‘Bottoms Up!’
Featuring works by Martin Guttmann, Julian Göthe, Christina Gruber & Clemens Schneider, Michele di Menna, Fernando Mesquita, Michael Part, Lucia Elena Průša and Marina Sula; curated by Severin Dünser and Olympia Tzortzi
Fluc, Praterstern 5, Vienna
14 March 2018
Social ties are established while drinking, people communicate and interact. The choice of drinks thereby also defines the relation of the participants among each other, while the rituals connected to them force the structure of the way of being together. The artists of the exhibition conceived and appropriated a variety of drinks, respectively formulated instructions on how to use them:
Visitors could lay their hands on Martin Gutmann, trying to find out via thought transfer which artist he was thinking about. If visitors guessed wrong - and that was actually always the case - they had to drink a vodka shot.
Julian Göthe mixed his favorite martini using Noilly Prat Vermouth and Tanqueray Number Ten Gin.
Christina Gruber & Clemens Schneider offered a milkshake and a reflection upon the creeping decline of the idea of the American Dream.
Michele di Menna contributed a drink that she named ‘Cosmic Imbalance’. It consists of two shots in a row: A sweetish whiskey first, then a gherkin water shot.
Fernando Mesquita's contribution was a Portuguese drinking game, the ‘Jogo da moeda’. Each player in the ‘coin game’ can put up to three covered coins on the table - who guesses the total amount of coins is out, who is left at the end has to pay a round.
Michael Part confected a special vodka for the evening, that combined the spirit with the characteristic scent of Chanel's Nr. 5.
Lucia Elena Průša brought cocao from Mexico with her, that she boiled to a hot beverage together with chili, cinnamon and water, which is also drunk like that where the cocoa comes from.
Marina Sula brewed a magic potion using cinnamon, jasmine, grapefruit, rose petals and other ingredients. The love potion was made according to an old recipe and promised that the person who drinks it falls in love with the person who handed it over.
What normally accompanies the communication, became the subject matter in this participative exhibition. In the tradition of relational aesthetics it transformed a conversation piece into a social sculpture – and the other way around.
Michael Part
‘Mercury et al.’
21er Haus, Vienna
5 December 2015 — 17 January 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).
‘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.
»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.