- © gelitin
The Bad Boys of Contemporary Art
January Performance by Viennese Art Collective gelitin in NYC
by Anna Gruessinger
Starting January 28, 2010, the Austrian art collective gelitin will be at Greene Naftali Gallery in NYC to create Blind Sculpture. For two weeks, they will work on a sculpture while blindfolded, with various other artists assisting. The public is welcome to observe the creative process.
gelitin are four 30-somethings from Vienna who have been causing a stir in the art scene since the mid-90s. By some accounts, Wolfgang Gantner, Ali Janka, Florian Reither, and Tobias Urban have been working together since they met at summer camp in 1978.
As a collective, gelitin (spelled “gelatin” until 2005) is eternally boyish. They create art to make childhood fantasies come true. Their work is neither for the faint of heart nor for the uptight. A lack of shame and a strong nervous system are recommended when entering gelitin’s escapist alternative to reality. gelitin enjoys putting the audience into an awkward situation and testing boundaries with their “enter-active,” site-specific installations in which they usually also perform.
Their intention is to provoke the audience’s play instinct. For Human Elevator in 1999, bodybuilders lifted adults onto the flat roof of a building in LA with amazing ease. In 2001, gelitin created Schlund in Munich, a 35-foot vertical shaft “filled” with large, naked men and women. Courageous participants could climb to the top, strip down, get greased up, and slowly slide down the big fleshy chute in the middle of the tower.
Due to their leaning towards exhibitionism in their performances, the foursome could easily be compared with the tradition of Viennese Actionism. But although this movement may well have provided the basis for gelitin’s oeuvre, gelitin lacks the politics, masochism, and real blood of Actionism.
Attempts to categorize the artistic collective have even led to comparisons with the Beatles, because gelitin “are what it would be like if the Beatles enjoyed playing with their own shit and made art instead of music.” (Vice magazine, Issue 10, 2003)
“We make visual show business,” Florian Reither once stated (art magazine 1/06), and New York might just be the right place for that kind of thing.
Josef Schützenhöfer and the “Liberators”
by Nadja Pracher
Austrian artist and US Navy veteran Josef Schützenhöfer (b. 1954) pays a special tribute to US veterans of World War II who are easily left out in Austrian politics of remembrance.
One project in particular is strongly linked to Schützenhöfer’s time of studying in Norfolk, Virginia. At the age of 19, the Austrian artist immigrated to the United States and started his artistic and academic career. Upon returning to Austria in 1997, he brought images and inspirations with him from the US. He kept remembering a story he read about a German submarine crew that had been killed near the US coast and buried at the Newport News National Cemetery. Inspired by the story, he had later visited the site of their burial.
At this cemetery for thousands of US Americans, he also found the graves of twenty-nine Nazi marines. He was astonished and moved by the fact that the enemy soldiers were buried next to America’s defenders of liberty. The image never left him and inspired him to create an art project in his home country.
Austria approaches the issue of historical rehabilitation in a very different way. During World War II, in the region of Styria where Schützenhöfer lives today, 460 US bombers descended to liberate Austria from the Nazi regime. One USAAF bomber exploded over Wiesberg/Pöllau and 21 US soldiers, the majority of the crew, died on February 22, 1944.
On the war monument in Pöllau, however, only victims of Austrian nationality were mentioned. So the foreign victims – including the liberators – were doomed to sink into oblivion.
Inspired by the missing liberators’ names, Schützenhöfer made a large-scale public painting of Harry Moore, the pilot of the dead USAAF crew members. Moore was meant to represent the “liberators” killed in action and honor them alongside the Austrian soldiers. The intention was to have the artwork installed near the old war monument. Unfortunately, the local mayor and monument conservators did not agree. Their objection was that this kind of painting upset the architectural balance of the site.
In Styria in 2008, the conservative party ÖVP bought the artwork for their permanent art collection, on Schützenhöfer’s condition that surviving liberator Robert Otto would be invited to Austria. Robert Otto visited Austria in October 2008, sixty-four years after the liberation, and was honored by the vice governor of Styria.
Schützenhöfer is currently expanding the Liberator project. His goal is to establish a visiting artist program in Pöllau in which artists from former allied nations are encouraged to produce a work of art dealing with Austria’s liberation and rethinking the associated connotations.
Josef Schützenhöfer will be at the ACFNY on February 22 to present and discuss the Liberator project.
The Hagen Quartett
by Desiree Kratochwil
The Hagen Quartett is one of the best string quartet ensembles in the world. It’s hardly surprising that they arise from Mozart’s hometown; in fact three members of the quartet (Lukas, Veronika, and Clemens Hagen) are even from the same Salzburg family. The fourth, German violinist Rainer Schmidt, has been part of the ensemble since 1987.True to their exceptional skills they demonstrated early on, their musical career has already spanned three decades.
They have repeatedly garnered outstanding reviews for their mastery of quartet playing. Their international breakthrough was 1981, when they participated in the Lockenhaus Chamber Music Festival and won both the Prize of the Jury and the Audience. Among many other engagements, they have played at the Salzburger Festival and the Mozart Week, have been guests of honor at the famous New Year’s Concert of the Vienna Philharmonic, and have toured Europe, the USA, Asia, Australia, South America, Japan, and China. The ensemble has had an exclusive recording contract with Deutsche Grammophon since 1985.
Their unusual concert repertoire and a discography spanning from Beethoven to Haydn and Shostakovich are extremely captivating. They are equally known for their complete recording of Mozart’s string quartets. The quartet’s interplay is impressive, their performances are characterized by crisp details. The Independent referred to their Beethoven concert at London’s Wigmore Hall as a "breathtakingly precise, dynamic, and thrilling encounter".
The Hagen Quartett is without a doubt one of Austria’s most celebrated classical music ensembles, and definitely not to be missed.
