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English summaries January 28 - February 10
Unteres Belvedere
The Night at Twilight. Art from the romantic to today
24.10.2012 – 17.02.2013
By Goschka Gawlik
The exhibition "The Night at Twilight" in the Lower Belvedere and in the Orangery implies a sort of post-historic dialectic between the maxims of enlightenment and "Dark Modernity" and deals with encounters between apparently opposite things which meet at their peripheries instead of the centres.
Because night backs onto the break of day, and awakening onto the periphery of sleep, these surging borderline experiences - which the day-night metaphor calls into question, thus initiating further reflection – contain additional brisance in some of the works (altogether, there are 280 works from the romantic to the present).
The curator team, Brigitte Borchardt-Birbaumer and Harald Krejci, expand the night iconography with examples from the fund of abstraction, in which night landscapes and the uncanny are captured in bright colours. Pictures, drafts and works on paper are not only to be seen but also objects, an excess of photography and again and again, "black" sculptures and nightly videos, amongst which are some by Lisl Ponger or Rodney Graham, everything rich in variety, occasionally combined in eye-opening juxtapositions. Besides the artists from the European art establishment, among them Courbet, Friedrich, Magritte, Richter or Lassnig, one meets some from outside Europe, and also come upon anonymous and smaller "night pieces" by unobserved artists such as Olga Wlassics, Traue Zemb-Wolsegger or Andrea Schnell. Always good. On the walls, there are repeated quotes by the minimalistic post-romantic, Samuel Beckett.
Further on, the exhibition contends with imagination, psychology and the subconscious in Night Myths and Dreams, which come to light in different disguises and disfigurations.
But what would the night be without the magic of lights? These pay homage, not only to the sublime night landscapes but also to the images of the natural and artificial underworlds against the backdrop of the town.
In contrast, the night and the half-darkness reach the dimension of pipe dreams, a flight into the interior and to black irony.
Unteres Belvedere
1030 Vienna, Rennweg 6
Tel: +43 1 795 57-200
Fax: +43 1 795 57-121
email: info@belvedere.at
www.belvedere.at
Opening hours: Daily 10 to 18 hours, Wed. 10 to 21 hours
Kunstmuseum Stuttgart
Andreas Magdanz – Stuttgart Stammheim
17.11.2012 – 24.03.2013
By Daniela Gregori
At the opening ceremony, the governmental Chief Construction Director praised the wonderful perspective of freedom, and the yellow press smirked over the "Prison with Roof Terrace", "Hotel for Gangsters and Hoodlums". The comfort and humaneness behind bars was praised when the penal institution in Stuttgart was opened in 1963 and deemed the most modern of its kind at that time.
Eleven years later, under strict security measures, a helicopter landed in the grounds and two women in handcuffs were brought to the courtyard of the institution under the eyes of the media. The enforcement officer, who greeted the first of the two women with, "Good morning, Mrs. Meinhof", got a vigorous kick in the stomach.
"Kafka will be well beaten by Stammheim,” wrote the former RAF member, Peter-Jürgen Boock, who sat in the penal institution as of 1983. The term Stammheim had embedded itself in the heads of the Germans; the topography had become the topic. Today, Stammheim stands for the "brick era", the German autumn, the battle between the RAF and the Federal Republic of Germany, but Stammheim itself as a building won't stand for much longer. The prison where in Ulrike Meinhof, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and Jan-Carl Raspe killed themselves is due to be demolished in the very near future.
Following "Duty Station Mariental", "Auschwitz-Birkenau", and "Federal Intelligence Service – Location Pullach", Andreas Magdanz has again taken on photographically one of the locations of German history and documented it completely free from emotions or dramatic presentation, but on the other hand, truly fastidiously and impressively. For five months, the artist moved into one of the dismal buildings in front of the prison walls where the enforcement officers had lived, was able to photograph the building complex from the air, got permission to shoot photos in the institution evening after evening. Step by step, Magdanz advanced through the corridors and courtyards, through the rooms of everyday prison life, and after weeks, to logically arrive at cell No. 719 on the seventh floor of the historic location in which Meinhof, as well as Baader, died. The photographs are completely unspectacular but they manage to convey what the artist felt in the rooms. Above all, the brick era in the rooms seems to manifest itself in the black-and-white shots
Part of the works are currently presented in the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, but in the hermetic seclusion of a publication, the gradual approach and documentation of the location, together with the floor plans and texts which, from the historic happenings, gradually zoom into a concrete work by Magdanz, is almost better.
Publication
Andreas Magdanz
Stammheim
Editors Andreas Magdanz, Ulrike Groos, Text by Andreas Magdanz et al.
Designed by Andreas Magdanz
Hatje Cantz Verlag
German/English
2012. 230 Pages, 98 black-and-white pictures.
30,80 x 25,80 cm, bound
ISBN 978-3-7757-3457-8
Kunstmuseum Stuttgart
70173 Stuttgart, Kleiner Schlossplatz 1
Tel: +49 (0) 711 - 216 21 88
Fax: +49 (0) 711 - 216 78 20
email: info@kunstmuseum-stuttgart.de
www.kunstmuseum-stuttgart.de
Opening hours: Tue, Thu, until Sun 10.00-18.00, Wed. and Fri: 10.00-21.00 hours
Künstlerhaus Wien
Time(less) drawing– Contemporary art in reference to Otto Neurath
13.12.2012 – 17.02.2013
By Iris Meder
Over the past few years, Otto Neurath - born 130 years ago – has had a fascinating hold over artists and academics. Publications and exhibitions have dealt with different aspects of Neurath pictorial statistics, from the pictogram art exhibition "The Loneliness of the Drawing" in the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, to the Neurath retrospective "Gypsy Urbanism" in the Museum for Applied Arts. Now, Maria Christine Holter and Barbara Höller have curated an exhibition in the Künstlerhaus devoted to the theme of contemporary art under the aspect of the drawing.
The anticipation of physical structures, precisely every rational, short imagery that earmarks Neurath's isotypes, is circumvented on entering the exhibition: monotone beeps bug you on the right – and if you turn to the left instead, you hear an agitated, screaming woman's voice.
The exhibition, which, besides contemporary art, also presents graphics by Neurath/Arntz, approaches its many-layered theme by means of being arranged in seven chapters. For example, "Sprachrohr" (voice) is concerned with socio-political matters and "Welt Macht" (world power) refers to consumption, capital and power. What definitely conforms to Neurath's humanistic approach - the artistic works turn out partly to be rather one-dimensional. Some remain incomprehensible as far as their intention is concerned, above all in the chapter “Zahlen Feld” (number field) – for instance, the graphic description of the colour of the artist's shirt which forms itself in a film-loop synchronized with the aforementioned beep, or a diagrammatic description of the results of the 1971 general election.
More conclusive is the chapter "Stadt Gebiet (city zone) with associations to architecture and urbanism. For example, Christian Rupp's stock market rate - portrayed in big dipper animation - is charming, as is Michael Bielicky's allegedly controllable, wall-filling catastrophe game and his Prague "traffic light hacking" with manipulated traffic light men. How would Neurath have liked that?
Künstlerhaus Wien
1010 Wien, Karlsplatz 5
Tel: +43 1 587 96 63
email: office@k-haus.at
www.k-haus.at
Opening times: daily from 10-18 hours
Kunsthalle Exnergasse
Origo – at the Nought Position
17.01.2013 – 02.03.2013
By Manisha Jothady
Some 4000 silver-coloured balloons cover the floor in the art gallery Exnergasse. They softly flatter the ankles when one walks through the room. "My Breath" is the name of the ever-changing installation. Stefan Riebel's work impetuously encapsulates the observer in a concrete space-time experience. Whoever doesn't want to be involved has to leave. And would miss the most haunting contribution to the show "Origo (At Point Zero of the Point of View)".
Under this title, Birgit Rinagl and Franz Thalmair have united eight positions with several works. Karl Bühler's language theory from the 1930's underlies the exhibition, whereby linguistic utterances referring to the subject whose spatial and time position is examined (I-Here-Now-Origo). This is now put to the test in the visual field. An exhibition has hereby emerged that, as a matter of fact, wants everything (not to say too much): here, reflection is directed just as much towards the artist's subject as towards the observer's awareness.
The linguistic approach functions well where the works manifest in a sort of communicative offer to the observer. But one could also have difficulty within the context of the exhibition with the presentation of several works. Michael Kargl's institution-critical wall drawings, for example, or Ignacio Uriarte's work are composed of empty, folded A4 pages and appear peculiarly speechless.
Kunsthalle Exnergasse
1090 Wien, Währinger Straße 59, 2. Stiege, erster Stock
Tel: +43 (0)1 401 21-41 oder +43 (0)1 401 21-42
Fax: +43 (0)1 401 21-67
email: kunsthalle.exnergasse@wuk.at
www.kunsthalle.wuk.at
Opening hours: Tuesday to Friday 13:00 - 18:00 hours, Saturday: 11:00 - 14:00 hours
Mehr Texte von translated and summarized by: Liz Wollner-Grandville
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