoliert oder neu kontextualisiert? Und kann man Sprache darstellen, ohne zu schreiben, oder bleibt es dann bei einer stummen Visualisierung? Es geht um das Spiel zwischen Signifikat und Signifikant, also Bezeichnetem und Bezeichnendem, und deren ungeklärten Status zwischen Zeichen, Bild und Objekt, der seit der Konzeptkunst der 1960er-Jahre thematisiert wird. Aber mit diesen Fragestellungen werden nicht nur Kunst und ihre Realität verhandelt, sondern wird auch auf den Prozess der Wahrnehmung verwiesen. Dabei wird deutlich, wie wir das Gesehene in Sprache übersetzen und welche Wechselwirkungen in unserem Denken über das Betrachtete ausgelöst werden.
- 21er Haus
- Marc Adrian
- Ei Arakawa
- Nikolas Gambaroff
- Richard Artschwager
- Josef Bauer
- Martin Beck
- Mel Bochner
- Marcel Broodthaers
- Gerard Byrne
- Heinrich Dunst
- Jenny Holzer
- Lisa Holzer
- Johanna Kandl
- Michael Kienzer
- Joseph Kosuth
- Hans Kupelwieser
- Thomas Locher
- Oswald Oberhuber
- Michael Part
- Gerwald Rockenschaub
- Anja Ronacher
- Gerhard Rühm
- Allen Ruppersberg
- Stefan Sandner
- Daniel Spoerri
- Josef Hermann Stiegler
- Josef Strau
- Thaddeus Strode
- Peter Weibel
- Lawrence Weiner
- Heimo Zobernig
- Leo Zogmayer
Philipp Timischl
‘Philipp, I have the feeling I‘m incredibly good looking, but have nothing to say’
21er Raum at 21er Haus, Vienna
28 August — 29 September 2013
“Philipp, I have the feeling I’m incredibly good looking, but have nothing to say,” the exhibition confesses. It presents itself as being superficially beautiful and incidental. At first glance the viewer is faced with a very impersonal scene. Flat screens are arranged in the gallery space, all showing the same video at the same time. The display in this exhibition appears as generic as a shop of electrical gadgets with their row upon row of simultaneous screens, a subject Philipp Timischl has already tackled in earlier works. At the exhibition No interest, no aim, beyond nothing, shown in Frankfurt in 2010, he explored notions of the universally valid and interchangeable, also through the medium of video. The work comprised establishing shots: city panoramas, slow-motion scenes of nature or helicopters flying over skyscrapers that are usually used to provide spatial context in a cinematic narrative. As such shots are the most expensive and time-consuming to produce, stock footage is used in many cases. Timischl isolated shots from the reality show The Real L Word until all that remained was a storyless, interchangeable, hypnotic collage of clips.
The video on the screens in this exhibition now tries to conjure up a similar atmosphere using comparable methods, such as shaky shots of landscapes, blurred details or exaggerated jump cuts. Here, however, it is anything but anonymous.
In fifteen minutes and using rapid cuts it tells the story of a vacation. A plane takes off, flies through the clouds and lands. Timischl goes by bus and meets his injured holiday romance again in front of a hospital. A bus and train journey later: View from a terrace. Legs are dangling in the air. Timischl drives to the beach with his friends. They swim and dive. Over dinner they talk about the video and filming. Later the camera is trained on the artist; he feels awkward and says nothing. A friend reads about the history of the village church. In the car, traffic jam and again the beach. These are followed by shots of the harbor and dinner. A conversation on the beach, a nocturnal walk, a town fair.
This highly atmospheric video is shown simultaneously on the flat screens while stills displaying individual frames from the video have been attached to these using wall mounts. When you watch the video, the sculptures’ images double for the duration of one frame, each time highlighting a specific aspect in the narrative. This deliberately draws the focus of the viewer deeper into what underlies these superficial holiday impressions.
One of these aspects is the relationship between work and life. In the daily professional life of an artist, a role model for contemporary concepts of work and life, these boundaries are not only blurred but seem utterly intermeshed and interchangeable. Even a vacation signifies both rest and activity to the point where in this case it is subsequently transformed into art.
Presenting this in an exhibition space also blurs the boundaries between private and public. Nowadays we often set out to document and present personal moments with an assumed, sometimes anonymous audience in mind. Timischl exalts these moments and compiles them into an allegedly authentic mini-documentary. This privacy creates closeness, yet this is ruptured by the protagonists’ awareness of the power of these freely circulating images and the consequent representative nature of their actions. Sometimes this creates the impression of a scripted reality, a mock documentary that follows a script. It seems as if something extraordinary, some anomaly could appear at any moment; as if the everyday on vacation is in fact a fiction. In spite of this, the images are as interchangeable as the mass-produced screens showing them. They are like an advertisement attempting to convey intimacy and credibility with these emotional, shaky shots.
In the exhibition’s title, the artist distances himself from the previously cited models. It is the exhibition itself that becomes an autonomous person – worried about not being good enough, having nothing more to offer or to say.
Philipp Timischl, born in 1989, lives and works in Vienna. In 2012 he founded the exhibition space HHDM (Hinter Haus des Meeres) together with Daphne Ahlers and Roland M. Gaberz. His works were recently included in exhibitions at Perfect Present, Copenhagen (2013), Galerie Emanuel Layr, Vienna (2013), Studio Lenikus, Vienna (2013), Kunstraum Lakeside, Klagenfurt (2013), ONO Gallery, Oslo (2012), COCO, Vienna (2012), and 68squaremeters, Copenhagen (2011).
Exhibition catalogue:
21er Raum 2012 – 2016
Edited by Agnes Husslein-Arco and Severin Dünser
Including texts by Severin Dünser, Simon Dybbroe Møller, Paul Feigelfeld, Agnes Husslein-Arco, Lili Reynaud-Dewar and Luisa Ziaja on exhibitions by Anna-Sophie Berger, Andy Boot, Vittorio Brodmann, Andy Coolquitt, Simon Dybbroe Møller, Iman Issa, Barbara Kapusta, Susanne Kriemann, Adriana Lara, Till Megerle, Adrien Missika, Noële Ody, Sarah Ortmeyer, Mathias Pöschl, Rosa Rendl, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Anja Ronacher, Constanze Schweiger, Zin Taylor, Philipp Timischl, Rita Vitorelli and Salvatore Viviano
Graphic design by Atelier Liska Wesle, Vienna/Berlin
German/Englisch
Softcover, 21 × 29,7 cm, 272 pages, numerous illustrations in color
Belvedere, Vienna, 2016
ISBN 978-3-903114-18-0
Barbara Kapusta
‘They She We Them’
21er Raum at 21er Haus
23 May — 23 June 2013
They She We Them is a seven-part photo series by Barbara Kapusta, which shows 13 people from the artist’s immediate surroundings. Standing behind the camera, the artist focuses on the gazes, gestures, postures and facial expressions of the protagonists. Formations, configurations and instances of physical contact give rise to a narrative of possible loves, bonds, friendships and professional collaborations.
The artist works primarily with moving pictures between reality and fiction, representativity, directness and presence. In doing so she mixes up the protagonists’ personal stories, endeavoring to make visible the construction, and simultaneously the reality, of fiction. In their conversations, the participants in her filmic and photographic works negotiate the ideals, wishes and conditions of friendship and cooperation, while also repeatedly questioning her idea of collaboration and collective authorship (“One never does things alone,” says Nina in Kapusta’s last film, Amazon, 2012).
They She We also explores the wide field of relationships in which the subject no longer encounters anything objective, where everything is associative and dissolves into the intermediate zone between the mutual and the collective. The protagonists are real people with genuine or possible relationships to one another, be it as friend, sister, ally. They are unusual individuals who cannot be indiscriminately combined into a homogenous group – just as the image of a circle of friends, as a narrative, is always a fiction and a construction.
Friendship is complicated: it demands commitment and is difficult to understand. Here gazes, gestures, spaces and colors form a circle, “the circle of this group, this story that we do not completely know,” Kapusta remarks. “Here we have seven forms of a gesture, a touch… a set of codes,” she continues, whereby “the poses, just like the light and the camera perspective, are extremely intentional. The bodily tension is deliberate, the closeness of the persons depicted is perhaps only imaginary. This is a game with the forms of group portraiture, of togetherness. It also plays with linguistic forms of address. Some of the protagonists address the camera and the beholder directly. They gaze at us, because we have been observing them. But we are not a part of the scene.”
The pictures speak to their viewers. Nevertheless, one is torn between closeness and distance – one can dive into the narrative, but soon enough one is again kept at a distance. Friendships are not something static; they must be actively conducted, and there is a continual movement between giving and taking. A group forms a frame of reference for individuals, and likewise a circle of friends enables someone to step forward from the group from time to time, to step into the focus.
Barbara Kapusta lives and works in Vienna. In 2008 she founded the exhibition space Saprophyt with artist and filmmaker Stephan Lugbauer. Together with artist Katharina Aigner she initiates and organizes video and film programs in diverse contexts and spaces. Recently her work has been shown at 21er Haus, Vienna (2013), Kunstpavillon Innsbruck (2012), Galerie Lisa Ruyter, Vienna (2012), Die Diele, Zurich (2012), Freies Museum Berlin (2012), Unit One Gallery, Beijing (2012), Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna (2011).
In cooperation with / with the support of Clara Zeiszl, Manfred Unger, Paran Pour, Olga Pohankova, Tanja Nis-Hansen, Natures of Conflict, Thomas Münster, Teona Mosia, Marlene Maier, Stephan Lugbauer, Ulrike Köppinger, Miriam Kathrein, Johanna Kapusta, Christina Kapusta, Jessyca R. Hauser, Katharina Aigner
Exhibition catalogue:
21er Raum 2012 – 2016
Edited by Agnes Husslein-Arco and Severin Dünser
Including texts by Severin Dünser, Simon Dybbroe Møller, Paul Feigelfeld, Agnes Husslein-Arco, Lili Reynaud-Dewar and Luisa Ziaja on exhibitions by Anna-Sophie Berger, Andy Boot, Vittorio Brodmann, Andy Coolquitt, Simon Dybbroe Møller, Iman Issa, Barbara Kapusta, Susanne Kriemann, Adriana Lara, Till Megerle, Adrien Missika, Noële Ody, Sarah Ortmeyer, Mathias Pöschl, Rosa Rendl, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Anja Ronacher, Constanze Schweiger, Zin Taylor, Philipp Timischl, Rita Vitorelli and Salvatore Viviano
Graphic design by Atelier Liska Wesle, Vienna/Berlin
German/Englisch
Softcover, 21 × 29,7 cm, 272 pages, numerous illustrations in color
Belvedere, Vienna, 2016
ISBN 978-3-903114-18-0
Andy Coolquitt
‘Bau haus, in the middle of our street,
Bau haus, in the middle of our …’
21er Raum at 21er Haus, Vienna
3 July — 18 August 2013
Andy Coolquitt collects things from the streets. Things that others throw away or leave behind: marginal objects from public spaces and non-sites. The artist categorizes the gathered items either as "somebody-mades" or "in-betweens". "Somebody-mades" are things that somebody produced her- or himself and that might have a function. "In-betweens" are neither something nor nothing and are therefore mostly used as raw material for the production of "legitimate sculptures". But the status of the objects is not really important for their reception; it’s just a decision the artist has to make at a certain point (and sometimes changes after a certain point). What is more important has to do with the individuality of these things and the social world they live in. So these discrete objects are not only fragile and ruptured in their very nature, but also question authorship and their own status. That leads to a precarious situation with their afterlife as exhibits, even though the objects already had something like a publicness in their past life.
So these things are complicated in their complexity as objects. To make things even more complicated, Coolquitt triggers a socio-economic reading of his shows by using aspects of contemporary retail store design to present his collections in museums and galleries. Asked about the aesthetic structures of this strong metaphor, he distinguishes three types: Comme des Garçons (a minimal theater), Urban Outfitters (1950s artist’s loft style) and the Salvation Army (an all-over). They describe three grades of denseness and openness. As in real life, these counterparts also compromise each other in Coolquitt’s shows. And they can be read as complication of the discrete and individual object in the aesthetic field as well as the complication of the individual subject in rural and urban society. For the exhibition ‘+’ at Locust Projects in Miami (2011) Coolquitt constructed an architectural stage setting with four clear plexiglass walls. The plus-shaped footprint of the transparent display for his things thereby created a discrete object and environment at the same time, so their separation collapsed. For ‘no I didn’t go to any museums here I hate museums museums are just stores that charge you to come in there are lots of free museums here but they have names like real stores’ at Devin Borden Gallery in Houston (2012) he presented small sculptures in a vitrine that just consisted of two protective sides while the other sides were open. This gesture of a display turned out to be a sculpture. In ‘chair w/ paintings’ at Lisa Cooley gallery in New York (2012), presentation structure und presented “sculptures” merged even more, as the gallery itself served as platform, being a retail-store-spaced ‘somebody-made’ like most New York galleries from the very beginning. The travelling exhibition ‘attainable excellence’ started out at AMOA-Arthouse in Austin (2012), and included an alley-like way behind a movable wall besides a more open space. That created a more intimate situation with the work while referencing a domestic space, and therefore transforming the objects into subject-like things. For the show’s version at Blaffer Museum in Houston (2012), Coolquitt made wide use of open and dense areas of objects, while placing scrap and leftovers on the floor. He turned the gallery into an entropic space and refered to empty store fronts, that contain an emptiness of abandonment, as opposed to the sterility of a clean well-lighted space.
Andy Coolquitt’s residency in Vienna was defined by limited tools and limited time. His practice of collecting dirty but social minimalisms was successful, but again the question pivots upon the exhibition design. Which form of theatre best introduces this activity? Instead of focusing on the objects, the relationships of colleagues were considered, and he proposed a more active collaboration with the curator. A set of rules was recognized:
"to: art handlers – put the stuff in the room
to: curator – finish the job
to: artist – take the day off
the casual, or first time viewer may reasonably ask ‚what’s the big deal?‘, or ‚isn’t that the way it’s usually done?‘
it is therefore important to impart this one bit of information; that my sculptural concerns of the past few years have revolved around the nature of exhibition
designs, around the domestic environment, and more specifically, the relationship between the discrete object and the mise-en-scene in which it exists so the nature of this exhibition revolves around translation. translation through an interpreter, or what we in the art world like to call a curator, of the residue from a few months of mindless tinkering … of the interpretation of feelings through stuff … of perceptions through material … of the insights that result from the insecurity of dislocation.
for me, as the artist of exhibitions, it is also an exercise in loosing control, of
confusing the roles of producer and consumer, and of creating a possibility for
a new perception.
i’m remembering this reality TV show (room raiders) from 10 yrs ago in which the primary contestant chooses his or her date based upon a visit to the
domestic spaces of three possible contenders …
now i’m also remembering an old punk rock friend back in the early 90’s, whose months-long obsession with a would-be was thwarted upon seeing a stone
temple pilots poster in the bedroom."
Andy Coolquitt was born in Texas in 1964, and lives in Austin. Coolquitt is widely known for a house, a performance/studio/domestic space that he is continuously working on since 1994. Recent exhibitions include ‘attainable excellence’ at Blaffer Museum, Houston; ‘chair w/ paintings’ at Lisa Cooley, New York; ‘+’ at Locust Projects, Miami; ‘Everyday Abstract – Abstract Everyday’ at James Cohan Gallery, New York; ‘Wir treffen uns am Abend’ at Galerie Kamm, Berlin; ‘Sculpture is three-dimensional artwork …’ at Galerie Johann Koenig, Berlin; ‘dwelling” at Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York; ‘Real Estate’ at Zero, Milan; ‘VARIO.US.1’ at Krinzinger Projekte, Vienna.
Exhibition catalogue:
21er Raum 2012 – 2016
Edited by Agnes Husslein-Arco and Severin Dünser
Including texts by Severin Dünser, Simon Dybbroe Møller, Paul Feigelfeld, Agnes Husslein-Arco, Lili Reynaud-Dewar and Luisa Ziaja on exhibitions by Anna-Sophie Berger, Andy Boot, Vittorio Brodmann, Andy Coolquitt, Simon Dybbroe Møller, Iman Issa, Barbara Kapusta, Susanne Kriemann, Adriana Lara, Till Megerle, Adrien Missika, Noële Ody, Sarah Ortmeyer, Mathias Pöschl, Rosa Rendl, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Anja Ronacher, Constanze Schweiger, Zin Taylor, Philipp Timischl, Rita Vitorelli and Salvatore Viviano
Graphic design by Atelier Liska Wesle, Vienna/Berlin
German/Englisch
Softcover, 21 × 29,7 cm, 272 pages, numerous illustrations in color
Belvedere, Vienna, 2016
ISBN 978-3-903114-18-0