From July 23rd until October 30th 2011, the Museum der Moderne Salzburg displays works about artistic self-representation in the exhibition “role models – role playing”. On the occasion, CastYourart produced the short film EVA & ADELE about(on, over) SALZBURG with the artist duo EVA & ADELE. The film will be on display in the exhibition, we have put a sample online for you.

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Role models – role playing

The masquerade and its staging are a challenge for the protagonists. However, since long ago performance has not been limited to the stage and spotlight anymore. It has freed itself from the narrowness of the theatres, playhouses, cinemas, television shows and magazines and has stepped out into real life. In the course this liberation, acting has been transformed into role playing. Its protagonists are we. more »

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.

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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. more »

This beautiful song annihilates, at least since the group Fuckhead has been celebrating its progressive deconstruction in a big way. Already captivated in recent years by the adrenaline kick of the mosh pit, the musicians and performers Aigner, Bruckmayr, Strohmann, Kern, Jöchtl, and Pittermann got their start originally as a noise-rock band. Along with their music and audience members, who are integrated onto the stage, Tableaux Vivants-type held-pose ending scenes have allowed Fuckhead to differentiate themselves from the authenticity-oriented hardcore punk generation at end of the eighties. Their ironic handling of political and masculinity-related themes in their “authenticity pictures” is still relevant for them today.

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However, irony must be understood in order to be noticed. This was not always the case. At the beginning of their career, Fuckhead’s role as a projection surface often ended up being a bad call. The left-wingers found Fuckhead to be too right, the right-wing found them to be too gay, the underground felt they lacked political objectives, and for the art world, Fuckhead was too nonconformist to be integrated into either art theory circles or the art business. more »

The production of “living pictures” has a tradition. They could already be found in the royal victory processions of antiquity and they appeared again in Catholic masses, as well as in ceremonial processions during the Renaissance and the Baroque eras. By the end of the eighteenth century, the art progressed to unmoving, held poses, which became one with the scenery, and were displayed “on stage”. Originating in France and from that point on coined Tableaux Vivants, these embodiments of historical paintings and sculptures found their way into the drawing rooms of the elite and became part of the main repertoire of the theatre and revue world of the nineteenth century.

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The artist Rita Nowak, based in Vienna and London, is carrying on the tradition of the embodiment of living pictures with her held-pose photography. Drawing from historical paintings, she composes living pictures using fellow artists as models thereby bringing the historical works up-to-date. Rather than creating mere reproductions, she investigates the possibilities of interpretation, thereby developing pictures that visualize the past in the present and modern images that are depicted through the visual language of past centuries. more »