Abruptly articulated, impassioned sound structures emanate from the large gallery in the basement of the Innsbruck Taxispalais; facades of sound, fluid and agile sequences, a dull rhythmic beat and intensive, seemingly unintentional eruptions of effort that iridesce around the borders of awareness, trompe-l’oreilles. They seem to make audible the hidden emotional content of rational speech, of acts of speaking. A fragmented and secondary structure penetrates the architecturally modernistic, cool set-up of the presentation, attacks it, obscures it.

Conventions and standards appear through these affective sounds: one really only knows them from sports programs on TV, but here they are exposed, doubled. When one enters the large gallery, one at first sees a platform, the model of a stage, and background figures that themselves also seem to be models. Models of modernistic exhibition displays, shop fittings, but also equipment for a studio or theater, which seems to have freed itself from the conventions of medial performance that otherwise stylize it as belonging to the background, and which structures the room. The backs of black TV monitors standing or hanging halfway up the walls of the room serve to reinforce this studio atmosphere.

A small sign on the wall informs visitors that the paints that have been used for these displays come from the interior design range »Martha Stewart Everyday«, which has been extremely influential in middle-class America since the eighties. It offers »among other things a specific color range for furniture«, whose individual items have names like »forget-me-not« and »sugar white«. In the foyers visitors had already encountered digi-printed photos showing various studio situations and film sets, mainly from L.A.: for example, a broad, light-blue wall standing in an urban location, which, however, really serves as a background for scenes played out in front of an »endless horizon.« And such a horizon is indeed developed in the light shaft of the gallery at nightfall. On its back wall, which is visible throughout the whole gallery, an endlessly slow shot of Monument Valley - a place full of film myths - is projected as a backdrop in cinema format (»Long Shot«, 2001) - and this in the Tyrolean winter, right next to the Christmas market. In the foreground of this picture, pieces of furniture, some of them overturned, arrange themselves into something that looks like a lookout or a private picnic ground, or perhaps only the left-overs from a film production dinner.

The reference space of this set of works that Dorit Margreiter had installed in the retro-modernistic, white exhibition hall of the Taxispalais under the title »Everyday Life« - next to a retrospective of her more recent works (including the video set »Around the World Around the World« for the 2001 Vienna Festival, the installation »Short Hills« of 1999 or the »Studio City« from the same year) - was encoded in a variety of ways.

The sound backdrop is only explained at the very back of the room, although the video images associated with it are the first to be seen, opposite the entrance. Part of the video work »I like L.A. and L.A. too« (2001) shows the artist responding physically to the throws of a baseball training machine. Equipped with helmet and baseball bat, she stands in front of the mesh of one on the training cages. She waits intently for the ball, and reacts with an eruption of sounds that can be heard in the exhibition space as if they wanted to disturb the complex, sensuous construction of Margreiter’s examination of the mediatization of space and everyday life in middle-class America. As if they wanted to underline the latent, disciplinary force to which the individuals expose themselves to live their lives in this city, and the effort they need to suppress the exercise of structural force that forms the basis of their wealth. The wedge this interruption drives into the conventional space of the exhibition does not otherwise occur any more in Margreiter’s analytical sets.

Instead, these sets illustrate a concept of cultural distance. A superficial objection could be that Margreiter relieves the viewers, so to speak, of the necessity of making sure of their own environments, of criticizing the conditions determining their own viewpoint, when she superelevates its position on the intersections between an interior and exterior of the real installation space quasi metaphorically into a theater or studio context. But this superelevation is also broken through the construction of interconnected viewpoints.

The second main role in »Everyday Life« is played by a house that has become one of the incunabula of the architecture of modernism because of a photo taken by Julius Shulman for Harper’s Bazaar: the »Case Study House #22« by Pierre Koenig in the hills of Los Angeles, built in 1960. The venue of numerous film and TV productions, Margreiter turns it into an object to which many of the plot lines of »Everyday Life« are connected; indeed, its image becomes almost itself a character in the set. In an adaptation of Shulman’s famous photograph, which immortalized a couple, isolated completely in the gray-flannel everyday routine of office employees, in the transparent showcase of the rationalistic glass-steel showcase above the anonymous grid of Los Angeles’ streets in the early evening, Margreiter herself sits casually holding a conversation with the present owner of the house. This conversation, in turn, is part of one of the videos from »I like L.A. and L.A. too«. This video, in the style of a documentary report that one might see on the regional state-run television stations, accompanies a middle-class woman in present-day L.A. who is trying to buy a house. They talk about the real economy that living in an icon means, about the profit from hiring the house out for film productions, being exhibited etc.. As well as the owner of the »Case Study«, the urban analyst Norman Klein also makes an appearance (with an analysis, wavering between Adornian criticism and post-modern affirmation, of the all-conquering strategies of a medially constructed urban space whose »imageneering« only allows controlled acquisition in conformity with consumption). There is also the architect of the »Case Study«, Koenig, who talks about his present views on architecture and urban development; and Jon Jerde, the very busy architect of cities that are mere backdrops for consumption. Among other things, Jerde is the planner of Studio City, a replicated urban space situated on a piece of unused land between two of Hollywood\\\'s studio complexes, and put together from pictures of stage sets from famous films. It has become one of the favorite places to stroll in this metropolis of cars. In the catalog for »Everyday Life«, Anette Baldauf points out the ambivalence of this space: it is one of the city’s most regulated spaces, she writes, but nonetheless becomes the stage for many different groups and classes of its inhabitants, who play out their idea of urban theatricality there.

It is precisely scenes like this that distinguish Margreiter’s depiction of the ideological and image production of neoliberal media economies and control schemes from the pessimistic scenarios drawn up by so many of the critical urban exhibitions of the 90’s: even in alienated scenarios, she locates potential for performative appropriations in opposition to the intentions of control regimes. Her approach is thus similar to the dialectics that the now rediscovered French urbanist and sociologist of everyday life, Henri Lefebvre, (one of whose texts from the seventies can also be read in the catalog) used to put forward as a response to deterministic pessimism:

Everyday life in modern industrial societies is very influenced by the economic, technological constraints that colonize space and time; however, the social practice of the collective does not merge totally with the system. A remnant is always left over that cannot be domesticated. »This ambiguity produces conflicts that structure everyday life as a state of contradiction between productive activity and passive consumption, between everyday routine and creativity. Thus, for Lefebvre, the analysis of existing conditions also means pointing out the elements that break them up, and the question of a liberating prospect. By showing how people live, the critique of everyday life also arraigns the strategies from which this everyday life arises, and exposes the despotism of the ruling order«. (Klaus Ronneberger)

The distancing step Margreiter places between the experience of the art work from the experience of the specific places of everyday life in her exhibition is not just about adapting the icons of esthetic representation from which the myths of everyday life arise. Rather, »Everyday Life« underlines their mutual dependence, the artificiality of the separation dividing esthetic practice from a social practice or experience. This work thus functions as a sort of marker showing how the differentiation of an interior and an exterior between viewers and protagonists becomes the privilege of those who, because of their social position, are able to separate their »culture«, their viewpoint from the social and economic circumstances of their everyday life and from those who cannot do this.

One of the main thrusts of Margreiter’s »Everyday Life in Model Form« is certainly also to »contaminate« the debate about architectural modernism with »everyday history«, and no longer to leave its analysis up to established disciplines and their restrictive bureaucratic conventions and elitist esthetics, but to open it up towards other aspects of cultural production and thus to contradictory attempts at appropriation. Even if these themselves are constantly commented upon: through barely suppressible eruptions of sound. From subjects.

 

Translated by Tim Jones

 

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