Vienna. Catastrophes like floods, explosions, terrorist attacks and even earthquakes do not burst into apparently well-functioning societies from outside, but are instead intimately interlinked with the economic and political conflicts shaping these societies. This is the fundamental thesis underpinning » Disaster Sociology «, which came into being with Samuel Prince’s book »Catastrophe and Social Change«, published in 1920. Three years after a French munitions ship collided with a Belgian lifeboat, causing the largest artificial explosion before Hiroshima und Nagasaki, Samuel Prince analysed the catastrophe’s social consequences for the city of Halifax. Parallel to the many examples of anti-social behaviour he detected, he also noticed the »symptomatic formation of groups, unparalleled forms of generosity, as well as the temporary disappearance of economic class barriers and social oppression«.
Los Angeles-based Dave Hullfish Bailey draws on these observations in his attempt to conceive of an alternative social model »outside the bounds of ethnicity, religion or political orientation«. Shortly before 9/11 he remodelled the Schindler House, turning it into a »temporary catastrophe playground«, designed to ensure the survival of up to seventy people for 96 hours. While he was interested at the time primarily in the house’s modernist architecture and the »natural« deconstruction of the utopias associated with it as a consequence of a possible earthquake, in Vienna he picks up on an explosion in a cereals warehouse in Alberner Hafen, seeking a possible new configuration of local (conflict) history. His search for traces takes as its starting point comprehensive research on the explosion that occurred in 1960 in Alberner Hafen and chooses as its central focus an everyday waste product, cereal dust. That was what caused the explosion, which seriously injured two workmen and completely destroyed parts of the cereal warehouse.
Fortunately the cynical undertone often clinging to his projects due to this collateral damage is scattered without a trace in the »Elevator« exhibition. For the show is not in any way a bombshell blowing up in your face, but approaches the subject-matter with due caution, historical knowledge and academic gravitas. It also includes microphotographs looking deep into the structures of the grains, which suddenly no longer seem so harmless, and which produce a fine, highly explosive dust when they rub against each other. Bailey combines these split-off elements, which for him are apparently equally destructive and productive, with the history and the name of the »Secession« building, which was actually used to store grain during the Second World War. The temporary walls pressing in on his exhibition give you the impression that you really are moving through a cellar or indeed an air raid shelter, contrasting with the usual practice for exhibitions held in the building’s basement.
At the start of his reconstruction of history, pieced together like a puzzle, are photographs of various work spaces in Alberner Hafen, built by the Nazis during the »Anschluss«, or Annexation of Austria, to make it easier to ship grain from the vanquished eastern territories. Bailey’s logic links up all the clues with each other; from this perspective noting that the unfinished port complex is now an agreeable place for retired workers to do a spot of fishing makes just as much sense as the fact that the site is associated in Vienna with the nearby »Cemetery of the Nameless«. It’s mostly suicides that are buried there, in other words, all those people who also slipped through the safety net of the seemingly intact social system.
In the exhibition this circuitous route leads you via photographs of the Danube flood meadows and the associations these awake to bring you directly back to the artist’s topic; he reflects, also on the aesthetic level, on the constantly bubbling smouldering instability of social circumstances. The still point at the centre of the presentation is a video following the various steps in cereal processing in Alberner Hafen.
However, although the video convincingly shows the impressive quantity of fine, highly explosive dust constantly being produced for a fairly long time, we wait in vain for the explosion, which at some point might have scattered the materials collected in the other rooms to the four winds.
In one room Bailey has collected these in showcases, imposing a new order on these objects and linking them together either via simple relations based on the letter they start with or through formal relationships. And thus we progress from historical photographs of Alberner Hafen via photographs of the Halifax catastrophe to Friedrich Nietzsche’s »The Birth of Tragedy«, or move from small containers once used to archive various types of cereal in Alberner Hafen, continuing past the surface structure of cereal to arrive back at the Secession building, whose cupola is adorned with laurel leaves of a similar shape. In another room Bailey has established a similarly loose configuration of a range of equipment discarded by the Alberner Hafen: the rusty chains of a conveyor belt, dust containers, segments of piping and other cobbled-together metal constructions.
The experimental, real and conceptual connections link the most diverse contexts, materials, media, sciences and disciplines and precisely through this approach promote a way of thinking that has to discard classical linear readings. His »head-in-the-clouds« world view reminds us to some extent of conspiracy theories, for he also extrapolates from the individual event to describe a more all-encompassing image. However, even if this association would fit almost too well with his story, Bailey does not at all attempt to come up with a seamless set of evidence. Instead he does exactly the opposite, undermining that kind of hermetic thinking, for even the approach adopted by his experimental configuration is based on society’s gaping fractures. In Los Angeles these included ethnic differentiation; in Vienna his approach also deals with (contemporary) history, neatly blowing it, and a number of the cultural certainties rooted in it, sky-high.
Translated by Helen Ferguson