Looking Beyond the Rim of the Teacup: Austrian Art in the Nineties

Friedrich Tietjen

The fact that time is, primarily, a social phenomenon rather than a natural constant has been illustrated by the nineties, if proof of this is required at all. The imminent switch to a new millennium as announced by the Christian calendar (regardless of when this change really occurs mathematically) becomes traumatic due to the way it is staged. As this century draws to a close, the cool ennui typical of the fin de siècle is complemented by progress euphoria as well as an intense fear of the failure of computer systems, erroneously called the Y2K bug. The impressive string of anniversaries and jubilees - 1000 years of Austrian history, 50 years after the end of World War II, 100 years after the death of Johann Strauss, the Austrian composer of waltzes - is accompanied by the culture of revivals successively focussing on the various decades of this century (beginning with the twenties). This is the reason why a plethora of social rituals and cultural practices have developed or emerged more prominently than before; together they historicize by means of a feedback mechanism, they make fall into oblivion, they absorb, they add to tradition, they reevaluate. This generates a change of epoch, and with this the burden of history - now that history is finally completed - resting on the shoulders of the present could be rendered more bearable. The expectations placed in the year 2000 refer to a hope for an entirely new beginning.

Contemporary art cannot evade the presence of time because it is itself defined by time. As new art, it differentiates itself from previous expressions, it absorbs them, or at least it is described along these lines by art critique which frequently devotes all its attention to changes of epochs. Achim Hochdörfer’s contribution¹ demonstrates how in the early eighties both artists and critics used the avant-garde mainly to formulate explicit counter-positions, how this tendency went hand in hand with a renaissance of easel painting formerly stigmatized as being reactionary and with a recognition of the institutional framework of art, and how some of these ruptures were subsequently corrected by a few artists (for others, they were never relevant anyway). Writing about Austrian art of the nineties means to explore these catalytic forces, continuations, and disruptions.

The lack of chronological distance to this topic is only a minor problem. It can be considered both aggravating and intriguing that within a few years the realm of art - in its social standing and level of production - has expanded to an almost immeasurable degree; nevertheless, there is certainly no dearth of differentiating features. New forms have evolved alongside new contents and vice versa, without aggressively pushing other trends away, as in the seventies and eighties. What is striking to see is the skepticism perceived when viewing such a dichotomy between art and life, modernism and avant-garde, or form and substance. This is a skepticism which suggests a doubtful attitude to the questions raised, rather than the answers given. It is expressed by qualities artists claim for themselves: fuzziness without a lack of precision, ambiguity devoid of arbitrariness, political statements not smacking of enlightening or educational propaganda.

In 1994 Martin Prinzhorn suggested that the term "transgression" be used for art produced in the nineties. This term defines the following activities: "wandering from one domain to the other, sounding out and challenging borders, mixing and/or intermingling homogeneity and heterogeneity, falling short of expectations, while giving rise to unforeseen pleasures, discoveries, and experiences. It is invariably a strategy which contests totalitarian tendencies and doubts fundamentals. Against this backdrop, the entire notion of modernism is changing - the processes defining it may no longer simply be viewed as positive symptoms of an enlightening attitude; for it to be postulated, the price of permanent exclusion would need to be paid."² Prinzhorn differentiates between substance- and medium-based transgressions, while emphasizing that this separation only exists in laboratory conditions because in practice strategies tend to mix. The former is not about "incorporating new substance into artistic production, i.e. expanding content. All domains are predefined, they may concern specific artistic tendencies or general social questions. What is crucial is that these domains are not simply defined as abstract entities hovering in an empty space; rather, they are firmly anchored in a social and historical network. We associate minimalism, for instance, with a type of production propagated by certain people at a certain time. Whenever somebody else, coming from another artistic discipline or living at a different time, articulates the substance of this art, i.e. whenever somebody moves from another domain into the domain of minimalism, I call this transgression."³ Medium-based transgression, according to Prinzhorn, is the act of "dissolving social, historical, and formal conditions existing for a given medium by transcending domains. In this area, there are two main strategies. On the one hand, formal aspects of one domain may be transferred to another one - this strategy was pursued all through modernism up to the eighties. On the other hand, content-related aspects closely tied to one formal domain may be transposed into another, formally defined domain [...]."⁴ Accordingly, transgression is no device used to develop new artistic languages out of allegedly obsolete ones. Rather, it focuses on mechanisms of mutually delimiting and excluding artistic substance and media. Historically and formally defined, they are worked on without making them disappear by flaunting taboos or displaying arbitrariness. Contrary to the social tendency of covering up, modifying, and erasing by topicality, artistic transgression toys with Benjamin’s motif of updating. As a process, transgression paves the way towards various quite non-hierarchical artistic strategies eluding established structures. Video art, per se, is just as marginally subversive with regard to media as computer art is advanced or graphic art boring and outdated. Painting is regarded neither as a politically doubtful medium nor as an antidote to avant-garde; painting does not mean that you refute these attributions but that you reflect on them.

Nevertheless, painting plays a key role in contemporary art, which may be surprising given the potential for a media change. This prominent position, however, is not so much due to a thirst for paintings emerging now or lingering on ever since the eighties, even though the ability to sell works has come to be a major argument, particularly for conceptual artists. More importantly, painting, historically labeled as one of the noblest artistic disciplines, lends itself perfectly to transgressions, which can be see in the oeuvre of some of the artists involved in this exhibition. Adi Rosenblum and Markus Muntean, for instance, have worked in this field with picture stories, linking the aestheticism of advertising photography and comic strips to the formality of the easel painting. Painted on canvas, the illustrations do not quite reach the edge. The texts accompanying the stories are written below. Both artists stress that their main concern is not good painting, but to make use of what different media can offer; in this case, they are interested in the fact that the status of autonomous, self-contained easel paintings can no longer be proclaimed because of the white edges. The paintings resemble comic panels, and even though they are hung individually there are constant references to the cutout nature of this representation and to what occurs before and after. The fact that these series of pictures are printed, in a limited number of copies, in what appear to be comic books emphasizes the formal links to comic strips; therefore, we can argue that these works are indeed located in two domains.⁵

The same holds true for works like XXXX: for a performance, the performer is not enough of an actress, while XXXX serves as a tableau vivant only on opening night. It is precisely this changeable nature which contradicts the genre of sculpting while the material used quite matches it. The photograph on the wall behind it serves both as documentation and preservation of independence from the platform. Hence, we are not confronted with just two but several domains which are both alluded to and which, as measured by classical definitions, remain incomplete. Whatever is missing is filled with various pieces in such a way that the work runs like a stalling engine - while the thing is moving, it attracts attention and becomes independent on account of its strange inner workings.

Markus Muntean and Adi Rosenblum speak about the "precise ambiguity"⁶ of their works and the conscious and accurate use of arbitrariness. Their works are a friendly as well as un-educational reminder that neither in art nor in the real world we should trust that solutions, once they are found and canonized, may be valid for all eternity.

Elke Krystufek has dealt with this issue in a less friendly manner. When she masturbated while lying in a bathtub at the opening of the exhibition XXXX, Austrian tabloids were duly shocked and art critics claimed she had followed in the footsteps of Viennese Actionists. When Krystufek later reported that she had had two orgasms just like at home, she denied her allegedly provocative intention and did not accept the artistic legacy offered to her. This event demonstrated that the genre of sexually connoted performances - an area of great relevance to Vienna - permits certain infringements provided they take place in different circumstances, and that it was not the provocative substance but the way it was created which created an uproar. When asked about her relation to the viewers, the artist replied: "I don’t think that the recipients have no clue when they go to an exhibition. Why should they go to exhibitions if they have never tried to relate to art? Therefor I think that these people are voluntary voyeurs"⁷ - voyeurs to whom she exposes herself voluntarily.

This interaction comes out quite clearly in many of her self-portraits. Applying quick and wet brushstrokes, she paints her face - occasionally also her torso, only very rarely her whole body - onto colorfully printed webs of fabric, frequently holding a camera in her hand. Pornographic posing publicizes what appears to be intimacy. Yet the camera in her hand and the change from photography as a model to painting turn the artist just as gradually into a mute sexual object as the viewer into a visual offender. Defining the balance of power of both gazes is something to be done and repeated time and time again.

Predefined perspectives are also contested by the sisters Christine and Irene Hohenbüchler. Their works performed in cooperation with mentally handicapped persons and prison inmates ("multiple authorship") may be slanderously called avant-garde Agitprop, or an attempt by the artists to appropriate the public’s favorable attitude to serve their own purposes, i.e. to focus attention on marginal groups or to promote their social integration. Insinuating an attitude of pity, however, would not reveal the sisters’ intentions, but rather the stereotypes of one’s own gaze which matches social conventions. The question as to what is artistic about all this becomes surprisingly relevant - answering it compels us to recognize artistic activity not just in the production of works but also in the more or less curator-like mediation of other artists, as was exemplified by Martin Kippenberger a few years ago in Graz, as well as by Adi Rosenblum and Markus Muntean up to 1998 in Vienna’s Bricks & Kicks. Even when not applying the principle of "multiple authorship", the sisters work collectively. Their contributions are occasionally determined by the skills they were trained in (Irene Hohenbüchler studied painting, Christine sculpting), and sometimes the borders between the sisters’ contributions become blurred in their jointly implemented artistic concepts. Irene and Christine Hohenbüchler devote their attention to areas commonly neglected; these become fraught with meaning the more natural they appear - pieces of clothing, handicraft, everyday stories. Marginalized aspects are expressed without any fashionable embellishment.

Maria Hahnenkamp’s works are equally unobtrusive while also being quite assertive. She photographs models at the hairdresser’s, manicurist’s, and in other situations where female beauty is restored. On the prints sewn together with a machine hands and hair can no longer be seen - smoothed with sandpaper, only the white background and an equally white amorphous surface remain visible. The artist refers to her process as scratching away a story in order to tell a new one on the empty surfaces. She thus juxtaposes the artistic act of exposure and the receptive act of projection which, on account of not being confronted with presentations, needs to do the presenting itself. That is where the index-like and realistic quality often attributed to photography ceases to exist. An examination of forms is possible with a shapeless surface just like with a picture; when viewing a photograph, reception and reproduction coincide on both sides.

Some authors stress that Gregor Zivic is a painter. It is a fact that he does not photograph moving subjects or objects but living pictures, constructed moments of immobility. Despite all formal differences, his works bear some resemblance to those of Maria Hahnenkamp. Where Hahnenkamp erases a story, Gregor Zivic makes it hold still for an equally strenuous moment and adds himself to it. In strangely gaudy and cool interiors of a decade long gone by, the artist identifiable as a contemporary becomes petrified, caught in a blurry gap of time which combines biographical fragments to form an irritatingly harmonious entity. We see the glass door of the artist’s family home as well as his former paintings - features of the past which, albeit subliminally, continue to be present. The pictures, therefore, are not really reconstructions of an autobiography, but rather approximations to a synthetic memory which cares even less for historical consistency than for truthful content.

Transgression is, eventually, an attack against conventional models of representation. The relations between art and life are hardly so mirror-inverted that we could postulate the antagonistic nature which would be necessary for this exercise. In the selection of artists and their works shown at this exhibition, representativity is overcome quite efficiently. Rather than presenting an overview which is bound to fail, interdisciplinary methodologies are on display whose sustainable power stems from their ambiguity.