calendario eventi  :: 

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1/3/2006

Three exhibitions

Wiener Secession, Wien

CLEGG & GUTTMANN
MACH VS. BOLTZMANN

MAJA VUKOJE

LONE HAUGAARD MADSEN
RAUM #26 - RETROFLEKSIVE



CLEGG & GUTTMANN
MACH VS. BOLTZMANN
Hauptraum

Individual experience and statistical calculation—these are the poles between which a debate took place at the end of the 19th century whose influence extended beyond its philosophical content to the political thought of its time and to the triumph of Modernist art. When Clegg & Guttmann reconstruct this discussion at the Secession using the positions of Ernst Mach and Ludwig Boltzmann, there is a direct link with the institution’s history—not in the sense of a retrospective representation, but as an invitation to expose oneself in the flesh to aspects of the debates conducted by the Vienna Circle: eight stations propose exercises dealing with problems whose scientific, historical and intellectual background is explored in an artist’s book.

The exhibition carries on from earlier works by the artist duo in which the functions and utilizations of historical, public, and institutional spaces intersect. Whether they are recreating structures from the first international Zionist congress, developing a Monument for Historical Change for Berlin, or creating libraries with uncontrolled access, they always actively involve the viewer in appropriating these works as historical and public places.

The same applies at the Secession: the exhibition by Clegg & Guttmann is what Ernst Mach might have referred to as a conceptual construction, consisting of a spatial and temporal composition in eight parts. From the point of view of Ludwig Boltzmann, on the other hand, it might be understood as a sequence of exercises in perception inspired by early Modernism that aim to encourage cognitive and emotional reconciliation with chaos. The installation can be understood as an obstacle course: some of the exercises address themselves to individuals, who are asked, for example, to play drums either to or against the rhythm of a machine; others are designed for groups, as when the “Prisoner’s Dilemma" is staged using one’s own body as a gaming piece.

The Secession itself has links with the debates that form the subject of this exhibition: by tracing out the discussions between Mach and Boltzmann, Clegg & Guttmann are also referring to the Modernist contexts that took shape as a rejection of the society of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and which also led to the artistic splitting-off to which the Secession owes its existence. In this respect, the exhibition and its venue can be read as a historical drama, as an animated presentation of the emergence of early Modernist philosophy as a highly significant episode in Viennese history. In addition, a special look is taken at the design, architecture, and institutional history of the Secession, presenting a context in which members such as Klimt, Schiele, and Hoffmann developed their artistic idiom. As well as the installation, Clegg & Guttmann will show several videos featuring readings of texts by Mach, Boltzmann, Weininger, Kafka, Musil, Kraus, Loos, and other Viennese cultural personalities of the period.

The consequence of contradictory and nonetheless correct descriptions of reality is a range of modes of perception and corresponding decision-making structures that determine the way actions are taken both in politics and in everyday life. On this subject, Clegg & Guttmann write: “A hundred years or so after the beginning of modernism we find ourselves deeply uncertain about what answers to give the most basic questions of ethics, aesthetics and politics. The existing ideologies seem unsatisfactory, leaving too much unsaid, the cultural agenda, conflicted and inconclusive. Perhaps an act of self-reflection on the origins of the current state of affairs might bring us closer to an insight concerning our identity thus providing us with invaluable tool to investigate where to go next."

The exhibition will be accompanied by the publication of an artist’s book with texts by Clegg & Guttmann and numerous installation views.

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MAJA VUKOJE
March 3 - April 23, 2006
Galerie

Maja Vukoje’s approach to painting is based on a double strategy: with a figurative predisposition, and always using existing media material, she creates pictures of landscape scenarios and mask-like figures. These motifs are overlaid with a sphere of the uncanny and of a physical presence in the process of decomposing, pointing to Vukoje’s interest in a new type of representational painting. A selection of her large-format paintings and her drawings of the last two years will be shown in the Galerie space at the Secession.

Maja Vukoje seduces the viewers of her pictures with scenarios that simultaneously embrace and block out the empathy of kitsch: the deer in the forest, a girl in a ballet dress, and African children appear at first glance as easily accessible motifs, all too familiar from mass culture. But Vukoje disturbs these images by combining them with others in montages, thus breaking down linear structures. Each of her works is usually based on three or four different image sources which she merges to form a narrative of their own.

In her approach to painting, this fragmentation of content is emphasized by loose allusions. The simultaneous use of different techniques—spray paints with acrylics and oil, dripping and smears as well as powerful brushstrokes, earthy watercolor tones next to bile green and luminous orange—generate the necessary tension between the concrete and the abstract. Almost fluorescent colors make the figurative elements start to float, until they move through the pictorial space like shadows of things, always on the verge of dissolving.

Characteristic for Vukoje is the way situations are turned round in the manner of a visual puzzle,
as when a group of flamingos idyllically gathered on the banks of a lake are joined by the shapes of two men with a chainsaw. Such visions, imagined experiences, and de'ja'-vu episodes are a recurring source of inspiration for Vukoje. Her works are shaped by many-layered content, such as her focus on her own history, a theme most strikingly expressed in her self-portrait drawings.

The drawings revisit motifs, symbols, and ideas from her paintings. In a comic-like situation, Vukoje is embodied as a female hero—a metaphor for her search for universally valid statements. In the same way that recognizable figures are made to appear unfamiliar in the paintings, this figure too stands for shifts in meaning beyond the cliche's of good and evil.

The mises-en-sce'ne refer both to the context of film and to that of the theater, which Vukoje continually reinvents for her figures: landscapes recalling forest, steppe, jungle, or swamp reinforce the theatricality of the action with a feeling of fundamental placelessness. Here it is a question of decoding form and figure; correspondingly, Vukoje also refers to her works as “Sisyphus pictures." A girl in the desert with a shovel and three dried out branches in the background, for example, offers various potential interpretations: How deep can we dig? And what are we looking for?

This opens up many and diverse references, e.g., to Dostoyevsky’s literary works of a psychology of unconscious, soft transitions. Vukoje quotes fantasy (image) content and scenarios of dreamlike sequences, as well as the demand made by such material: “Fantasy therefore always counts on an active recipient, the phantastikos." (Melanie Ohnemus).

The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue with essays by Tom Morton and Melanie Ohnemus.

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LONE HAUGAARD MADSEN
RAUM #26 - RETROFLEKSIVE
March 3 - April 23, 2006
Grafisches Kabinett

In the works of the Danish artist Lone Haugaard Madsen, discussion events and texts as forms of theoretical engagement with art occupy as large a place as concrete works, her photography, objects, and drawings themselves. The fundamental questions she addresses concern the conditions of making and exhibiting art: Which contexts constitute an artwork? What makes an institution? What is the relation of a catalogue to its exhibition, to the institutional space, to the artist’s intentions, and to the expectations of the public?

Consequently, Lone Haugaard Madsen treats the catalogue, her first major publication, not as documentation but as an extension of her exhibition in the Grafisches Kabinett at the Secession. For the cover design, she refers back to her series of filmed or photographed “white" walls of art institutions where she has worked. These photos and videos were projected onto the walls of exhibition spaces, with the resulting layering and simulation creating an interlocking of the actual and the mediated, of private and public space. The cover shows a photo of the Secession logo designed by Heimo Zobernig as drawn by the artist in pencil on the wall of her studio.

In this way, Lone Haugaard Madsen questions the parameters of the art business by subjecting her own position within it to careful scrutiny, making this reflection part of her own production. She takes a step back, checks, reduces, edits, and then continues. Her recent work has concentrated on work in the studio and the question of the extent to which this space is institutionalized, what kind of production it demands, and which decisions and considerations take place in this special place.

Her new works and texts were made in the studio and reflect various working and decision-making processes. These supposedly autonomous objects point to an artistic will that cannot be explained in solely conceptual terms, although they also formulate a lack of belief in authoritarian gestures of knowledge and skill. The works bring together diverse aspects, traces and lines inscribed in the underlying paper while drawing, errors or shifts of the kind made during transcription or when speaking a foreign but closely related language, scraps of paper with notes, materials left over from the production of something which itself is not visible. Things that are not shown, and thoughts: the actual drawing that left its traces on the paper is hidden from us (if indeed it is a drawing at all), just as we do not know which of the things discussed during Lone Haugaard Madsen’s conversation with Heimo Zobernig for the catalogue go unmentioned, kept from the reader.
What is visible is a kind of postponement, since the actual objects of desire are held back; or a tentative approach to sculpture and painting, which are positively reluctant to appear as works in the conventional sense. As such, they are never “innocent" creations; they are always aware of their own background and contextual complexities, which are reflected on a multitude of levels.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue with an interview by Lone Haugaard Madsen with Heimo Zobernig, a text by Sanne Kofod Olsen, and texts by Lone Haugaard Madsen.


Press office: Urte Schmitt-Ulms presse@secession.at

Image: Clegg & Guttmann, study for an exhibition installation, 2006

Press Discussion Thursday, 2 March 2006, 11 a.m.

Exhibition discussion: Thursday, March 2, 2006, 6 p.m.
with Michael Clegg, Martin Guttmann, and Martin Prinzhorn

Secession, Association of Visual Artists Vienna Secession
Friedrichstrasse 12, 1010 Vienna
Tuesday to Sunday 10 a.m. - 6 p.m. / Thursday 10.am. - 8 p.m.
Admission:
Adults € 4,50
Groups (minimum 8 persons) per person € 3,-
Reduced rate (students, senior citizen) € 3,-
Groups reduced (minimum 8 persons) per person € 2,-

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