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6/11/2009

Francesco Vezzoli

Kunsthalle Wien Project Space, Wien

Curator Synne Genzmer

A passion for glamorous cinema and its divine divas is characteristic of the artistic creations of Francesco Vezzoli. The work complex shown in the exhibition, revolving around the film Marlene Redux: A True Hollywood Story! (2006) is simultaneously a homage to the actress Marlene Dietrich and an autobiography. But what does the artist really have to do with Hollywood? What is actually true about the stories he tells? Vezzoli plays with the ways in which traditional marketing strategies of the film industry, where they are used to manufacture celebrities, can be transferred to contemporary art. Significantly, Marlene Redux begins with a quotation from the Dadaist Tristan Tzara: "Since peoples have always needed divinities to protect the three essential laws, which are those of God: eating, making love, and shitting, since the kings are on their travels and the laws are too hard, the only thing that counts at the moment is gossip." ("Dada MANIFESTO on feeble love and bitter love", 1920)

Basing itself on the US entertainment series E! True Hollywood Story, a TV show that has broadcast gossip and trash about actors and rock musicians since 1996, Vezzoli uses the style of trivial TV reporting to narrate his own rise and fall as an artist and director as well as the preparations for his new film Marlene Redux, a remake of the prize-winning documentary by Maximilian Schell, Marlene (1984). As in earlier works, the artist calls on the iconographic and symbolic repertoire of the cinema and its history to discuss the tension between over-stylised fictionalisations and banal reality. Marlene Redux is concerned with parallels between the figure of the diva and the image of the artist as products of the media, which feed from public success as well as from negative headlines and rumours. Vezzoli satirizes the obsessive fascination surrounding the private lives of stars and starlets, around persons and personalities that embody dreams and themselves become myths. In the manner of Kenneth Anger’s chronique scandaleuse Hollywood Babylon, he constructs his contemporary hell of celebrity and, with self-irony, writes himself into the scandal reports as a creative artist. The complicated network of relationships surrounding the deceased idol is continued in the poster and embroidery works presented in the project space alongside the video film in the glass pavilion. In the advertisements for imaginary film productions, which Vezzoli asked Italian poster-makers to produce, the names of important artists come out as a Who’s Who of some alternative world of glamour, relating the art avant- garde to film history of the 20th century.

At the latest, since his international breakthrough at the Venice Biennale in 2005 with his trailer for a fictitious remake of the Penthouse production Caligula, on a script by Gore Vidal (shown in the Kunsthalle Wien in 2005 as part of the exhibition Superstars), Francesco Vezzoli, who was able to win over such actors as Sharon Stone, Cate Blanchett, Milla Jovovich, Courtney Love and Natalie Portman for his projects, has himself been one of the stars of the art scene. He is interested in remakes, copies and fakes and assumes the language of the Hollywood dream factory, TV broadcasters and gossip mags, in order to pervert communications tools into autonomous forms of representation for non-existent products – parodies of showbiz and hype for the wealthy, beautiful and powerful of this world. With analogies between film, art and the political jet-set, Vezzoli makes reference to current decadent social phenomena and carries the domination of the media and the mechanisms of their visual language, with which worlds of appearance and the collective hunger for them are created, ad absurdum. Guy Debord’s "Society of Spectacles" with its event character is embodied in Vezzoli’s work as self-reflective performance: "For me the art world has become a place that has turned itself, willingly or not, into some sort of entertainment industry." Vezzoli practises a form of contemporary Dada, by playfully infiltrating the art-world and its commercial vehicles, not without being an accomplice himself.

Francesco Vezzoli born in Brescia, Italy, in 1971, lives and works in Milan.

Image: Coming Soon, 2006, Courtesy Galleria Giò Marconi, Milan © VBK, Wien, 2009

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog with a text by Synne Genzmer and an interview with the artist contucted by Gerald Matt.

In Cooperation with Italia@KUNSTHALLEwien
Kindly supported by Lancia and Mega Denzel Erdberg

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Claudia Bauer Tel: +43-1-521 89-1222 presse@kunsthallewien.at

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