Vienna Art Week part 1

In seven days you wouldn’t actually be able to do justice to all the exhibits in the Vienna Art Week, visiting it one felt the enormous sense of inadequacy that seems standard in the corpulent mega shows of the European art circuit. With almost all of the most important venues taking place, both state funded and private, there is just too much to see.

The sheer scale of some of the larger shows is daunting, 200 separate artists at the Museum of Modern Art, several hours worth of video at the Kuntshalle. And despite the fact that many of the spaces are clustered even the most hardened art hound or biennial hopper would be hard pressed.

Having been invited by MAK to take part as performer during the week for a piece by Rainer Ganahl I was immediately whisked off on my arrival to the first opening of the evening at Secession. For any one who doesn’t know the building it is more Jugend than Judendstil, a sort of over decorated white cube exterior with a golden bucolic leafy dome. From the city of Klimt it seems to fit but it has to be one of the campest pieces of nonsense on the planet. Three exhibitions on show, Marc Chaimowicz, Michael Ashkin, and Mona Vatamanu & Florin Tudor. I remember Chaimowicz as one of the teachers the Slade when I studied there in the early eighties and was surprised at seeing his work at the Berlin Biennale last year. I’m sorry but I really don’t understand the resurgence of his pastel vision. I must say I found the work at best well turned out and at worst and an insipid over-dressed formalism. The works by Vatamanu & Tudor seemed an over-determined polemic. The couple seem to wear their political hearts on their sleeves and in the context of Secession I saw no ‘daws’ willing to peck. The context of recent events in Romania seem to impede rather than enable the wider discussion of the rhetoric and poetics of resistance that is the artists’ goal. It was great that the Ashkin show had real punch. One of his cardboard constructions includes a box, a full ashtray and an AK-47 resting on a stool. The combinations of recycled brown card as a simulacrum of the public spaces of prisons, squares, landscapes or objects seems to work so well in the refined Secession architecture. The highlight of the exhibition is a commissioned work titled Untitled (where each new sunrise promises only a continuation of yesterday). It is a landscape of brown cardboard, accurately recreated form aerial photographs. One can only imagine how more impressive it would be on an even larger scale.

After Secession we move to COCO, a great new space run by an excellent young curator Severin Dünser and an evening titled Speak & Spell curated by Spike art Magazine. The first performance was atypical for the evening, a sadly a run-of-the-mill, very well meaning action where the performers were clearly having more fun than the audience. I was tempted to head to the excellent COCO bar but was rescued by an extraordinary video by Ryan Trecartin. With echoes of early John Waters mixed with George Kuchar’s humour and a genuine feeling of threat it was one of the most immediately ‘got-to-watch’ works I’ve seen for a long time. Slip-slide gender play, rapid fire dialogue, quirky editing, great acting and brilliant staging adds up to a car crash you cant avoid and simultaneously can’t stop wanting to be part of. The performance by Nils Bech was so full that I could only catch glimpses of this rising stars extraordinary delivery but from what I could see he more than deserved the standing ovation that he got. Bech sings with a pathos that is tangible and a sense of desperation that is heartbreaking. A great end to an evening anywhere, but not least in a Vienna that in my mind is always haunted by Meg Tilly in Amadeus playing Mozart’s wife and screaming “Wolfie Wolfie”! Just about as joyously camp as you anyone could want.

MAK: http://www.mak.at/index.html

Secession: http://www.secession.at/

COCO: http://www.co-co.at/

Vienna Art Week 2009 http://www.viennaartweek.at/2009/

Marc Chaimowicz at Secession 2009

Secession Vienna

Ryan Trecartin - A Family Finds Entertainment 2004