Situationsbericht (Situation report)

4 wall texts, 4 x 2 m, 2008
Part of the video installation It's All About Art


© Exhibition view: Recent Changes – Änderungen vorbehalten: Situationsbericht,
PHASE 2, Galerie 5020: Situationsbericht, 2008.

On Annja Krautgasser’s “Seitenwechsel” (Changing Sides)

by Hildegard Fraueneder

Select, arrange, display—the creation of meaning: the exhibition in a dispositif in the sense of a heterogeneous ensemble of the shown and the not-shown, the said and the unsaid, has been frequently addressed in the recent past, and this debate has had a varied impact on both the theoretical and the artistic arenas. Obviously, this focus is better suited than others to see both arenas as belonging together and involved in mutual exchange.
The concept for Recent Changes – Änderungen vorbehalten, a three-part series of exhibitions in which a total of 10 artists participated, pursued an artistic interest shared by both curators as well as addressing the responsibilities of curators and institutions regar-ding the exhibition as a medium: “Position work, positioned—served-up art ...; then delete parts, retain parts ...; then react with different new works, contextual shifts ...; partial deletion again ...; then react again, context renewal ... three layers, increasing density, overlaps, shifts, flowing transitions, ties, transparency, interventions, questioning, commenting, image/theoretical discourse, authorship—curatorship, action—reaction—inter-
action ...” (Peter Haas and Bernhard Gwiggner, curators of the exhibition).
Annja Krautgasser was designated to contribute to the second phase of the exhibition so she had to react both to what had been left behind while also leaving something behind herself. Of all the artists’ invited to participate, she placed the act of exhibiting in itself most decisively open to discussion, as the two curators had stipulated or encouraged, in the form of a dialogue-based model: a display that she subjected to a critical reading, with elements providing meaning as well as settings generating atmosphere. She obtained texts from four well-known currently active curators and critics, which she applied as lettering onto the wall of the exhibition space as done in the presentation of paintings. She also installed a blog where she posted texts on the exhibition as a medium while also equally ephemerally projecting a survey of her own video work onto a painted canvas left leaning back to front against a wall following the first phase of the show. In doing so, she was testing the basic parameters of institutionalised exhibition practise by permanently changing sides, from being shown to showing, from being invited to doing the inviting, and so forth—rendering the boundaries and associated hierarchies and interdependencies visible and tangible. In contrast to the, at first glance, open gesture of the exhibition concept which promotes the production of art, Annja Krautgasser reacts by adding a dynamism to the artist’s and the curators’ fields of competence with which she avoids an essential aspect insofar as neither the institution nor the curators, and not even the authors of the texts on the wall, are able to dictate the content of her artwork. They were all involved, appropriated, manoeuvred, and instrumentalised—perhaps without even real-
ising it ... What was, what remains? Interventions—which is what the concept of the exhibition called for—are just as unpredictable as they are aimed at finding consensus. At best they open new spaces for thinking or acting here aimed at the well-established mechanisms behind exhibition making. To the extent that Annja Krautgasser deliberately presented her own artwork in the exhibition (i.e. the projected survey of works mentioned above) while also adopting the institutionalised roles by displaying the contributions from those she had invited, she insists on a practise of interruption and of reversal, although positing these conceptually as forms of thinking and action: to pick up on, to continue thinking about, condense, and delete ...
(Hildegard Fraueneder)


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Situation report #1

– Walter Seidl

Situation report #2

– Ursula Maria Probst

Situation report #3

– MidiHy Production

Situation report #4

– Rita Vitorelli

Situation report #1

Walter Seidl

On the Interference between Curatorial and Artistic Production

The definition of artistic strategies aims to make individual approaches to the reflection of social processes visible where they manifest themselves. Curatorial interventions in the artistic practise reflect the interest in art-specific precepts that adhere to a thematic superstructure. The usual method for productions in an exhibition context is the synchronisation of these levels. The conceptual remix of both approaches hallmarks many major events, which have been increasing in numbers and finding their echo in world-encompassing biennials since the 1990s. The challenges associated with these ubiquitous exhibition arrangements, however, are an indication that the success of all of these operations is not automatically guaranteed.
Harald Szeemann provides a shining art historical example for a curatorial approach not dependent on museums but still location-bound. He had not regarded himself as a museum curator from the outset and resigned from the Kunsthalle Bern in 1969 to found the Agentur für geistige Gastarbeit (Agency for Spiritual Migrant Work) as a freelance curator. Szeeman’s exhibitions, curated all over the world in the last decades, speak for the success of his model for working and thinking, although the relationship between artists and curators is not always a friction-free one. Søren Grammel, for instance, commented on this problematic issue of the Szeeman’s authorship of exhibitions in his publication: “The collaboration between artist and curator increases the artist’s loss of autonomy by implying the direct intervention by the curator in the work while it is already in the production phase.”¹
In the exhibition Recent Changes – Änderungen vorbehalten at Galerie 5020 artists are asked to react to the work of the artist preceding them, and so to alter the display of the exhibition in three sections, and to generate a common flow in the character of the work. This method is, however, always dependent on a thematic ‘and media-specific practise and by no means uncontroversial. Annja Krautgasser attempts to approach this task in an interventionist manner by leaning a painting by Stefan Heizinger against the wall the wrong way round and using the back of it as a screen for projecting her videos onto. In doing this she alludes to the complex thematic fusion in her work with the previous display of mural drawing, painting, and installation. Krautgasser balances here between support of the curatorial author’s position and an attempt to secure her own autonomous stance as an artist.

^{1 Søren Grammel, Ausstellungsautorschaft. Die Konstruktion der auktorialen Position des Kurators bei Harald Szeemann. Eine Mikroanalyse, Revolver, Frankfurt 2005, p. 31. Here in translation.}


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Situation report #2

Ursula Maria Probst

Appropriation Today?

Exhibition practises with open structures aimed at confrontation render visible that the exchange of expertise between artists and curators might contain the potential for conflict but nevertheless still has a positive impact. The installation by the artist Annja Krautgasser in the three-phase project Recent Changes – Änderungen vorbehalten integrates possible forms of reception into an engagement with the deconstruction of new processes of appropriation as well as interventionist strategies and practices of appropriation in the treatment of institutionalised networks of relationships and artists’ peers. A state of multiplication of the curator-subject? While the art theorist Hal Foster always promotes artistic strategies for the curator, here it is the artist whose engagement creates parameters for information going beyond content however, and whose discursive output on the topic of appropriation, exhibition mechanisms, and exhibition concepts is to commission other curators, art critics, and artists with making statements which she then integrates in the installation. The issue here is not A represents B at location C; structural questions are posed about the exhibition practise. Through the intervention in the display that resulted from Phase 1, the display gains a double function by becoming both a bearer of information and an aesthetic dispositif.
What can the strategies of Appropriation Art achieve today? Appropriation no longer functions today as a substitute term for subversion, strategies of appropriation are not de facto critical, and in our media culture the principle of appropriation is supplemented by that of piracy. It is this precarious moment of appropriation that Annja Krautgasser addresses. A painting is turned around and the back becomes a user interface for Anna Krautgasser’s video projection. By means of this act of appropriation of another painted artistic entity, the question of technologically, media-conditioned, and socially conditioned relationships between images, and the relationship between the image and the recipient are opened to discussion. What seems like a stratagem of negation reveals itself as a complex process of intermedial translation and mediation. From the issue of appropriation also emerges a simultaneous issue regarding the differentiation between the original and the reproduction, of difference and repetition, shift, conveyance and transitions. Practices of appropriation range from sampling to remixing, infiltrating tactics of quotation or of fakes. Appropriations play on and push the boundaries of artistic property and authorship, but also those of market value. The dialectic of appropriation and disappropriation taking into consideration processes of production and reproduction provokes a new practise of appropriation. Whether intended or unintended, the appropriation of objects, resources, and expertise is to this extent always also a statement on the social conditions of production, and receives its worthwhile dynamics from the reworking of obsolete norms.


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Situation report #3

MidiHy Production


Dear X,
I am never one hundred percent convinced by an exhibition; I do think 
it’s good that two artists I appreciate are participating, though. What can I say ... Group exhibitions tend to appeal to me less than good solo shows. Please write me a couple of lines saying why it is good for me and my career if I participate. I will then let you have 
my decision in the coming week.
Regards,
Y


Dear Y,
Well, if the issue is primarily your career then I am probably the wrong curator; although last year artists from Graz did “succeed” in making it into Manifesta, but in general I try not to let such mechanisms take the upper hand because if they do then projects become dominated by strategies and surface issues ...
I think that the key issue is that the exhibition, its engagement with the designs of options for action with regard to the reproduction of stereotypes, with regard to moments of seduction within everyday attempts to find orientation, has a great deal to do with your work in general; although I am interested not in the depiction of issues but in the charged moments between the challenges they pose, which the exhibition aims to predefine, and the actual works ...
At present I cannot tell you much more, my projects develop during the preparations (sometimes into something completely different from what was originally intended, which I think is also positive ...)—I hope it doesn’t sound too much like empty words, but I would still insist on a particular moment in curating that distinguishes itself from the unrestrained authorship of the people who conceive and realise the exhibition and create space for the works, also to be read in part against the curator’s hegemony ... to this extent the selection of the participants is also based on being able to show some surprises in the overall com-bination of the exhibition—the moment of control appears key to me, i.e. the question as to the way curating also engages with the borders of its own control ...
So, now I’m curious to know whether this would interest you ...
Regards,
X


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Situation report #4

Rita Vitorelli

Homer

: I’ve just bought this wreck of an ice cream van. (Homer covers Bart and Lisa’s eyes and leads them to the van)

Lisa

: How could we have forgotten? Mom said because of that we couldn’t afford to pay the orthodontist anymore.

Homer

: This’ll really surprise you!

Bart and Lisa

: Aaahhhh ... (Get Ur Freak On by Missy Elliott)

Bart and Lisa

: Wooooow. Wild!!!

Bart

: Otto, you’ve made a total pimpmobile out of it.

Homer

: He was just following my instructions (shows a drawing of a rectangle with two circles as wheels) ... and now I’m going to see my tailor about something outlandish ...

Marge

: I’d so like to do something I could be remembered for. Something that says “Marge was here” when I’ve gone.
(Sits next to Maggie at the kitchen table, lying on which is a mountain of ice-lolly sticks) That’s the story of my life: everybody gets ice cream, and I only get the sticks.
(Takes a small “tree” from the mountain of ice-lolly sticks and suddenly has an idea ... Laying one stick after the other she builds a portrait of Maggie, who is, pacifier in mouth, watching her mother with fascination)

Marge

(to Maggie): I’ve just made a picture of you with sticky orange pieces of wood. (Maggie screams enthusiastically)

Homer

(comes into the kitchen, sees the sculpture and is also delighted by it): Naive art!! That’s the only art I understand!

Marge

: I made that!

Homer

(kisses Marge): Marge, you’re a genius. You should make lots more sculptures, of Lenny, of Karl, or one of the new James Bonds. Will America accept a British James Bond? I’m very curious about that. ...
Homer brings Marge more and more ice-lolly sticks that he gets as trash from the now flourishing trade with the ice cream van.
Two weeks later. In the Simpsons’ front garden there are lolly stick sculptures of the whole family, of friends, and of their neighbours. ...

Journalist

(in a helicopter): Is that a telegenic housewife down there who makes art with lolly sticks? Set this bird down. I smell an easy story.

Journalist

(in the garden, between the sculptures): I’m standing here with the sculptress Marge Simpson, who makes things out of the bit that people throw away when they’ve finished their ices. I have two questions for you: What for and why?

Marge

: Why did cave men draw on cave walls? Why does one scratch one’s name into Tupperware? Only so that something is left when you have gone that says: I WAS HERE. I’m important. This is my Tupperware.

(The opening of Marge’s exhibition People from the Sticks. We see the sculpture of Krusty the Clown. Krusty is looking at his likeness and his name plaque.)

Krusty

(is furious): Hey, Lady, you have to pay to use me, that’s a registered trademark.
(Marge takes the plaque, turns it round and writes “TV Clown” on it.)


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