calendario eventi  :: 

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20/11/2002

Three exhibitions

Wiener Secession, Wien

Sue Williams Art for the Institution and the Home Koo Jeong-a 3355 Michael Beutler Sue Williams Art for the Institution and the Home In all the phases of her painting she has remained true to one principle. Koo Jeong-a 3355 For the Secession, he has created a sequence of installations, to which the title 3355 offers an approach that is equally metaphorical and concrete. Michael Beutler He develops structures and forms from conventional building materials - such as wood, plaster or glass - that question standardization. Sue Williams Art for the Institution and the Home Main Room In all the phases of her painting, the American painter Sue Williams has remained true to one principle. While she professes dissolving form in abstraction, she simultaneously allows a corporeality to emerge through the gestural brush strokes against a monochrome background. The exhibition in the Secession assembles works from the last ten years, making it possible to trace the painterly development in Sue William's work. In the feminist discussion of the 80s, painting did not really feature as a terrain for women. Painting was dealt with as the patriarchal domain par excellence, and the criteria for judging painting were in fact so strongly subjected to male power of definition that many women found it better, or even strategically more clever, to work in fields that were still considered largely unoccupied at that time (photography, video, performance). Sue Williams made use of painting right from the beginning. Ultimately by carrying feminist issues into painting as well, she insisted on painting as a métier not inherently suitable for women. The early pictures, created in the mid-90s, have an affinity with the genre of trivial picture stories - comics and caricatures. With undisguised rage, they show scenes of violence, sexual transgressions and abuse against women and children as a kind of labyrinth of all obscenities. Whereas the motifs by themselves frequently do not clarify to what extent the scenes of domestic violence are merely traced and sarcastically left on display, in combination with fragmentary sentences and commentaries, they unequivocally bear witness to commitment. In the beginning, Sue Williams explicitly named her themes, undoubtedly also to find a clarity in her formulations herself. Over the course of her artistic praxis, in which her contents are now named with equal explicitness, her interest shifted more to the gesture of painting, brush stroke and color. In the late 90s, the depicting moment in Williams' work gave way to an increasingly growing abstraction, although she retained the rhythm and movement of her earlier paintings. The works created now no longer contain any conceptual information to explain themselves. Since Williams has taken the words out of her visual vocabulary, she concentrates her attention exclusively on the contents of painting technique. In comparison with the earlier comic strip-like works, now it is the expressive, colored brush stroke that becomes an object against the empty background. Her new paintings are dominated by forceful lines, broken by an allusion to human anatomy, often in neon colors, sometimes using no more than three or four colors. In their vulgarity, the sometimes phallus-shaped lines are not only in contrast with the sublime that was sought by representatives of abstract expressionism, for example, but also subject the patriarchal power structures that traditionally dominate abstract painting to an ironical treatment with a high painterly quality at the same time. The title For the institution and the home refers on the one hand to the balancing act between job and housework that many women still have to perform, but on the other hand, the title also formulates the reproach that painting is often confronted with, that it is namely no more than a decorative gesture. The extent to which Sue Williams assumes a critical position with the title, remains hanging in the balance. Koo Jeong-a 3355 In her interventions and installations, Koo Jeong-a starts from the constitution of an exhibition location and simultaneously identifies the most advantageous form for the placement of her objects there. Koo Jeong-a's compositions are often more firmly rooted in poetic than in sculptural thinking, and they have the delicateness and lightness of dream worlds. In her subtle and meditative, but no less sober manner, Koo Jeong-a leaves the objects their banality, rather than seeking to enhance their value, but at the same time, she attributes structural positions to them with the constellation. The way in which it all comes together, the way in which the objects mutually relate to and condition one another, has nothing random about it. Instead, it follows an order, in which microcosm and macrocosm correspond.

For the Secession, Koo Jeong-a has created a sequence of installations, to which the title 3355 offers an approach that is equally metaphorical and concrete. In Korean, 3355 designates the special situations, in which one can observe a group of people from a distance, the way in which people form small, not precisely defined groups, in order to meet, converse, or even to demonstrate for/against something. A pattern in between order and disorder that applies equally to the view from a coffeehouse window and a public square on market day. Contracted, however, 3355 can also be read as three thousand three hundred and fifty-five and interpreted as a date or a period of time: a dimension of duration that resembles a standstill, a frozen moment of time. With her precise placements, Koo Jeong-a creates lasting moments, atmospheric landscapes that call for watchfulness, presupposing a recognition and remembering on the part of the viewers in order to be accepted. With the works in the Secession, the question of perspective is also raised in the way that Koo Jeong-a stages the change of the viewers' perspective. The distanced survey of a worktable in the first exhibition room is supplemented with an interior view of the coldness of a white cell, which Koo Jeong-a places in the next room. Moments of hiding and a desired isolation define these independent interiors. Like in a dream, Koo Jeong-a thus achieves a correlation between inside and outside. Her intention is to publicly display what is one's own, but without surrendering it this way or for this reason. In the third room, there is a series of drawings, which are shown as a new group of works for the first time at the Secession. Michael Beutler Grafisches Kabinett Michael Beutler's expansive sculptures are usually created directly on site in relation to the given architectonic arrangements. In an experimental process that concentrates more on the logical sequence of mutually conditional decisions than on preconceived planning, Beutler develops structures and forms from conventional building materials - such as wood, plaster or glass - that question standardization. His methods range from do-it-yourself strategies, the compilation of (playful) rules for action, to the fabrication of machines that contribute to deformations. His work recurrently centers around an interest in conceptualizing the properties of various fabrication processes and material structures so that a content-based understanding of the materials and interventions takes precedence over a material-functional understanding. In his project for the Secession, Michael Beutler starts from the placement of the Grafisches Kabinett within the Secession and the characteristics of this space. The elements that are central to this are the way to the Grafisches Kabinett - the narrow stairs leading up to it - and its architectonic format: an almost square, very low room with an elongated, narrow window that has no thematic correspondence. Michael Beutler relates these observations in combination with the otherwise very delicate and transparent ceiling construction of the Secession to the tradition of the glass pavilion in the second half of the 19th century, which was intended to create transparent interior landscapes on the one hand, but also standardized exhibition architectures on the other. Michael Beutler's interest is concentrated primarily on one of the high points of this kind of construction: the Kibble Palace (Crystal Palace) in the Botanical Garden in Glasgow. It was constructed in 1872 by the engineer and architect John Kibble, and Michael Beutler visited it several times during his stay in Glasgow. The Kibble Palace has not only gone down in history as a masterpiece of glass and iron construction, but also still stands for a radicalization of standardization in industrial building production today. "At once ... the status of bourgeoisie forces of productivity is demonstrated as a whole: the domination of nature and appropriation through the application of industrial procedures based on the methods of natural science." These considerations were among the impulses that led Michael Beutler to explore the methods of glass construction, resulting in the decision to make a glass, dome-shaped structure on site in the Grafisches Kabinett. As in earlier works, the experimental construction process follows his interest in questioning processes of standardization, e.g. in glass and glass house production, as well as integrating new forms and methodological coincidences.
Consequently, a pleasure in ornamentation is always also present in the sculptural spatial intervention at the same time. The glass sculpture is conceived as a work that encompasses the space, so that visitors are not confronted with a model-like perspective, but rather find themselves part of the spatial arrangement. The experience of different ways of building recalls historical attempts of alternative and utopian architecture and thus of forms of living, which the details turn into thematic components. In recent years, Michael Beutler's works have been included in, among others, the exhibition New Heimat at the Kunstverein Frankfurt, where he built a "zig-zag bridge" made of European standardized pallets. It was modeled on Chinese bridges between the mainland and temple islands, which were supposed to prevent evil spirits from entering the sacred places. In September this year, he developed a project for the offspace kjubh in Cologne in collaboration with Henning Bohl. Under the title "Florenz", he deconstructed a conventional party tent by "bending" the four round, metal side poles into an ornamental surface, so that the statics of the tent changed, leading to further interventions, all the way to cutting the roof into a plane like a canopy of leaves. The exhibition is organized in cooperation between the Secession and the Institut Valencià d'Art Modern (IVAM). After the Secession, the exhibition will travel to Valencià. Opening: November 21, 2002 7 a.m. Wiener Secession, Association of Visual Artists Friedrichstraße 12 1010 Vienna Tel: +43-1-5875307-21, Fax: +43-1-5875307-34

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