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English summaries September 22 - October 5
21er Haus
Sigmund Freud and the game with the burden of representation.
An installation by Joseph Kosuth
19.09.2014 to 11.01.2015
By Susanne Rohringer
On the 75th anniversary of Sigmund Freud's death, the 21er Haus is exhibiting an installation by the American concept artist, Joseph Kosuth, under the confusing title "Sigmund Freud and the game with the burden of representation".
On the 29th of September 1939, Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, died in exile in London aged 83 of tongue carcinoma. Evicted by the Nazis from his flat and practice in the Berggasse, the 82-year old gave the BBC an interview in which he alluded that he had come to England to "die in freedom". This interview was to be heard on today's anniversary of his death in the stairwell of the Berggasse 19.
For the exhibition in the 21er Haus, one could have wished for a bit more about Freud's remarkable biography and the methods of psychoanalysis.
Instead, Joseph Kosuth installed a course of art works on his moveable system "Zero & Not", which had already been used on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Sigmund Freud's death in his flat. It's all about large, white moveable walls, which are inscribed with passages from Sigmund Freud's works. The black sentences are crossed through with wide, black lines, thus making the text illegible. On these walls, which form a sort of exhibition architecture, Kosuth now hung works of renowned artists who, in his view, apparently have something to do with psychoanalysis. And yet the connections are not always clearly visible. And they don't always hit you in the eye like the psychoanalytical couch by Hans Hollein or the libraries by the artist duo Clegg & Guttmann. The viewer attempts to construe the connections and these often remain rather flat like the associations with the photography of Viennese Actionism by Rudolf Schwarzkogler or Günther Brus. That the Viennese Actionism has much more to do with repressed socio-political themes is, meanwhile, a platitude.
Due to the lack of a recurring theme, the selection of artists fail to convince. The individual works are often of good artistic quality, but Joseph Kosuth's approach to the psychoanalytical theme doesn't reveal this.
21er Haus
1030 Vienna, Schweizergarten/Arsenal-Straße 1
Tel: +43 1 795 57-0
E-mail: info@belvedere.at
http://www.21erhaus.at/
Opening hours: Wed-Sun 10-18 hours
Künstlerahus Wien
Paraflows.9 – Intimacy
12.09.2014 – 12.10. 2014
By Margareta Sandhofer
The ninth edition of the Festival for digital Art and Cultures, under the direction of Judith Fegerl and Günther Friesinger, presents 16 artistic positions in Vienna's Künstlerhaus. The theme is INTIMACY, the private sphere, its actual disposition with its possibilities in the surroundings characterized by digital nets, under the circumstances of the all-present and permanent availability, but also inescapability.
The artistic approaches are very different and polymorphic, the more personal the involvement with the difficulty, the more exhilarating the result. If the respective aspect that has been singled out in the context of general attachment, such as, for example, the simultaneity and interweaving of private and public data traffic in social networks, or the traced accumulation of identical passwords in the internet, and is not reflexively pushed further from a personal perspective, the result contains a rather scant epistemic value of an exercise admittedly tried but yet illustrative. Such exhibits are also to be found in the paraflows .9.
Truly more daring is the experimental performance by Jos Diegel, which he realized in 2013 together with Lisa Schröter. The two hardly knew each other and met in San Francisco to play at having a relationship for the duration of a week. . As an artificial construction, the relationship turned out to be no different from reality, respectively the concept of the relationship became relativized and was exposed as a performance.
With this work, an effect was attained that wanted to lay claim to another exhibit, a self-reflexion of the beholders: the reception of the play "Vincent and Emily" (Carolin Liebl + Nikolaus Schmid-Pfähler; 2013), in which two robots that react to one another and to the environs via sensors as one budding pair in a relationship, hardly goes beyond an amusing voyeurism.
Funny, but more profound is "Frankie" (Maayan Scheleff; 2013): the inquisitive computer wants to learn about the essence of humanity from the visitors. These are invited to present the interview through Frankie. "Frankie" reacts to them in an apparently emotional manner through movements captured by cameras on a screen and verbally with blunt directness and incomparable tenacity.
Marlene Haring developed her video installation "Photoboothautograph" 2009. She fills an entire room with loosely distributed screens which show her person with different facial expressions each time. Two diverging photos about one definite mimic or gesticulation change with one another in a loop.
Michael Heindl's activistic undertaking, "The Same Old Story" (2012) based on the experience of his having come upon his unlocked car in a parking lot in which the radio was turned on loudly. He recorded the telephone conversation which he later had with the police about the disconcerting fact and then multiplied a variation of this situation in a public space: He searched for other unlocked cars and, in their CD players, put a CD with a recording of the conversation with the police and turned the volume up to maximum. The video presented in paraflows .9 captures the essential passages in focused cuttings of his intervention and distribution in the public space. Heindl's invasion into the strange, private spheres of cars is licentious, yet humorous.
Künstlerhaus Wien
1010 Vienna, Karlsplatz 5
Tel: +43 1 587 96 63
E-mail: office@k-haus.at
http://www.k-haus.at
Opening hours: daily 10-18 hours
OK Offenes Kulturhaus Oberösterreich
Bill Fontana – Acoustic Visions
04.09.2014 – 19.10.2014
By Roland Schöny
A classic of sound sculpture on new paths. The American audio artist, Bill Fontana (*1947, Cleveland) surprised us in 2009 when he began to show digital films. Characteristic of his Œuvres, he continued to work, however, with tone material with real connections and inherently understands sound as a sculptural medium. However, he now combines the sound level with equivalent cinematic pictures.
Led on by the question as to how special locations sound, Fontana traces these with the camera. Exciting insights open up which are almost inaccessible to the naked eye. The larger the proximity, the greater the tendency to abstraction. For example, the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco stands at the centre of "Acoustical Visions" (2012). At a visual level, it is rhythmic shadow plays in a maintenance shaft that emerge when cars are driving right over it on top. The bridge's foghorns prime the acoustical atmosphere whilst a metallic sound, reminiscent of a percussion instrument, emerges through the vibrations of the construction.
The structure of the exhibition in the upper area of the Offenen Kulturhauses leads up to the roof of the building to the "voestalpine open space". At an airy altitude, at 20.00 hours, Fontana's work "Desert Soundings" (2014) is presented on a big screen. For this film, buried vibration sensors trace the movement of individual grains of sand to make the sound of the desert available in the macro field whilst the dynamics of the sand dunes are visible in the picture.
Central is the "Linear Visions" (2014) installation. By means of a live transmission in the exhibition area, Fontana transforms live pictures of the hot rolling machine on the Voestalpine works grounds in an impressive acoustic-visual scenario. In principle, this networking of locations resembles the certainly most significant live installation that Fontana has realized in Austria: "Landscape Soundings" 1990. At that time he transferred the natural sounds of the Hainburger Au as a mix onto the forecourt of the Museum of Fine Arts / Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, as well as into the foyers of the individual ORF regional studios in the provinces.
OK Offenes Kulturhaus Oberösterreich
4020 Linz, OK Platz 1
Tel: + 43 732 78 41 78
Fax: + 43 732 77 56 84
E-mail: office@ok-centrum.at
http://www.ok-centrum.at
Mehr Texte von translated and summarized by: Liz Wollner-Grandville
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