It is not just an interest in the (auto-)biographical that connects the artist and exhibition organiser Carola Dertnig with the painter and filmmaker Hans Scheirl. Even though the drawings, videos and photographs by Carola Dertnig differ greatly from the painting installations by Hans Scheirl, both set great store by Viennese Actionism and performance art of the seventies.
However, while Dertnig is concerned more with the performative representation of a feminist view of history, Hans Scheirl foregrounds traditional boys’ games (among other things in his »Bubenserie«) with a completely different slant.
Selected actions by Brus and Schwarzkogler also appear in a work of Dertnig, who is presenting a selection of her most recent works in the Galerie im Taxispalais. However, when she paints over the famous photographic documents of Actionism, it is not the male protagonists that she emphasises, but the »models« of Viennese Actionism. In a wall text, she combines excerpts from interviews with Ana Brus and Lore Heuermann to form a personal report that tells of the role of women in Actionism from the point of view of the fictive »female Actionist« Lora Sana. By virtue of the fact that Dertnig does not rely solely on the (re-)constructions of the women interviewed, but also adds her own views and feminist outlooks to these reflections, (art) history is itself represented as a performative process that can be continually revamped and subjected to changes in perspective. The authentic or the true thus does not play a role either in this work or her »Seefeld Trilogy«, which also has a female protagonist as its focal point in the form of the artist’s grandmother, Gabriele Dertnig, who used to run a bed and breakfast: a series of photographs shows her in her half-public four walls, which she shared with her guests for many years. Carola Dertnig did the three-part portrait – which also includes the video »Love-Age« and a model of »Haus Jennewein« - with a view to the way the tourist industry has put paid to this traditionally female source of income. Like her grandmother’s B & B, the modernist »Jennewein House«, built by Siegfried Mazagg, had to make room a few years back for an apartment house in the Tyrolean style. The 86-year-old grandmother herself prevents this look at these profound changes from turning too nostalgic: in the video »Love-Age«, she relates, laughing, how she dreamt that a handsome young man had kissed her.
In the exhibition, this »little« dream of the grandmother, which thematises the sexual desires of elderly women, is presented on an equal footing with the »big« dreams of the tourism industry. The artist sets her sights on the latter among other things in the work »Playcastle«, which – set up like a computer game – leads through the devastated facilities of a failed tourism project. »Game Over« does not only stand at the end of this project set in the Tyrolean mountains, however. In the Twin Towers in New York, in which Dertnig had a studio in June 2001 as part of an artist-in-residence programme, the artist discovered signs of decline. The video »A room with a view in a financial district«, made two months before 9/11, shows several abandoned offices in its documentation not only of the downfall of the New Economy but also of the somewhat patchy success story of capitalism. The towers themselves speak in the picture story »... but buildings can’t talk« as symbols of the capitalist system: in it, they converse about the bomb attack of 1993 and their strange position of power, and finally do Power-Yoga and a family constellation to reflect on their unloved status. The fact that the series has not lost any of its playful, experimental character despite 9/11 is due to Dertnig’s deliberately unspectacular and humorously critical approach to controversial socio-political issues, an approach that can also be found in the five-part slapstick series »True Stories« (1997-2003). The videos, partly based on experiences had by the artist herself, are about everyday events, absurd happenings and completely »normal« encounters: in the short video »Bread«, Dertnig deals with the fact that the tables in her New York studio are not even good for cutting bread, in »Byketrouble« she confronts a New York business man with the banal indispositions of life, and in the video »Strangers«, the artist shakes up the usual course of reality with a lost sock. The performative – understood as the permanently necessary renegotiation of »reality« - plays just as important role in her works as in those of Hans Scheirl, who also brings the Tyrolean mountains into the gallery. Like the Northern Range (Nordkette), which does not look quite so unconquerable in his installation, the painter also works with the colours red-white-red: »You have to appropriate and change the things that disturb you« is just one of the painter’s mottos, who presents himself in a self-portrait at the entrance in the guise of a great painter. A pink-coloured camera defines the setting in the main room, a setting that functions like a walk-through storyboard. On it, the most diverse, organic forms romp about, growing out of the picture, into each other or over the walls in bright and dirty colours. As an unambiguous shorthand for sexuality and transformation, they tell of his (life) concepts as a transgender person, in which not only »coming with the brush« but also the until now usual feminist perspective of this classical artistic action is given a refreshing reinterpretation.
Translated by Timothy Jones