Adrian Melis, Oviation, Videostill, 2013-2014
As you may have read last week, Vienna is vying to be the next Berlin. But where does that leave Graz, Austria’s second city, traditionally a university town, in terms of culture? That’s the question that the Steirischer Herbst festival tries to answer. Held from 26 September until 19 October 2014 (in the “Herbst”), this year’s annual celebration of art, performance and music chose to focus on different artists’ notions of sharing, with the title “I prefer not to…share”. Here are some of our highlights from the festival.
“Forms of distancing” delved into who represents us and why
One of the exhibitions that focused more closely on the Herman Melville-inspired festival title was “Forms of Distancing” in the festival centre itself, exploring how the concept of political representation – the premise of democracy itself – is dealt with in contemporary art. Adrian Melis’s simplistic TV screens of applauding European politicians, entitled “Ovation” (2013-14), was a wry nod to the self-satisfaction of the coterie who appear on our behalf. Meanwhile, Maryam Jafri’s “Mouthfeel” (2014) showed a dramatic dialogue between two colleagues, confined in a limousine, discussing the dubious ethics of their firm’s imminent production of a new chemical. Spliced in between this story were real adverts for beauty and food products from the developing world, featuring the real end product of their company’s borderline illegal actions.
Young Jean Lee: Straight White Men. Photo by Wolfgang Silveri
We had #feelings for the guilt of the oppressors in “Straight White Men”
A feminist play that only features men: say what? Young Jean Lee’s family drama removes all women from the domestic setting, allowing her savant male characters to discuss among themselves the obstacles of that unmistakeably first world problem: privilege. The play deals with the intricacies of male self-image in a world where they feel like they can cause more harm than good by speaking up, in a genuinely funny dramatic narrative.
Whose territory are you on? <rotor> wants to know
The definition of property is something that is not shared, that is not communal. This was the starting point of the <rotor> show – how far does this definition explain property in the contemporary mindset? Again, video work was strong, including Mark Boulos’s “All That Is Solid Melts Into Air” (2008) pitting film of stockbrokers on the a Chicago trading floor on one wall against Nigerian fisherman who are militantly fighting against the exploitation of people and environment by oil companies on the wall that faces it.
Become the film camera in Lundahl and Seitl’s installation/film
Led into a dark room with 3D glasses and noise-cancelling headphones, confronted with a gigantic film camera that feels like it’s at the end of your nose, “An Elegy to the Medium of Film” by Swedish/British duo Lundahl and Seitl took Sleek on a whispered nostalgic journey that ended in a participatory trajectory directly into the camera’s lens. If it sounds weird, that’s because it was, yet somehow conjured the meaning and language of film that is now so embedded in our consciousness, allowing us to imagine our lives as a camera (or a camera living our lives).
Kim Gordon, The Promise of Originality, 2010. Acrylic on canvas. Courtesy the artist and 303 Gallery, New York
Is art cool? Nightlife in the Künstlerhaus
For this exhibition that attempts to bridge the gap between pop and art, all the enfants terribles got together, with the help of theatre director-turned-curator Schorch Kamerun, to create a “cool invasion” of the white cube. Cue David Ostrowski’s almost blank paintings (#rocknroll), Bruce Connor’s punk photographs and Kim Gordon’s sploshy slogans. Authenticity and performance, and particularly how they relate to the concept of contemporary art, are the order of the day. A “nightclub”, eerily empty most of the time, downstairs, reminds us of the impermanence of everything pop.
Text by Josie Thaddeus-Johns
More: The audience is my material: we interview Christian Falsnaes