ART CITIES:Vienna-Artistic Practices around 1990

 

The words to expose, to show, to demonstrate, to inform, to offer may seem to define the functions of an exhibition very clearly, but around 1990 there were many open questions as to what art should be offering, how it should be exhibited and made public. In the context of larger societal changes around 1990, artists increasingly discussed the social functions and base of their work.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: mumok Archive

The exhibition “To expose, to show, to demonstrate, to inform, to offer” (Artistic Practices around 1990) at the mumok looks back on the international art scene around the ‘90s. On three levels of the Museum, installations, publications, objects, projects, movies and interventions from over 50 artists are shown. All of them put the traditional forms of display into perspective and dedicate themselves to the social challenges of their time. Around 1990, artworks might be inserts in magazines, objects, photographs, displays, services, or performative interventions. Forays into other disciplines became the basis of countless projects. Archives were set up and quasi-scientific laboratory conditions were created, not least as a sign of the mistrust of established mechanisms of knowledge dissemination and their claims to objectivity. Traditional, object-based notions of art that had seen a renaissance in many places through the 1980s were displaced by site- and situation-specific installations. Artists were no longer happy with the traditional roles ascribed to them. They appropriated positions that hitherto had been left to others in the art business by organizing symposia, operating their own project spaces, and writing in influential specialist media. The exhibition show the diverse activities of museum in progress, which was founded in 1990 in Vienna, as well as the art activism project “Democracy” (1988–1989) by the US-American artists’ collective Group Material and Kunstraum Friesenwall 120 in Cologne, a project space run by artists in which art, discourse, film, politics, and leisure activities were aligned with each other in a new and paradigmatic form. Selected projects and installations by individual artists range from performative interventions such as: Andrea Fraser’s Museum “Highlights” and Felix Gonzalez- Torres’s “Untitled (Go-Go Dancing Platform)”, to photographic exploration of questions of appropriation and display (by Louise Lawler, Zoe Leonard, Christopher Williams, and others), to new forms of installation and presentation, like those practiced by Fareed Armaly, Tom Burr, Clegg & Guttmann, Mark Dion, Maria Eichhorn, Renée Green, Christian Philipp Müller, Gerwald Rockenschaub, Fred Wilson, and Heimo Zobernig. Works by Renée Green and Fred Wilson come together in questions concerning colonialism, racism, and cultural identity, for example. In this context, Heimo Zobernig’s installation “Amerikaner” looks at the cultural hegemony of the USA from a European perspective. A critical look at cultural transfer is as crucial to Zobernig’s project as it is to Renée Green’s installation “Import Export Funk Office”. She makes use of the private record and book collection belonging to music and art critic Diedrich Diederichsen, a white man living in Cologne who took an interest in “Her” black pop culture, and questions site-specific opportunities for experience, identification, and representation.

Info: Curator: Matthias Michalka, mumok (Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien), Museumsplatz 1, Vienna, Duration: 20/10/15-24/1/16, Days & Hours: Mon 14:00-19:00 Tue-Wed & Fri-Sun 10:00-19:00 Thu 10:00-21:00, www.mumok.at