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24/4/2013

Teutloff meets Ars Sacra

Salzburg Museum, Salzburg

The Salzburg Museum is hosting the internationally renowned Teutloff Collection, including nine video works by the artists Tracey Emin, Simone Häckel, Gary Hill, Micha Klein, Sigalit Landau, Bjørn Melhus, Osvaldo Romberg, Una Szeemann and Peter Weibel. But this particular show is special: namely, the Teutloff Collection was willing to enter into dialogue with the "Ars Sacra" exhibition, which presents a view of the museum’s medieval art treasures.

The result is a thrilling tour in which two narrative strands of the history of art and of contemporary art continually coincide and touch, the whole show spanning an arc across the centuries. Despite the different media of painting and sculpture on the one hand and video on the other, the interleaving of two collection complexes also owes its existence to the collecting concept of Lutz Teutloff. Through his keen attention to the image of the human body and the reflection of pictorial conventions, many of the works he has collected touch on lines of tradition whose form and iconography seem to be inscribed into the history of art.

Portraits of Children
Simone Häckel (*1974), 2007
"Kinderportraits" (Portraits of Children) shows the intent expressions of three to four-year-old children watching something happening below and to the left of the camera. Their breathing is irregular, their attention is captivated as if they were under hypnosis. Häckel observes children in her friends’ families watching television and shows the intense absorption with which children use media – even when they’re only watching marionette dramas, as in the scene documented here.
Simone Häckel began her artistic observations with her own children, and went on to develop many more projects on how children and young people experience their world.

No Sunshine
Bjørn Melhus (*1966), 1997
In this video, named after Bill Withers’s song "Ain’t No Sunshine When She’s Gone", Melhus, one of Germany’s best-known video artists, portrays four persons who look identical. They appear in pairs, communicating in short pop-song phrases with each other or with the camera.
Melhus borrows from the science fiction film genre and plays on the aesthetics of toys, commercials and Christian iconography. The computer-generated spaces in which the two pairs of figures are suspended seem to be interconnected. The frame is repeatedly occupied by objects covered with regular bumps which recall computer-generated images representing the HIV virus while one of the partners seems to be leaving the other.

Sometimes the Dress Is Worth More Money Than the Money
Tracey Enim (*1963), 2000
Pinning bank notes to the bride’s dress is a tradition at Cypriot weddings. The longer the bride dances, the more money she receives. The video artist plays a fugitive or banished bride in a barren landscape. The scenes are accompanied by Ennio Morricone’s film score for "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" (1966).
Emin, the daughter of an English mother and a Turkish Cypriot father, has become one of the most prominent exponents of young British art through shocking works that explore traumatic teenage sexual experiences. The film was commissioned by the Beck’s Futures art awards and shot in Cyprus. It caught the eye of the British director Michael Winterbottom and led to Emin’s first feature film, "Top Spot" (2004).

Thrill Me
Una Szeemann (*1975), 2004
"Thrill Me" is a condensed documentation of the self-creation of the pop star Michael Jackson. Szeemann’s video essay focuses on Jackson’s stylised appearance over the course of his career, and the continual cosmetic and surgical manipulation of his body. Bit by bit, he effaces familiar, hereditary ethnic features, and appears increasingly self-destructive.
Using clips of Jackson’s performances, the Swiss artist Una Szeemann conveys the seductive power of a utopian vision of self-creation, and also the psychological voids that appear in Jackson’s fabulous rise to fame and the fairy-tale world he created.

Figuring Grounds
Gary Hill (*1951), 1985/2008
Language, electronics and the human body are both the media and the subject of works by Gary Hill, a pioneer and a well-known exponent of American video art.
"Figuring Grounds" is based on a 1985 group performance by Hill and his long-time associates, the poets George Quasha and Charles Stein. In a kind of musical improvisation, Quasha and Stein assemble fragments of speech into a primitive form of human communication.

Venus im Pelz | Venus in Furs
Peter Weibel (*1944), 2003
The Ukrainian pioneering artist Peter Weibel presents a sequence of feminine subjects that have become classics in art history, beginning with Cranach’s "Naiad" and progressing via works by Giorgione, Titian and Manet, back to Cranach. The morphing video shows how all of these male artists’ notions of femininity are inseparable from their time.
The title is taken from the 1870 novel "Venus in Furs" by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, which was one of the first artistic treatments of male erotic fantasies of subjection. Weibel’s video was created in 2003, when Sacher-Masoch’s postumous work was republished and the related exhibition "Phantom of Lust. Visions of Masochism in Art", curated by Weibel and others, was shown in Graz.

Classic Artificial Beauty
Micha Klein (*1964), 1998
Morphing software produces the smooth sequential transformation of these artificial beauties. This work is an early example of artistic experimentation on the boundary between free art and applied multimedia design.
Micha Klein identifies with club culture, and house in particular, as the most important form of spirituality and cultural expression in the 21st century. The Dutch artist and VJ (video jockey) also works in advertising as a successful graphic designer.

Rome & Julieta According to Romeo
Osvaldo Romberg (*1938), 2008
This animated video retells the story of Romeo and Juliet, but allows the heroes to drop out of character. Charlie Chaplin plays Romeo, Romeo 2 and his subconscious. Greta Garbo, Grace Kelly and Rita Hayworth portray three Juliets. The resulting video deals with the gender-specific logic of war, with many humorous quotations from historic films and other art works. In Romberg’s version, Romeo and Juliet decide in the end against double suicide and merge to form a single androgynous figure.
The video belongs to a three-part film project by Romberg titled "Theater of Transparency". Romberg, born in Buenos Aires, is a painter and a media and conceptual artist, and is currently head curator at the Slought Foundation in Philadelphia.

Barbed Hula
Sigalit Landau (*1969), 2000
In the background, the video shows the Mediterranean south of Tel Aviv, and in the foreground a nude female torso: that of the Israeli artist Sigalit Landau, swinging a hula hoop made of barbed wire. In this shocking performance, barbed wire turns a harmless children’s activity into a painful, dangerous ritual. The artist alludes to borders as both a condition of and a threat to human coexistence. "The seacoast is the only peaceful, natural border Israel has", Sigalit Landau has said.
Other sculptures and installations by Landau, considered one of Israel’s major contemporary artists, likewise deal with issues of land and resources and the vulnerability of human life.

Teutloff Collection: http://www.teutloff.net

Image: Sigalit Landau, “Barbed Hula”, 2000. Video on DVD, Edition 18+1, Expl. 15/18, loop 2:00 min

Media contact:
Natalie Fuchs Tel: +43 662 620808-777 natalie.fuchs@salzburgmuseum.at

Salzburg Museum
Mozartplatz 1 5010 Salzburg Austria
Opening times:
Tuesday to Sunday 9 am to 5 pm
Closed on 1 November, 25 December
24 and 31 December: 9 am to 2 pm, 1 January: 1 pm to 5 pm
Admission:
Adults 7,0
Reduced 6,0
Young people (aged 16 to 26) 4,0
Children (aged 6 to 15) 3,0
Families 14,0
School classes free

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