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English summaries October 15 - 27
Ostlicht
Anja Manfredi – Images of Movement
03.10.2013 – 21.12.2013
A hysteric in a carpet shop
By Nina Schedlmayer
The apparatus is somewhat reminiscent of Alexander Calder’s sculptures. However, it’s a corset lacing machine, along which the performer moves – she turns neatly on her own axis, laughs, falters briefly: counteracts the brutal apparatus with floating ease. Her neighbour – the artist, Katrina Daschner – also handles the lacing machine with great ease: attired in a flowered dress and hat, she laughs like a coquettish silent film diva and finally disappears after she has taken off the dress down to her hips. And then there's that woman who moves her arms and legs elegantly along a ballet barre.
Anja Manfredi's projection of three 16mm films is the core piece of her exhibition in Ostlicht, a sort of early-mid-career survey. Starting with this, the artist transferred the movements in abstract notations onto paper as well as onto curtains which, in turn, should allude to a cinema and make the show rhythmical. In between she presents her meanwhile well-known "Archive of Movements", her re-enactments of historic dancers – collages on which, together with her colleague, Roberta Lima, she imitates Isadora Duncan – as well as newer works such as a recent self-portrait.
Manfredi's works definitely have comedic moments such as when she caricatures Duncan's already very expressive gestures in an exaggerated manner. But it's more than just that, it's about measuring the body, about gender stereotypes – wonderfully exaggerated for example, in the series "Viennese Carpet Shop", in which she lets a man pose as an hysteric. Yet the exhibition is somewhat bloodless when it comes to reflecting on the medium of photography: photograms from film material that has been "thrown back onto the photographic carrier” – neither Manfredi nor art needs these sort of things.
Ostlicht
1100 Vienna, Absberggase 27
Tel: +43 1 996 20 66
Fax : +43 1 996 20 66 - 66
info@ostlicht.at
www.ostlicht.at
Opening hours: Wed - Sat: 12 noon - 18.00 hours
Kunsthalle Krems
Yoko Ono. HALF-A-WIND SHOW
20.10.2013 – 23.02.2014
Video Heaven over Fluxus Rock
By Roland Schöny
It was high time to show the epochal Œuvre of Yoko Ono as a pioneer of Fluxus and performative, conceptual art right from its beginning. Since »Y E S Yoko Ono« a decade and a half ago, there has hardly been a retrospective of similar dimension such as this, prepared by the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt's co-operation project now shown in Krems.
Poetic aspects transport Yoko Ono's sky works. In these earliest video works in the history of art, in »Sky Machine« (1961) or »Sky TV« (1966) – shown in Krems in technically renewed form – cloud formations play the main role in pictures of the sky which are broadcast on a TV screen. Not only subjective dreams and experiment led there. Also the involvement with Yves Klein who had already signed the Mediterranean sky with a gesture in 1946 on the beach in Nice. Also visible through the glass wall of the entry corridor in the entry setting: a variation of the »Morning Beams« in the large hall. Inside: a documentary photograph of »LIGHTING PIECE« (1955) - Yoko Ono sitting at a piano without pressing a single key. Instead, she let a match burn down. That was (non-)action, dramaturgy, subversive performance.
»Painting To Be Stepped On« (1961 / 2013) continues the idea of the performative in another way – as an invitation to the public to come inside the art work, whilst »Painting To Hammer A Nail« (1961/1966) is reminiscent of Günther Uecker. The content-related centre piece follows - that paradigmatic change of picture and text to performance and participation unfurled through that work which Yoko Ono showed in 1965 in the New York art gallery of Fluxus founder, George Maciunas: short, partly fantastic and partly easily comprehensible directives written in black ink on paper. Yoko Ono later continued this idea as »Paintings To Be Constructed In Your Head« (1995) and as interventions »en miniature« written directly onto the walls of the Kunsthalle. However, it's significant that the work is complete for the first time through the involvement of the public. In this combination of writing, text, instruction, score, notation, action and participation, the formal revolutionary and the socio-political awakening is substantiated.
How early Yoko Ono crossed genre limits, especially the allocated cultural and social context demarcation lines for women, is shown in the video »Cut Piece«, a performance which she already premiered in 1965 in the Sôgetsu Art Center in Tokio and later in Carnegie Hall in New York: on the stage, a young woman is literally having the clothes stripped off her. Thematising violence with smouldering feelings of panic.
Beautifully presented, the dissected room »Half-A-Room« from the late 1960's. Somewhat lost, on the other hand, »Balance Piece« (1997/2010). And if you've seen the film »Fly« (1970) in Vienna's Gartenbau cinema with a fly on a naked woman's body, the projection here will certainly seem tiny. The exhibition seems distinctly cooler, however, where the story with John Lennon begins. Naturally, appearances such as the »Bed-in for Peace« in the Hilton Hotel, Amsterdam (1969) are included, but the problems that always accompanied Yoko Ono's reception seem to appear here: only appreciated as an artist by insiders, her work remained hidden for many years through her marriage with John Lennon, his murder, as well as also all possible rumours about the split-up of the Beatles.
Altogether, a comprehensive and well-rounded project that throws superb light on this constantly active, exceptional artist in the avant-garde context of the twentieth century.
Kunsthalle Krems
3500 Krems, Franz-Zeller Platz 3
www.kunsthalle.at
Tel: +43 (0)2732/908010
Opening hours: Daily 10.00 - 18.00 hours
Kunsthalle Wien Museumsquartier
Salon der Angst
06.09.2013 – 12.01.2014
Saldon of arbitrariness
By Daniela Gregori
Well, this is not new in Vienna: as soon as an exhibition venue is under a new directorship it is closed and renovated and the corporate design is also altered. At the Kunsthalle Wien this is now an eyrie. At least now any eagle can represent the Kunsthalle, said new director Nicolaus Schafhausen. One can only hope that he doesn't identify himself with the heraldic animal.
Whether he was able to identify himself with the topic of the exhibition curated jointly with Cathérine Hug, remains open. Unfortunately the organizers refrained from providing a thesis as well as a catalogue. It might have shown a path through the plethora of the 45 positions. Apparently a printed theoretic compendium will follow later. One is therefore forced to stick to a booklet , which doesn't really help in answering the question as to what the doubtless well done works actually have to do with the title.
For example, in Rainer Ganahl’s video “El Mundo” a classic concert is performed in the halls of a New York discount shop that is due to be shut down. The salesroom was formerly a theatre. The Cuban artists collective Los Carpinteros presents an impressive video titled “Pellejo” (skin), in which a couple rapidly ages during the course of a remarkably passionate act of love.
Understood. The exhibition doesn't aim at evoking this diffuse feeling of fear. Rather it thematises fear on a quasi meta level; and this works best using mass media, which today potentially represent the most appropriate distributors invoking all kinds of fear. Marco Lulic, who transforms photos of urban situations in Vienna with headlines from the yellow press to venues of fear or Kader Attia with his installation of room high shelves in which historic papers and magazines are piled, that all have a cover photo in common – one instilling fear with the image of ethnic groups from faraway countries. Or Thomas Hirschhorn’s somewhat brutally staged collage-like juxtaposition of glossy magazine beauties with sites of violence and muted human bodies. Yet these kinds of works remain to be the exception. In these types of exhibitions, one frequently has the feeling that the point was missed - but this time one really questions if the point was ever pursued.
Kunsthalle Wien Museumsquartier
1070 Vienna, Museumsplatz 1
Tel: +43(0)/ 1/ 521 89-0
Fax: +43(0)/ 1/ 521 89-0
http://www.kunsthallewien.at
Opening hours: Daily 10.00- 19.00 hours
Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya
Tápies. From Within
21. 06. 2013 – 03. 11. 2013
Sent to the cellar
By Wolfang Pichler
This to date largest retrospective of works by the artist who passed away in 2012, failed to fulfil its self-defined goal, to meet his posthumous wishes. For one, it had been Antoni Tàpies long-standing wish to once present his works at the Museu Nactional d’Art de Catalunya (MNAC), but it was his explicit wish that his work be displayed as a both a supplement as well as a contrast to the wonderful and worldwide exclusive Romanesque apses on the museum’s ground floor – and not, as this is the case in a White Cube installed in the cellar. And secondly, Tàpies did not like his early surrealistic works - and it is precisely these works that were used to form the starting point of the rather uninspired chronologically arranged exhibition, which leave the impression of a being mediated in a rather cold way.
Nevertheless, a visit is absolutely worthwhile due to the energy and wonderful composition of his paintings. They frequently mediate an unbelievable intensity with their large format and few gestural lines and mainly earthy colours. Sand and earth not only serve as pigment but are predominantly the material on which the painting is based. Windows, doors and other found objects are effectively and simply mounted into the works. The artist, who is often falsley described as informal, is most powerful when he lets the objects speak for themselves - if he simply presents the beauty of an old door or the structural and colour nuances of sand; wherby his often very political statements, not randomly in catalan, also deserve attention.
After visiting the Tápies show, it is highly recommended to look at the Romanesque church fragments and paintings, that have been mounted on visible wooden constructions and collected from all over Spain, because only then will this allow one to perceived the logical connection between Tàpies oeuvre and these building structures which he admired to so much.
Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya
03038 Barcelona, Palau Nactional, Parc de Montjuic
Tel: 00 34 93 622 03 76
Fax: ’0034 93 62 03 83
Email: mnac@mnac.cat
http://www.mnac.cat
Opening hours: Winter (1/10-30/4): Tue-Sat 10-18 hours, Sun, Fri: 10-15 hours
Summer (1/5-30/9): Tue - Sat 10-20 hours, Sun, Fri: 10-15 hours
Mehr Texte von translated and summarized by: Liz Wollner-Grandville
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