TIEFENRAUSCH MONDAY READINGS with Brigitte Felderer
“Let us descend to the blind world.”The Imaginary Topography of the Underworld
Monday, June 30, 2008, 8 PM, OK
Room 1 PURIFICATION
Pipilotti Rist: “Selfless In The Bath Of Lava”
1994
LCD monitor flush-mounted in the floor, playback device, sound system
Director, film editor, camerawoman, cast: Pipilotti Rist; Sound: Peter Bräker
Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth Zurich London
At first glance, one sees nothing, but then one hears a female voice loudly calling out: “I am a worm and you, you are a flower. You would have done everything better. Excuse me. Help me.” The monitor flush-mounted in the floor is quickly found; it shows the artist Pipilotti Rist. She desperately reaches out her arms to the audience like in old-fashioned depictions of sinners in purgatory. The arms outstretched above in these images signify that, once purification has been completed, there is still the prospect of attaining paradise.
Room 2 IMAGES OF HELL:
Christianity’s Hell has long since ceased to be the only underworld that confronts us. In the middle of this space, there’s a long, narrow display case containing historical Krampus cards. These demons that so impudently and lasciviously leap out at us also personify a Panopticon of unspoken desires, fantasies, fears and feelings of guilt that seem to be emanating directly from Hell. Since the advent of the Enlightenment, Hell is no longer just a terror-filled Christian fantasy; it has established itself in the mythological inner worlds of a rationalist here and there as well.
Room 3 DESCENT: Ore Strata and Aragonite Crystals:
Mine engineering, understanding the history of the Earth, new methods of extracting and processing ore are metaphors as well as the contents of a process of enlightenment. Nevertheless, amidst the development of rational approaches to the economic viability and efficient organization of the mining and smelting industry, magical and mythological forms of dealing with nature have lived on. The “miracle stratum” from the Erzberg iron mine complex in the Austrian Province of Styria that’s on display here, its various depictions, the legend of its discovery in 1669 and its significance for the history of iron mining in Erzberg—almost magical, as it were—attest to this ambivalence.
Room 4 Plan the Impossible:
In the history of the symbolism of humanity’s seizure of power over the Earth, the mine can be described as the “inverted Tower of Babel.” Such a structure of planetary dominion was planned in 1941 by Dutch architect and modernist Henricus Theodorus Wijdefeld, who designed a subterranean tower that was to reach all the way to the center of the Earth and would bring together the world’s foremost scientists to study the planet’s interior. Artist Florian Bettel’s project about an 1874 underground interment system shows that even amidst the technical fascination of the 19th century, state-of-the-art technology was deployed to maintain the ancient order separating the great beyond from everyday life on this mortal coil.
Room 5 EXIT The Shaft of Babel:
The artist excavates a shaft into the ground below his studio. The material that he extracts in doing so fills the studio and, in order to create the necessary space in there, the artist seals up the shaft again. The excavated earth corresponds to the volume of the studio space. The apparent escape tunnel on which the artist had labored in secret is filled up. There is no escape from the studio. On one hand, among European historians of ideas, the process of digging below the surface is a familiar metaphor for the search to attain insights; on the other hand, the withdrawal into the interior of the Earth stands for flight into a countervailing world, a place governed by a set of rules completely different from the generally accepted conditions of reality.
Hans Schabus
Astronaut
2002
Video on DVD, 7 minutes 32 seconds
The artist / Engholm Engelhorn Galerie
The psychonaut expands and digs through the underground. The unlit depths are a spooky realm, shadowy and brachiated; they enclose and oppose the individual, who becomes more relative with each stab of the shovel. The earthy depths come across as a utopian space but as a paradox too—after all, they’re also associated with the concept of weightlessness and boundlessness. But to an even greater extent, the underworld delivers an explanatory model for the stratification of the psyche—the encounter with mentality and the initiation into its secrets demand years of work on the “material resistance” of the consciousness.
Hallway:
Lucifer Rising
Director: Kenneth Anger, Music: Bobby BeauSoleil and the Freedom Orchestra, Tracy Prison, Cast: Miriam Gibril, Donald Cammell, Haydn Couts, Kenneth Anger, Sir Francis Rose, Marianne Faithfull, Leslie Huggins
1981
16 mm
28 minutes
Stairway:
Orphée
Director: Jean Cocteau, Cast: Jean Marais
F 1950
(Excerpt: Orpheus enters the underworld)
Brigitte Felderer
Studied applied linguistics, Romance languages & literature, and communications in Vienna and Perugia. She teaches at the University of Applied Arts Vienna.
Exhibition Projects (selected):
Wunschmaschine Welterfindung. Eine Geschichte der Technikvisionen seit dem 18. Jahrhundert Kunsthalle Wien, Wiener Festwochen, 1996
Rudi Gernreich. Fashion will go out of fashion Künstlerhaus Graz, steirischer herbst, 2000
and Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, 2001
Alles Schmuck Museum for Design Zurich, 2000
Phonorama. Eine Kulturgeschichte zur Stimme als Medium ZKM Karlsruhe, 2004/05
Thinking without brain, speaking without lips... Die Automaten und Maschinen des Wolfgang von Kempelen Humboldt University Berlin 2005
Rare Künste. Zauberkunst in Zauberbüchern Wienbibliothek im Rathaus, 2006
Sound of Art Museum of Modern Art Salzburg, 2008 (in preparation)
New Production – Wall-mounted Works
Peter Hauenschild / Georg Ritter
Gold, 2000
Drawings
Hundreds of men, working by hand, raze an entire mountain and finally end up in a deep pit. They’re digging for gold, driven by rapture of the deep. Claims are staked out, bought and sold. In square parcels, the digging goes on. Sacks are filled with the excavated material, which porters carry out of the pit via narrow stairways and ladders. Then, the dirt is washed and the precious material filtered out. Torrents of rain repeatedly fill the pit with water. Pumps and hoses lay about on the heavy, wet earth. Below, men covered with mud or encrusted with dirt seek their fortune and try to survive while doing so. A drama of desire.
Peter Hauenschild: Born in 1958 in Linz; 1982–87, studied visual design with Laurids Ortner at the HfG – University of Design Linz; 1988–2004, member of the staff of Stadtwerkstatt Linz; since 2005, instructor at Linz Art University (graphic design and photography, with an emphasis on drawing, art in public spaces and computer animation.
Georg Ritter: Born in 1956 in Linz; 1977–81, studied stage set design at the Mozarteum, Salzburg, and then visual design at the HfG Linz; 1981–2004, artistic and cultural work at the Stadtwerkstatt Linz; since 1994, collaborated on Radio FRO and Radio Freistadt; 1999, founded Kartell, an open forum of the Linz indie scene; since 1999, instructor at Linz Art University (painting and graphic art)
Peter Hauenschild and Georg Ritter live and work in Linz; collaborative drawing since 1989.
Peter Fischli/David Weiss
Untitled (canal video), 1992
Video
Courtesy of Galerie Sprüth/Maegers, Cologne
Swiss artists Fischli & Weiss are masters of discovering traces of our longings and projections in the banalities of everyday life. For their “canal video,” they have recourse to the City of Zurich’s canal surveillance service that captures images via camera in the city’s underground tunnel system. The rapid sequence of different colors and levels of brightness produces a hypnotic attraction that transforms the tunnel images into a picturesque underworld.
Peter Fischli was born in 1952 in Zurich, where he currently lives.
David Weiss was born in 1946 in Zurich, where he currently lives.
The artists have been working together since 1979.
Franz Anton Obojes
Innere Kerker und äußere Panzerungen (Inner Prison and Outer Armors)
Mural painting, 2008
Proceeding from an architectural framework that alludes to Piranesi’s prison drawings, Franz Anton Oboje’s mural painting accompanies exhibition visitors as they descend the stairway into the depths of the OK. It depicts the fissures and faults running through the landscapes of our souls, as well as locations and elements that are proxies for the underground and the underworld. Oboje’s approach is to select images from his extensive archive and to assemble them like a collage—the psychoanalyst’s consultation room, a bunker under bombardment, and cinematic images coalesce into a representation of the underworld and our own internal abysses.
Franz Anton Oboje
Christoph Draeger / Heidrun Holzfeind
Tales from the Underworld
Two-part video installation, 2008
What awaits us in this cinema-like display by Christoph Draeger and Heidrun Holzfeind is found-footage from Hollywood movies featuring views of the underworld. Clips from about 200 films—Murnau’s Nosferatu, Barbarella and South Park, to name just a few—elaborate on the underworld (in a consciousness-expanded sense). This is a horror trip indeed, full of twists and turns through caves, chasms and endless passages into the innermost sanctum of the subconscious where primal fears seethe and roil, a psychedelic nightmare through the history of the cinema, a relentlessly descending roller coaster ride. Destination: Hell.
Heidrun Holzfeind studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and at Cooper Union in New York City, where she now lives and works.
Christoph Draeger was born in 1965 in Zurich. He studied at the School of Visual Arts, Lucerne (1986-90) and École National Supérieur des Arts Visuels de la Cambre, Brussels (1990/1).
www.christophdraeger.com, www.heidrunholzfeind.com; www.exposed.at; alien.thing.net
alien productions
Martin Breindl, Norbert Math, Andrea Sodomka
Tiefenklang I es ist viel zutage gekommen (much has come to light)
Electromagnetic sound installation, 2008
Artistic collaborator: Daniel Lercher
Interviews: Isabelle Muhr
Research: Georg Nussbaumer
The underground labyrinth of Linz’s Limonikeller and Aktienkeller tunnel systems and the tales told about them are the point of departure of this work by alien productions. People with real-life relationships to this real-life subterranean world have their say about it, their voices blending into the ether at certain locations in the confusing layout of the installation. With the radio serving as receiver and source of orientation, the narrative fragments assume an indifferent presence along the way through the slanting tunnel and gleaming white room with its unusual perspectives. It’s not until the end, at the speaking tube intercom system, that visitors can identify the voices.
Martin Breindl was born in 1963 in Vienna. Norbert Math was born in 1962 in Bozen, Italy. Andrea Sodomka was born in 1961 in Vienna. All three live and work in Vienna.
alien productions was founded in 1997 in Vienna as a network for artists working in the theory and practice of new technologies and new media. Its sphere of activity encompasses media art, the visual arts, electronic music, network art, radio art, sound art and interactive art. The trio has been working in these fields since 1985, both individually and jointly as well as in collaboration with other artists, technicians, theorists and scholars. They have produced their projects at numerous festivals, symposia, exhibitions and concerts in Austria and abroad. alien.mur.at
