Wenn die Rezensionen des Katalogs nicht mehr durch links abgerufen werden können, erfolgt hier ein Nachdruck. Sie erscheinen mir vor dem Hintergrund, dass der Herausgeber des Katalogs sich in einem eigenen Text im Katalog von meinem Beitrag distanziert hat, als erwähnenswert.

Wiener Zeitung, Freitag, 17. Februar 2006

Hundert Jahre voller Einsamkeit?
Sammlung Essl Klosterneuburg: "Österreich: 1900–2000" – "Konfrontationen und Kontinuitäten"

Von Brigitte Borchhardt-Birbaumer

Ein derartiges Anliegen müsste eigentlich scheitern, da höchstens ein dreimaliges Füllen des Museums annähernd alles Wesentliche umfassen könnte. Aber liest man den Text von Thomas Zaunschirm, der hier zum Thomas Bernhard der Kunsthistoriker mutiert, fällt die Versöhnung mit dem "gescheiterten Projekt Moderne" in Österreich nicht schwer.

Es sind einmal dem breiten Publikum weniger bekannte Namen und Werke, obwohl natürlich von Anzinger bis Zobernig oder von Attersee bis Wurm nur im abstrakt-geometrischen Bereich Lücken zu beklagen sind. Der Hang zum Zeichnerischen wird von Peter Weiermair im Katalog abgehandelt, von Plastik bis Objektkunst führt Matthias Boeckl.

Breite Präsentation

Also alles Experten auf ihrem Gebiet, die gegen die Tatsache anarbeiten, dass wenige österreichische Künstler international wirklich bekannt sind. Die Aktionisten sind dabei eine Ausnahme, bekommen daher auch breite Präsentation, samt einer Klanginstallation von Karlheinz Essl junior. Leider konnte Silvie Aigner den Bereich der "Neuen Medien", der seit den Gründungsjahren durch Valie Export und Peter Weibel auch nicht gerade unerhebliche Beiträge international leistet, aus Platzmangel wenig berücksichtigen. Die mittlerweile so wesentlichen Bewegungen zwischen Objekt und Fotografie werden zwar mit Erwin Wurm und Judith P. Fischer andiskutiert, hier wäre unter anderen noch Inés Lombardi zu ergänzen. Mit Esther Stocker und Barbara Höller werden endlich auch die Kontinuitäten einer geometrischen Abstraktion seit dem Wiener Kinetismus stärker zum Ausdruck gebracht. Ein gelungenes Projekt also? Dass von den Nazimalern nur später hineindriftende Vertreter der "Neuen Sachlichkeit" vorhanden sind, kann man Schmied nicht ankreiden. Seine persönlichen Vorlieben für fantastische und figürliche Tendenzen auch nicht. Für Zeitgeistige wird das Konzept vielleicht gediegen erscheinen, aber Zaunschirms Synthese von Größenwahn und Minderwertigkeitskomplex umkreist es trotzdem. Deshalb wäre der Widerspruch des Kurators gegen dessen heftigen Text im Katalog gar nicht nötig gewesen.

Sammlung Essl Klosterneuburg, bis 21. Mai
Kuratoren: Silvie Aigner, Wieland Schmied

******

The Art Book Volume 14   Issue 1 february 2007, p.22-23
© 2007 The Authors.  Journal compilation

ÖSTERREICH: 1900-2000/ KONFRONTATIONEN UND KONTINUITÄTEN
AUSTRIA: 1900-2000/ CONFRONTATIONS AND CONTINUITIES
Birgit Trinker and Kevin Dillon (EDS) Edition Sammlung Essl Privatstiftung 2005  €39.00          480 pp. Over 250 col illus          ISBN 3-902001-27-5   

The Essl Collection dedicated 3200 square metres of exhibition space to the exhibition „Österreich: 1900-2000/Konfrontationen und Kontinuitäten“ (17 February to 21 May 2006). The volume of artworks brought together here is also echoed in the accompanying exhibition catalogue, which, at 480 pages (including over 250 colour illustrations), establishes a thorough overview and record not only of the exhibition, but of Austrian art across the twentieth century, and extending to artistic productions from 2005. The catalogue contains essays written in German and English, and carefully sets out its and the exhibition’s limits. Even though it offers an accomplished record of Austrian art, it does not claim to be complete or objective, as curator Wieland Schmied repeatedly stresses in his rationale for the exhibition:

an exhibition is no encylcopedia. It cannot aim at being altogether complete, however this completeness might be defined. [. . .] Each selection has to be subjective. But this choice is also carried by the sincere conviction that it points to forces which have left a lasting mark on the fine arts of this country.   

The catalogue, according to Schmied, „aims at a documentation of the essential holdings of the exhibition  - as a  ‚fixed term museum’“.
Peter Weiermair’s essay  „Austria  - A land of draughtsmen“ emphasises the central role of drawing in Austrian art, demonstrating intriguing continuities from Alfred Kubin and Egon Schiele to Günter Brus and Arnulf Rainer. Johanna Schwanberg’s essay,  „Art  - body  - politics“, discusses Actionist art in Vienna in the 1960s and early 1970s. Silvie Aigner’s writings on  „Contemporary positions in Austrian art between continuity and confrontation“ (she curated the contemporary part of the exhibition) give an up-to-date, detailed overview of figurative positions, formal and constructive tendencies and Media art. Aigner presents an interesting mixture of media and new artists ranging from Judith P Fische’s strange, ethereal haptic objects and Barbara Graf’s disturbing Vertebral Column Garment (1996), to video installations by Dorit Margreiter, and Heiko Bressnik’s representations of animal and human bones.
All essays address the thematic centre of  „continuities and confrontations“, which is set out by Schmied’s critical discussion in  „The thorn in the flesh“, exploring artistic developments in Austria as emerging out of these opposites. Continuities are traced between Richard Gerstl, Herbert Boeckl and Josef Mikl, and Schiele and the Actionists’ body art. The section dedicated to confrontations argues that personal rivalries between artists led to the development of different styles, as was the case with the group around Otto Mauer (Mikl, Rainer, Hollegha, Prachensky) and the Fantastic Realists (Brauer, Fuchs, Hausner, Hutter, Lehmden), emphasising the importance of the  ‚destructive’ force in Austrian artistic production.
Catalogue and exhibition both demonstrate the extent to which Austrian art is focused on elements of death, destruction and (national) sickness, often closely intertwined with religion: Alfred Kubin’s haunting pictures of creatures from  „the other side „; Schiele’s and Kokoschka’s malformed figures, seemingly emaciated by their surroundings (perhaps even uncannily prefiguring images of victims in Nazi death-camps); Sebastian Isepp’s and Albin Egger-Lienz’s bare landscapes; Wilhelm Thöny’s faceless figures; Klemens Brosch’s landscapes in which humanity only remains as corpses or debris; Arnulf Rainer’s overpaintings; Hermann Nitsch’s bloodsoiled Actions; Valie Export’s inhumanly walking a man like a dog in front of a shoe shop called  „Humanic“; Hans Bischoffshausen’s art works titled I - Under the Impression of my Botchy Existence (1972) or Prayer Board for a Dead Landscape (1972); Bressnik’s bones which seem to ask the difference between human and animal - all these artworks are marked by the rejection and destruction of Austrian culture, tradition and politics. As Schmied states:  „An attitude of resistance and contradiction characterizes Austrian art above all after 1945“.
Whilst the first essays, although addressing aggression and confrontation, still remain fairly detached from the aspect of Austria which would motivate or even demand these kinds of artistic rejections, abjections and even repulsions, Thomas Zaunschirm’s essay, whose title echoes the first line of the Austrian Hymn  „Land of Mountains“, breaks through this surface with a polemic reminiscent of Thomas Bernhard’s writings, plunging the reader into the thick sewage of Austrian identity, history and politics:

The typical Austrian is really typical in the sense that his view is not only directed towards an introspective navel-gazing into the interior of his country, but that he crosses this analysis with observations from outside, in other words, he is defiantly trying to reconcile his inferiority complex towards an external perspective with his megalomania.

As in the art works of the exhibition, history erupts in this essay and  „very quickly, loving memories become a provincial constriction in the discourse with others“. Even Austrian jokes that consist of comparisons between Germans, Swiss and Austrians are here turned against Austria itself:

In any case, one is not always confronted with the same difficulties, if asked to characterize the typically German, Swiss or Austrian. The German reflects again and again on the atrocities of the National Socialists and recently, too, on the GDR-system, the Swiss lives on the richness of its petit bourgeois, the Austrian slides with devastating lack of orientation, whether now the view from outside or the obsessive pure conscience on the inside is meant.

Zaunschirm’s essay is utterly necessary. Its argument is echoed in so many paintings in this exhibition that speak of the despair in the face of the  „all too powerful“ past and its subsequent  „hiccups“ which mark Austrian history up to its present, like the sentencing of Günter Brus to six months  „strict arrest“ after the  „Art and Revolution“ event at the University of Vienna in 1968, the official reason for which was  „Degradation of Austrian State Symbols“ and  „Violation of Morality and Sense of Shame“, or the election of Kurt Waldheim in 1986 as president of Austria and the subsequent controversies and denials relating to his involvement in war crimes, or the election of the far-right Freedom party in 1999 (the only far-right party in European government). Most pertinent, perhaps, was the bullying and harassment of Rachel Whiteread, in response to her Holocaust memorial, by the Austrian far-right (which left her fearing for her life).
This catalogue, as a ‘fixed-term museum’, is a record of artistic struggle with and rejection of Austrian politics and history and the ‘eternal return of the always the same’, a record which anchors Austrian art as one of the few spaces of resistance to the country’s politics, by saying clearly and loudly ‘‘‘No’’ to the world, as it is.’

PATRICIA ALLMER
MIRIAD, Manchester Metropolitan University