Helmut Draxler

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  architecture October 2015

  Amie Siegel’s The Architects

  DESPITE ITS TITLE, The Architects (2014) is not about architects. Certainly there are architects to be seen, mostly sitting, silently absorbed at their computers, sometimes chatting or tinkering with models. But artist Amie Siegel shows little interest in their personalities, pursuits, or motivations; the film registers people as objects, as merely one component of the complex social and economic machinery that produces our built environment today.

  Altogether, the film shows ten architecture offices in New York. Each has been filmed in a similar way, with a series of parallel tracking shots, and

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  print January 1991

  Fareed Armaly

  Fareed Armaly has put together an exemplary exhibition that reorients the site-specific strategies of the early ’70s. Here, a distancing from that which is inside the frame (the sacrosanct pictorial object of the ’80s) is accompanied by the interest in that which surrounds and constitutes the frame. This exhibition analyzes the functional components of present-day architecture as well as the resulting cultural policies and the sociopolitical conflicts between former Minister of Culture André Malraux and the protesting movement. Thus, a leitmotiv of Armaly’s show is the passage or the transition

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  print March 1990

  “Wittgenstein”

  Wittgenstein is one of those philosophers who has not yet been totally demolished because in the ’40s he was already performing deconstruction on his own system. Now the Wiener Secession has celebrated the centennial of Wittgenstein’s birth, not by pursuing a historical transfiguration, but by taking seriously the philosopher’s potential for contemporary relevance. Joseph Kosuth curated an homage to Wittgenstein that was one of the few bright spots in the disaster area of European group shows. Naturally, Kosuth’s tribute requires some clarification. It was neither an exegesis in the academic

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  print January 1990

  “Vienna Actionism”

  An all-encompassing exhibition of Viennese actionism still lies ahead, even though Vienna has just witnessed a rapid succession of three partially overlapping shows on this subject. “Von der Aktionsmalerei zum Aktionismus” (From action painting to actionism), conceived by Veit Loers and Dieter Schwarz and already mounted in Kassel and Winterthur last year, reached the Museum für Angewandte Kunst, albeit with a few changes. At the same time, “Der zertrümmerte Spiegel” (The shattered mirror), a show concentrating on graphic works, ran at the Graphische Sammlung Albertina. And, finally, the Museum

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  print Summer 1989

  Peter Weibel

  Peter Weibel’s show at the Museum of Applied Art was not really an exhibition of art, but as its title (Inszenierte Kunstgeschichte) explains, a “mise-en-scène of art history.” The things on display were not artworks in the sense of compressed findings of form or spiritual expressivity, but rather a wild mixture of reproductions, recreations, and reconstructions done in situ and based on pretty much everything the artist has found significant in art of the past 30 years.

  Weibel reviewed the art history of that time span in six sections, each one devoted to a fictitious persona. These included

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  print April 1989

  Franz Graf

  Two years ago, in his last solo exhibition, Franz Graf showed work in only three rooms of this gallery; each room contained one work, hung at the precise center of the wall. Now, in the same gallery, at exactly the same places, Graf has exhibited three new works with exactly the same theme: variations on the circle. Yet the difference in the two artistic conceptions of this theme could hardly be greater. The pieces shown in 1986 were canvases worked in black india ink. The strongly centralized images radiated in jagged or wavy lines; in some cases, the dark/light contrast between the lines and

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  print March 1989

  FRANZ WEST: THE ANTIBODY TO ANTI-BODY

  FRANZ WEST'S SCULPTURES ORBIT around opposing poles. Their initial impact is of a kind of bodily impurity—the forms are amorphous, the surfaces crusty, even coarse. Yet there is also an underlying elegance in these works, even a hyperelegance, as if their blemishes of the skin had erupted from some dazzling interior charge. They are at once Caliban and Ariel.

  To combat the “cleanly” aspects of Modernism—the Modernism of even, unornamented lines and coolly ideated forms—is an old trait in Viennese art, which, from Hermann Nitsch’s and Otto Mühl’s physical-theater Aktionismus work back through

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  print January 1989

  Oswald Oberhuber

  This huge Oswald Oberhuber retrospective looked like a historical tour of art during the past 40 years. Just about all the styles, stances, and ideas propagated during this time are reflected in some way or other by this artist’s oeuvre. One cannot even claim that he simply places his personal stamp on the various aspects of the zeitgeist; rather, his personality keeps giving us the slip. Oberhuber may be present in each of his works, but never as an integral whole. One stylistic attitude after another reveals merely a single facet of an individual identity that never loses its fragmentary and

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  print November 1988

  “Das Glaserne U-Boot”

  Das gläserne U-Boot (The glass submarine) is a transparent vessel in a transparent medium—at least as defined by John Hilliard in his catalogue essay for this exhibition. This poetic metaphor was offered as inspiration to 27 artists who were invited to indulge their wildest and freest associations on the subject. The exhibition space, an old tobacco factory in Krems, a wine-producing region 40 miles west of Vienna, was like a tourist dream of the 1950s. However, Richter/Gerngross, the exhibition architects, provided a rather tight corset of sheet metal and concrete for the building’s three

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  print September 1988

  Brigitte Kowanz

  Brigitte Kowanz’s latest installation comprises drawings, paintings, and other objects. While the gallery has reserved a separate room for each of these media, the overall exhibition is infused with a highly consistent spirit. Kowanz demonstrates an impulse toward investigation, and an analytic way of tackling her material, though her goal is never analysis per se. Basically, her work deals with ancient philosophical questions about the essences of things and their phenomenal manifestations; to put it in more contemporary terms, the work probes the relationship between product and promotion,

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  print April 1988

  Erwin Bohatsch

  Erwin Bohatsch’s paintings are rooted in a fascination with anthropology that took hold in the art of the ’70s. They evoke Ur-forms of experience and propagate “untamed” models of thought and perception. Drawing on elements from both Surrealism and folklore, they are intended as subjective antidotes to the loss of immediate experience in our highly civilized world. Although such a characterization might be accurate, it is essentially banal, in light of the abundance, variety, and subtlety of the works.

  The traits that characterized Bohatsch’s paintings in the early ’80s—their strong narrative

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  print September 1987

  Richard Tuttle

  The late-Baroque hall of mirrors in the Neue Galerie made such an impression on Richard Tuttle that he decided to do an installation here, called The Baroque and Color, 1987. Over the course of a year he wrote a series of nine letters on this theme to the director of the museum. The decor of the hall of mirrors is an ensemble of white wainscoting, gilded moldings and shell-work, crystal chandeliers, and, of course, mirrors; color as we normally think of it is nowhere to be seen. In his letters, which were incorporated into the installation (displayed in a long, glass exhibition case), Tuttle