Vienna. It is stories of form and of the media of its representation that make up the most recent exhibition at the Vienna Secession. Its focus is on modernism, modernity and the structural figures of the main procedures of their artistic representation, as well as the technologies of image production used in these. The show is conceived as a dialogue between two artistic approaches that have, for over a generation, been concerned with similar questions regarding the content of form and aesthetic production. The Los Angeles-based (post-)conceptualist Christopher Williams and the artistic double-act Jeroen de Rijke/Willem de Rooij, one generation younger, accepted the Secession’s unusual invitation to come up with a joint concept for all rooms. What they have in common is the way they employ beauty and seduction, aesthetic quality and perfection in their visual representations. In de Rijke & de Rooij’s works, the pleasure in a pure aesthetic – in a subtle treatment of the values and arrangements that inform the dominant, now normative formal concepts of classical beauty – masks an interest in the real that is hidden behind the surfaces of this aesthetic, in the margins, in the social. With a rigorous, almost scientific gaze, Christopher Williams analyses narrative moments and transferences of meaning within the universal system that modernism wanted to establish in its constructed gazes: progress and the symbolic systems used to put across Fordian-modernist social projects and ideologies are integrated into the facets of Williams’ images. It is a system of references that lies between and in the works and that does not become obvious at first glance.
In this display at the Vienna exhibition, which is constructed via the almost twin-like dialogue of common motifs and similarities in the works, explorations of space are important to all three artists. Christopher Williams’ uses the central space almost on his own, except for the bouquet, an opulent flower arrangement in pastose colours, in which local florists have interpreted the grey tones of a black-and-white photograph. De Rijke & de Rooij use the two side aisles of the »cathedral«. In the right-hand one is shown the slide production »Orange«, on the left there is the film/social commentary »Mandarin Ducks«, made for last year’s Bienial in Venice.
For the exhibition, the artists use the Secession’s system of mobile and modular walls, developed by Adolph Krischanitz. Williams also uses the wall system as a subject in one of his photographic works. Spatial figures also play an important role in de Rijke & de Rooij’s projections. When the film installation is not running, it appears as a minimalistic, sculptural arrangement of benches and a soundproof tower containing the film projector.
As opposed to other auratic exhibitions that have been shown in this venue, this one builds up its systems of reference in a way that goes beyond the art space, highlighting its self-referentially and exclusions. The slide projection »Orange« shows a series of 81 monochromatic slides with different shadings. The industry avoids using orange, because this colour tends to lend skin tones an unrealistic hue. In this exhibition, Williams has also looked at similar questions concerning the tricky reproducibility of orange, examining the production conditions of the photographic medium using the industrial colour palettes of Kodak, Fuji and Agfa. But in a supplement to the slide projection »Orange«, De Rijke & de Rooij explain their association with the political values of various oranges: the colour of the overalls worn by Guantanamo Bay prisoners, a reference to Dutch migration policies and the national colour of the Dutch, the Oranjes, which refers back to the royal family of the Oranges.
In Williams’ new cycle »For Example: Dix-Huit Lecons sur la Societe Industrielle« - the title comes from a Godard film, an important source of reference – the focus turns from the »Neue Sachlichkeit« towards a rupture of the logic of the Cold War and the modernist experience of the 1960s. Along with many other incunabula of late modernism, Williams cites a brochure for the the Renault design Dacia, produced since 1969 under license in Romania, as an example for the cultural transfer of images. Williams’ photos draw on the conventions of advertising and industrial photography and the aesthetics of fashion pictures. The seductive surfaces, which the artist as director has done by trained professionals, mostly differ from the standards through minimal deviations or irritations. Williams’ referential eloquence is seen in the inscription panels: a conceptual representation of the abbreviations of the respective technical terminology as codes for the fabrication or distribution of the various products in the exhibition.
Both Williams and de Rijke & de Rooij are passionate proponents of the representation and analysis of the meaning of apparatuses for the form of image production. Altogether, this twofold perspective has led to a complex dialogue about the politics of form that can also be inscribed in a local genealogy of formal approaches.
Translated by Timothy Jones