Parallel zu Hans Peter Litschers „Operation Otto Retter“ beim donaufestival wird die Ausstellung „rats live on no evil star“ mit einer repräsentativen Auswahl von Otto Retters PALINDROM-IKONEN erstmals auch Einblick in Retters jüngste und letzte Schaffensphase als bildender Künstler gewähren.

Julian Opie’s landscapes are illustrations of real-life locations, integrated into his works as moving or still elements. The reduction of the form is based in the abstraction of the 20th century, which he subjects to even greater changes with the help of computer technology. This approach can also be linked to the tradition of Japanese colour woodcuts from the first half of the 19th century, which have the same silhouette-like features found in Opie’s works. In his exhibition at the Austrian Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna in 2008, for example, Opie presented his animation Eight Views of Japan, which was reminiscent of landscape woodblock prints by Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858) whose works are part of the Collection of the British Museum and have influenced Opie’s approach to this field. Opie in fact travelled through the Japanese countryside to find inspiration for his works in which he has often integrated the commonly reproduced motif of Mount Fuji.
 
The current exhibition at the Krobath Gallery features Opie’s latest landscapes as stills or animations, which allude to the barely perceivable changes in a landscape. Here, the flatness of the environment reflects the green meadows stretching for kilometres and the serpentine grey roads, generating the sense of emptiness that can be felt in such environments.
The animated landscapes are hooked in endless loops, intensifying the feeling of monotony. In detailed takes, Opie examines computer-animated trees moving in subtle motion sequences on LCD screens. The portrait format of these works – entitled Apple Tree, Evening Sun and Shooting Star – symbolises the connection to the illustrated landscape, and the varying hues of sky blue contrast with the green fields in the landscape format paintings.
The works also display elements of 19th century landscape painting, which examine the immediacy of nature-related notions of the idyllic, depicting nature in its pristine form, untouched by human hand. Moreover, Opie’s landscapes are influenced by the work of Dutch painter Jacob Isaakszoon van Ruisdael, one of the most influential 17th Century landscape painters from Haarlem. His work relates especially to woodland scenes and the meticulous rendering of tree details, which is also found in Opie’s work. Hence, Opie draws on such art history traditions, yet deconstructs them using his trademark computer-aided style and scrutinises their very essence. Current tools like Google Maps and Google Earth as well as built-in computer games help to stimulate the creation of environments that synthesise painterly tradition with current forms of digital visualisation. Slow-motion helps to make the works oscillate between still and moving images, which often creates a trompe-l’œil effect that triggers a more thorough look at the works. Being calm and contemplative, these works may be said to convey the feelings of the beholder when viewing the landscape.
 
Walter Seidl
(English translation: Mandana Taban)

Unrest of Form. Imagining the Political Subject
Exhibition and performance parcours
A project by Wiener Festwochen, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, and Secession
In cooperation with Museumsquartier Wien
Curated by Karl Baratta, Stefanie Carp, Matthias Pees, Hedwig Saxenhuber, and Georg Schöllhammer.
Display: Johannes Posch
 
With: Thomas Arzt, Tarek Atoui, Neïl Beloufa, Banu Cennetoğlu and Yasemin Özcan, Keti Chukhrov, Tim Crouch, Carola Dertnig, Jimmie Durham, Barbara Ehnes, Gustav Ernst, Tim Etchells, Antonio Fian, Franzobel, Dora García, Rodrigo García, Thomas Glavinic, Gruppe P / Go Get ‘Em Tiger!, Dmitri Gutov, Hannah Hurtzig, Schorsch Kamerun, Hassan Khan, Sung Hwan Kim, Chris Kondek, Mapa Teatro, Rabih Mroué, Marina Naprushkina, Henrik Olesen, Boris Ondreička, Ontroerend Goed, Ewald Palmetshofer, Judith Nika Pfeiffer, Nuno Ramos, Raqs Media Collective, Milo Rau, Navin Rawanchaikul, Kathrin Röggla, Ferdinand Schmatz, Franz Schuh, Tino Sehgal, Akira Takayama, Miguel Ventura, Tris Vonna-Michell, Jeronimo Voss, Tanja Widmann u.a.
 
Since new protest movements have been cropping up worldwide, often quite unforeseen and bursting with inexhaustible energy, many people in the artistic-cultural sphere who feel solidarity with these movements are faced with a number of explosive questions: can contemporary art advance the resistance against fraudulent economic structures if it has itself a definite share in them? Or have the true potentials of art – i.e. the difficult, the nonconformist – already been liquidated behind the façades of its spaces still conceived as free? Must not the project of a political aesthetics transcending all activism suitable for media exploitation be considered aborted and suppressed? In our view, this historic aporia now needs to primed for artistic imaginations of a political subject embracing novel forms and formats.
 
Wiener Festwochen 2013 will dedicate the exhibition Unrest of Form to these forms and formats. For this group show, all Secession rooms and adjacent exhibition areas at both the Academy of Fine Arts and the MuseumsQuartier will be transformed into a parcours – a walking tour that explores the agora of the future at the interface between visual and performing arts. For the duration of the exhibition, this parcours will be enlivened on a temporary basis by artistic interventions, lectures, concerts and performances as well as by ten political speeches given by Austrian authors, who will address the present or future political situation through a fictitious identity – a language experiment – to thematise what is wrong in the public discourse or missing from it, and to try to pinpoint the blind spot of politics.