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 »

The fact that we carefully inspect the food that we consume is potentially relevant to culture. A civilized person does not simply eat, she dines, provided that she can give significance to the appearance of what she consumes. A meal is prepared in such a way that the colors are preserved: it is decorated and then covered up, then the lid comes off, and voila!—it is presented and celebrated. A sensual feast for the eyes either increasingly whets our appetite, or, especially if the display appears too alive, or too obviously dead, invokes a sudden sense of nausea.

A meal that is visually prepared not only informs us of the quality of the food. This view is also far more accessible on a symbolic level than it would be, for example, through our noses or palates. Our view readily contributes something, it directs our attention to something, it attributes a quality to the food that it previously did not possess. When the food is prepared in a way that makes it visually enticing, then it is also likely that something additional to the food is being served, or brought in front of our eyes to see. Lamb, rabbit, wine, salt, bread: these subjects are obviously not only about meals and consumption. The accessibility of the view to symbolic and narrative aspects of, and not only just to, the object, is also reflected in artistic representations of food, especially in the form of still lifes.

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A pheasant on a small wood inlay table next to a lobster, surrounded by silver bowls full of fresh citrus fruits: potentially edible items are shown here, but it’s probably more about the representation of wealth. For a long time, the representation of edible items was embedded into a religious context and its iconography. As a result, the apple was not only thought of as being a russet, Grafensteiner, or Granny Smith, it also served as a reminder of temptation and its consequences for humanity.

Beautifully presented food arouses the desire to just reach out and grab it: these foods represent wealth, indulgence, and exclusivity—qualities which can also be found in the baroque vanitas still life. But that which looks fresh and fruity at first glance appears old, shriveled, and close to death and decay upon the second view. In the vanitas still life, those who indulge in this feast for the eyes are served their existential just desserts in the end. The ripe fruits are already at the peak of their beauty, but from this point on, they can only go downhill. Distrust of desire, which is fleeting and enticing, comes into the picture – a meal that is served as a reminder of perishability and death.

The representation of food in art does not always have a narrative. The concentration of the still life artists on that which formerly only served as decoration provided them the freedom in other representations to work on an emerging visual language, independent of symbolic statements and narratives. Onions on a sideboard, or a bunch of asparagus - the less meaning the object possessed, the less the artist and art had to serve as ambassadors for matters which had nothing to with painting.

In the presentation of food, the refusal of the artist to be mistreated as ambassadors of something which lies beyond art has been noted. However, the represented meal is more often an indication of the themes of the respective time: its religious messages, its morals, its inequalities. The meal that is presented artistically for the eye is a warning against imprudent assimilation, against thoughtless imbibing. Instead, it demands thoughtfulness and clearly expresses, or hides a criticism of, gender relations, the pursuit of wealth, a bias towards beauty.

Visual treats to be devoured with the eyes: such is the theme of the exhibition called “Augenschmaus: A Feast for the Eyes – Food in Still Life” at Bank Austria Kunstforum. On display are principal works from the representation of food from the sixteenth century to the present, works ranging from Arcimboldo, Aertsen, Van Gogh, Cézanne, Picasso, Braque, to Hirst, Lassnig, and others, gathered from over sixty lenders. The exhibition will run from February 10th to May 30th. In this episode, the expert commentary on Augenschmaus is provided by Heike Eipeldauer, the curator of the exhibition, as well as Christian Petz, one of the best and most awarded chefs in Austria.

Since the beginning of 2008, Open Space, the Center for Art Projects, has been in full swing in the Vienna art world with its ambitious program. Open Space’s repertoire of exploring artistic variety and multilayeredness corresponds to its self-conception as an open space for international networking. Under the direction of Gulsen Bal, Open Space has realised a marathon of exhibitions with a density of international participation that is unusual for Vienna.

Last year the art space opened in Lassingleithnerplatz in Taborstreet with an exhibition curated by the Vienna-based artist, Fatih Aydogdu. Aydogdu, who artistically feels at home somewhere between the categories of installation, video, graphic art, and music, and who also had boundary experiences in his life as a geopolitically sensitized migrant, made the boundary signal the conceptual starting point of his interdiscplinary exhibition.

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Ten artists and artist collectives followed the request of the theme of the boundary signal. CastYourArt visited the exhibition at Open Space recording sounds as fields of experimentation and boundary signals beyond the act of speaking and music, as well as artistic positionings emerging from historically political moments in relation to current events. (wh/jn)

Irene Andessner began her career with painting. She first studied with Emilio Vedova, one of the most important Italian Informal painters, at the Academia di Belli Arti in Venice, and then with Max Weiler and Arnulf Rainer—also a representative of the Informal—at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Andessner encountered paintings by the Italian Renaissance painter, Sofonisba Anguissola, for the first time at an exhibition at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. The self-portraits fascinated her, and after an attempt to paint herself as Anguissola, she turned to the fields of photography and video art, in which she explores contemporary forms of the self-dramatization.

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Andessner’s portrait works are revivals of historical personalities that utilize memory as a source of reactivation: Marlene Dietrich, Electress Dorothea of Brandenburg, Wanda von Sacher Masoch, Irene Harand, Barbara Strozzi, Hedy Lamarr, Ida Pfeiffer, Maria Sibylle Merian, Barbara Blomberg, Gwen John, Constanze Mozart, Angelika Kaufmann, Frida Kahlo. The artist portrays over fifty personalities, primarily women, through role performance. The selection of her protagonists follows strict criteria: they are strong and politically involved women who were inventive, creative, aggressive, intelligent, and remarkable, who made an impression through their personalities or their approaches to life, however, often enough to be displaced into the lower and hidden ranks behind a male-dominated world and historiography.

Andessner is interested in how women have dealt with themselves throughout various centuries. In order to develop this approach, she investigates the life of her subjects, seeks out portraits of them, and then selects one of these picture-worthy moments as a starting point for her artistic embodiments. Through the conversion, the artist reflects on the models as social figures, as fictions of women as holy, untouchable superstars, as suffering, dominating, or promiscuous, and reenacts them partly faithfully, and partly as a reinterpretation with materials from our own time.

Andessner’s self-dramatizations take place either in the studio or in photographic situations that are recognizable as sets. Large polaroids are taken there. According to Andessner, the material was always important to her, since she also wanted to take a painterly approach to photography, which the polaroid material makes possible. When her self-dramatizations are done as videos, they also have a performative character and integrate others into the revivification.
When the artist mixes among people as Ursula K.—a scarred, depressed woman—in suburban bars, laundromats, and public saunas, or, in the live-streaming project, “Maternoster”, rides up and down the traveling lift compartments in a paternoster in the headquarters of the Federation of Austrian Industry with heads of business as Alma Mater, Maria von Nazareth, Mutter Courage (Anna Fierling), and Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone, she approaches these self-dramatizations as real performances. Her restaged self then becomes evident through actual existing circumstances and thereby eliminates the boundaries of who she is. (wh/jn)

What happens when you realize that you still love somebody? When you fall in love with someone all over again? When you’ve just fallen in love?

Suddenly, what is normally difficult and heavy becomes easy and light: e.g., one carries a piano into the courtyard.

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In order to catch the last rays of autumn and let your hearts run free, CastYourArt helped with the piano. Uwe Dreysel sings, the courtyard serves as the stage for the actor this time around—take your concert away. . .(wh)

“And if there ever was an age when one sees varied and wondrous things I believe that ours is one” (Mateo Bandello, 1554)

Miniatures made of ivory, rhino and narwhale horn. Ostrich eggs, symbols of power and resistance as the ancient mythology says the giant birds live on stones and iron. Seychelles nuts washed ashore on the Maldives. Bezoars, rocks found in the stomach of ruminant animals that are rumoured to dispel melancholy, composed in the finest art of metalworking. Arty watches, wondrous automatic machines, quadrants, astrolabes and other scientific instruments. The most bizarre monstrosities, Madonna figures and Dionysian satyrs standing in a row with mystic animals thrown out of the deepest oceans. Basins, goblets, bowls, cans, mugs, made of gold, polished with precious and semi-precious stones. An unbelievable mishmash, collected at numerous expeditions and trips to the most isolated and distant places on earth, passed on, inherited, bought and finally exhibited at the Ambrase court of prince Ferdinand II and at the specially for this occasion equipped premises of Kaiser Rudolf II, at the Hradschin in castle of Prague. The cabinet of curiosities and wonders of the renaissance rulers opens up a whole new world to the curious.

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The displayed objects fascinate the viewer, cause amazement and inquisitiveness, and leave the impression of a long gone era. „In uno omnia.“ The view of the world of Athansius Kircher, scholar and founder of the first museum the Kircherianum at the Collegium Romanum, signalizes modern times not only by the immense amount of knowledge but also by power. The amazement should not only cause cognition and knowledge it should rather cause awe of the power of those who were able to pool it. The world as a micro cosmos within the chamber of curiosities represents the prince as the ruler of the world, explains Sabine Haag, an expert of the chamber of curiosities and managing director of the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna.

The chamber of curiosities in the renaissance, an early model of museums conflicts with the emerging modern time assertiveness because the basis of the presented knowledge was to stabilise power. The general orientation of the chamber of curiosities, a concentration of knowledge and amazement was seen as a handing down of traditional perceptions. Too much wonder and amazement can be negative, as it inhibits and perverts the use of mind, says René Descartes. The holistic perception had to give way to the analysis and the concept of differentiation. A major part, of the chamber of curiosities collection disappears; the rest is split and distributed to emerging special museums.

The two chambers of curiosities and wonders of prince Ferdinand II and Rudolf II, are brought together by the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna. In spring 2002 the collection was closed to the public and should reopen after a major restoration in spring 2012. The adjustment of the premises allows donators to become involved with the chamber of curiosities. For example, our partner UNIQUA sponsors the restoration of the Saliera saloon, named after the famous saltshaker of the Italian sculptor and goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini. CastYourArt, thanks to our partner UNIQUA, had the chance to take a look behind the closed doors of the chamber of curiosities and to hold an interview with Sabine Haag. (wh/ek)

This podcast was realised with the kind support of UNIQUA ArtCercles. The exhibiton “Karl der Kühne” can be seen till the 10th of January 2010 at the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna.

Violins are often only spoken about when they are stolen. However, before they can be stolen, they have to be built, and this is the aspect on which we focus in this podcast.

The “New Viennese Violins“ Association came about based on an idea from Christoph Schachner, to bring professional and amateur musicians closer to high-quality, newly manufactured instruments. These offer a better alternative to the mystified, often overestimated old instruments. “As a result of violins being treated like antiques, a myth has developed around them which is often incomprehensible. Hence, a new violin often costs only a quarter or fifth of what an old violin of similar quality costs“, says Nupi Jenner, a member of the association.

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The production of violins is a complex experience, a craft which involves an intuitive process. The knowledge required for the selection of the wood that is suitable for building stringed instruments developed over many generations. The cover is frequently made from spruce and the remaining parts from maple. It can be very difficult to find the right kind of spruce to build the instruments, even in a dense forest. For larger instruments, like the cello or double bass, willow and poplar trees are also used. The selection from a wood dealer who specializes in instrument-making is left up to the discretion of each instrument-maker.

In order to develop instruments of equal high quality, it is necessary to keep the parameters as consistent as possible. Nevertheless, in the end, each instrument has its own character. Achieving consistency in the production can be almost impossible, even when scientific procedures and computerized measuring techniques are utilized. Thus, the virtuosity of the violin craft always remains a bit mysterious.

Since objective assessments of a certain quality level are difficult to establish, the purchase depends very much on the personal approach of the musician, his/her sensitivity to tone, physical requirements, financial options, and the kind of advise and maintenance he/she expects from the violin-maker.

Once a year, those who would like to produce, play, and/or listen to the “New Viennese Violins“ gather at the Radio Kulturhaus in Vienna. In the context of instrument presentation, the partly newly-built stringed instruments of renowned musicians are played. There, one can directly encounter violin-makers, musicians, and experts involved with the new stringed instruments and become convinced of their sound quality in person.
(jk/jn).

Centuries do not have clear boundaries, rather, they flow into each other in the same way that the years which they are made up of do. The transition period in which the nineteenth and twentieth century collapsed into each other was called the fin de siècle. The fact that something was coming to an end was a modern perspective.

In 1918, Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Otto Wagner, and Koloman Moser all died within a year. Accompanying them was the fall of turn-of-the-century, successfully up-and-coming, modern Austrian art. So what remained in terms of artistic progress? For one thing, there was Oskar Kokoschka. He had moved to Dresden and fled—as did a majority of the intellectual and artistic heavyweights—upon the rise of the National Socialists: first to Prague, and then to London. And then there was Herbert Boeckl, who stayed behind. This starting point was not exactly ideal for the development of the painter: an authoritarian, conservative, anti-modern mood prevailed in Austria, along with a shortage of moral support from colleagues.

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Towards the end of the turn of the century, Herbert Boeckl’s works were close to those of Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele: expressionistic. Over the course of time, however, his painting took many turns. University professor and grandchild Matthias Boeckl counts five direction changes: first, there were the traditional atmospheric paintings of his early Carinthian years, then his move to secessionism with his line paintings, then expressionism, then his pastose phase of expressionistic realism, and finally, his abstract colorfield painting, starting from the end of the Second World War. Boeckl himself always rejected a categorization according to creative periods, rather, he saw his work in relation to motifs. Boeckl sharpened his view of nature and humanity, of the essence of existence, of the necessary form, in his portraits and landscapes. Both, according to Agnes Husslein-Arco, director of the Belvedere and granddaughter of the artist, proved to be persistent motifs throughout his stylistically diverse work.

The intrinsic, the enduring, the fundamentally valid: this is what Herbert Boeckl wanted to maintain as a painter. This objective did not, however, make him conservative, rather it made him an advocate of modernity. He experimented to figure out which new possibilities on offer would preserve that which was essential. However, his focus on the everlasting probably corresponded to his religious nature. At the beginning of his career, Boeckl had already completed a fresco in the Church of Maria Saal, which locals considered provocative and which therefore remained covered for years. At the very end of his life, he created one of his most important works, “The Apocalypse”, in the Angels’ Chapel at the Seckau Monastery.

Boeckl was committed to the ideals and style directions that modernity brought out, and he shaped the development of the Austrian art scene as a director and professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, as well as as a prominent member of the Austrian Art Senate. He supported the appointment of Fritz Wotrubas and Albert Paris Gütersloh as professors at the Academy and counted among his students some of the most important artists of the postwar generation—including Maria Lassnig and Alfred Hrdlicka.

On the occasion of the retrospective of Boeckl’s works at the Lower Belvedere in Vienna, CastYourArt spoke with both curators of the exhibition, Agnes Husslein-Arco and Matthias Boeckl, in Herbert Boeckl’s studio, which has remained virtually untouched since his death in 1966. Accompanying the exhibition is a 500-page catalog which includes a list of Boeckl’s works. (wh/jn)

The exhibition is in view at the Lower Belvedere in Vienna until January 31, 2010.

In this hi-tech age, the relationship between artist and viewer is a complicated one. There has always been the tacit agreement of suspension of disbelief between them, that what is presented may be altered or manipulated, but that the intention of the artist is to reveal some kind of truth nonetheless. Digital technology provides the means to doctor photos in every context, be it in advertising, art, or even private use. We seem to have all come to the agreement that when it comes to visual media, there is always room for improvement.

The artist Helmut Grill worked for many years in the field of photographic manipulation. In the early years, the necessary equipment for this venture would take up an entire room. Now, Photoshop is a standard application on every computer—almost no photo goes unretouched. Those with advanced skills in this craft are among the highest-paid in the media industry. But despite our awareness of this sophisticated process, we still engage in the game of believing what we see, or at least enjoying the challenge of thinking we can still determine what’s real or what’s not.

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As an artist, Helmut Grill likes to push this engagement to the limit. Instead of using the medium of digital alteration to render images more palatable and easier on the eye, Grill creates images that disturb, provoke, and call into question our complicity when it comes to visual mediation. In the “Alphapeople” series, portraits of faces assembled out of mismatched features question our presumptions about conventional beauty; the “Arstarte” series positions soft-porn shots against a backdrop of current war scenes, rupturing the seductive hard-sell of such quintessentially commercial images; “Relations” is an interactive series of visual comparisons in which typically modified proportions in photos can be physically displayed through a mouse click, demonstrating the arbitrary yet significant influence of slight alterations in dimensions—a technique used on a regular basis in advertising.

In his latest works, Grill has moved on from human figures to houses and landscapes. Like his human subjects, none of Grill’s residential subjects actually exist. Pasted together from various components, these dwellings are situated in a strange, surreal universe that attracts and repels the viewer simultaneously. Their facades are swathed with multifarious messages in the form of neon signs, posters, graffiti, etc., which suggest an intriguing, potentially dangerous world within. Helmut Grill was inspired to take this project one step further—moving for the first time into three-dimensional territory—by realizing these imaginary structures into actual models. As with the doctored photos, the imagination is stimulated—for better or for worse. (jn)

Thanks to the Gallery Suppan for permission to film at the exhibition “share your dreams - young art from the EU”.

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 .