By Declan Long
Spin-Off festival centre, designed by orrizontale for the Steirischer Herbst festival, Graz. Photo: JJ Kucek
It was mid-morning on the first day of ‘Steirischer Herbst’ – Austria’s autumn festival of progressive art, music and theatre, staged annually in the Styrian capital of Graz –and the local polizei were out in force. At either end of the sleepy side-street where I was staying, pro- and anti- immigration groups were staging simultaneous demonstrations. So far, this deliberate clash in the city’s schedule had not led to any actual, physical clashes. But precautionary security barriers had been erected and – despite the untroubled demeanour of the police rallied outside my hotel – riot gear was at the ready.
Behind one set of temporary barricades, members of a pro-refugee crowd were speaking and singing their words of solidarity in the shadow of the gloriously absurd Kunsthaus Graz: the grandly out-of-place architectural ‘blob’ designed by Peter Cook and Colin Fournier for Graz’s year as European City of Culture in 2003. Fittingly, this famous, audacious structure – a preposterous sci-fi presence in the city landscape, purposefully clashing with its ornate historical surroundings – has been affectionately nicknamed ‘the friendly alien’ by its creators.
At the opposite end of the street, occupying a normally peaceful public square, a (so far) poorly attended Austrian nationalist protest was beginning to grow in numbers. Surrounded by a cordon of shoulder-to-shoulder cops, middle-aged couples in traditional costume mingled casually with little groups of surly, shaven-headed young men. Up on a podium decorated joylessly with national and Bundesland flags, a DJ blasted out frenetic, belligerent techno. The force, pace and rabble-rousing menace of the music disturbed any expected sense of laid-back weekend routine in this quiet part of town; it was as if, suddenly, the day’s events were being played out in slow-motion and fast-forward all at once.
Kunsthaus Graz, designed by Peter Cook and Colin Fournier
At Steirischer Herbst itself, time was also moving in strange ways. The 2015 programme title was ‘Back to the Future’ – an apt theme for a forward-looking festival that describes itself as ‘avant-garde with tradition’. Amongst the art included this year, much multi-directional time travelling was evident. Walking the short distances from venue to venue on the opening day meant covering a great deal of historical ground. But this was a discontinuous, back-and-forth meander through time, occasioning brief encounters with ordinarily unconnected bits and pieces of the past and with diverse, sometimes disturbing, figures of future possibility. To move between these various exhibitions was to negotiate contrasting – even contradictory – styles of historical summation, study and speculation.
So, for instance, an approachable, unchallenging ‘retro-futuristic space station’ (conceived by Italian architecture collective orizzontale) welcomed visitors to the festival’s information centre: its clean, uncomplicated design a nostalgic nod to the lost optimism of the early space-age. Also at this location, Austrian artist group Fourdummies presented a ‘photolab for things to come’: the hub of a participatory initiative based around ‘images of the future’ contributed by local communities and festival attendees.
Fourdummies, ‘Flash Forward’. Photo: Wolfgang Silveri
Other exhibitions contemplated past, present and future connections with more difficulty and doubt. ‘What Remains: Strategies of Saving and Deleting’, a series of art and technology projects at esc medien kunst labor, gathered disparate relics of outmoded or discarded data storage systems, asking what – if anything – future societies will successfully access from our soon-to-be-forgotten, but once essential, hardware. (So should I ever wish, for the benefit of posterity, to publish my collected emails, I will need to robustly future-proof my precious personal archives.)
‘Speech Acts’ at the Forum Stadtpark also posed the question of what can be preserved of human communications. This compact but substantial four-person show featuring Michael Baers, Ricarda Denzer, Sharon Hayes and Elske Rosenfeld, carefully attended to the politics of talking. In works such as Hayes’s compelling, touching documentary Richerche: three (2013) – in which a group of students at an all-women’s US college are quizzed on attitudes to sexuality and identity – or Rosenfeld’s purposefully faltering lecture-performance about collective protest, special value is granted to moments of hesitancy and interruption in private or public speech. Here, the unavoidable agitations of back-and-forth interaction and tentative articulation in specific historical situations are recognized and recorded.
Spending time at ‘Speech Acts’ before taking in sizable exhibitions by Jörg Schlick (at Künstlerhaus) and AA Bronson (at Grazer Kunstverein) helped to highlight how these solo shows were also, in different ways, richly polyvocal situations. Graz-born artist Schlick was a restless conceptualist (leaping freely and regularly from painting to video to music to whatever else felt right at the time) and a promiscuous collaborator (founding, for example, a parodic artists’ society in the 1980s with Albert Oehlen and Martin Kippenberger). His historical ‘position’, even as a painter of coolly playful abstracts (given prominent representation here), seems best understood as one that points to many possible positions simultaneously. Singular authorial qualities perhaps matter less than the abundant conversational opportunities – between mediums, ideas and individuals – that his exuberantly wide-ranging work proposed. As such, this monographic survey of Schlick’s excitable oeuvre could easily have been mistaken for an eclectic group show.
AA Bronson and Ryan Brewer, ‘Blue’ (2011)
AA Bronson’s ostensible solo at the Kunstverein, by comparison, actually was a group show – as is consistent with this veteran artist’s predilection for collective practice. With his party of fellow travelling performers and participants – a generous, cross-generational and cross-disciplinary troupe – Bronson staged a sequence of quasi-theatrical scenarios, drawing on religious rituals and magical rites in order to newly channel experiences of loss, trauma and oppression within gay culture. If, for this writer at least, the determined turn towards the spiritual and the shamanic in Bronson’s recent work is a dead-end escape route from modernity (and mortality) his venturesome explorations of these folkloric realms nonetheless produce scenes of deep sadness and gorgeous strangeness.
Through the lenses of myth and magic, Bronson and friends aimed to offer a broadened perspective on reality and history. But the effort to expand our apprehension of time was at its most extreme, and successful, in Steirischer Herbst’s central exhibition, ‘Hall of Half-Life’, and its associated projects. Curated by Tessa Giblin of Project Arts Centre in Dublin – easily the most energetic and imaginative institutional curator working in Ireland today – this was an intense get-together of 14 artists (or artist duos), each of whom, in Giblin’s view, copes uniquely well with the necessary present-day strain of working with ‘one eye looking forward, the other looking back.’
Stéphane Béna Hanly, “Length of a Legacy” (Schloßberg), 2015 in ‘Hall of Half-Life’
The question of how far human society is capable of looking into the past or the future – and how much we can learn from what we may discover – was fundamental to the exhibition’s investigations. ‘Hall of Half-Life’ set off from two primary reference points: one general, one specific. The first was the philosophically fashionable concept of the Anthropocene: that recently articulated scientific framework for the planetary epoch defined by humanity’s decisive, irreversible impact. (And a term becoming so prevalent in art discourse that I propose an online column tracking its ubiquitous appearances: let’s call it ‘AnthropoScene and Herd’.)
Giblin’s second inspiration, triggering the show’s title, is the near-incomprehensible timeline associated with a profound modern problem: the treatment of nuclear waste. Taking thematic direction from Peter Galison and Robb Moss’s astonishing film installation Landscapes of Stopped Time (2015) – a meditative study of radioactive clean-up and containment sites in New Mexico, South Carolina and Fukushima, Japan, presented as a centre-piece of the main show at the Graz Museum – Giblin wished to reflect on art’s place within the expanded time-frame of nuclear recovery.
If (as an accompanying text asked) the half-life of plutonium is 24,000 years, and ten half-lives are required to guarantee the total eradication of dangerous radiation, how might hazardous ground be marked in ways that can communicate a warning 240,000 years into the future? To develop exhibition ideas in the context of such problems, or within such a vast periodization as that of the Anthropocene, is to seek dramatically augmented understandings of what TJ Clark once described as ‘the complex and specific material of a single artist’s historical situation and experience.’ But, given the puzzle of messaging future generations, Giblin also seems concerned to ask how art (again to adapt Clark) can consciously work the historical ‘material’ that it is made from.
Jean-Luc Moulène, ‘ Laura Bush, George Walker Bush, George Herbert Walker Bush’ in ‘Hall of Half-Life’. Foto: Gudrun Becker
The works in ‘Hall of Half-Life’ were thus variously engaged with deep-time history and with the challenge of finding a position and perspective within it. Some therefore considered the long-term meaning of physical memorials to human belief, achievement or power (pieces by Harun Farocki, Jean-Luc Moulène and newcomer Stéphane Béna Hanly). Others took on questions of psychology, technology and time (Gerard Byrne, Regina de Miguel). Others again looked underground to exhume buried histories, or sought to query human relationships with natural resources (diversely site-studying contributions by Mikhail Karikis, Simon Boudvin, Lara Almarcegui, Lonnie van Brummelen & Siebren de Haan).
All of the above approaches applied, in some measure, to Sam Keogh’s installation and performance at the Graz Museum: a work that maniacally montaged images of ancient, preserved ‘bog bodies’ (curling underfoot in a floor-covering vinyl photograph) with narrative and visual snapshots relating both to touch-screen museum mediation systems and – vaulting forward in imagined time – to the technological consciousness of ‘Bishop’, the synthetic human in James Cameron’s dystopian sci-fi 1986 classic Aliens.
Ulla von Brandenburg, “Wolken lösen sich in Wasser”. Foto: Wolfgang Silveri
Keogh’s frenzied work was one of several that involved live action as well as complex representation. New commissions from Mikala Dwyer and Ulla Van Brandenburg – the main components of which were situated in small towns quite a distance from Graz – were based on ongoing or prospective situations of interaction and collaboration. Von Brandenburg’s _Clouds Dissolve in Water _(2015) was a theatrical environment designed for the Porubsky Halle in Leoben: this was a brightly decorative space, conceived with reference to principles of Baroque illusionistic painting, but without prescribed purpose. It was an open environment, a place for performance or dialogue, whose future meaning was yet to be determined.
One outcome of Dwyer’s ambitious project St. Jude’s Leftovers (2015) took place in Von Brandenberg’s elegantly indeterminate theatre – a group performance evoking an unnamed occult ceremony – but the core of Dwyer’s work was located further beyond Graz in the former mining town of Vordernberg. Once defined by the excavation of iron ore from the mountain landscape, this district now accommodates a different industry: the processing of asylum seekers. Dwyer’s public work for the town’s mining museum brought these different histories into unlikely convergence, using a large LED screen (attached to the main furnace of the redundant plant) to display transcribed conversations with Graz-based refugees. In its forceful conjoining of digital communications, industrial relics, geological resources and current socio-political realities, Dwyer’s work seemed an exemplary experiment in the context of Giblin’s (and the wider festival’s) framing themes. Here, as in other contributions to the ‘Hall of Half-Life’, a far-reaching perspective on historical change was crucially coupled with clear-eyed attention to the growing tensions of present circumstances.
Declan Long is Co-Director of the ‘Art in the Contemporary World’ MA Programme at the National College of Art & Design, Dublin.