ART CITIES:Vienna-Philipp Timischl
Philipp Timischl’s expansive multimedia installations combine personal notes from everyday life with found and self-produced materials to build narrative structures. Balancing between documentation and fiction, between the private and public spheres, they play with intimacy and self-reference. Major themes in his art include the lasting influence of our roots, exclusion, and queerness in relation to social classes as well as the power dynamics between art, artist, and audience.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Vienna Secession Archive
Philipp Timischl’s solo exhibition “Artworks For All Age Groups” is an orchestrated installation of photographs, collages, and sculptures. The photographic series shows a conspicuously glamorous female figure; it is the artist himself in drag. Accompanied by a muscular young man, she is taking a private stroll through the Secession’s deserted galleries, secret corridors, and offices. Yet her appearance and bearing suggest a misconception of what is normally considered appropriate in this setting. If Timischl relies on an exaggerated impersonation of heteronormativity, humor, and artificiality, it is not to invest his work with the aesthetic allure of camp. Rather, he seeks to spotlight a form of feigned self-confidence prompted by insecurity, marginalization, and being torn between milieus and classes. The protagonist’s color-coordinated makeup and outfit in fact suggest that she took great care to mimic the institution’s aesthetic, she apparently misread the unspoken rules on how to be and act that are in effect even in a liberal space such as the world of contemporary art. Didier Eribon’s “Returning to Reims”, an autobiographical meditation on the nexus between his sense of shame over his roots, he was born to a French working-class family and his homosexuality, is a central reference for Timischl. The question, then, is whether familiarity with cultural techniques such as a visit to a museum can be learned. Complicating its inquiry into the underlying social distinctions, the exhibition interweaves this issue with the aesthetic qualities of the work of art. The installation expands on the photographic series to make the tension between desire and lack of access physically palpable. Rather than supporting artworks, toppled pedestal sculptures scattered throughout the room address the visitors and interfere with their exploration of the show, forcing them to make detours or impeding and even obstructing their view of the individual pictures. The two TV sculptures play a similar game in the temporal dimension. Hybrid towers combining a flat-screen monitor with a photograph mounted directly atop, they are activated by the interaction between static and time-based digital images. For the longest time, a countdown raises the spectators’ expectations of some sort of revelation, but then the complete motif is shown for no more than a split second before the countdown starts over.
Info: Vienna Secession, Association of Visual Artists, Friedrichstraße 12, Vienna, Duration: 16/11/18-20/1/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 10:00-18:00, www.secession.at
