The first project undertaken by the new management of the Belvedere in the Augarten Contemporary, formerly the Atelier Augarten, focuses on Markus Schinwald. It is being run in cooperation with the migros museum für gegenwartskunst in Zurich. Curated by Anina Huck and Thomas Trummer, it is Schinwald’s first solo exhibition in an Austrian gallery.
The exhibition is dominated by a large installation of white beams and occasionally calls on the visitors to take up the poses that are typical of the protagonists in Schinwald’s photographic and video works. Schinwald transforms the studio-like character of the venue into a sort of stage, while at the same time emphasising the fundamentally discursive and location-specific approach that has informed exhibitions by Thomas Trummer over the years. The »L and T System« of Kiesler is named as a reference point for these large-scale installations; Kiesler’s displays have already played a role at this venue, providing a sort of coordinate grid in Florian Pumhösl’s section of the exhibition »Objekte«. Schinwald, however, seems concerned not so much with the projection surfaces of modernity and a shared concept of other scales and other locations, as with turning a (historical) setting into seating furniture, a barrier or a spatial structure. The first room contains, along with a specially made curtain, mostly pictures and sculptures; the video work »Ten in love« is installed in the second room; and, in the third room, one encounters the swing with the marionette »Bepo«. The last room is closed off. In contrast to the selection of works, which is small in range despite its multi-media character, the catalogue is broad in scope. It consists of a comprehensive glossary on Schinwald’s works, which Anina Huck and Thomas Trummer put together with the artist and in which each work or view of an installation has a corresponding text.
Here, the open work-concept that is stressed as typical of Schinwald is elaborated on well, but without any close examination of the historical potential that is Schinwald’s major point of departure. One can also ask whether Schinwald really fits well into the model of heteropy with which Foucault influenced the understanding of »other spaces« in 1966. Published in the German-speaking world for the first time in 1991, this model had a formative influence on the 1990s. Its openness and effectiveness contrast with the utopia that Foucault connects with heteropy through the mirror. Utopia (and dystopia as a distorted image of a prevailing social situation) are often cited as historical models that distance themselves far from history in order to come very close to it. Schinwald seems to take the opposite tack. He takes history at its word, so to speak, in order to distance himself as far away from it as possible. The mythologically charged vocabulary of the Surrealists, which Benjamin already identified as stemming from the 19th century, is, however, for Schinwald a transhistorical point of reference. In Surrealist mythology, the old is simultaneously the new, and, particularly in fashion, the Surrealists incorporate the ephemeral and the sublime, zeitgeist and history.
For example, the monocle, as the most characteristic attribute of the Surrealists, makes its wearer a statue, but nevertheless allows an ironic distance. Schinwald uses it in one of his pictures as a negative shape that lies like an almost Dalí-esque plastic form over one eye of the portraitee and thus opens up a direct view. These portraits, which are old paintings reworked by a restorer, once again pose the question of how to handle history. Are they to be understood like Asger Jorn’s »Modifications«, in which Jorn painted over kitsch pictures from the flea market in order to counter the avant-garde movements with a critical potential based neither on collage nor negation?
In »Fiat Modes Pereat Ars«, Max Ernst transformed the »manichino« of de Chirico into an almost sculptural understanding of fashion. In the catalogue glossary, sculpture is associated with ballet, which governs a machinery of poses and gestures. Schinwald seems to transform the extreme pose, which is photographic in its nature, into prostheses, parts of furniture and other sculptural objects. The table legs and shoes show best how concisely and precisely he carries out his interventions to redirect the historical and functional ballast.
Translated by Timothy Jones