CHRISTIAN HÖLLER

Heimo Zobernig: What is it? - Nothing. Notes on the Early Work of Heimo Zobernig

At the end of the seventies and the beginning of the eighties, Heimo Zobernig studied stage design at Vienna’s Academy of Visual Arts, where, among other things, he tried out various crossovers between performance and visual media. His “Initial-Aktion” comes under a similar category as the music / action theatre just described. The eight “Friday Actions” at Vienna Drama Centre conceived with Alfons Egger (January to March 1980) articulate with pinpoint precision some of the patterns of negativity that also featured successfully in Punk and New Wave: be it graffiti quotes randomly reproduced and then deleted from a board (“Smash everything, whenever and wherever you like”) or electrically amplified abuse of a zither – styled after Fluxus actions – this is the first appearance of the “radical reductionism” that was to distinguish Zobernig’s subsequent working method. The performance of Alfons Egger’s “Die Versuchung” (the temptation) that concluded the “Friday Actions”, a production styled after Flaubert (29 March 1980), also made it clear that the aim was to thoroughly dismantle the inner workings of theatre and to expose its material components –precisely not trying to extract a positive meaning from stage presence or “animated” text. Work on the negative, in this case set in the theatre context and breaking it up from within.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 80/2002, pp. 7–18.

YILMAZ DZIEWIOR

Anri Sala: Spaces of Society

In the work of the Albanian artist Anri Sala, space is conceived both as a material three-dimensional local unit with a concrete expansion and as a socially, politically and culturally defined phenomenon. In this sense, we may see space as being architecturally, territorially and societally defined in his work. Anri Sala’s videos and photos often revolve around questions of cultural identity, of transitory moments and life in an intermediate zone, questions that Homi K. Bhabha sums up with the aid of such models of thought as “gap”, “interstice” or “third place”. How does someone who was born and raised in Tirana and who has now been living in Paris for almost five years articulate the differences manifested in language, habit and attitude, differences experienced both at home and in exile? What role is played by cultural memory, the complex that we conceive as comprising the rituals, texts and images required to communicate, with which an ethnic, national or political group stabilises and conveys its self-image? This collectively shared knowledge, referring primarily to the past and backing up the awareness of one’s peculiarity and distinctiveness, is manifested in Anri Sala’s videos in terms of clothing (“Déjeuner avec Marubi”, 1997), language (“Intervista (Finding the Words)”, 1998) or eating habits (“Byrek”, 2000). The decisive factor in this context is the history of Albania, whose societal, economic and political situation features as a subtext in the works, representative of the characterisation of a country with an eventful fate.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 80/2002, pp. 19–30.

MATTHIAS HERRMANN

AA Bronson: A conversation with Matthias Herrmann

Matthias Herrmann: For twenty-five years you lived and worked as part of General Idea, the art collaborative you formed with your partners Felix Partz and Jorge Zontal. General Idea came to an end with their deaths in 1994, and the first works you showed publicly under your own name dealt explicitly with those deaths. Damien Hirst once remarked that “art is like medicine, it can heal”. To what extend were those works part of your process of coping with the loss of your partners?

AA Bronson: My first works were indeed part of my process of coping with the loss of my partners, and of General Idea.
General Idea was always an amalgam of life and of art. We took on new names in the early seventies in order to shape our lives into a living work of art, and our publications and gallery installations became a sort of crystalization of our lives together. By the eighties, and into the nineties, our self-portraits in advertising formats had become a sort of ongoing project. Our last self-portrait was made in 1994, and was completed just after Jorge’s death. In order to actualize their deaths in my life, I had to weave the story of their deaths into our ongoing narrative. I felt compelled to continue to produce art as life, and my life as art.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 80/2002, pp. 31–42.

THE ATLAS GROUP / ZEINA TRABOULSI / WALID RAAD

Sweet Talk or Photographic Documents of Beirut

from Forthcoming pages 64-66
In countries such as Bosnia, Lebanon, or Rwanda, that have suffered a brutal “civil”-war, one encounters myriad cases of traumatized survivors. Many of these survivors seek psychiatric treatment to regain a cathexis of the world, including of tradition and culture in general. But that subjective working through cannot on its own succeed in remedying the withdrawal of tradition, for that withdrawal is not a subjective symptom, whether individual or collective, and therefore cannot be fully addressed by psychiatrists or psychoanalysts, but demands the resurrecting efforts of writers, artists, and thinkers. Without the latter?s contribution, either the psychiatric treatment fails, or else though the patient may leave ostensibly healthy, he or she soon discovers that tradition and art are still withdrawn.

With regard to the surpassing disaster, art acts like the mirror in vampire films: it reveals the withdrawal of what we think is still there. “You have seen nothing in Hiroshima.” Does this entail that one should not record? No. One should record this “nothing,” which only after the resurrection can be available. We have to take photographs even though because of their referents? withdrawal, and until their referents are resurrected, they are not going to be available as referential, documentary pieces?with the concomitant risk that facets relating to the subject matter might be mistaken for purely formal ones. A vicious circle: what has to be recorded has been withdrawn, so that, unless it is resurrected, it is going to be overlooked; but in order to accomplish that prerequisite work of resurrection to avert its overlooking, one has initially to have, however minimally, perceived it, that is countered its withdrawal, i.e. resurrected it. But how can one speak of a withdrawal of “civil”-war Beirut buildings when refugees still noticed and lived in them? Yet aren’t these refugees, who are marginalized because of their lack of political power and their economic destitution, affected with an additional overlooking through their association with these withdrawn buildings? The Lebanese’s overall obliviousness and indifference to documenting the carnage through photographs, films, and videos cannot be fully explained by the circumstance that toward the end of the “civil”-war they must have grown habituated to the destruction around them, as well as by the fact that many of these ruined areas were declared military zones, off-limits to cameras. Can photographs of these withdrawn buildings become available without resurrecting their withdrawn referents? It seems such photographs become themselves withdrawn. There is going then to be “a time of development” of the chemically developed photographs taken during the latter stages of the war. The documentation is for the future not only in the sense that it preserves the present referent for future generations; but also in that it can function as a preservation of the referent only in the future, only when the work of resurrection has countered the withdrawal.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 80/2002, pp. 43–56.

KRYSTIAN WOZNICKI

Aesthetics of Globalisation: The Design Of Natural Selection

Text feature in Camera Austria International 80/2002, pp. 74–75.