Carola Dertnig
Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst
The last beats of the techno wave are finally fading out, and after watching countless videos of dancing artists in recent years, I wasn’t altogether eager to see Carola Dertnig’s recent exhibition, which was titled “Dancing with Remotes.” But it is only at first glance that the videos of this Austrian artist who lives in New York bear any relation to techno’s oft-celebrated theme: the withdrawal from the social into the private sensation of one’s own body merging with musical rhythms. What distinguishes Dertnig’s work from such privatisms are her subtly deployed references to social conditioning—an