Francis Bacon, the crown jewel of British painting, lived through most of the twentieth century, from 1909 to 1992, earning in a good fifty years of activity a reputation as an existentialist on account of his often horrifying diagnoses of reality. Though the artist feared his work would one day end up in storage, it recently appeared in the hallowed halls of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. One might think this pairing rather surprising for this superrefined museal shrine, where artworks tend to carry an expiration date of around 1800. But with the privatization of the formerly state-run

A man stands in an empty white room, by turns bored and annoyed, then intent, thoughtfully staring into space. What we are seeing is a close-up of Wolfram Berger, a famous Austrian movie actor, for a full seventeen minutes. Isabell Heimerdinger titled her 16 mm film, which came out of her residency at the Atelier Augarten in Vienna, Waiting, Acting Waiting, 2003. She hired Berger to play a man waiting but instructed him first to wait before being filmed. In fact, the camera was already running, giving rise to two portraits.

The viewer quickly begins to search for the line between the acted and