‘Instructions for Happiness’
Anna-Sophie Berger, Keren Cytter, Heinrich Dunst, Simon Dybbroe Møller, Christian Falsnaes, Barbara Kapusta, Rallou Panagiotou, Angelo Plessas, Maruša Sagadin, Hans Schabus, Socratis Socratous, Jannis Varelas, Salvatore Viviano, Anna Witt; curated by Severin Dünser and Olympia Tzortzi
21er Haus, Vienna
8 July – 5 November 2017
Happiness is a fundamental human emotion, and every single one of us strives to achieve it in one form or other. This individual pursuit of happiness also forms the cornerstone of this exhibition, but instructions for happiness? Happiness is a very personal thing, and so it seems—quite frankly—absurd to promise that we can get closer to it simply by following a series of instructions. Whatever the truth of the matter may be, this exhibition attempts to approach the phenomenon of happiness from a variety of different perspectives.
Since the dawn of history, humans have sought to discover what it is that makes them happy and at what point they can truly be called a happy person. Although today we have access to a wealth of self-help literature on this very topic, instructions for happiness have existed since antiquity, albeit in a more philosophical form. According to Plato, happiness was to be found in maintaining the balance between the three parts of the soul—reason, spirit, and appetite—and preventing them from coming into conflict with one another. Aristotle saw a fundamental link between happiness and self-fulfillment, as when you do what you set out to do well, you gain a place in society and, at the same time, contribute to its betterment. As far as Epicurus was concerned, an individual’s happiness hinged on strategic abstinence: an individual could gain greater happiness by pursuing their pleasures, taking care not to numb their senses by pursuing desires that exceeded their basic needs. One of these pleasures was the cultivation of interpersonal relationships. ‘Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for’ is one piece of life advice offered by Epicurus. ‘Learn to be silent. Let your quiet mind listen and absorb,’ advised Pythagoras, who was also quoted as saying: ‘The more our minds understand, the greater the blessings received.’
According to the old proverb, ‘every man is the architect of his own fortune.’ We all have a different concept of happiness, and since we each have our own individual needs, the fulfillment of these needs must necessarily be taken into our own hands. Regardless of whether fulfillment is sought in human relationships, the immediate, everyday life, or the beauty of small things, this exhibition seeks to challenge notions of happiness.
Anna-Sophie Berger’s piece, for instance, invites us to build a house of cards and knock it down again; to work with care and precision towards a specific goal and retain the freedom to leave behind the fruit of our labors at the end. In Keren Cytter’s video installation, visitors reflect themselves on the surface of a screen while watching a story of a family, a lover, a beach house, and a lonely boy, and are drawn into a meditative state by a soothing voice. Heinrich Dunst, meanwhile, raises questions about status. The phrase ‘Nicht Worte’ (Not Words) has been written on a page but has then been scored out; ‘Dinge’ (Things) has been written underneath. Is this a double negative, thus meaning words and things? Beneath this image lies a doormat featuring a Piet Mondrian design: it remains unclear, however, whether this mat is anything more than a thing or whether it instead constitutes an image-like thing or a thing-like replication of an image. The photo by Simon Dybbroe Møller shows a hug between a cook and a plumber. Is this a photo about interpersonal needs? It is, if anything, a representation of physical needs, consumption and digestion, the ‘basics’, so to speak. Christian Falsnaes’s sound installation instructs visitors to interact with one another through simple actions that obviously bring pleasure by playfully transgressing social conventions. Barbara Kapusta, meanwhile, invites visitors to make cups and bowls from modeling clay, to use their own bodies in the molding of drinking vessels that will satisfy basic needs. Rallou Panagiotou combines impersonal suitcases with replicas of things associated with happy memories, such as a pair of sandals lost on a beach in the 1990s and a mask—presumably of Medusa—that once hung on the wall of her grandmother’s summer house. Under the motto ‘Sharing is caring’, Angelo Plessas offers us a USB stick with files that can be transferred onto our own devices. These files seem to cover every one of life’s eventualities and include self-help books, music for meditation, and advice on love and spirituality. Jannis Varelas, on the other hand, instructs us to leave the exhibition space and go for a walk around the city. As we walk, he asks us to think about whether or not we want to go back and turn our attention once more to art. Salvatore Viviano asks us to ask ourselves how lonely we feel while listening to Elvis Presley laughing as he sings ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight?’ Maruša Sagadin’s sculpture collection invites us to reflect on life in public space. On the one hand, she scrutinizes the opportunities for regeneration in urban spaces and on the other, the function of make-up and the formulaic conventions associated with it and representations of the self: if lipstick is a building, does that mean my face is a façade? A different question is asked by Hans Schabus and his sculpture: if good luck is a birdie, does that mean it is fleeting? And if that is the case, wouldn’t it be better to build a house for it? Socratis Socratous’s sculptures also deal with forms of flight and refuge. Small islands and bollards, made partially from smelted-down munitions from the world’s conflict zones, symbolize landing sites. The work focuses on migration over the seas and the safe havens that migrants hope to reach. Finally, Anna Witt’s video installation shows a group of people smiling for sixty minutes. Revolving around the commercialization of emotions and the sale of our own feelings, her video becomes a form of endurance test.
With their artworks, the artists shown in this exhibition ask us to follow instructions, respond to constructed situations, use objects to engage with others, or think about a particular theme. The different perspectives on show, in terms of both form and content, reflect the diversity of the artists’s own perspectives on happiness and those of society in general.
Walter Benjamin once wrote: ‘To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.’ In this spirit, we invite you to interact freely with the artworks on display and to use this experience as a chance to reflect on the phenomenon of happiness. One’s own fulfillment is, after all, intrinsically linked to reflecting on one’s own needs and actions, which in turn leads to a conscious, self-determined life and mastery of the ars vivendi, the art of living. For as the sociologist Gerhard Schulze once said: ‘What does one live for, if not for the beautiful life?’
Exhibition catalogue:
Instructions for Happiness
Edited by Stella Rollig, Severin Dünser and Olympia Tzortzi
Including texts by Anna Sophie Berger, Keren Cytter, Severin Dünser & Olympia Tzortzi, Heinrich Dunst, Simon Dybbroe Møller & Post Brothers, Christian Falsnaes, Barbara Kapusta, Rallou Panagiotou, Angelo Plessas, Stella Rollig, Maruša Sagadin, Hans Schabus, Socratis Socratous, Jannis Varelas, Salvatore Viviano and Anna Witt
Graphic design by Alexander Nußbaumer
Photos by Thomas Albdorf
German/English
Hardcover, 22.5 × 16 cm, 128 pages, numerous illustrations in color
Belvedere, Vienna, 2017
ISBN 978-3-903114-41-8
‘Specular Windows – Reflections on the Self and the Wider World’
Marc Adrian, Martin Arnold, Vittorio Brodmann, Georg Chaimowicz, Adriana Czernin, Josef Dabernig, Gunter Damisch, VALIE EXPORT, Judith Fegerl, Michael Franz / Nadim Vardag, Padhi Frieberger, Bernhard Frue, Walter Gamerith, Bruno Gironcoli, Samara Golden, Judith Hopf, Alfred Hrdlicka, Iman Issa, Martha Jungwirth, Jesper Just, Tillman Kaiser, Johanna Kandl, Joseph Kosuth, Susanne Kriemann, Friedl Kubelka/Peter Weibel, Luiza Margan, Till Megerle, Henri Michaux, Muntean Rosenblum, Walter Pichler, Tobias Pils, Arnulf Rainer, Ugo Rondinone, Isa Rosenberger, Gerhard Rühm, Markus Schinwald, Toni Schmale, Anne Schneider, Richard Teschner, Simon Wachsmuth, Rudolf Wacker, Anna Witt; curated by Severin Dünser and Luisa Ziaja
21er Haus, Vienna
22 June 2017 – 14 January 2018
The point of departure of every thematic group exhibition is the spatiotemporal difference of its parts, bearing in mind that they each stem from specific contexts that are more or less explicit in their aesthetic appearance. By bringing together these parts and especially by positioning individual works in specific constellations, inconspicuous connections between them become discernible, contexts of meaning emerge or are reinforced, and occasionally contradictions arise. The fact that the exhibition as a medium has such an ability to generate meaning makes it a space of negotiation where the visual and narrative threads presented are repeatedly picked up, spun further, dropped, or linked with another point by us as observers. Our curatorial selection and combination of works from the collections of the Belvedere and the Artothek des Bundes is motivated by the question of relevance for the here and now with regard to the tensions addressed in the title ‘Specular Windows: Reflections on the Self and the Wider World’: windows mark the threshold between private and public, they are openings that frame our view of the outside from the inside, whereas from the outside we see ourselves reflected in them. Both motifs—the mirror and the window—are known in the fine arts as metaphors for our perception of the world and our perception of self. This view of the internal, the external, and their interaction is the focus of this exhibition. The show opens with works whose topic is, in the widest sense, the subject’s ability to articulate in the face of an ongoing state of crisis. Joseph Kosuth, for instance, quite literally shines a light on a passage of text from Sigmund Freud’s ‘Psychopathology of Everyday Life’ on linguistic slips in times of war, while Muntean/Rosenblum connect the scene of a violent clash between demonstrators and police with the dissonance between individual memory and official historiography, and Anna Witt encourages viewers to ‘Radical Thinking’ and to sketching a different reality with her video installation. The photographs by Bernhard Frue and Nadim Vardag tell of the body’s presence in its absence: Frue’s negative print ‘Samthansen’ makes plain how the shadow economy of sex work leaves its mark on a public park in the form of improvised screens; in contrast, Vardag exposes mechanisms of fetishization by defamiliarizing an iconic image. ‘A Vicious Undertow’ by Jesper Just revolves around the production of desire in mainstream cinema and means to thwart it; Luiza Margan turns our attention to traditional gender relations by staging a gesture carried out by couples in public spaces, while VALIE EXPORT draws a connection between the normalization of the female body and urban architecture. Both Anne Schneider and Judith Hopf work with anthropomorphic qualities, though on very different levels: Schneider’s ‘Bodyguards’ stand their ground between figuration and abstraction while oscillating in their materiality and chromaticity, whereas Hopf’s waiting, seemingly permanently poised laptop as a quasi-animated object makes reference to the burnout-stricken individual. Finally, Till Megerle’s human wheelbarrow bears witness to a game of dominance and submission, which affects body and mind in equal measure.
Drawings by Megerle can also be found in the following constellation, which is dedicated to phenomena of the spiritual and inquires after the contemporary significance of religious symbols. His drawings of donkeys’ heads reference Georges Bataille, who interpreted them as the ‘most virulent manifestation’ of base materialism in the sense of the Gnostics. Marc Adrian, on the other hand, quotes Goethe’s striking proverb ‘No one against God but God Himself,’ positioning it in a polytheistic context with his depiction of a pagan idol. Adriana Czernin’s abstract drawings unmistakably allude to Islamic art while at the same time metaphorically breaking their symmetry, whereas Simon Wachsmuth’s video shows Iranian men doing physical exercises that date back to clandestine martial arts training and that have been ritualized and imbued with spiritual content over the centuries. Physical rituals as an expression of coping with social, economic, and political escalations are also represented in the works of Walther Gamerith, Isa Rosenberger, and Alfred Hrdlicka. Gamerith’s ‘Dance of the Cripples’ is testament to the woeful state of the war-wounded who must march to the beat of Death incarnate’s drum; he reappears in Rosenberger’s video work ‘Espiral’ in the supratemporal motif of the dance of death and is enmeshed in a dense fabric of references to and continuities since the first global financial crisis. On the other hand, ‘Bal des victimes’ by Hrdlicka deals with the phenomenon of the reputedly cathartic balls said to have been hosted by the survivors of the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution in commemoration of their guillotined relatives. In turn, Iman Issa’s installation sets in motion an intellectual game that is rich in associations and revolves around whether we associate a bygone era of luxury and decadence with melancholy or revolution. And Johanna Kandl’s painting focuses on the fringes of the economy and on the precariousness of the everyday in societies shaken by turbo-charged capitalism. Nature and the laws of physics provide the focus of another room. As metaphors for society or the body, analogies emerge here from which conclusions are drawn and passed on to the observers. Peter Weibel, for example, quite literally realizes his appeal for ‘More Warmth among People’. In her work, Susanne Kriemann portrays a monolith of red granite and thus also the artist Robert Smithson, at the site of whose death the stone was erected. Judith Fegerl’s piece uses soldering to connect pieces of copper wire into a fragile installation that reveals a relationship between physics and the physical. Lastly, with the aid of the laws of physics the film ‘Entropy’ by Michael Franz and Nadim Vardag describes an atmosphere in the cultural field that faces a slow emptying of meaning and hence stagnation. The protagonists of ‘Hotel Roccalba’ by Josef Dabernig on the other hand seem to surrender themselves to a conscious, paradoxically positive emptying of meaning when they collectively yet separately pursue activities—though ultimately nothing happens. The intensification of this instance of banality, which shifts into the uncanny or culminates in the horror of the everyday, is testified to in works like Markus Schinwald’s life-size doll ‘Betty’, who swings apathetically— as if controlled by an external source—back and forth on a chair, and Samara Golden’s photograph ‘Mass Murder, Blue Room’, which portrays a hallucinatory room—in which past, present, and future are entwined—as a potential crime scene. In Walter Pichler’s drawing ‘Sleeping Man’, the resting position becomes an existential act and is associated with sickness and death, whereas Martin Arnold’s video ‘Passage à l’acte’ exposes the psychological tension and latent aggression in the idyll of a family scene and Tillman Kaiser’s disconcerting wallpaper ‘Habitación retorcida’ translates the loaded relationship between mother and child into a spatial visualization. This work is linked to another constellation in which everything revolves around the self. Ugo Rondinone’s protagonist in ‘Cigarettesandwich’ saunters along a wall in a loop: in its repetition, the movement becomes a meditative, timeless rotation around himself. Another product of self-reflection is the drawing ‘Me—Embedded Somewhere in (or out) There’ by Gerhard Rühm, in which the artist has used circular hand movements to write the word ‘ich’ (English: ‘I’ or ‘me’) innumerable times in the same place; in contrast, Adriana Czernin transforms internal processes into an interplay between figuration and abstraction in her self-portrait. Self-awareness and exploring one’s own psyche as well as the emphatically anti-rationalist creation of individual, surreal pictorial worlds are themes that unite a whole array of works. The ‘Self-Portrait’ by Georg Chaimowicz, for instance, shows the artist’s head dissolving and testifies to the existential search for identity after the Shoah. Martha Jungwirth’s fantastical ‘Beetle Creature’ arises from associating subconscious gestures with conscious experiences, while Richard Teschner’s ‘Downpour’ personifies the force of nature and depicts it as a monster-like being. On the other hand, with his comic-like anthropomorphic figures Vittorio Brodmann creates intensive visual worlds of emotion just like Gunter Damisch, whose composition originates in its own cosmos beyond our collective understanding of reality. In contrast, the aesthetics of Neue Sachlichkeit set the tone for Rudolf Wacker’s still life ‘Two Heads’, which thrives on the symbolic interplay of its pictorial elements. Henri Michaux’ écriture automatique oscillates between painting and poetry, figure and writing, and was seemingly transferred directly from his subconscious onto the paper. ‘Dealing with Small Quantities’ by Tillman Kaiser suggests the fantasy of a substance-induced journey through space, and with his ‘Pig Altar’ Padhi Frieberger produces a memorial to a fictitious religion while satirizing the idolatrous worship of things in our world. Bruno Gironcoli’s space-consuming sculpture ‘Maternal, Paternal’ represents an enigmatic universe of forms and symbols that appears to address human existence in terms of the physical and the psychological. This intertwining of internal and external worlds also lies at the heart of the works by Tobias Pils and Toni Schmale: Pils’ genuine formal vocabulary holds his works in a limbo between reality and mental imagination, while Schmale’s pieces of nitro frottage on concrete exercise and sketch out a destabilization of conventional interpretive patterns of how desire can be translated into objects. This narrative description of the exhibition is our attempt to briefly outline the interplay of works on display, in the knowledge that it is in fact much more multifaceted and complex, and occasionally more fragile. It is intended to serve as a springboard for new, subjective associations and narratives that intertwine different threads than those we interweave here. As the sum of its parts, the exhibition makes it possible to experience the modern-day tensions between individual and society and simultaneously reflects—appropriately enough for specular windows—effects on the body and mind.
Exhibition catalogue:
Specular Windows – Reflections on the Self and the Wider World
Edited by Stella Rollig, Severin Dünser and Luisa Ziaja
Including texts by Véronique Abpurg, Severin Dünser, Alexander Klee, Michaela Köppl, Naima Wieltschnig, Claudia Slanar and Luisa Ziaja on works by Marc Adrian, Martin Arnold, Vittorio Brodmann, Georg Chaimowicz, Adriana Czernin, Josef Dabernig, Gunter Damisch, VALIE EXPORT, Judith Fegerl, Michael Franz / Nadim Vardag, Padhi Frieberger, Bernhard Frue, Walter Gamerith, Bruno Gironcoli, Samara Golden, Judith Hopf, Alfred Hrdlicka, Iman Issa, Martha Jungwirth, Jesper Just, Tillman Kaiser, Johanna Kandl, Joseph Kosuth, Susanne Kriemann, Friedl Kubelka/Peter Weibel, Luiza Margan, Till Megerle, Henri Michaux, Muntean Rosenblum, Walter Pichler, Tobias Pils, Arnulf Rainer, Ugo Rondinone, Isa Rosenberger, Gerhard Rühm, Markus Schinwald, Toni Schmale, Anne Schneider, Richard Teschner, Simon Wachsmuth, Rudolf Wacker and Anna Witt
Graphic design by Atelier Liska Wesle, Vienna/Berlin
German/English
Softcover, 19 × 24 cm, 136 pages, numerous illustrations in color
Belvedere Vienna, 2017
ISBN 978-3-903114-36-4