Constantin Luser challenges us to enter the maze of his imagination: he corners us against the wall of our indifference and confronts us with the unavoidable question whether we will ever be able to escape. But escape what? A portrait.

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In any case, it tames the wildness of our thinking, which means that when it happens –ever so rarely- the hegemony of the concept is erased and for a moment we are cured of our illness separating us from time – our rationality. more »

There has been substantial evidence for the theory, according to the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, that it is far less important for humans to know who they are, than where they are. The persistent ignorance regarding one’s place of existence is one of the causes for what newer philosophy calls oblivion of being.

The inquiry after the “where” and the placing of one’s person and works represent central aspects of Wilhelm Scherübl’s work. His work realizes itself in the examination of his locations of residence and life, and in the integration of the respective condition of the places and resources which he finds there.

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Scherübl lives in the country, in upper Ennstal, where he sometimes paints outdoors, using trees and plants for his works, and plays with reflections on natural water surfaces for his light installations. His art is a reflection on nature and the attempt to attain insights into artistic and natural processes of development, as well as into the complexity of the earth’s organism and our own finiteness.

The artist acts as an initiator here, he begins a process for which he formulates basic conditions which, in the end, still escape his control for the most part. The process leaves growth, light, cold, and wind to nature. By freezing the paint outdoors, the so-called Minusaquarelle (“minus watercolors”) are formed: only then do moments of the completion of his light installations on the water emerge, when the surface is flat and undisturbed by wind. The plant installations are subject to the natural cycle of growing, blooming, and withering.

Conversely, installations in which plants are transplanted into artificial and/or artistic contexts and are therefore dependent on life-supporting measures, refer to the concept of nature as something which is in principle made possible through production, as well as to the attempt of humans to disconnect themselves from natural processes.

The anonymous, living sculptures in states of perpetual change reflect on the imperfect, the temporary, and the unformulated. With a background in sculpture, Scherübl - who attended the Academy of Fine Arts and completed his degree under Bruno Gironcoli –has progressively shifted his focus from form to transformation. His works represent the overlying process and the physical energy which flows into it, as well as those things that are left out—like chips of stone—which Scherübl then incorporates into new developing cycles of works. What is essential here is the time aspect: transformations develop over time and possess their own rhythm. Scherübl’s idea of making efficient use of time paradoxically involves time consuming techniques in order to fill up large surfaces of paper with ball-point pen or pencil, or to gradually obscure windowpanes with many small brush lines. Through these works, the time and the energy which something needs in order to come into being becomes tangible.

Coming into and out of existence, artificial and natural light: these are also themes to which Scherübl dedicates an installation which can currently be viewed in the exhibition “Nature - Creation is not finished!“ at Stift Admont. The “Hall for Artistic Intervention“ was set up by the artist with a light installation in which a network of power cords branch out in tributary-like forms, representing the transformation of energy, and lead to a fluorescent sign reading “ENNS”, making reference to the river to which he lives nearby. Books from the Stift Admont library show illustrations of sunflowers: the ultimate light seeker. “I am addicted to light“, says Wilhelm Scherübl. (sh/jn)

A grid-like strut frame, constructed out of several vertical and horizontal aluminum rods, stands in the space, and is held both together and upright by means of a chaotic network of wide black rubber bands with no visible beginning or end. The sculpture conveys a precarious stability, based on workings of gravity, traction, pressure, and friction. Bringing attention to the forces that constitute a work is a central concern of the artist, Michael Kienzer. Through the methods of interlacing, interweaving, and extensive tension, he creates links, references, connections between things and materials, and thereby reveals the fact that it is not the elements themselves, but the mutual relations between the elements—what is formed in between—that represents the character of a work.

Kienzer completed his degree at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Graz and the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, where he studied sculpture under Bruno Gironcoli. For his work—which has received numerous awards, among them the Monsignore Otto Mauer Award—he uses various media; for objects, installations, and designs, he takes different approaches to themes such as space, time, surface, compression, materiality, image, and the original. His sculptural interventions are mostly site-specific, working within the means of a given space. For example, in a lapidary fashion, two aluminum plates are set up straight across a space, supported only by themselves and the walls, drawing attention to the physical forces at work, therby shifting them, and changing the viewer’s perspective of the structures, which at first appear unalterable.

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Some of Kienzer’s works—especially those which are located in public and semi-public spaces—invite the viewer to take part in them. As a communicative work of art, the artist describes a space constructed out of thirty doors, which was on display as a major feature of MUMOK sculpture series, “Out Site”, in the following way: one can arrive here into a liminal space, a gap. For his current installation, “hanging around“, in the Bruno Kreisky Park in Vienna, the artist stretched a few hammocks between trees, which emphasize the spaces in between them and makes them usable. The stretching and interweaving also shape the principles of construction and representation that are present here.
This theme finds its strongest expression in the sculptures in which wires, pipes, rope, and rubber bands are intertwined into inextricable balls, forming different units of materiality. The coming together of the various materials directs one’s attention to their characteristics–smooth, raw, flexible, rigid—and how these characteristics work on one another. The materials themselves are an important topic for Kienzer. Most of the time, he uses semi-manufactured materials such as wire, glass and aluminum plates, bars, rope, rubber bands, as well as everyday household items such as tape, tin cans, glass bottles, and erasers—but these are not used in the readymade sense. The materials and objects seem to be or are, in fact, new, untreated, carry no traces, have no history, and represent a pure presence in their respective functions in the works of art.

Their composition raises the question concerning their conditions and balances of power: when rolls of tapes are piled up one on top of another forming a post that seems to be supporting the ceiling, or telephone boxes are placed one on top of the other, or a pile of paint cans replace one beam of an aluminium installation, or a helium balloon is suspended in the air with tape, an order of the things and the forces involved become a subject of examination. The view is one of pragmatic irony, the work of art without the narrative. Dubravka Ugresic asks a friend “What is art?“ in her novel, “The Museum of Unconditional Surrender “. “An activity which has something to do with overcoming the force of gravity—but not with flying. “ (sh/jn)

The works of Michael Kienzer can be viewed at Galerie Thoman .

In the modern, functionally disenchanted world, those who seek out magical moments must first acknowledge reality, but still hold on to the belief that that which is possible can reveal itself in reality. The magic of enchantment exists in transformation. It is based on the ability of the ordinary, banal, and overlooked to wake the fantasy buried within ourselves.

Two parallel curved pencils experience togetherness. Small flames burn from the valves of the tires of a casually parked bicycle. Lighters positioned next to each other share an adjoining flame. The Israeli artist Ariel Schlesinger describes himself as a little romantic. His sense for the fantastic and awareness of the possible as that which is overlooked in reality are two jumping-off points for his art, which magically draws in and fascinates viewers through subtle interventions.

Ariel Schlesinger grew up in Israel and studied at the Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem and the School of Visual Arts in New York. Currently, he lives and seeks out magical moments in Berlin and Tel Aviv. His art is characterized by object art and installation.

In his work, Schlesinger uses found objects, building them up into larger works. Installed on a stepladder with cable straps, a cheap power drill on its last legs of battery power propels a gear that ends with a showerhead, which in turn releases a gas-filled soap bubble that floats down and bursts with a loud bang into the reality of an incandescent grid.

The relics from everyday life gathered by the artist seem to be cobbled together in their artistic reconstruction. The do-it-yourself aesthetic prevails: one can also be enchanted by simple things—as a child constantly experiences in play—which are often veiled by the slick product design that is the result of a lack of imagination in the adult world. (wh/jn)

We keep things on hand because they are important to us. We store them. They are available: for example, birthdays of friends, important telephone numbers, and sometimes, works of art. In Vienna, the Museum on Demand (Museum auf Abruf, MUSA) serves this purpose. This museum of the city of Vienna keeps a collection of artworks by artists living in Vienna which is accessible to the city’s residents.

The collection began in 1945 with an acquisition of watercolors. Since then, the art collection has increased to nearly 20,000 works. They represent the work of Vienna’s resident artists for over a half century. Acquisition, says the present director of MUSA, Berthold Ecker, is the most significant form of support for artists. This has been the cornerstone of MUSA’s artistic policy since the beginning and remains so until today. The city of Vienna purchases about 130 new works of art annually for this collection. Today, one can find works from Franz West, Maria Lassnig, and Erwin Wurm there.

The city’s collection was available for quite some time, but there was no location available at which it could have been shown. What began with paintings, sculptures, and drawings, grew to include installations, videos, and new media work. If a permanent exhibition space could be found, the collection could be brought to the public’s attention. With each exhibition, a “Museum on Demand” was created, as designated in 1991 by the director of the collection at that time, Wolfgang Hilger, which is also how the name of the permanent institution was coined.

In 2007, the Museum on Demand came into being. In a building next to Vienna’s City Hall, 600 square meters of the most modern exhibition space including storage are located in the former premises of a public kitchen. The MUSA houses a front gallery reserved for young artists in addition to the exhibition hall in order to allow for these single exhibitions. In the Artothek, pieces from the collection can be borrowed and taken home for the small fee of less than three Euros per month.

The goal of bringing art made by the Viennese artists to the Viennese and making access easier is just as much a part of the museum’s program as the promotion of the artists. The museum offers three large-scale exhibitions per year and ten exhibitions in the front gallery, as well as an ambitious revolving program which takes into account individuals with special needs. Admission to the exhibitions is free. It would be inappropriate, according to the director of the museum, Berthold Ecker, if the Viennese and their guests, as patrons of the collection, had to pay admission.

An independent jury decides on the purchases as well as the selection of the young artists that are featured in the front gallery. Submissions for purchase are available here and those who are interested in an exhibition in the front gallery can submit an application accompanied with a biography and portfolio to MUSA. (wh/jn)

With her work, says the Canadian artist Karine Giboulo, she would like to leave behind an impression of the world. That is, her impression. The common thread in the works of this artist is her viewpoint. Giboulo looks closely at those things which do not lie directly before her eyes. Her view refuses to be influenced by the power strategies which aim at holding the world in an overview so that one need not see it in precise detail and can look away so as not to get so emotionally involved. The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman identified such an overview—the social production of moral invisibility—as an intentional strategy of our modern, global world. Giboulo’s view points in a reverse direction. It concentrates on the particular, focusing in on things in detail, thereby identifying the effects of these overviews and strategies of looking away.

Giboulo’s work consists of miniature worlds: 3D views of fast food restaurant parking lots, living rooms, advertising themes, factory halls…all assembled from intricately detailed Plasticine figures. Her childlike representation of the adult world, sometimes reinforced even more by the stylistic use of fairy-tale personification, is disarming. Such art can be so endearing and frank, in the same way children are, who will tell you to your face that from which you would rather look away.

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For example: the readiness in our global world to look away from things and to retain untouchability through a persistent overview remains most pronounced where one extensively seeks out the cheapest commodities, which are in turn produced elsewhere for even cheaper. In her work, “All you can eat”, Giboulo follows the need to illustrate in detail the realities of the productions of things on which “Made in China” is imprinted anonymously: sneakers, TV screens, plastic flowers, mobile phones, electric toothbrushes, and other things that describe the consumer side of our western life. Who are the people who produce these things for us? Do they sometimes wonder about the people who buy all these things that they manufacture? Giboulo visited factories in the Special Economic Zone of Shenzen and made a miniature world of three-dimensional close-ups of the people she observed there after her return. Her views, which go beyond the aesthetics of repetition, bring attention to de-individualization and mass by emphasizing the individual aspects of such an existence. Looking closer in the way Giboulo does closes the gap between the consumer and the anonymous factory worker, much in the way the wall of the consumer’s living room in Giboulo’s work borders the bedrooms of Chinese migrant workers. (wh/jn)

Karine Giboulo won the second price for emerging artists at the Pulse Contemporary Art Fair in New York 2009! Congratulations from CastYourArt!

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.

In 1771, Louis Sébastien Mercier published the novel 2440, which depicts an utopia of a convenient, more ideal, distant future world. Utopias had already existed in the past. However, in Mercier’s utopia, the ideal world is not stumbled upon – for example, through a storm in which one is shipwrecked and washed up onto the shore of the ideal place – but rather a result of a linear history that is played out through human action. “Some were immediately enlightened from the beginning, but the majority of the nation was still careless and childlike. Gradually, the population became more intelligent. We still have much more to accomplish than what we have created so far. We are only halfway there,” according to the caretakers of the future regarding the intermediate conditions of the half-realized utopia. Mercier’s narration of the gradual realization of an ideal world carried out by mankind is a modern vision – with human capital, reason, and faith, as applied to technical, rational progress, as its focal points.

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The modern visions of progress exploded upon its realizations. This we had to recognize in the centuries that followed. The modern project is halfway down a path which leads it further, however not necessarily forward, and the faith in this common path of mankind towards an ideal world, whose vision Mercier calls “The Dream of All Dreams”, eventually fades. Generally speaking, both on the large and small scale, the conception of a more optimal world multiplies, and instead of one movement towards reaching one big goal, juxtaposition and constant flux of means and ways takes its place.

The sculptures and public interventions of the Canadian artist Michel de Broin refer to a certain extent to the intermediate conditions of this halfway point. They capture those transformations that have resulted from the greater history of modern progress, objects which are already slightly outdated but still determine our everyday life: for example, the car, that status symbol of progress, which is usually only used by one person at a time, consuming gas and destroying the environment. However, at the same time, de Broin’s works also refer to the many new formulas for progress: a general slowing-down as a strategy for environmental protection, a balanced economy without a loss of energy, postindustrial visions of sustainability – and the appropriate means towards this conversion which occupy our life.

De Broin’s work translates and highlights such visions of optimization and reveals their inner tendencies and contradictions, sometimes through exaggeration, but often only through showing examples of possible realizations. He breaks down the restrictive definitions of old and new forms of dogmatic idealism without becoming didactic. His style corresponds more to that of one who is playing hooky from such lessons, summoned by his instinct for playful exploration, poking fun at the “progress” and “efficiency” that is holding back the world. (wh/jn)

For a long time, contemporary art was strictly a national phenomenon in Turkey and was therefore, to a large extent, ignored internationally. This has changed. In the 1970s and 80s, artists such as Füsun Onur, Ayse Erkmen, Gülsün Karamustafa, Hale Tenger have begun to break through traditional and national orientations and to bring in international influences. As international attention grew stronger in the 90s and the Istanbul Biennales offered venues of presentation and publicity to the more progressive contemporary art of Turkey, awareness of the value of this art and its development was promoted locally. The recent generation of Turkish artists profited from these changes both thematically and professionally.

One of the internationally renowned Turkish artists of the post-2000 generation is Ahmet Ögüt. The past twelve months of the 27-year-old artist, who lives and works in Istanbul and Amsterdam, have been densely packed: his work has been featured in group exhibitions in San Francisco, Berlin, Sydney, Athens, Eindhoven, Seoul, Helsinki, Santa Fe, Nimes, Malmö, Stockholm, Zagreb, London, Banja Luka, and Stuttgart. In addition, he has had solo exhibitions in Basel and Barcelona, three Biennales, as well as numerous online and print contributions.

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Painting, performance, video, sculpture, photography, design, installation—Ahmet Ögüt utilizes a variety of artistic media in order to provide multiple ways of accessing his ideas. In his work, he captures ordinary events: actions, articles, and situations which we encounter on a daily basis and take for granted, thereby no longer falling under our range of perception. The shrewd interventions in which Ahmet Ögüt positions these everyday occurrences bring the unexpected to the surface: the instituting of national power and the fixing of both social differences and indifferences. However, idealism, hope, individual resistance, and powerlessness also become apparent. It reminds us, says Ahmet Ögüt about the effect of his art, of something which we already know, but have forgotten to notice.

In place of the often hermetic approach of theory, the artist uses the anecdotal and playful absurd in order to address his audience. Despite this seemingly lighthearted approach, his work is also critical and exhibits a clear partiality towards the inquisitive, open-minded, experimental side of mankind. He wants, says Ahmet Ögüt, not to instruct, but to remind. In his artistic-political self-conception, he is not so much interested in grand narratives, but rather in modest anecdotes, which one can easily grasp. These do not require that much time in order to be understood, leaving enough time for us to mull them over. (wh/jn)

As you are looking at this podcast, you are looking into a monitor, be it on your laptop, your iPod, your mobile phone, etc. But how much time do you spend actually looking at your monitor, a physical object that one has come to take completely for granted? The point of a mobile world, in fact, is that these objects, through which we stay connected with an information-saturated world, are disposable—toys that we purchase and update on a regular basis, and, at the same rate, discard and forget about just as quickly.

In Noah Fischer’s work, one returns to looking at this neglected object, the monitor, in all its different versions and models over the ages—a technological “era” which only really covers about thirty years of time. The Brooklyn-based artist was first drawn to the monitor by noticing the predominance of them in trash heaps on the streets of New York. What was once a valuable, sought-out item as little as one or two years ago becomes worthless material for the junkyard today, and the cycle accelerates with the emergence of every shiny new model that appears in the store each year, month, week, even—as the regular lines of hungry customers at every new Apple store will attest.

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Noah Fischer brings this frantically mass-produced object back to its simple lo-tech origins: as a relic, a piece of furniture, and most poetically, as a light source—a kind of simple lantern emitting a soft, ethereal light. He re-introduces the most basic structural and aesthetic features of the object in terms of its color, its material, its form. As the newest models of monitors become ever-more streamlined, flatter, smaller, trying to divert attention, in fact, from their condition of being actual physical objects, the obsolete models that once enjoyed such state-of-the-art status become ever more strange and quaint in their outdated bulkiness—a quality made even stranger by the fact that early models of monitors were once a product of designers who even marked each of their works with their signatures.

In an age when video art represents the most cutting-edge medium of young artists, Noah Fischer turns the ubiquitous monitor—both figuratively and literally—on its head, evoking a decidedly modernist, Duchamp-ian gesture in the process. In this case, the signature on the object is his. (jn)