When, in 1970, five gentlemen - Peter Kubelka, P. Adams Sitney, Jonas Mekas, James Broughton, Ken Kelman – decided to put together a representative selection of cinematic art works (»The Essential Cinema Repertory«) in the specific context of the cinematic avant-garde as part of the conception and opening of the Anthology Film Archives in New York, not a single film by Kurt Kren appeared on this long-contested, extremely dubious and very controversial list. Since then, a lot of time has gone by. Kren’s films (!) have been shown at countless important festivals, universities and museums in individual screenings, his complete film oeuvre was recently made available on DVD, his unpublished films are being gradually reviewed and catalogued by the archivist Edith Schlemmer, and it is now eight years since he died. Despite this, until recently, there was not one museum exhibition devoted solely to Kren, one of the most important pioneers of the international (structural) avant-garde.
»Kurt Kren – Uneasiness on Film/Das Unbehagen am Film«, the apt title of the exhibition curated by Thomas Trummer in Atelier Augarten, took this opportunity to concentrate on Kren’s early works with a small but very telling selection and to contrast this with works from the sphere of art.
Kurt Kren was born in Vienna in 1929. He spent the war years in Rotterdam, then worked as a bank clerk. After the heated media campaign that followed the action »Kunst und Revolution« (»Art and Revolution«), filmed by Ernst Schmidt Jr. – Kren himself was not actively involved, but a lot of his film remnants were confiscated by the police, because they did not find the films themselves – he gave up his job and went to Germany, staying in Cologne, Saarland and Munich. In 1978 he moved to America, married, divorced a year later, and travelled through the USA in a car that mostly also served as a place to sleep. Completely burnt-out financially, he took a job as museum attendant until he returned to Vienna in 1989 with the kind assistance of Hans Scheugl and VALIE EXPORT. There, he also received a three-year contract to teach media design at the Hochschule für Angewandte Kunst with Peter Weibel. If one takes a closer look at Kren’s biography, what is striking, besides his always disastrous economic situation, is his interest in various forms of collaboration. This facet of his work is dealt with in two of the four rooms at the exhibition.
For example, in the first room, alongside detailed, very attractive frame sketches, one finds various paraphernalia, neatly displayed, such as Kren’s old 16mm Bolex camera, notebooks, a roll of film etc., and fascinating and rarely seen kinetic objects or silk-screen prints by the Viennese painter and Op-Art artist Helga Philipp. In 1965, the year in which Op-Art caused an international stir on the art market because of the large exhibition »The Responsive Eye« in the MoMA in New York, Kren als made the film »11/65 Bild Helga Philipp«, which remained a marginal one within his oeuvre, but finds a clever correspondency in the exhibition owing to the dialogue with its source material. The five boxes covered with textile silk-screen prints, which each contain a score, photos and a Super-8 film, can also be called real finds. The painter Wolfgang Ernst published four of them as an edition between 1972 and 1975, and Kren one of them - »26/71 Zeichenfilm oder Balzac und das Auge Gottes« (»26/71 Animated Film or Balzac and the Eye of God«. They were each sold for 1,000 schillings. »26/71 Zeichenfilm« was to remain the only animated film Kren made, and is often subjected to critical neglect: 31 seconds, drawn directly onto the film by hand, frame by frame. The film, which unfortunately was not to be seen at the exhibition, juxtaposes the strangulation of a man and a woman with their sexual reactions. There is ejaculation, fucking and shitting in a corner, but the film is by no means as clear as this in causal terms.
Room three of the exhibition is devoted to three »action« films by Kren that are presented on monitors: »6/64 Mama und Papa«, »8/64 Ana«, »10/65 Selbstverstümmelung« (»Self-Mutilation«). The first of these is based on a collaboration with Otto Mühl, while Günter Brus is behind the other two »actions«, although Kren always demanded, and was given, a completely free hand. Artistic elements can also be seen in these films of »actions«, which were largely conceived for the camera. They are combined here, logically enough but very instructively, with Ludwig Hoffenreich’s black-and-white photographs of the »actions«. What strikes one directly in this juxtaposition are the differences – with »6/64 Mama und Papa«, for example, quite simply highlighted by the use of colour or black-and-white material, among other things – between the two mediums film and photography. While Kren achieves a radicalisation of the originally boring »actions« by means of rapid cuts, Hoffenreich simultaneously documents and alienates them, and gives them an almost object-like character that emphasizes their extended artistic potential. This could be one of the reasons why the photographs were able to establish themselves a place in the artistic context much earlier on.
Two black-box cinemas installed in rooms two and four allow a closer look at Kren himself. The programme includes three classics of structural film: »1/57 Versuch mit synthetischem Ton« (»1/57 Experiment with Synthetic Clay«), »2/60 48 Köpfe aus dem Szondi Test« (»2/60 48 Heads from the Szondi Test«) and »3/60 Bäume im Herbst« (»3/60 Trees in Autumn«). The smallest unit of editing is no longer the shot, but the individual frame, which is cut according to a metrical sequence. These are also the first three films that Kren started to number, which from then on became a part of the title. The first number indicates the order, the second the year of production. »15/67 TV« and »20/68 Schatzi«, one of the few really political works of Kren, are in the end films that challenge and demand awareness or reflective seeing. They do not depict reality, but »thought-images«, which need to be seen several times to be understood. This is guaranteed by the loop character of their display. The contextual differences in viewing could be compared, parallel to the exhibition, in the Austrian Filmmuseum, which was a cooperation partner and presented all of Kren’s films and a very affectionate portrait, »Keine Donau – Kurt Kren und seine Filme« by Hans Scheugl, made for the series »Kunst-Stücke« (ORF), in the cinema. In the Kren portrait by Scheugl, we go back to Kren in the year 1988, i.e. to his job as a museum attendant in Houston, Texas, and thus in exactly the same context in which he is presented today. In one scene in the film, Kren is sitting in front of two monitors; on one of them, television programmes are babbling away, while the other is a computer screen that Kren is feeding with data. In the last decade of his life, students say, Kren spent many hours playing computer games that are now seen as ancient. He used the computer as a means of communication, infiltrated virtual communities very early on, and showed himself, even in this period of his life, in which he only made very few films, as an open and nimble-minded representative of a modern avant-garde movement that cultivates change in every form as opposed to tradition.
»Das Unbehagen im Film« ends its film selection in 1968 and indirectly refers to the phase of Kren that began subsequently, a phase that probably most clearly reflects the import of the title. The concentrated nature of the selection is however legitimate as well as clever, because it offers only one specific view of a very complex and incoherent oeuvre, where one could wish for several more examinations in different contexts.

Kurt Kren – Das Unbehagen am Film, Atelier Augarten Vienna, 10 May to 13 August 2006. The exhibition was accompanied by a very recommendable, wide-ranging and nicely designed catalogue from Sonderzahl Verlag.

 

Translated by Timothy Jones

 

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