»The Grasping«

Heinrich Dunst, VALIE EXPORT, Franziska Kabisch, Barbara Kapusta, Peter Weibel, Tina Schulz, Javier Téllez

21er Raum at 21er Haus, Vienna

November 30, 2016 — January 22, 2017

The expression “grasping” defines the process of intellectual realization and is used synonymously with “understanding.” Etymologically, it is derived from the physical-haptic act of touching—similar to the term “conceive,” which stems from the Latin “concipere,” and translated literally means “to grasp things together.” The exhibition attempts to pursue what converges in the terms: manual act and intellectual reception.  

For example, with his work “Writing the word hand by hand,” Peter Weibel inquires into the ability to confirm the existence of things, processes, and relations—and, first and foremost, the existence of the hand. There are very good reasons for this; already in early childhood, the hand is used to affirm external reality. In the bible, for example, doubting Thomas is quoted as saying, “Unless I see in his hands the mark of the nails, and place my finger into the mark of the nails, and place my hand into his side, I will never believe.”1 The philosopher Helmuth Plessner describes our perception as “eye-hand field,” which became a characteristic of humans when they learned to walk upright: “The eye leads the hand, the hand confirms the eye.”2 This seeing with the hand and the experience it brings is also at the center of Barbara Kapusta’s “Soft Rope”. In the video one sees a rope that the artist explores with her hand while sketching out her impressions of the procedure in a poem. Also Javier Téllez’s film, “Letter on the Blind, For the Use of Those Who See” (which can be seen in the Blickle Kino on the ground floor) is about tactile perception. Based on an Indian parable, the film shows six people who are blind, exploring an elephant with their hands. All have a different experience of the animal before them and their interpretations do not coincide—their subjective perceptions do not lead to an objective truth. 

The hand is, however, an instrument not only for touching, but also shaping. Richard Serra made the film “Hand catching lead” in 1968. In it, one sees a hand that is trying to catch pieces of lead and form them before letting them fall again. In Serra’s film, the same gesture is repetitively iterated, and no successful or failed products can be detected. Instead, focus is on the process of making, the film becomes a metaphor for sculpting per se. Tina Schulz adopts the film’s gestures and repeats them—however, without lead. What remains are the hand’s seemingly aimless motions, which only make sense when compared with the original film, and become exaggerated by the reduction.

The hand, seen as an object, is the subject’s performing agent—especially when the ego is an artist, such as Heinrich Dunst. In Dunst’s work, the hand does not “act” as it did in Schulz’s, but instead, is addressed. “Hello Hand” says Dunst to the Hand, which he has placed like an exhibit on the table. In a monologue, which he directs just as much to the hand, as the viewer and himself, he attributes the parts of his body functions that they actually do not primarily hold. He delineates a structure of relations that begins with perception and ends with communication—as a metaphor for acting, which keeps thought in balance with physical existence.3 

Martin Heidegger wrote on this: “Perhaps thinking, too, is just something like building a shrine. At any rate, it is a “hand-work.” … but the work of the hand is richer than we commonly imagine. The hand does not only grasp and catch, or push and pull. The hand reaches and extends, receives and welcomes—and not just things: the hand extends itself and receives its own welcome in the hands of others. The hand holds. The hand carries. The hand designs and signs, presumably because man is a sign. Two hands fold into one, a gesture meant to carry man into the great oneness. The hand is all this, and this is the true hand-work. Everything is rooted here that is commonly known as handicraft, and commonly we go no further. But the hand’s gestures run everywhere through language, in their most perfect purity precisely when man speaks by being silent.”4

VALIE EXPORT also refers to Heidegger in her video “Visual Text: Finger Poem”, as she loosely quotes him by saying “Ich sage die Zeige mit den Zeichen im Zeigen der Sage” (“I say the showing with the signs by signing the saying”). She performs the sentence with her fingers in “visual sign language”. “The body can thus be used to impart both intellectual as well as physical contents. The body as information medium. The human is adapted to the social structure by the body,” she explains about the intention of her video. And also Franziska Kabisch’s “Deklinationen (Can I inherit my dead parents’ debts?)” is about the social communication surrounding the hand. Beginning from the gallery of professors, which exists at many universities, contemplated is how knowledge production and scientific norms are manifest in postures—especially of the hands—and how they are adopted and continued. This final quote by Martin Heidegger is also from the university context, from a lecture: “It is only to the extent to which man speaks that he thinks and not the other way around, as Metaphysics still thinks. Every motion of the hand in every one of its works carries itself through the element of thinking, every bearing of the hand bears itself in that element. All the work of the hand is rooted in thinking. Therefore, thinking itself is man’s simplest, and for that reason, hardest, hand-work, if it would be accomplished by oneself in time.”5

1 The Gospel of Thomas

2 Helmuth Plessner, Anthropologie der Sinne, (1970), Suhrkamp, 2003

3 “I think and compare; I see with a feeling eye, feel with a seeing hand.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Roman Elegies (1788–1790)

4 Martin Heidegger, “What is Called Thinking?” (1951–1952), trans. J. Glen Gray, Harper Perennial, 1976, pp. 16–17.

5 Ibid.

»The Gestural«

Thomas Bayrle, Andy Boot, Christian Falsnaes, Roy Lichtenstein, Klaus Mosettig, Laura Owens, Markus Prachensky, Roman Signer

21er Raum at 21er Haus, Vienna

September 8 — November 20, 2016

Painting is the application of paint onto a surface. Brushstrokes are the constituent parts that make up an image. Unified through the process of painting, it is around these individual elements that this exhibition revolves.

A recent donation to the Belvedere, the painting »Rouges différents sur noir - Liechtenstein« by Markus Prachensky, will act as the starting point for a discussion surrounding aspects of style and the very essence of the gestural. Completed in 1956/57, the painting was named after the Liechtensteinstraße, where Prachensky created it in a studio he shared with Wolfgang Hollegha. Incidentally, this was the place where these two founded the artist group “Galerie St. Stephan” in 1956 together with Josef Mikl and Arnulf Rainer. The painting comes from an initial series of images in which Prachensky painted with red paint on a black background. The color red became a recurring element and something of a characteristic in the works that followed. Prachensky’s work is totally committed to Informalism, which made its way to Vienna from Paris, where it was initiated at the end of the 1940s. The movement was developed in response to the phenomenon of geometric abstraction, with which it shared a rejection of classical concepts of composition. However, unlike geometric abstraction, Informalism was defined by its formlessness and spontaneity. Prachensky was, therefore, mainly preoccupied with the tracing of a gestural impulse and the energy applied to a canvas.

What Prachensky emphasizes in this image is the procedural moment in the production of the image – with all its implications, reaching from unmitigated personal expression to speculation around its echoes of the unconscious. These gestures on a monochrome background come forth as clearly legible and thereby manifest a stark contrast. They are themselves transformed into their own kind of sign, a recognizable symbol of the gesture. This was also employed by Roy Lichtenstein in his series Brushstrokes, which took form between 1965 and 1968. Ironically, using oil on canvas, Lichtenstein transformed individual, overlapping brushstrokes into his typical cartoon style – making, as it were, caricatures out of the spontaneous moment, while also referring back to Abstract Expressionism. In the case of the Little Big Painting Reproduction, the theme of the series was also translated into chromography, industrially reproducing the uniqueness of painting and reducing personal expression ad absurdum.

Thomas Bayrle works with reproductions and the repetition of forms. As in Pop Art, these forms often refer to objects of consumer culture and can thus be read through a socially critical lens. He distorts individual pictorial elements by way of mechanical and digital manipulation; from there arise systematic structures that tend to reflect their constituent parts and so refer to the underlying logic behind image making. In Variations of a Brushstroke, Bayrle appointed the brushstroke as the primary motif. Arranged in differing deformations that amount to a collage covering the entire picture’s surface, this meta-painting questions the authenticity of its expression through its mechanical repetition.

Since 2007, Klaus Mosettig has been translating works by other artists into his own drawings. He projects the works onto paper and, over months of diligent work, records his interpretation into different shades of gray in a way reminiscent of print processes. Despite his elaborate manual process, Mosettig leaves behind no detectable mark of his hand. And yet, he has afforded his works an artistic autonomy beyond the originals they seek to reproduce. This could have to do with the time he invests in his works, which becomes clear upon close inspection. The template for Informel 2 was a child’s drawing. Analogous to the movement mentioned in title, the child’s drawing is an attempt toward direct expression, toward the experimental search for a personal visual language. Mosettig alters the reception of small gestures through appropriation, by copying them with pencil and enlarging them.

Roman Signer is known for his actions, but sees himself as a sculptor whose works deal with temporality, speed, and transformative processes. Pyrotechnics are a recurring element in his oeuvre. In the 2006 video Punkt, he sits at an easel in a meadow, dips his brush in paint and holds it to the canvas. Shortly thereafter, a box explodes behind him and startles him. Jumping at the sudden loud noise, he plants a point on the painting surface. The result of Signer’s premeditated startle-response corresponds almost literally to the transference of energy to the canvas that was realized by Informalism – save that Signer exaggerated this process of gestural painting in order to find an authentic expression of his own.

Andy Boot dealt in the depiction of expressive gestures early on, an example being his work e who remained was M that is part of the Belvedere collection. Boot takes noodles that have been dipped in colored paint and lets them fall to the surface of a canvas placed on the ground. The result is a neo-abstract-expressionistic pattern that dilutes the absurdity of the gestural moment to that of an ornament, thereby caricaturing its dynamism as illusionism. However, his 2012 work Untitled (light blue) indulges in these gestures without a hint of irony. In this work, he draped a light blue ribbon typically used in rhythmic gymnastics within the frame and filled it with wax. The use of this sports device meant to make movement more visible somehow produces something reminiscent of an abstract composition – a sort of meta-painting that points to the gestural in painting, without itself actually being painted.

Laura Owens as a painter is known for both her abstract and figurative works that cross and overlap in their application of different media, while taking a variety of references from art history and elements of popular and folk culture. She often chooses to focus on smaller aspects and details in her images when she tries out new techniques, thereby changing the style once again. The brushstroke as a decorative element and sign, feature increasingly within her works over the past few years. For example, her 2013 work Untitled (Clock Painting) does not stray far from the decorative. In this painting, she has incorporated part of a clockwork in which a hand moves over the image. What is part of the process of painting is also linguistically part of the clock: the pointer is also called “hand” and the strike of the hour “stroke.”  Therefore, the second hand can quite literally be read as a metaphor for the arm that moves while painting on canvas and virtually takes the form of a stroke, enabling Owens’ allusion to time as a factor in the production of images.

Performance being his medium of choice, Christian Falsnaes works with pre-made scripts that he follows more or less, and which motivate the audience to interact. He is concerned with making group dynamics accessible, but also with drawing attention to rituals and norms of behavior, particularly those within the art world. For this exhibition, Falsnaes has developed a new iteration of his piece Existing Things, in which the public is prompted to paint a picture together with a performer acting as the brush. The action effectively dissolves individual authorship into a collective process, leaving multicolored brushstrokes within the exhibition. 

In general, the brushstroke stands alone as a metaphor for art itself and, especially within the contemporary context, can be read with critical reference to the myth of the artist. The exhibition shows how the views of individual authorship, artistic authenticity, and originality have changed. These categories, terms which we use to perceive and reflect upon art, seem never to have fallen out of our collective imagination. However, the possibilities afforded by technical reproduction and medialisation have transformed our attitude towards the nature of the gestural in painting. Gestural expression has recently gained new appreciation because of its unification of qualities that hold something genuine, unaffected, and refreshingly corporeal over the digitization of our everyday lives.

Andy Boot

»Überfläche«

21er Raum at 21er Haus, Vienna

November 14 — December 9, 2012

Überfläche (Übersurface) is the title of this exhibition by Andy Boot. The title suggests two things: firstly, that there is something that lies above the surface, and secondly, that this something is sublime. In our present-day life, which continually surrounds us with images, the underground is less and less able to break through all its smooth and shiny surfaces. It is not that the human being has been made transparent by surveillance, but that the individual has become a media entity. Andy Boot’s investigation of surfaces and patterns corresponds with this progressive blurring of the boundary between being, presenting and representing.
But what surfaces are to be seen in Boot’s exhibition? There is, for instance, the Bacterio pattern, designed by Ettore Sottsass in 1978, which withdraws from unequivocal identification and oscillates between the abstract and the figurative. The designer used it as a laminate for his Memphis furniture, as a means of negating materiality and structure, and in repetition as an industrial pattern, elevating it to the status of an antiform of its own. Boot applies the pattern to a sculpture mounted on rollers, which itself is made out of a supporting material – in this case shelves. On another occasion it appears as an object at rest within itself: as pure laminate, unsure as to whether it should be material or surface. In sharpies thumb a canvas is unpretentiously painted over in black; upon its surface Boot has mounted a photo showing two youths who in the course of perpetrating an unsuccessful burglary colored over their faces with a felt-tip pen to mask their identities. Here the gesture of overpainting doubly marks the fine line along which surface balances: between beautifying and disguising. Untitled also plays with this tension, and here again on two levels. A bronze cast of a makeup item is set in a wooden board, alienating and disguising its original function. And yet the surface structure of the makeup continues to transport the character of the product, which wanted to be applied to the skin. Another sculpture presents not makeup, but a backup – at the same time it marks the end of a container and conceals the space behind it, similarly to a work on canvas primed in white, except for an X that has been painted onto it. As a symbol borrowed from a graphic program, the X serves as a placeholder for an image yet to be defined, here for a self-referential metaphor of acrylic on canvas. A further definition of image and painting is found in a canvas painted light-blue, upon which Boot has put little cat stickers. Here the gestural aspect of abstraction is treated ironically as the mere covering up of the surface, while the stickers on it invite one to touch their furry surfaces: Boot’s decoration would like to be understood as sensuous figuration. The largest work in the exhibition also ventures a jibe at Pollock: in e who remained was M, Boot drops noodles dipped into paint onto the canvas. This produces a neo-abstract-expressionist pattern, which on account of its absurdity degrades the gestural to mere ornament, thus opening the floodgates for illusionism in his paintings. Something similar happens in Untitled (ambassador), a concrete cylinder in whose top side the inner space of a martini glass (after a design by Oswald Haerdtl) has been left open as a concave – robbed of its function, it is only readable as a sign.
In Andy Boot’s work, the querying of surface’s status also entails reflection on materiality and functionality. Through the transformation of patterns in materials, gestures and painting in ornament and decoration, and all of this vice-versa as well, he puts our perception of surface above both form and function. Ornament and its repetition is no longer a crime, rather a reflection of reality. A reality in which being, self-presentation and self-representation have become increasingly blurred, where even the ego itself is visualized and lived as a mediatized entity. The individual has become a screen with the largest possible surface, an Überfläche: I am the message, because I am the medium.

Andy Boot, born in 1987 in Sydney, Australia, lives and works in Vienna. Recently he has presented solo shows at Croy Nielsen in Berlin and at Renwick Gallery in New York.

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

Constanze Schweiger

»Scrollwork«

21er Raum at 21er Haus, Vienna

December 20, 2012 — January 13, 2013

The exhibition Scrollwork by Constanze Schweiger revolves around various aesthetic phenomena related to painting, fashion and social ties. The artist translates specific elements from her blog (constanzeschweiger.blogspot.co.at) into exhibition objects and its texts into printed form. In the same way as Scrollwork sometimes resembles acanthus leaves, sometimes an abstract pattern, the exhibition oscillates between objects that tend in different directions and yet still form a coherent whole.
The slide projection Peppermint, Cheerleader oder Schlechtes Gewissen [Peppermint, Cheerleader or Bad Conscience] shows color charts made by the artist. For the work, Schweiger transfered all the acrylic colors she uses in her paintings on square cards, to be able to appraise the chromaticity after drying - a reflection upon production, while refering to the rich suggestivity of color names with the title of her work. Furthermore displayed on the table: Sox by Michael Part, a picture by Nicolas Jasmin,  a photo of a plant in front of a pattern, trousers, paint on shoes, two textiles, a book, a wall clock, a record, a color chart, a postcard and an older publication by the artist.
The particular exhibits are connected by Schweiger‘s blog  and a new publication (free to take). It contains the artist‘s blog texts on individual things, out of which an all-over re-evolves: a continuous meta-ornament, the Scrollwork.

Constanze Schweiger, born 1970 in Salzburg, lives and works in Vienna. Recent exhibitions include shows at school, Vienna (2012); Museum der Moderne Mönchsberg, Salzburg (2012); Kunstraum Niederösterreich, Vienna (2011); Ve.Sch, Vienna (2011) and Magazin, Vienna (2010).

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

Anja Ronacher

»Void«

21er Raum at 21er Haus, Vienna

January 23 — Februar 24, 2013

“I operate under the assumption that at the basis of the photographic image there is a desire,” says Anja Ronacher, whereby she understands desire as an evolutionary product of archaic needs. These same needs are satisfied by the containing vessel, of which Heidegger writes: “The void is that aspect the vessel which holds. This emptiness, this nothing within the jug, is what the jug is as a holding vessel.” Furthermore, he describes the thing in itself through nearness: “In nearness is that which we are accustomed to calling a thing. But what is a thing? Man has given as little thought to the thing as a thing as he has to nearness.”(1)
Thus, in a certain sense, Anja Ronacher’s photographs are also placeholders for the void, for the signifier that the vessel stands for. That relates to our elementary needs; we have, as it were, a natural relationship of nearness to this thing. The same is true of fabric, which we approach primarily via the haptic. Ronacher’s photographs of drapery play on the absence of a body, despite the fact that textiles are indivisibly associated with corporeality. “The work of draping is a slow advance toward form, which is both being worked upon and is occurring.” And, Ronacher continues, “the way in which time occurs in images is also twofold: in the time of working on the material and in the time of the exposure.” The time of exposure determines the degree of darkness. Draping is a work of lessening and reduction, “a return to the depth of the world,”(2) as Deleuze notes in an essay on Leibniz. In photography, the fold becomes form without matter, a “disembodied similarity,”(3) as Maurice Blanchot writes. Similarly, the artist’s photographs of archeological objects and vessels demonstrate a simultaneous presence and absence in the images, whereby the producers of the things and the draperies are also unknown: depersonalized and deaurafied (in accord with Ronacher’s ideal of the artist).
The object comes before the image, and thus the image becomes a site of loss and of invocation: an invocation of the magical, the uncontemporary, the historical. “The point is, the image doesn’t define itself through the sublimeness of its content, but through its form – its “internal tension” – or through the force it gathers to make the void or to bore holes, to loosen the grip of words, to dry up the oozing of voices, so as to disengage itself from memory and reason: a little alogical image, amnesic, almost aphasic, now standing in the void, now shivering in the open,”(4) writes Deleuze. Like photography, the vessel is grounded in its negative. In the vessel this negative is an emptiness, a gap: “void”.

(1) Martin Heidegger, “The Thing”
(2) Gilles Deleuze, “The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque”
(3) Maurice Blanchot, “The Two Versions of the Imaginary”
(4) Gilles Deleuze, “The Exhausted”, in Samuel Beckett, “Quad” (plays for television)

Anja Ronacher, born in Salzburg in 1979, lives and works in Vienna. She studied photography at the Royal College of Art in London and the Estonian Academy of Arts in Talinn, as well as scenography at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. Her works have recently been shown at Beers Lambert Contemporary, London (2012), Museum of Modern Art Salzburg (2010), Salzburger Kunstverein (2010) and Fotohof Salzburg (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

Sarah Ortmeyer

»KOKO PARADISE«

21er Raum at 21er Haus, Vienna

February 5 — April 17, 2016

KOKO PARADISE is the final part of an exhibition triptych by Sarah Ortmeyer. At different times and in three different places (Paris, New York and Vienna), the KOKO trilogy deals with escapism and avarice. KOKO PARADISE shows palm trees in a tableau that is as beautiful as it is sad.

Sarah Ortmeyer was born in 1980 and lives in Vienna. Her works have been exhibited at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (2016), the Monnaie de Paris (2015), the Swiss Institute, New York (2014), the Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2013), the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Gent (2012), the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw (2012), the Frankfurter Kunstverein (2011), the MAK Center, Los Angeles (2010), the Stedelijk Museum Bureau, Amsterdam (2009) and the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2009), among others. A new project in collaboration with Andrew Wyatt will open this Valentine’s Day at the MoMA PS1 in New York City.

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

Simon Dybbroe Møller

»Lettuce«

21er Raum at 21er Haus, Vienna

December 5, 2015 — January 31, 2016

We look at everything with photography. When we see a black piece of marble, often used in wet spaces and at memorial sites—bathrooms, kitchens, and graves—we notice its glossiness. It is so photographic. Look at its white veins, the snail shells, the mussels. See how it resembles a print made from a damaged negative. This is photography avant la lettre.

Of course, photography is different now. The growing breed of male tech enthusiasts posting online reviews of new camera equipment is inhabiting a complicated territory. In order to investigate and discuss the visual capabilities of the constant stream of new digital gear, they have to point their lenses towards something; they have to choose a motif. They mostly choose women or birds.

A cormorant drying its wings on an old withered wooden pole, for instance: the Jesus-like silhouette and the pride of its posture mirrored in the water surface. A truly pathetic image. It is said that the cormorant is the most ancient bird around; that it dates back to the dinosaurs. That unlike other aquatic birds it has not developed the oil sheen that would protect it from getting soaked, hence the crucifix-like pose: it does so to dry its feathers in the breeze. What an anachronism. A more constructive voice would frame it differently and explain how most creatures are naturally buoyant, but how for diving birds  this is an issue. The cormorant is thought to swallow pebbles to increase its weight. Its main adaptation, though, is its open feather structure that does not trap buoyancy-increasing air but absorbs water instead. Regardless: imagine soaked feathers. Conversely imagine water droplets on a water-repellent surface. Let us think about this in relation to analogue and to digital image making.

Perhaps the wet white t-shirt was the climax of old world sleaziness. A last spasm of the analog, before our descent into the weight- and age-less universe of silicone and botox, the taxidermy of the technosphere; Into the waxed universe of the virtual. Do you remember Sabrina and Boys Boys Boys? Can you recall Samantha Fox? The way those singers exploited white cotton and water to produce images of their hefty bodies both concealed and enhanced. Images that seemed to transcend the slick surface of the glossy magazines by echoing the fluidity of analog processing and the stickiness of the emulsion coat of a photographic print. Tits and ass or draperie mouillée. A century earlier the realist Constantin Emile Meunier modeled his monumental sculpture The Dock Worker, depicting the toned figure of his subject draped in moist, clingy garments. In this fantasy even the soggy is solid, the saturated is steely. The patina of the bronze reminiscent of a vintage sepia toned black-and-white print; the lack of tonality melting the body with the cloth.

It is surely no coincidence that perfectly contained drops of liquid sitting on surfaces of things feature so heavily in digital image making tutorials. Like the techy garments used in the outdoor sports industry, these images inhabit a landscape of impenetrability. We know that the perfect water drops on the bright green leaves adorning our computer desktops did not occur naturally. That they were placed there, then elaborately lit. Possibly they are not water at all but either gelatin or resin or pure digital post-
production. Even when sitting on an absorbent surface they do not soak things; they do not evaporate into the air. We are dealing with digital image making here, with ideals. No earth to earth, but a world where things have borders, a world without entropy, a universe without decay. Like fresh lettuce lying on a minimalist polished steel kitchen countertop - its white veins piercing through the neon green translucent hue of its leaves, its objecthood amplified by the mirroring metal surface - so low in calories that digesting it requires the same amount of energy as it contains.

— Simon Dybbroe Møller

Simon Dybbroe Møller grew up in Greenland and lives in Berlin. His works have been exhibited most recently at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, at the Musee d’Art Contemporain de la Ville de Paris, at the Kunsthaus Glarus in Switzerland, and at Ludlow 38 in New York (all in 2015). Upcoming exhibitions of his works are hosted by Le Plateau in Paris, MOCA Cleveland, as well as the Kunsthalle São Paulo.

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

Michael Part

»Mercury et al.«

21er Haus, Vienna

December 5, 2015 — January 17, 2016

Michael Part works with and about photography. His concentration on the technical requirements of the medium is closely connected to the early history of analog photography. The title of Part's exhibition, »Mercury et al.«, names an element that was used in daguerreotype to bring out the image during the final stage of the process.
Developed between 1835 and 1839, daguerreotype is considered the first viable photographic process. A plate coated in silver halide is inserted into a camera; the molecular structure of the silver halide crystals is destabilized by exposure to light, which leads to the silver halide being reduced into metallic silver. Subsequently, the image on the plate is enhanced with mercury vapor. The result is a daguerreotype; the silver areas are where there was little exposure to light. As no negative is used, the image is inverted and unique. In contrast, the silver gelatin process does not involve the silver halide being reduced to metallic silver due to light exposure, but due to the application of a developer fluid. Selenium can be used to influence the levels of contrast and coloring. Selenium converts the silver into silver selenide, which is a chemically more stable compound than pure silver and makes photographs more durable and hence more suitable for archives. lt is precisely this selenium that is at the fore in a series of Michael Part's works: silver mirrors on which colorful patterns catch the eye. The way in which the mirrors were produced resembles the silver gelatin process: in both processes, the source material is silver nitrate and the result metallic silver. However, the surface of the mirror does not capture an image with light; instead, selenium is used in an aqueous solution, as is the case with silver gelatin prints. As a result, various patterns emerge that render the use of selenium visible and hence illustrate a chemical process without portraying any motifs - since nothing was exposed to light.
To supplement the mirror process, which Iacks any apparatus, the slide installation »Untitled (Sodium dithionite et al.)« has equipment at its core. On a pedestal is a projection stand in which two slide projectors are mounted. From it, a sequence of images is cast onto the walls opposite; those images refer to further photographic methods and contextualize the production process of the reflecting works displayed on the outer walls both in terms of content and form (namely via their textures).
The works by Michael Part question what the photographic image is; what its role is, above all in terms of documentary purposes; how it differs from other media; and what a photograph as a »light drawing« actually constitutes. His works achieve this by means of experimental configurations that combine the substances around the imaging methods in new ways. The function of chemicals is subverted without losing sight of their relation to photography and their history. What photography can depict is suspended; at what point photography becomes an image is called into question. Where that can be determined from a technical point of view, and whether it is defined as developing or enhancing, is more of a rhetorical question. After all, Part did not use the mercury of the title in his works – which is probably for the best, since the lives of the first daguerreotypists were indeed cut short as a consequence of their work with mercury vapor. In the style of the various treatment methods, however, Part advances a narrative that on the one hand lies beyond the depiction of motifs, and on the other makes the chemical processes themselves the subject of his images – an endeavor that could literally be described as »drawing with light.«

Michael Part, born in 1979, lives in Vienna. Recently his works could be seen in »Para/Fotografie« at the Westfälischer Kunstverein (2015), »The day will come when photography revises« at the Kunstverein in Hamburg (2015), »green postcard« for lbid Projects, London (2015), »e.g., 2005-2014« at Galerie Andreas Huber, Vienna (2014) and »Occupy Painting« at Autocenter, Berlin (2014).

Anne Schneider

»Ableger / Lessening Fold«

21er Haus, Vienna

December 5, 2015 — January 17, 2016

The title of the exhibition, Ableger / Lessening Fold, makes reference to two fundamental processes in Anne Schneider’s artistic work: An »Ableger« is a cutting, taken from a plant in order to grow another— in other words, a means of propagation. Metaphorically, it represents Schneider’s processes of thinking and working. »Ableger« literally translates as »deposition« and depositing is a key component of her practice. »New conceptual connections and formations arise from depositing things. This tendency to let things rest and accumulate initially generates chaos, which I can use as a source of creativity and allows to formulate something new through the deliberate repetition of individual connections,« the artist explains. Lessening Fold refers to the formal aspect of Schneider’s work and to the creation of folds through the squeezing and compressing of volumes.
Working on and with volume is the basis of every sculptural process, be it an additive process of building something or the subtractive revelation of a sculpture through the removal of materials. Anne Schneider deploys both methods, working with materials such as wax, concrete, jute, and metal. These everyday materials afford the artist considerable freedom. Jute is generally used to make sacks to be filled with other things. Schneider uses second-hand jute, which is actually a waste material of little value. In doing so, she undermines the established hierarchy of materials. Wax, too, is an everyday material— reversible and malleable. Her hands-on approach to these materials allows her to work in an almost improvisatory fashion, whose sketchlike nature reveals the creative process to the viewer. Even when she is working with concrete, the gestures and touch are evident—not in the form of handprints but in the impressions of seams, which render the production process legible. Anne Schneider sews jute into negative forms and fills them with concrete. Normally any such moulds are made of rigid materials in order to achieve precise results. However, textile moulds are limp, which means that bulges and even folds occur as they are filled. Thus, the cast from what was once a basically geometric form can take on an organic, almost anthropomorphic aspect, its soft curves contrasting starkly with its hard material qualities.
What is more, many of Anne Schneider’s concrete objects are pink or skin-colored, which merely heightens the sense of corporeality. The organicity of these objects gives them subjectivity and character. Like living beings, they sit and stand. By contrast, another cycle of works, Bodies, bears the anthropomorphic connection in its title but not in its appearance. These are figurative objects, reminiscent of items of furniture, whose potential use references the body. Their evocative power lies in the absence of the body, while at the same time inscribing the body into the sculpture itself.
The public space of the exhibition suggests the private space of a living room. Architecture is a recurrent motif in the work of Anne Schneider, as is the notion of perception through time and motion. Two of the objects in the exhibition, for instance, are positioned like lions flanking a gateway, through which the visitor must pass only to be confronted by a black wall of wax. Privacy and intimacy are dissected and presented in the public space, yet instead of illustrating a domestic space, this configuration is the domestication of public space. Schneider counters modernism and its rationalisation of life by creating something organic and a place of respite within the White Cube.
This, then, is how Anne Schneider has conceived the exhibition: as a place for slowing down, for coming down. By focussing on everyday materials, to which she personally relates and which she handles in ordinary ways, like sewing, the artist underlines a contemplative aspect of her art. This is not so much about confrontation as about engagement. The bodily perception of the exhibition thus becomes an experience of the mind, relieving inner tensions by lessening folds.

Anne Schneider, born in 1965, lives in Vienna. Her works have been on display in the exhibitions Care at Interstate Projects in New York (2015) and Oysters with Lemon at Ventana in Brooklyn (2015), at the Minerva Gallery in Sydney (2015), at Supergood in Vienna (2015), at the Salzburger Kunstverein (2014), in anthropomorph und unähnlich at the Galerie Christine König in Vienna (2011), and in Nichts ohne den Körper at the Lentos Kunstmuseum in Linz (2008), among others.

Till Megerle

»Donkeys«

21er Raum at 21er Haus, Vienna

October 29 — November 29, 2015

An artist is first and foremost occupied with finding opportunities to communicate. Drawings are situated outside a discourse of representation and hence offer a high level of artistic freedom, which is also created by the low-threshold conditions of production: drawing is practical and cheap; drawings can be made everywhere and at any time. It is for that reason that people like to assume that drawings possess a certain immediacy; they tend to psychologize them. Till Megerle’s works on paper appear to evade such interpretations, however. The artist’s drawings are on display in the 21er Raum of the 21er Haus from 29 October to 29 November 2015.
The medium makes it possible to adopt vocabularies to then formulate ideas in different ways. Till Megerle uses the resulting gestures like individual signs or letters, which—repeatedly pieced together anew—result in constructions that can be “read.” Yet he thwarts this interpretation by using styles like empty phrases and by exchanging them from drawing to drawing. Our reception is embroiled in a game of hide-and-seek between what we see and what we project onto those images; and it is made unstable by the concurrence of proximity and distance. In the early romantic period Friedrich Schlegel wrote, “In every good poem everything must be intentional and everything must be instinctive. That is how the poem becomes ideal.” Megerle also combines reflection and intuition—or the mind and the gut, distance and proximity—in his drawings in order to generate intensities.
Concurrence within a dualism is also true of Gnosticism. Between 200 BCE and 300 CE, various Gnostic teachings were based on their belief in a fundamentally malevolent, material world (humans—both body and soul—included) in contrast to a good, all-embracing god. However, as he is torpid, the malevolent gods are worshiped instead. “Thus the adoration of an ass-headed god (the ass being the most hideously comic animal, and at the same time the most humanly virile) seems to me capable of taking on even today a crucial value: the severed ass’s head of the acephalic personification of the sun undoubtedly represents, even if imperfectly, one of materialism’s most virulent personifications,” wrote Georges Bataille in his 1930 essay “Base Materialism and Gnosticism.”
Till Megerle appropriates the motif of an ass’s head for his series of drawings. He adopts the subject complex as an atmospheric picture that he finds interesting: this is a case of Bataille as a pop motif and not neo-surrealism. As Bataille observes, the donkey offers considerable identification potential. While the horse embodies an ideal of beauty, the donkey is its brother with lesser qualities. The horse represents high culture, the ass the circus: it harbors an element of subversion; it is the manifestation of unfettered, dark materialism.
The artist has drawn most of his donkeys in a caricatural style. The idea of caricature has always had a particular appeal for Megerle because it requires the artist to try not to be authentic, but rather to speak about objects in an artistic form. Caricature is not in itself a style of expression, but rather an artificial style that is distanced from reality to a certain degree and hence facilitates the creation of suspension between reflection and intuition. It is therefore unsurprising that Megerle draws on the caricatural repertoire of the 19th century—for example the work of Wilhelm Busch—in another series. Busch’s works can be read as amusing stories, but also as illustrations of Arthur Schopenhauer’s ideas. Among other topics, Schopenhauer’s philosophy revolves around will, the strongest manifestation of which being the only temporarily satisfiable sex drive.
We now come to the heart of Till Megerle’s works, whether they are photographs or drawings. It is not only the donkeys’ heads that deal with corporeality—or more precisely, corporeal complications—with physique in an adverse or unconfident condition. In his daily artistic practice, Megerle subsumes individual gestures into meticulous frameworks. Doubt is cast on the resulting constructions, which are reduced to only a few sheets. This distillate is succinct, but its few marks leave intact a space for discourse around body politics, sexuality, and interpersonal power structures, which is revealed between the lines of his drawings.

Till Megerle was born in 1979 and lives in Vienna and Berlin. Most recently, his works have been on display at William Arnold in New York (2015), at the Kunstverein Freiburg (2015), at Christian Andersen in Copenhagen (2014), at Galerie Micky Schubert in Berlin (2014), at Diana Lambert in Vienna (2013), and at Center in 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