Party in Vienna

Umělec magazine 2001/2

01.02.2001

Vladan Šír | news | en cs

"Following 15 years of planning and construction, the ambitious project MuseumsQuartier, a new museum quarter in Vienna, is nearing completion. The beginning of June saw the opening of the Vienna Kunst-halle, which has moved into the neighborhood from its former home in the White Cube on Karlsplatz. The building that had been home to the Kunsthalle since 1992 will be reconstructed, wrapped in glass and from January 2002 will serve as the Kunsthalle’s “project space.”
The Kunsthalle’s premier hall held its first exhibition, A Baroque Party, which presented the Chapman brot-hers, Wim Delvoye, Ulrike Gros-sarth, Yvonne Rainer, Sam Taylor-Wood and Paul Thek. The theme reflects the ubiquity of the Baroque in Vienna and suggests that the Kunsthalle, a house for contemporary art, is trying to find a way to deal with its new location among the museums of tobacco and natural beauty. Curators Sabine Folie and Mi-chael Glasmeier say that the exhibiting artists “throw a bridge between Baroque ideas and concepts and art-making positions of today.” They intend to prove that the 17th century has not only outlived historical facades but that it plays a significant role in contemporary art. The Chapman brothers, like the Baroque artists, capture the horror of life on earth; Wim Delvoye deals with the idea of a human body as a machine; Paul Thek focuses on rites of passage and ritual, and Sam Taylor-Wood plays out allegorical stories in the form of panoramic rooms. Accompanying the exhibition are a number of events, the biggest of which will come reeling out on June 30 under the title “Party Baroque” — a house party in Kunsthalle’s E and G blocks as part of the Europride 2001 campaign. A Baroque Party will be open until September 16.
Shortly before the official opening of the Kunsthalle, an exhibition of Steve McQueen’s film projects opened: It will be on until August 19. The fall program will include the exhibitions Flash Afrique (from September 7), Televisions (from October 12), and Ro-bert Adrian X (from November 30).

Vladan Šír
"

01.02.2001

Send to e-mail Print

Comments

There are currently no comments.

Add new comment

3 krát 5
Jméno		Email

Recommended articles

	Acts, Misdemeanors and the Thoughts of the Persian King Medimon
	There is nothing that has not already been done in culture, squeezed or pulled inside out, blown to dust. Classical culture today is made by scum. Those working in the fine arts who make paintings are called artists. Otherwise in the backwaters and marshlands the rest of the artists are lost in search of new and ever surprising methods. They must be earthbound, casual, political, managerial,…

Why political intellectuals, do you incline towards the proletariat? In commiseration for what? I realize that a proletarian would hate you, you have no hatred because you are bourgeois, privileged, smooth-skinned types, but also because you dare not say that the only important thing there is to say, that one can enjoy swallowing the shit of capital, its materials, its metal bars, its polystyrene…

	Nick Land – An Experiment in Inhumanism
	Nick Land was a British philosopher but is no longer, though he is not dead. The almost neurotic fervor with which he scratched at the scars of reality has seduced more than a few promising academics onto the path of art that offends in its originality. The texts that he has left behind are reliably revolting and boring, and impel us to castrate their categorization as “mere” literature.

	The Top 10 Czech Artists from the 1990s
	The editors of Umělec have decided to come up with a list of ten artists who, in our opinion, were of crucial importance for the Czech art scene in the 1990s. After long debate and the setting of criteria, we arrived at a list of names we consider significant for the local context, for the presentation of Czech art outside the country and especially for the future of art. Our criteria did not…