Getting ready for 2000 AD – an imperative that sounds anachronistic today, sixteen years after the millennial turn (and 984 years before the next one) – functioned as a title for Benjamin Patterson’s first solo exhibition back in 1992 and suggested to the audience to brace themselves for what was to come. In order to achieve this, the Fluxus artist vowed to „DO MORE“ in his publication for the show, and – as Julia Elizabeth Neal argues in this issue – effectively created a starting point for much his future work with a compelling self-interview that he continued to come back to until recently.
Johanna Braun, no less thinking ahead, talked to UCLA professor Laure Murat about opening up academic discourse towards a wider audience; an issue connected to her own biography as a Quereinsteigerin to academic teaching. More rooted in the present and with a glance oversees they further discuss the topic of madness – a subject to a recent publication by Murat.
Back in Europe, Dominik Reisinger takes a close look at the Bankgebäude am Floridsdorfer Spitz in Vienna, discussing the architects’ way to encounter the challenges of constructing in existing contexts. As Reisinger argues, the architects found a solution by confronting the original style with its architectural countermovement to fulfil present needs, thus creating a symbiotic relationship of two different building traditions, hence a “Wiener Melange”.
Hannah M. Bruckmüller and Michal B. Ron, both graduates working on the artist, have visited “Marcel Broodthaers: A Retrospective”, currently on view at the Reina Sofia in Madrid. In their review for all-over they unpack their theoretic suitcases in order to reexamine, by playful means, the numerous objects and installations that the artist orchestrated in a complex, yet ludic, net of interconnections and reiterations.
Again, temporality is a decisive axiom in Oliver Caraco’s review of the book “Kunstgeschichtlichkeit. Historizität und Anachronie in der Gegenwartskunst,” edited by Eva Kernbauer, which takes Rancière’s concept of anachronism as a starting point to highlight a recently rather common tendency in contemporary art. The use of history and historicity of art as subject and potentially critical tool in art practice is explored from different angles but eventually it might not suffice to break the hierarchies of the art world that, as Caraco maintains, are nonetheless dominated by the market.
As we too are getting ready to face a (politically) uncertain future, we will continue our mission to bring you high quality articles and wish you: Bonne lecture!
Hannah Bruckmüller | Jürgen Buchinger | Barbara Reisinger | Stefanie Reisinger
