Vienna Art Week part 2

The exhibition Gender Check at MUMOK, (The Museum of Modern Art, Vienna) is an outstanding example of great curatorial practice, tremendous international research and dedicated ambition. 200 artists, a half century of works to choose from, a huge range of material process, acres of floor space to fill and a large selection of works both grand and intimate. With such room to move the curator Bojana Pejić has created one of the best shows of this type that I have ever seen. Following the advice of the guard, I started at the top floor working my way down and backwards in time. This was perhaps a mistake as I assume the show intended a chronology of some sort even though the exhibition is not designed with a simple historical linearity. The divisions of the exhibition may seem somewhat to over-determine their object, covering as they do, gender roles, personal spaces and the genderscapes of post communism.

The subdivisions make a complex index that are hard to follow as a viewer but may make better sense as chapter headings. It may also be the case that there is a sort of normative argument behind the works and the show can be viewed as a series of interruptions of the chauvinist and heterosexual hegemony of first, the communist apparatus and then later of the insidious nationalism and the rampant consumer capitalism of the new ‘free’ East. Here all breaks with the dominant ideology are seen as positive disruption. It would perhaps be hard to imagine it otherwise. The norm supports the hegemony of totalitarian control.

Amongst many highlights in the exhibition the Performing Gender/Performing Self section, with works by Natalia L.L, Cornelia Schleime, Marina Abromovic and Katalin Ladik and many others seem to retain much of their original offensiveness. The performative gestures provided a In the collection of more recent works on the top floor video works by such artists FNO and Igor Grubic are powerful works that demand attention. But more than anything else it is the whole of this exhibition that is its strength rather than individual works.

http://www.mumok.at/

Later the same day I also visited the Kunsthalle Wien , a remarkably nondescript space beside the more impressive MUMOK. Two exhibitions a selection of Austrian video works titled Videorama Art Clips from Austria and 1989. The End of History or Beginning of the Future? a revisit to the fall of the Berlin wall. I may be missing something, but the presentation of the numerous video works of the first exhibition simply set beside each other, the soundtracks comingling created a cacophonous visual deluge that I found both unwatchable and not a little insulting to the works on display. If there were pieces that demanded attention I can imagine no way in which one might be expected to find them. It felt like being curatorial bullying. The main event, a large-scale review of works in the shadow of the fall of the wall was almost worse. There were many great artists included, Barbara Kruger, Hans Haacke, Martin Parr and Chantal Akerman in the show, but the total over-determination of the exhibition by a heavy handed curatorial brutality left little space for any subtlety or nuance. The lack of a developed context or conceptual frame seems mildly nauseating considering the importance of the anniversary and the political integrity of the included artists. I can find nothing to recommend this type of exhibition, it is simply a selection of well known art figures brought together without, as far as it would seem, any consideration of the how the individual works combine or contribute to any developed argument whatsoever.

http://www.kunsthallewien.at/

The evening found me performing Rainer Ganahl’s short sound play Ubu Lenin at MAK. I had performed the work once before at Tensta Konsthall and it is a wonderful piece full of Dada references and sharply drawn political satire. The evening also included Ganahl’s food soirée, a cornucopia of carved food in the form of phalluses, vaginas, asses and communist emblems. A wonderful attack on the senses as the scents of sardines mixed with cheese and a vegetable soup served to the audience by Ganahl’s students who were also responsible for the carving. The generosity of the event was a wonderful riposte to the artistic elitism and curatorial arrogance from earlier in the day. Ganahl’s exhibition that had been developed at Tensta Konsthall in 2008 was an elegant and refined version of the work that asks important questions about the historical rewriting of totalitarian barbarism of communism as post-modern kitsch. Ganahl despite his delight in making jokes is a deeply humanist artist and his readdressing of the atrocities committed in the name of the emerging Soviet state seem, sadly, as relevant today as ever.

http://www.mak.at/

http://www.ganahl.info/