Warhol, Newman, Wool “Barney is now at another party.“ When exhibitions show artistic developments in a larger context, it is a good thing for every visitor. Such an exhibition can be seen at the moment at Kunsthaus Graz. Under the curatorial direction of Peter Pakesch, the exhibition “Warhol, Wool, Newman” bridges the gap between abstract American expressionism, minimal and pop art, and some of the art of our time.

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Abstract American expressionism brought a new image and understanding of space into the world of art. The viewer played a central role here, because the work was no longer possible without his/her presence. In Barnett Newman’s work, this becomes noticeably clear. It positions the viewer as the counterpart and participant in the space of the image and confronts him/her with a physical reality.

Andy Warhol built upon Newman’s understanding of space, according to the director of the Kunsthaus Graz, Peter Pakesch. Pop art – when Warhol is considered to be its most important representative – is, to that extent, not a reaction to American abstract expressionism, but rather, the logical extension of a continuous development. Peter Pakesch has been following this theory for a long time. After a ten-year preparation period, he can now publicly confirm this theory on the basis of original works.

Like Newman, Warhol also plays with the perception of space and time. Through his silkscreen images, which often use newspaper images as source material, he demonstrates that it is pointless to look for references that correspond to reality. There is no independent reality behind these pictures.

He tries to dispel the meaning out of the pictures and thereby produce a counterbalance to mass-media reporting, “Because the more you look at the same exact thing, the more the meaning goes away, and the better and emptier you feel.“

By contrast, in his films, Warhol tries to set the illusion machinery of Hollywood against disillusionism by bringing the films back into the physical. He slows them down, plays with time, and thereby creates a new space of perception for the viewer. Christopher Wool also works in this context. For him, original painting no longer exists. The prototypes are stamped, the writings are painted along with the template. The motif is endlessly repeated. It is exactly through this repetition of the same that identity develops, and this connects Wool with Warhol.

In the word paintings of the New York-based painter and photographer Wool, condensed slogans and shortened messages from the present media world are featured. There often exists a gap thereby between the signs and the original “SENSEISNOLONGERTOBEMADE”. The randomly placed empty spaces obscure meaning and put perceived reality into question. It produces a disturbance and represents an alternative world to the determined everyday life of the media. (jk/jn)

This podcast was made possible with the generous support of UNIQA ArtCercles. The pictures of Warhol, Wool and Newman are on display at the Kunsthaus Graz until January 10th, 2010.

Maria Teresa Ponce understands how people develop a nostalgia for the country they have left behind, where their own friends, family, places, experiences, and history have remained. Ponce left Ecuador when she was nine and moved to the US, where she spent her youth, and studied architecture. After she completed her degree, she returned to Ecuador to find a country in economic crisis, with no work to be found for young architects.

This crisis resulted in Ponce turning to art: she began to take photographs. She experienced that photography opened up new worlds which interested her, but to which she hardly had access. Her photographic work investigates the inner world of prisons, including their inmates. She then digitally superimposed the photographs from the prisons onto photographs of a condemned hospital building, thereby representing the ailments of an institution meant for rehabilitation. Her landscape photography, taken along a pipeline which runs from the Amazon rainforest to the Pacific coast, gives the impression that wealth and economic prosperity are being siphoned outside the country through a hermetically sealed channel. Ponce’s work is characterized by her search for these areas and her willingness to expose herself them, as well as their inhabitants.

One aspect of Ponce’s documentary style is an intentional staging of scenes – some of her projects reveal an interventional approach. In the end, Maria Teresa Ponce works with the medium photography not only to produce pictures, but also to experience, and to evoke associations which are easy to miss. Sometimes, the artist says, she finds herself bordering on activism, the term “photographer” falls short of a proper artistic self-definition. (wh/jn)

In his work, the Ecuadorian artist Miguel Alvear works with motifs that originate from the pop culture worlds of South America. He mixes popular icons with historical, mythological, and art historical examples. Sometimes he brings together images from different social environments, combining things that normally try to stand apart due to taste or class distinctions. This approach to art, which ignores the concerns of snobbery and taste, creates friction. In his work, Popular Mechanics, commissioned by the City Museum of Quito, Miguel Alvear reestablishes the flashy, over-the-top style of female Tecnocumbia dancers in the imagery the local public bus drivers like to display on their dashboards. In the end, his work, which is basically reflecting the taste of the public, was not accepted by the museum as a symbol of Ecuadorian culture.

Miguel Alvear comes from a film and video background. He studied at the Institut des Arts de Diffusion in Belgium and then at the San Francisco Art Institute in California. This cinematic background comes through in his photographs, which are like cinematic still images – Tableaux Vivants, which mix the sacred with the grotesque, the fluid with the static, landmarks with garbage, and, like in the Tecnocumbia songs, religious language with sexually provocative imagery.

In his most recent film, Blak Mama, Alvear captures the hybrid visual language of religious pagan rituals, such as the annual celebration in Latacunga in honour of “Mama Negra”. The parade held there does not only refer to the rescue of the city by this holy figure. Its visual language also alludes to the suppression of the native population by the Spanish colonialists, the mixture of religions that emerged from a not fully successful Christian mission and further influences of the religious concepts of the African slaves, of Bolivian and Guatemalan immigrant workers, and not least of all, the necessity of throwing wild celebrations.

The artist’s film is not documentary. The imagery of the festival, its characters and their visually symbolic power are a reference, he places them into situations, which unearth buried layers of the collective unconscious or give voice to the suppressed, which is present in the parade, but only subliminally articulated. “Personal transformation stems from insatisfaction, desire and fantasy. When wanting to become the other, cross-dressing is the first step to take. Dress like him, dress like her. And dance.” (wh/jn)

The movie premiere of Blak Mama takes place at the 6th of March at Ochomedio Cinema in Quito and Tumbaco.

Carlos, born 1976, Jason, born 1981, surname Sanchez, together, “The Sanchez Brothers”, are an extremely promising, young photographer collective. The work of the two young artists from Canada has already been shown in numerous solo exhibitions in Canada, the USA, and Europe.

Their photography, produced in a Montreal studio located in a factory buildings owned by their uncle, has been successful, although, or perhaps because, they shed light on the dark sides of life and human actions: pain, insanity, death, natural selection, injustice, abuse, disaster, mourning, degradation, isolation, exploitation. One can find among these, that which one turns a blind eye to in life.

What Carlos and Jason Sanchez visualize are themes of events which one hears about based on media reports and stories. Their photographs condense the storylines. They are key scenes, frozen in time, into which one immediately gets immersed, allowing the viewer to experience the challenge of the photographers, who want to share a complex context in a single cinematic image.

Such capsulization is costly and would be not possible for the two young artists without national funding and support from the province of Quebec, which goes into research, scouting for the right locations, the visualization of the imagined scenes in the studio sets. Part of the interior design, purchased in furniture stores and second-hand shops, is carefully packed up again after the shoots and properly returned for reuse – this saves money, because the photographic work of the duo is already costly from a temporal perspective. On the average, two months go into the production of one image.

The brothers have observed development in the extension of their work towards installation, a path which they have already followed in the last few years with works such as “Between Life and Death”, “Natural Selection”, and “Buried Alive”. Film also holds a place in the long-range artistic future of Carlos and Jason Sanchez. (wh/jn)

Their next solo exhibition will be shown at the DNJ Gallery in Los Angeles in February.

Sculptures and installations of the artist Thomas Baumann possess the quality of being alive. Usually, they are moving. They de-form, they make noises, they move their observers: emotionally, in terms of their beliefs, through the challenge to participate even physically. Movement, says the artist, is a language of our time. We understand it and feel addressed by it on different levels.

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Thomas Baumann’s produces his work from mechanical, technological, and electronic materials. The units of construction have their own aesthetic, and do not remain hidden behind the façades of design. In this way, the sculptures retain the quality of being mechanically engineered works of art which create the effect of being the siblings of those machines that are used in the production lines of industrial manufacturing. In view of their proximity to their rationalized relatives – in terms of production optimization and the avoidance of side effects – Baumann’s works of art, taken out of the manufacturing context, show a surprisingly soulful dimension to its human viewers. They have lyrical sides, humor, they pull one in, they require time, they provoke social critique and thoughtfulness, they delight, they reveal souls which have been exorcised from production-optimized machinery and its operators and have reappeared under the hand of the artist. Technology’s original function, says Thomas Baumann, was to please humans and enhance their existence—a purpose which he attaches to his artistic work. (wh/jn)

In Heinrich Kleist’s essay, “On the Marionettentheater”, a discussion takes place between a layman and the principal dancer of the city opera. The layman, impressed by the presentation, wants to know what kind of technical mechanism has made it possible for the puppets to dance so convincingly that it seems as though dance itself has been shown in its most perfect form. The dance professional considers this for a moment, then gives an answer: When we see a “perfect” dance presentation and ask how it was done, then we’re already missing the point. It does not depend on the mechanics, nor on the perfected techniques with which the individual limbs of the puppets are handled with the most precision.

If one wants to understand why a dance appears “perfect”, it is much more effective not to focus so much on the technical perfection, but rather on the mechanisms of the representation of the dance. If these mechanisms are perfect, then the viewer who sees a movement corresponding to the represented one has to call this movement “dance”. And vice versa, when he sees movements which do not correspond to this representation of dance, even if they are also superbly performed, he does not even consider them to be dance. In short: What we perceive as dance is what corresponds to its representation.

In their workshop, “Sweat -The Movie“, Tor Lindstrand and Marten Spangberg of International Festival together with the participants take on this topic of the representation of the dance. Contemporary dance is very different and much more than what is shown to us on stage. Contemporary dance is not limited to the isolated movements which are demonstrated to us in video clips and Hollywood movies. But contemporary dance is influenced and rarely separated from such representations of dance. What is dance when the medium of its representation shifts? What is dance?

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Lindstrand and Spangberg conceived of a workshop setting in which the participants – all professional dancers – not only reflect on typical representations of dance, either by approaching them or distancing themselves from them, but also investigate cinematic possibilities of the representation of dance and thereby contribute to the definition of dance. “Sweat - The Movie”, according to Lindstrand, is “a workshop about the production of a dance film and a dance film about this workshop, which took place as part of the Impulstanz Festival in Vienna”. Each participant took part in discussing, training, choreography, building and designing film sets, directing, shooting, and editing. The production took place over 30 days, ending with its premiere on the 31st day, August 8th 2008 at Kasino am Schwarzenbergplatz, Vienna.

She produces films every year. She stands before the camera. She directs—in recent years, together with Chris Haring. It was a blessing that she met Chris Haring, explains Mara Mattuschka. He is generous. He has an open system of working that integrates people and their respective points of view. Haring stages his productions in bare spaces, from which Mattuschka makes films which correspond to cinematic rules of setting and dramaturgy. She extends her perspective as a painter into her cinematic approach. Up-close views of the body, from below, from above. Views which distort perspective. With digital retouching, she designs places, architectures, and spatialities. The films resulting from their collaboration are called: “Legal Errorist”, “Part Time Heroes”, and “Running Sushi”. A fourth is to come.
She refers to her earlier cinematic work as “psychological mini-dramas”. Their contents move between the borders of tragedy and comedy. She appears in them as a performance artist. She plays Madame Ping Pong, Mimi Minus, Mahatma Gobi, and Ramses II. Their identities are somewhat loose, at play, they only become clearer in self-expression. In play, one develops a certain relaxedness towards oneself and towards problems in everyday life. This is probably what Otto Mühl was aiming at, in principle.

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Mara Mattuschka makes films, plays, sings, paints. Bulgarians, she says, have a tendency to do everything. Mara Mattuschka comes from Bulgaria. She studied painting and animation with Maria Lassnig. She boasts a wide variety of artistic styles. Her work lives to the fullest, her characters are usually naked and psychologically open-hearted. Truth has many sides. She refers to herself as a post-post modernist – she likes to play, but also somehow addresses truth.
In the twenty first century, the need to experiment and break rules is over. There is a new renaissance, a return to humanity, for whom a discussion about gender roles has actually already begun. This new renaissance could be wonderful, as she hates the word “creativity”. Her work is extremely versatile, and she is so full of energy. She takes breaks between works in café houses—a truly Viennese tradition during which she takes a breather from the (Kasachok) dance of life. (wh/jn)