030508: Belvedere: Tony Cragg - F.X. Messerschmidt

Belvedere: Tony Cragg – F.X. Messerschmidt Canon and cannot New works only exist because there are old ones. No art without canon – you can’t come up against this fact, no matter how hard you try. In our post-modern time this mechanism has slowly become accepted. And since there is nothing you can do about it, one might as well make it clear: new pieces of art are positioned next to, in front of and above the old ones. This can be a successful undertaking – take the Francis Bacon exhibit in the Kunsthistorische Museum, where his works were displayed together with his inspiring example Velazquez. Or it can be an experimental undertaking - like the current exhibit at the Lentos, in which five contemporary artists juxtapose their work in connection with archived inventories. Or it can be insignificant, banal, and nondescript as this is currently the case in the Belvedere. The founder of scurrility in art is presented in comparison to a software specialist. Obviously Tony Cragg ends up with the short end of the stick - not F.X. Messerschmidt . It is always the younger one who loses - and old pieces of art can easily exist without the new ones. Poor Cragg. Messerschmidt offers everything that contemporary art would like to offer: stylisation, necessity, an individual program, and spectacularity. All that Cragg has to offer is a certain level of attention, while his program is a computer program, the gallery owner creates the necessity, and the stylisation exhausts itself in styling. Cragg’s colourless steles have nothing to offer in comparison to Messerschmidt’s work. If you circle around his work often enough, you can get a notion of silhouettes with something of a likeness to a human head, but most of the time you see nothing but a machine formed sculpture solely offering a momentary effect. Not worth talking about - and no chance to be taken up in the canon. Belvedere 1030 Vienna, Prinz Eugen Strasse 27, until 25. 05. 2008-05-01 www.belvedere.at

Mehr Texte von translated and summarized by: Liz Wollner-Grandville

030508

Belvedere
1030 Wien, Prinz-Eugen-Strasse 27
Tel: +43 1 795 57-0, Fax: +43 1 795 57-121
Email: info@belvedere.at
http://www.belvedere.at
Öffnungszeiten: Täglich 10 bis 18 Uhr

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