Vienna letter

ArtForum, Dec, 1993 by Georg Schollhammer

While such initiatives are hotly debated in the press, dialogue within the Viennese art world is never so open. Gossip circulates, but nobody goes public with their arguments. The consequence, for many, is that Viennese artists seem to be running in place. In the absence of productive dialogue, their work relies on an armature of theory and language in order to legitimize it. Viennese intellectuals in general have a tradition of being paralyzed by indecision; look around the city, for example, and you see that none of the great architectural projects--the Hofburg Palace, St. Stephen's cathedral, Otto Wagner's urban plans--was ever finished. It's an enormous challenge to carry something to completion in a culture that seems unequivocally to cling to equivocation, to find its apotheosis in the fragmentary.

On the other hand, strong esthetic traditions survive to motivate discourse, even among the youngest Austrian artists. First, the legacy of the Aktionismus artists--Otto Muhl, Gunther Brus, Hermann Nitsch--and their obsession with the body are powerfully felt. Austria's unique contribution to the avant-garde of the '50s and '60s, they remain an inspiration, because they were open enemies of the state. Today, young artists like Elke Krystufek and Richard Fleissner carry on their investigations of the body, articulating issues both public and private.

Within the fragmentary context of the city's fabric, and given the local history of artists working with the body as a kind of public field, some artists are carving private, self-reflexive markings into what we call "public space." To deal with public space in a fragmentary, subjective way has become a means of turning Vienna's own, physically visible history of incompletion against the stasis of the art world. The painter Herbert Brandl, for example, has created a new grammar for gestural painting; Walter Obholzer has transformed the ornament of Viennese architecture and wallpaper into a minimalistic language; the recently deceased Kurt Kocherscheidt made nature painting into symbolic abstraction; and Franz West, making objects and furniture designed for performative use, positions sculpture between the body, the subject, and the public space.

Another group of artists are advancing a kind of conceptual, inherently critical formalism. Heimo Zobernig creates sculpture, painting, and books with conceptual underpinnings; Peter Kogler modifies computer symbols and makes tapestries out of them; Gerwald Rockenschaub installs structures that aggressively disrupt space. Such work makes it clear that Viennese art is concerned not just with theoretical critique but with social context: the history, traditions, and contemporary life of the city.

It remains a joy to write letters from Vienna. Where else can esthetic discussion be politically correct yet hermeneutically formalist--formalist yet involved in ideological and institutional critique? Nowhere else in Europe can protest come so firmly from within the center of power.