Innsbruck. In an open field, women hang up linens on a clothesline that seems to go on forever. Like a flowing wall it meanders in serpentine curves across the green meadow. The faded photograph projected onto the wall seems like an endless moment captured with just a short click. Ana Lupas was the director. 100 Rumanian villagers created a »Humid Installation« according to her instructions, one that the sun presumably dried out soon thereafter and the wind then blew away. What remains is the photo of the action from 1970, carefully chosen by the artist, who leaves nothing to coincidence. Skillfully, she makes use of old familiar behavior patterns, transforming them by means of precise interventions. Back then, Joseph Beuys was busy at work on social sculpture, and two years later, in 1972, Christo began to put up his »Running Fence« as a white fabric barrier traversing the California landscape.
But such comparisons are misleading. The 1970s Rumanian avant-garde, sustained by a few intellectuals, worked largely behind the scenes, hidden away from the public eye. In the shadow of the Communist dictatorship and without being openly political. Instead, the classic boundaries of art were extended. Geta Brătescu, born in 1926 and a generation older than Ana Lupas, likes to work with her own body, and her stage is her studio. In 1975 she pulled clear plastic bags over her head one after the other until the contours of her face became blurred under the layers of plastic and finally dissolved into white. She looks out at us frontally, gradually losing her subjectivity. The seven-part black-and-white photo series »Self-Portrait, Towards White« unites space and time into a process that leads from the pictorial image of a subject to abstraction. The tension-laden opposition between fleeting action versus timeless artwork, between a restricted place versus endless space forms a thematic thread running through the exhibition at the Galerie im Taxispalais.
Tyrol’s state gallery once again proves to be a little treasure trove where one can make new discoveries in Conceptual art. Just as was the case before for example with Atsuko Tanaka or Sanja Iveković, who were later represented at the documenta, women are featured here whose art impresses both formally and conceptually. Nevertheless, the personal approaches taken by the two Rumanian artists are quite different. While Ana Lupas juggles with collective action sequences, Geta Brătescu, her artistic predecessor, bases her strikingly incisive works on her own personal world of experience. She explores the space around her and derives universal concepts from it. In 1978 she measured her studio using her body: a performance immortalized in her first video, »The Studio.« The artist strides through the room, using objects in accordance with prescribed rituals to create a »spatial drawing,« as she calls it. This could very well be something conceived by Bruce Nauman – which attests to the quality of this art, which, although regionally rooted, achieved an international standing. Out of a smile, captured in a photo sequence in which the corners of the mouth curve upward step by step, Brătescu created that same year an object reminiscent of a tombstone. All that remains of this monument to the moment is a photo. The transient act is artfully conserved.
This is a theme likewise addressed by Ana Lupas. In 1964, at the age of 24, she traveled through Rumanian villages and had peasants craft minimalist objects out of sheaves of grain. A harvest festival for art. The artist called the result »Solemn Process.« She had the collectively executed grain sculptures installed on site and let them weather over the course of ten years. The large end wall in the main room of the gallery is covered by a huge and imposing photo series of the action. In a ritual proceeding for 20 years, the artist later sequestered the remains of the installation in tin containers, as preserves. Like reliquaries, numbered and arranged precisely in space, they stand there and enter into a dialogue with the recollections of the original process. Ana Lupas calls the whole thing »Restoration.« By contrast with renovation, where the old building fabric is merely freshened up, here the missing parts are also replaced.
Lupas refuses to repeat actions. Ephemeral works of grain become idea-laden metal sculptures. Geta Brătescu’s 1974 installation »No to Violence,« by contrast, still appeals with its air of lightness. Strips of wood, bound together with bandages, are combined with felt and a suggested stage where two table lamps act as spotlights. Youthful memories of the bombarding of her hometown, when she learned how to bandage injured limbs. A mobile time capsule. On the wall hang four drawings, instructions for how one might set the scene for a pair of wooden crutches. This is the most political of all the works in the exhibition, even though it was realized at the time only privately in the artist’s studio. The installation has now been reconstructed down to the last detail for Innsbruck. The artist was thrilled about the recreated work, which lends her idea a new freshness. Something that is unimaginable for Ana Lupas. All that’s left of her »Humid Installation« is only the one, painstakingly chosen photo. When she decided in 1994 to show this work again, it was created anew, out of paper and on a smaller scale. This time, the white sheets are bleeding in spots. Carefully placed pots catch the red paint. In Innsbruck as well, it took the artist several days to determine the exact position in which to place each object. In the next room a video plays back in super slow motion, making this act seem to go on forever. The attempt to keep a process alive across time and space. For Ana Lupas, a symbol of the end of Conceptual art.