Attempts to a Diagnosis of Austrian Art

Miscarriages of Art in the Light of Late Josephinistic Defeatism and the Proporz-system of the Second Republic

Ed. Hamid Nouar: Widerstand – art and politics from Austria. Århus: Rhizom, 2000, Lmd. [20] ff. Modifierad version: Århus: Center for Kulturforskning Arbejdspapirer (91-01), 2001, Klmhft. [ii], 29 (1) pp. Translated from the Swedish by Jesper Grube Overgaard.

”As is well known, Kant defined enlightenment as man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. In Austria, they are still looking for this way out, but are unable to locate it. Someone took down the exit-sign, and since then, in the event of fire, people will rather trample each other down than look for the exit that leads to the coming of age. Why this lack of enlightenment in Austrian social community? One of the reasons is the fact that, in this country, enlightenment—wherever it occurred—was always imposed from the top (and never demanded from below). From Joseph II up to Kreisky & Co.” (Oliver Marchart)

In his book Das Ende des Josephinismus (1999), the Austrian philosopher and media theoretician Oliver Marchart states that the creation of the black and blue coalition government between the right-li­beral FPÖ, then under the leadership of Jörg Haider, and the conservative ÖVP, with Wolfgang Schlüssel as chancellor, represents a unique op- portunity for Austrian art and culture to dispel the shadow of the conflict and consensus-inviting enlightenment-from-above of “josephinism”, and to build a proper social community from a new conflictuality.

Since the two serious threats of impending collapse that faced the Habsburgian Empire—first at the time of Maria Theresia in 1740, and later with the re­vo­lu­tion of 1848—political culture in Austria has always strived for a consensus-aiming policy in the setting of a kind of enlightened despotism. First with the Maria-Theresian enlightenment (carried on by her son, Joseph II, dead in 1790, who lent his name to the term “josephinism”) and later with the biedermeier-culture, styled by a conservative spirit of enlightenment, of Franz Joseph I. This policy was subsequently enhanced with the imposed state-con­struc­tion out of nothing that became the First Republic (”die Republik die keiner wollte”), which only reluctantly was setting its eyes on a mo­dern government form, such as we know it from the rest of Europe, made from a decaying empire as it was. Before the black and blue came into power, the Second Republic, which was devised by the same persons who thought out the first one, was always characterised by the political bureaucratic power distribution policy of the SPÖ and the ÖVP (the Proporz-system).

Attempt I: Bureaucratic delirium

Austria is built on a myth. Let us first briefly recapitulate the hist­or­ical background of this myth:

It is a myth of disaster—completely parallel to the Untergang des Abendlandes of the (German) Oswald Spengler, from 1918—and the disaster in question is naturally the decline and fall of the empire under Franz Joseph I, from the re­vo­lu­tion in 1848, through the royal and imperial double monarchy in 1867 until the dissolution of the empire by the end of the first world war in 1918.

Maybe paradoxically, maybe not so, it is in this exact period of decline, and in an increasingly obdurate and introverted late biedermeier culture, that the Austrian intelligentsia and art had its most prominent representatives, as if they took nourishment from precisely this “voluntary enlightenment”, from the dark carpets, wallpaper and fur­ni­tu­re of their homes, which later always seemed to be repositories of most horrible secrets and repressions.

Maybe it is also like this: that the bourgeois biedermeier-jugend room is the turn-of-the-cen­tu­ry counterpart to the building-boom in the most bombastic late baroque style between 1714 and 1740, and that it is such rooms, with their folded spatial conception, that also lend themselves to hiding corpses.

This involution and evolution in the conception of facades and interiors from baroque to jugend may correspond to the tolerant repression of the josephinistic enlightenment “from the crystal crown”, but it also invites an alpine conception: people live in the valleys, where the view naturally is claustrophobically hidden behind a mountain.

The radicalism of Austrian writers and intellectuals around the First World War turns against this alpinism. One imagines that they would like to see Austria flattened by a large bulldozer.

A bulldozer has ev­erything a mo­dern mood of disaster could wish for, and it must have been in a similarly decadent mood, reminiscent of the last days of Rome or Sodom, that writers and intellectuals like Adolf Loos, Karl Kraus or Ludwig Wittgenstein went around proclaiming, no, not the new forms and new times of the avant-garde, but—faithful to the Riesenrad of hist­or­ical recurrence—precisely the inevitable coming of doomsday.

In contradistinction to the Habsburgian high culture from Charles V (born 1526) until Charles VI (†1740), Austrian art seems fatally chained to this Spenglerian conception of art, and that is how one should understand the ortographical zeal of Karl Kraus, the eagerly correct con­struc­tions of Loos and the monotonous tautologies and contradictions of Wittgenstein, again: not as a tabula rasa with the eyes set on new times (as had the avant-garde in the rest of Europe), but on the contrary as a non-nostalgic and fated clinging to the Habsburgian virtues: the bureaucracy, the baroque involution and the “plus ultra” alpinism of the times of Karl V, but now in an inverted per­spect­ive: bureaucracy as seen through a delirious kaleidoscope by Walser or Kafka, the involuted forms and the alpinism forced through dif­fer­ent ty­pes of rectifying manoeuvres, i.e. straightenings and dispositions, apparently driven by a sort of rage, eyes firmly set on the desire for destruction that Freud de­scrib­ed in Jenseits des Lustprinzips.

The tabula rasa we are witnessing here seems more directed at the ruin as a goal, a building consisting of a skeleton, a text of which nothings remains but silence or a cultural debate, the ultimate goal of which seems to be to unceasingly impress upon humanity its own stupidity and to herald the end of the world.

In a contemporary form, it is quite symptomatic that the otherwise rather minimalistic painters Josef Danmer, Manfred Erjautz, Michael Kienzer, Günter Pedrotti and Werner Reiterer, when associating in a demonstration project on an empty street in front of the chancellery on the occasion of the black-blue government, appear to mix the rabulism of Karl Kraus with the famous final point 7 of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus logico-phi­lo­so­phi­cus: “Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen” in—so it seems to me—a rather precise political statement with an accurate and ambiguous humour.


Warning: imagesx() expects parameter 1 to be resource, boolean given in /home/www/portheim.org/pub/imagecopyresampled.php on line 18

Warning: imagesy() expects parameter 1 to be resource, boolean given in /home/www/portheim.org/pub/imagecopyresampled.php on line 19

Warning: getimagesize(/home/www/barnabooth.portheim.org/museum/konst/at/danmeretall_whitedemonstration.jpg): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/www/portheim.org/pub/textbild.php on line 63

Josef Danmer, Manfred Erjautz, Michael Kienzer, Günter Ped­rot­ti & Wer­ner Reiterer: [Demonstration]. Wien, februari 2000.

Attempt II: Artistic refuse

Austrianartis a bastard.

As Austria is an unwanted nation, in the strictest sense of the term, a bastard sprung from the final failure of the matrimonial strategies of the Habsburgs, and a residue of the final collapse of the Holy Roman Empire and the double monarchy of the Habsburgs, one can hardly speak of any national Austrian art that could crown the wall of honour of a mu­se­um, as The Nightwatch of Rembrandt adorns the Rijksmu­se­um in Amsterdam.

It is probably no coincidence that the word kitsch im­me­dia­te­ly brings alpine folk-art to mind. And the other way around: one should not be surprised to find that the last “k.u.k.-painters” Egon Schiele (†1918) and Gustav Klimt (†1908), whose icons sprout on all sorts of merchandise in Vienna, have become a kind of decadent kitsch by being so overexposed.

If we should speak of an Austrian Nightwatch of sorts, it would be precisely Klimt’s Beethoven-frieze in the practically atombomb-proof bunker in the basement of the Secession-building of Joseph Maria Olbrichs (†1908), a stu­dent of Otto Wagner (†1918). Nothing here points the way to any kind of mo­dern state structure, but rather back to the remains of the fallen empire of the Habsburgs, under the petit bourgeois guise of the royal and imperial double monarchy.

Austria could be said to be its own Nightwatch: the national state of Austria has taken upon itself to be custodian of the empire of the Habsburgs, selflessly standing guard over it, in honour of the tourists.

Pre­sum­ab­ly, this absence of a proper national state can explain why Austria displays so little of the nationalism that is otherwise the hallmark of other European states; it is not unlikely that it could be one reason why for several projects—not unsimilar to the “settlements” of Erwin Posarnig, interconnecting through a sort of conceptual un­der­ground-system (“beyond the web”)—where the artists are founding new “states”; as when the painter Edwin Lipburger proclaimed his “Republik Kugelmugel” in 1984; a republic consisting of a main building in the shape of a planet and other small hideaways, ev­erything fenced in with barbed wire and delimited by a frontier door painted in red and white stripes. The republic of Kugelmugel also issued its own stamps and other national artefacts.


Warning: getimagesize(/home/www/barnabooth.portheim.org/museum/konst/at/republik_kugelmugel.jpg): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/www/portheim.org/pub/textbild.php on line 63

Republik Kugelmugel

As the epoch of josephinism and double monarchy is intimately related to that of the fine arts, Austria does not have any need for art; it does not want to be reminded that it is a bastard. Regional folklore like traditional alpine buildings, horned creatures on the walls, Lederhosen and folklore are welcome; also Burgtheater, Oper and Kunsthistorisches Museum. All the remains of the double monarchy are guarded as though they were national treasures.

This is what the infamous 1995 election campaign of the FPÖ reflects: “Do you love Scholten, Jelinek, Häupl, Peymann, Pasterk ... or art and culture?” In paraphrase it could run: do you want a degenerate mo­dern bastard of a nation or do you want the royal and imperial tradition?

But art itself shows no urge to be art. The most important Austrian artists of the second republic were undoubtedly those who were known as Wiener Aktionismus, i.e. primarily Günther Brus, Otto Mühl, Hermann Nitsch and Rudolf Schwarzkogler, whose main characteristic is a—pardon the expression—almost pathological masochism and formal nihilism (though Nitsch nurtured a number of occult ideas about mysteries and ritual). Unlike other actionistic artistic strategies or performance artists, the Wiener Aktionismus is practically devoid of any sort of utopian, social or poetic dimension (as one finds with Fluxus, Bjørn Nørgaard or Joseph Beuys), and can in my opinion fittingly be reduced to anything from orgies of hatred to suicide, laced with sadism and masochism, aggressions and perversions.

It is as though Austrian art lives and feeds on the voluntarily incapacitated public, by responding with a voluntary pathology, by reacting to the post-biedermeier Kunstwollen with witless infantility, and by reacting to the royal and imperial icons with orgies of scribbling over and aimless hatred.

It may be this identity as a bastard that brings about that the favourite sub­ject matter beyond compare in Austrian literature and art is the turd, and that its focus is anal. The turd is ubiquitous: from Werner Schwab’s Fäkaliendramen to the photographs by Edda Strobl in the Rhizom exposition, Roman Klug’s series Dreckmund, or the Danke, Jörg-video—showing a pulsating pink-red rectum to­geth­er with the highly uncomfortable soundtrack of repetitious farts—of Cor­ne­lius Kolig.


Warning: getimagesize(/home/www/barnabooth.portheim.org/museum/konst/at/eddastrobl.jpg): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/www/portheim.org/pub/textbild.php on line 63

Edda Strobl.

Iconographically, Adolf Hitler appears to function on the same level as faecal matter; Hitler’s forms (the military cap with the sturdy erected front), the heil-salute, the moustache and the heel-clicking) evoke—and are intended to evoke—the same kind of instinctive repulsion that does faecal morphology, or, (which is not always untrue), the same kind of repressed desire. At least—since the in­vest­ment of the blackblue government—one can take notice of a markedly increased interest in Hitler-morphologies in the more troublesome part of the Austrian art scene; maybe initiated by the actor Hubsi Kramar, who suddenly emerged from a car at the Wiener Opernball on march 2nd, wearing a complete Hitler-outfit. Kramar heiled—albeit somewhat flabbily—and started a speech, but he did not get very far before a con­si­der­able number of policemen had rounded him up and whisked him away.


Warning: getimagesize(/home/www/barnabooth.portheim.org/museum/konst/at/hubsikramar.jpg): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/www/portheim.org/pub/textbild.php on line 63

Hubsi Kramar Wiener Opernball 3:e mars 2000.

In a similar manner, Franz Kapfer appears as a resurrected Hitler at the railway station of Berchtesgarden, but the sturdy cap has now assumed the form of a piece of ass-shaped head- gear.


Warning: getimagesize(/home/www/barnabooth.portheim.org/museum/konst/at/franzkapfer.jpg): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/www/portheim.org/pub/textbild.php on line 63

Franz Kapfer: A.H. wieder da!, Berchtesgaden (1998). Videostill.

Hitler also has a prominent part in the probably most commented multiple from the “short-circuit-action” at UNIKUM (the gallery of the university of Klagenfurt), i.e. Helmut Stockhammer’s Bärentaler-Sterndolar with Haider dressed as a young girl—encircled by three angels in the shape of Mussolini, Hitler and uncle Weberhofer—from whom he beseeches the estate of Bärental. Until the Second World War this estate belonged to an austro-jewish family, who sold it “remarkably cheap” to Weberhofer, whom later gave it to Haider’s father.


Warning: getimagesize(/home/www/barnabooth.portheim.org/museum/konst/at/unikum.jpg): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/www/portheim.org/pub/textbild.php on line 63

”short-circuit-action” at UNIKUM, Klagenfurt 1998.

The government now reacts against this kind of tasteless mischief (in the case of e.g. faecal morphologies, the re­act­ion is usual­ly an­oth­er, for instance it is impossible to lay hands on a book by Werner Schwab in Graz, his native town). Precisely this piece of art, Stockhammer’s Bärentaler-Sterndolar, did cost UNIKUM dearly—at least in the short run—as Bundesland Kärnten stopped its support to the cultural centre overnight. The cultural di­rect­or of Klagenfurt, the capital of the federal state, cut down the support by half, but not until Andreas Mölzer, Haider’s own cultural counsellor, had issued comments on the piece in the Kronenzeitung where he concludes—quite symptomatically, to stick to our favourite morphologies—that “one might as well flush the tax-payer’s mon­ey down the toilet” as support this kind of art. So, we got some confirmation of the post-war functional similarity between excrements and Hitler.

Hubsi Kramar was also reprimanded: he now stands accused of propagating nazi material. This would mean that Kramar has “lied, grossly trivialised, sanctioned or tried to justify the national socialist genocide or other national socialist crimes”, as it goes in § 3g in BGBI, nr. 148/1992, appendix to BGBI, nr. 13/1945. But the question is whether the court will not agree with Kramar that even the police had “im­me­dia­te­ly realised that it was an anti-Hitler”.

I don’t know whether Cristoph Schling­ensief has been or will be indicted for hetz against an ethnic group for the Container project happening Bitte liebt Österreich, in front of the opera. The event consisted partly of a large sign suspended over the ring road, where probably hundreds of tourist busses drive by ev­ery day, which read black on white: “AUSLÄNDER RAUS”, while next to the ring road was a container, packed with actors impersonating fugitives and imploring passers-by in halting language, telling them how much they loved Austria and how much they would love to stay, with shouts like that of the title “please, love Austria”.


Warning: getimagesize(/home/www/barnabooth.portheim.org/museum/konst/at/schlingensief_auslaenderraus.jpg): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/www/portheim.org/pub/textbild.php on line 63

Bitte liebt Österreich! (2000)

A similar syntax supports the singular mood in Julius Deutschbauers posters, with their bureaucratic flair and visual poetry. On one of them, a man is dressed for civil marriage in an environment from the early sixties with rosy-yellow floral-pattern wallpaper. We see him from the per­spect­ive of, we assume, an Eastern European woman, in search of a permit to stay: “Du Österreich heirate”.


Warning: getimagesize(/home/www/barnabooth.portheim.org/museum/konst/at/deutschbauer_oesterreichheirate.jpg): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/www/portheim.org/pub/textbild.php on line 63

Julius Deutschbauer: Du Österreich heirate.

I’m not sure if it’s a unwarranted comparison, but one can’t help thinking of “skeletons in the closet” and waste disposal pro­ble­ms, when last year the president of the parliament of Kärnten, Jörg Freundschlag (FPÖ), decided that a number of very large frescoes in the assembly hall of the parliament, hidden behind wooden panels since 1945, should be uncovered and transferred to the Landesmu­se­um Kärnten. The “Anschluss frescoes”, by Leo Switbert Lobisser (1878-1943), were com­­mis­­sion­­ed by the nazi regime in 1938 in commemoration of the Anschluss, and depict a number of nazi rallies, hitlerjugend, hailing multitudes, strong men waving swastika-banners and other political hot potatoes. Of course, there is a measure of interest on the level of history of art, but it has understandably also brought about some debate. Already in 1960, the frescoes had been restored and again covered up, but now, Jörg Freundschlag wants to relocate them to the Landesmu­se­um Kärnten. However, the daughter of the artist has the rights until 2013 and prefers that the frescoes remain where they are. As well known, it is also more difficult than one might think to remove corpses from closets: as recently as August 8th this year, the restorer declared that the frescoes would perhaps not sur­vi­ve the transfer.
Warning: getimagesize(/home/www/barnabooth.portheim.org/museum/konst/at/lobisser_leoswitbert_anschlussfrescoes.jpg): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/www/portheim.org/pub/textbild.php on line 63

Leo Switbert Lobisser: [Anschluss-Fresken]. Klagenfurt, 1938.

In an article of August 16th 1998, at least Andreas Mölzer, the above mentioned feature writer of the Kronenzeitung himself included a comparison between the Hitler-morphology (here in the shape of a swastika) and anal forms in a couple of installations by the also above mentioned Cor­ne­lius Kolig, who in June 1998, and in spite of an appeal by the FPÖ, won a competition for the decoration of the very same assembly hall. Mölzer wrote: “In the venerable parliament of Kärnten there is one more fresco to be ashamed of: now it is a Cor­ne­lius Kolig installation, with human torsos centred on the genital parts and the in many ways dubious quotation of the swastika-symbol, where before it was the swastika-apotheosis of Switbert Lobisser, hidden behind a wooden panel.”

Maybe there is also here a deeper sense to the priceless expression of Werner Schwab: “Analschwanger”.


Warning: getimagesize(/home/www/barnabooth.portheim.org/museum/konst/at/martinkrenn.jpg): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/www/portheim.org/pub/textbild.php on line 63

Martin Krenn (Wien 2000).

Attempt III: “Stop making Art!”

The end of josephinism and a new Austria?

The Austria that is conjured up here: an Austria on the one hand peopled by anti-mo­dernistic petit bourgeois with skeletons in the closet, and on the other hand by artists who, like Thomas Bernhard, seem to take nourishment from shocking, provoking and unceasingly flogging those petit bourgeois (“Catholics, old nazis and dumbheads”), is naturally very dangerous. It is dangerous precisely because it locks Austria in a predestined position, something the surrounding world has a tendency to do (and which Thomas Bernhard corroborates, almost caressing the foreign critics, while he himself practises all the things he parodies in his texts).

Such a hist­or­ical necessity à la Spengler implies that Austria was predestined for nazism, that it will always be nazi and that Austrians—by the very same set of Blut und Boden-logics the nazis themselves exploited in their argumentation—are nazis by nature (as if the Alps were an infection source of nazism). Naturally, against such a fatum of nature, no enlightenment, no social community and no free will can prevail.

At least it was such a conception of the political, artistic and cultural situation in Austria that provoked the re­act­ion of artist and curator Roger Martin Buergel, German by birth but working in Vienna, when he, rather shortly after the formation of the coalition government, curated the exposition “Gouvernementalität”, with the eloquent subtitle Kunst in Auseinandersetzung mit der internationalen Hyperbougeoisie und dem nationalen Kleinbürgertum in the setting of the Austrian art display at Expo2000 in Hannover, from June 7th until July 30th 2000: it was equally levelled at the sanctioning of right wing populism by the international “superbourgeoisie”, like in Austria, where the proporz-system had paved the way for Haider’s populistic eclecticism; but the phenomenon—so the exposition seems to claim—is being mythologisized and banalized if it becomes defined as a spe­ci­fi­cal­ly Austrian.

Nevertheless, I have myself been under the im­pres­sion that the key to Europe lies in Austria. Not because Austria represents some kind of repressed Europe (it might then be more fitting to cast the eyes on some of the great colonial powers, who most eagerly advocated the sanctions—maybe even the Western part of the Habsburg dominion which was cleaved in 1792), but rather because it constitutes a kind of gra­vi­ta­tional hub around which the question of East and West, North and South revolves, through which migrations and streams of refugees have always passed, as they still do. Austria is the geographic vacuum, “void of nationality”, unaligned since the war, the benchmark in re­la­tion to which the frontiers of nations and countries have been drawn and redrawn all through the cen­tu­ry.

According to Oliver Marchart, the paradoxically positive aspect for Austria with respect to the FPÖVP-government is that its obvious “obscuration” of culture has brought to light the conflict which since long has been hidden under the lengthy tradition of consensus-seeking “josefinismus” and the ensuing proporz-system (which has proven just as inefficient with regard to drain-pipe maintenance as it is effective when it comes to closet manufacture). As a unique hist­or­ical opportunity for Austria, it is precisely this conflict which offers the possibility for a revitalisation of the community.

This is the chance that the artists on this exposition have grasped; not by making art, but by politicising or socialising their artistic practices, where you can right­ly ask if the project initiated by Erwin Posarnig with “human urban sculp­tu­re”, kunst://abseits vom netz, has taken art as hostage for social reforms, or, social reforms are camouflaged as art-material. The question resolves itself in the insoluble, as ‘kunst://abseits vom netz’ defines art as precisely “social intervention”. The same pattern is apparent in the co-operation Klub Zwei/MAIZ, where Klub Zwei are artists who co-operate with MAIZ (autonomous integration centre for ‘migrant women’), or then it is MAIZ who co-operates with the artist—both alternatives are equally valid, and there is no question of division of labour.

According to many artists and writers among those of more constructive views think that such a “revitalisation of the social community” is heralded by the Thursday-demonstrations, demonstrations which in no way are tainted by the violence which similar demonstrations have shown a tendency to generate, when “autonomous” groups are involved.

The Germans in Austria think it rather charming in a childish sort of way when demonstrators are walking around with cameras, taking party pic­tures of demonstrators and police (the first rule in the guide to demonstrations of the autonomous, so I am told, is: never bring a camera on a demo). But at the same time it is a clear expression of the efficiency with which the proporz-system maintains ‘repressive tolerance’.

It is also remarkable how these demo-party-shots have come to function as a kind of independent artistic genre, as for instance with Martin Krenn, Oliver Ressler, Klub Zwei/MAIZ or Point of Few.


Warning: getimagesize(/home/www/barnabooth.portheim.org/museum/konst/at/paulalbertleitner.jpg): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/www/portheim.org/pub/textbild.php on line 63

Paul Albert Leitner (2000).

More practised in demonstrations (and a trifle less constructive, well, almost a bit on the cantankerous Karl Kraus side), and considerably more rabid in their rabulism, are Alexander Brener and Barbara Schurz, who since the change of government have been very industrious, with crayons in a kind of mix of ‘68 and Russian Propart as well as with spray-cans on the walls of Vienna, which they provide with slogans like “FUCK FPÖVP COALITION” and other expressions of displeasure, as you can read in their newly pub­lish­ed book Demolish Serious Culture!!! Oder Was ist radikal-demokratische Kultur, und wem dient sie? ... (Wien: edition selene, 2000), where the furious monomaniac assaults on ev­erything and ev­erybody alternate with—so I suspect—the lyrics of a punk orchestra. Here is, in my opinion, one of the highlights:

Yes – the rhythm, the rebel
Without a pause – I’m lowering my level
The hard rhymer – where you never been I’m in
You want stylin’ – you know it’s time again

All, all, all are racists!
All, all, all are sexists!
Tourists!
Tschekists!

D the enemy tellin you to hear it
They praised the music -
This time the play the lyrics
Some say no to the album, the show
Bum rush the sound I made a year ago

All, all, all are racists!
All, all, all are lobbyists!
Purists!
Sadists!

I guess you know – you guess I’m just a radical
Not on sabbatical – yes to make it critical
The only part your body should be parting to
Panther power on the hour form the rebel to you

All, all, all are racists!
All, all, all are fascists!
Popists!
Cubists!

Radio-suckers never play me
On the mix – just O.K. me
Now known and grown when they are clocking
My zone it’s known
Snakin’and takin’ ev­erything a sister owns

All, all, all are racists!
All, all, all are dentists!
Nudists!
Gaullists!
Gauchists!

Neither part of—nor derived from—the demonstrations, but appearing demonstration-like, i.e. in commercial, demonstration-like, low-formal versions, are for instance the minimalistic homepage of www.vienneselounge.at, consisting of a (formally) monotonous list of links to other homepages of related political outlook, resistancewear.org’s basse-couture, the poster “Ich habe die internationalen Protesten bestellt” by Paul Albert Leitner or the non-actionistic performances of group ergo.

By resistancewear.org and Kurzschlusshandlung the artwork is politicised to such an extent that it would seem more related to free ads or discount-gimmicks. It is difficult to catch a glimmering of any artistic idea by the in­di­vi­du­al artists, behind the thick buttress of political satire which has mo­tivated the production or the activity; and the Point of Few-demonstration—where of course you did not either get the faintest idea about what the painters otherwise are working with, constitutes what must almost be called an art-strike, an art with­out works or activities with­out art.


Warning: getimagesize(/home/www/barnabooth.portheim.org/museum/konst/at/oliverressler.jpg): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/www/portheim.org/pub/textbild.php on line 63

Oliver Ressler (Wien 2000).

Similar currents can be recognised on the international art scene, but they have rarely been so widely applied, and never has there been so sudden a shift in artistic activity as in Austrian “post-Haider” art.

Finally, it may also be Austria that will be the focus from where the dissolution of art, expected since 1918 by Oswald Spengler, will spread, which would only be logical, as the bastard Austria was born just that year; at least, not many of the present artists would lament such a dissolution.