- Zenita Komad, Californication, 2008
ZENITA KOMAD
When she was 16 years old, Zenita Komad left the Austrian province of Carinthia for Vienna to study at the University for Applied Arts. Today, just 28 years old, the daughter of an opera singer is a darling of the Austrian contemporary art scene and has worked with a host of renowned artists from many different genres. Despite her prolificness, and a plethora of projects ranging from videos to drawings, installations, and light sculptures, her focus remains on painting. Most recently, her paintings have made the jump to three-dimensionality, in the form of oversized sculptural paintings and objects reminiscent of Oldenburg's soft sculptures. An example is Californication, 2007, a piece involving the artist's own performative self-image and hearkening back to the tradition of performance art and even Vienna's Actionists. The pink breast sculpture is painted over with a grotesque black face, and while Komad nestles herself comfortably into the object she also leaves her arms dangling, implying that she is not ready for further contact or touch. This ambivalence between affection and aversion is typical of the artist's work.
- Zenita Komad, Ode an die Kunst, 2008
Another theme in Komad's oeuvre is the construction and definition of identity, most recently with a focus on clothing. As a visual vocabulary, clothing imbues the body with meaning and constructs its identity within a social environment. This is evident in recent pieces like Ode an die Kunst (Ode to Art), 2008, in which she dresses canvasses with oversized pieces of clothing: The constructed entity cloaks the inner life of the soul, creating an ambivalence between the inner and outer self.
For further reading see Zenita Komad's catalog "Zenita Komad, Opus IV, Selected Works" 2008.
ON OSCAR BRONNER
By Frederic Morton
One of Arthur Schnitzler's earliest stories is Son of a Famous Father. It reflected young Arthur's attempt to grope his way out of his father's swollen shadow. Dr. Johannes Schnitzler towered over Vienna's medical world as its most renowned physician. When I first met Oscar Bronner, on a visit to my native city in the 60s, I found him in young Schnitzler's situation.
He had the wrong first name; his father Gerhard had the right one. Gerhard Bronner was a show business byword, dominant in cabaret, radio, television, and pop music. Even before Chancellor Bruno Kreisky, Gerhard Bronner was the first Jew to have become a household name in post-Hitler Austria. But Oscar Bronner? "Oscar? ...I guess he must be the son of..."
If young Bronner had a problem with that, he handled it impassively. At least that was my impression when his father introduced us in his, Gerhard's, "Fledermaus" nightclub, Vienna's hip "in" spot at the time. A club reporter for a Vienna paper, Oscar looked like a blond waif of a teenager. No wonder his friends - soon myself included - called him by the diminutive "Ossie." Yet, oddly, this Ossie-waif suggested the taciturn poise of a much older man. His was not the sort of quiet that invited being ignored.
On my next visit to Vienna I found him running a small ad agency. On my visit after that I saw him sitting on a bar stool in the Fledermaus. He said nothing. But next to him people were buzzing, all bent around an object on the bar counter. It was a mock-up of the magazine trend he was in the process of founding. The fuss was justified. The stylishly lowercase trend constituted an unprecedented boldness in Vienna's media scene: a business magazine by and for Austrians in a country considered much too small and too poor to support such an undertaking. Ossie undertook it quietly and successfully.
The year following, 1970, saw the birth of another journalistic improbability. Ossie began to publish profil, a serious news magazine by and for Austrians. Overriding birth pangs - some of them dramatic - his magazines survived and prospered. Through their sheer stubborn integrity, Ossie raised more and more political hackles. By the time he sold both publications in 1974 he had also raised quietly, irreversibly, the country's journalistic level.
By the mid-70s I no longer needed to come to Vienna to see him. He had moved to New York, the quiet of his persona now amplified by a blond beard. In a Soho loft he took up painter's brush and sculptor's chisel. As artist he steered the same against-the-grain course he had chosen as publisher. It turned out that Manhattan galleries were less responsive than his readers in Vienna. Manhattan's Bohemian elite, however, welcomed this understated Continental with open arms, not least the female part of it. For thirteen years he enjoyed the embrace.
Then suddenly, quietly, he returned to Vienna. What he now attempted was not just improbable but impossible: a daily newspaper with the scope, the heft, the multifarious depth, and the probity of the New York Times. When he announced his intention, heads all around him were shaking. Quietly he ignored them and went on to found Der Standard.
Not that those heads shook for nothing. The optimal audience he could reach in Austria was and is a small fraction of the New York Times readership. This severely limits his advertising revenues, his newsstand income, hence his editorial resources. But that handicap has neither deterred nor crippled the Sulzberger in Bronner. To this day breakfasters across the Alpine republic unfold a newspaper that's authentically Austrian in idiom, perspective, and flavor - yet still it approximates to an astounding degree its stellar exemplar across the sea. Der Standard is a voice that has become indispensible to Austrian politics and culture. Rarely has a quiet man been the source of so much eloquence.
FRIDAY MAY 29, 6:30 PM
BOOK PRESENTATION | PANEL DISCUSSION
VIENNA'S SULZBERGER: ARTS, POLITICS, VIENNA AND NEW YORK
Oscar Bronner in conversation with Frederic Morton, Klaus Stimeder, Eva Weissensteiner, Dieter Bode, et al.
ACFNY
