Symposium (German)
May 6–7, 2011
How important is secrecy for the truth? Some media become invisible when in use: at the movies, for instance, we watch not a screen but a film. “Transparency” and “opacity” are central terms in current debates, representing an attempt to map this tension within and between media.
Moderated by Vitus Weh (Cultural scientist, Vienna)
Program
Friday May 6, 2011, 6–9 p.m.
6 p.m.
Welcome: Sabine Folie, Director and Curator, Generali Foundation
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6.15 p.m.
Glossing on Gloss. Playing with the idea of transparency and its vexations
Lecture by Emmanuel Alloa
“Gloss” is a word of iridescent equivocation. It refers to semblance, to superficial appearance and deception, but also designates the act of polishing materials so that what lies beneath them can shine forth. In an unsystematic series of glosses on the phenomenon of “glossing”—the gloss originally served to illuminate an obscure word of the “tongue” (glotta)—the lecture will attempt to show the extent to which the “gloss” of the material brings about the collapse of the ancient opposition between transparency and opacity, giving rise to a forever chatoyant play of vexation and deception that allows the obstinacy of the medium to emerge between meaning and its withdrawal.
Emmanuel Alloa is a research fellow at the NCCR “Iconic Criticism” in Basel. Selected publications: La résistance du sensible. Merleau-Ponty critique de la transparence (2008); “Transparenz und Störung,” in Hide and Seek. Das Spiel von Transparenz und Opazität, ed. Markus Rautzenberg and Andreas Wolfsteiner (2010); Das durchscheinende Bild. Konturen einer medialen Phäno-menologie (2011). Editor of Bildtheorien aus Frankreich: eine Anthologie (2011).
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7 p.m.
The Depth of the Threshold
Lecture by Gernot Hertl
In architecture, the question of transparency is a question concerning the threshold; concerning the vista, the glimpse of what is inside or outside, the conditions that frame lighting; concerning intimacy, mise-en-scène, and the experiences that interstices offer.
Drawing on selected projects, the lecture will trace these qualities of the threshold as an approach in the process of design. Examples that will be considered include the Egger house, Die Besorger Agentur, the Aichinger house, the Hofmeister office building, the Reform window factory, the Suedpool office tour, the Ecker Abu Zahra Honighaus, the Krammer house, the Stadtvilla Kloster-neuburg, and the campus of Vocational School 8, Linz. They all illustrate different ways of engaging inside and outside, public and private, light and dark, or stage the appearance and mutability of the shell as an artificial element.
Gernot Hertl, b. Steyr/AT 1971, studied architecture at Technische Universität Graz/AT from 1992 to 1997. Joint venture with Josef Steinberger from 2000 to 2002; founded HERTL.ARCHITEKTEN, Steyr, in 2003. HERTL.ARCHITEKTEN has been awarded the Förderungspreis für Architektur Oberösterreich (Most Promising Young Architect Award) 2003, the Landeskulturpreis für Architektur Oberösterreich (State Culture Prize for Architecture, Oberösterreich), and The International Architecture Award, 2008. Participated in the 7th Sao Paulo International Biennial of Architecture 2007. Gernot Hertl has been member of the Wood Construction Advisory Board, Oberösterreich, since 2006, member of the Townscapes Advisory Board, Oberösterreich, since 2008, chair of afo Architekturforum Oberösterreich since 2009, and executive board member of the Chamber of Architects, Oberösterreich and Salzburg, since 2010.
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7.45 p.m.
KwieKulik
Lecture by Georg Schöllhammer
In December 1971, one year after the suppression of the labor unrest that led to the overthrow of the Gomułka government, a group of young artists congregate in Elblągń near the Baltic Sea coast for a "meeting of the dreamers." Theirs is the generation that leaves the stern conceptualism of 1960s Polish art behind. Among the participants are Zofia Kulik and Przemysław Kwiek. During the same year, the two artists, who were also a couple in private life, had initiated their collaboration under the pseudonym KwieKulik at their apartment in Warsaw, which would later also serve the famous Studio for Action, Documentation, and Dissemination (Pracownia Działa, Dokumentacji i Upowszechniania) as an archive and production venue: with actions in front of the camera they performed according to scripts and storyboards and documented meticulously in photographs and notations, with films and objects—and with a radical interrogation of the function of the classical display.
KwieKulik see their work as political. Their aim is to develop a process-oriented art that operates along the boundaries between everyday experience and aesthetic practice in order to respond to the irresolvable contradiction between the imaginary spaces of the representation of power and the real spaces of everyday life in socialist Poland.
Georg Schöllhammer
Georg Schöllhammer is an editor, author, and curator. He is editor-in-chief of the magazine springerin. Hefte für Gegenwartskunst, Vienna, which he co-founded in 1995. From 2005 to 2007, he was editor-in-chief of documenta 12 and conceived and directed documenta 12 magazines. In his function as the head of tranzit.at he co-curated Manifesta 8 (2010). He leads the international research projects Lokale Modernen – Architektur am Rande der Sowjetunion (Local Modernities—Architecture on the Fringes of the Soviet Union; Frankfurt/Berlin) and Sweet Sixties (urban Avantgardes in the shade of the Cold War in Algiers, Beirut, Delhi, Kiev, Istanbul, Rabat, Yerevan, Tbilisi, Zagreb), and is chair of the Július Koller Society, Bratislava. Georg Schöllhammer is on the artistic board of the festival steirischer herbst, Graz/AT, and is a corresponding member of the Vienna Secession. He has published widely on contemporary art, architecture, and theory, primarily on issues of urban and cultural transformations with a focus on Central and Eastern Europe.
Oberösterreich and Salzburg, since 2010.
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8.30 p.m.
Closing discussion
Saturday May 7, 2011, 3–6 p.m.
3 p.m.
Surface Denied. On displays and the productivity of blanks
Lecture by Sybille Krämer
Are “displays” media? Media present something by receding, withdrawing into a sort of “invisibility”—or that is what the model of the medium as “messenger” suggests. But one of the tasks of art is to stop the disappearance of the medium and to bring it back into the focus of attention. Yet what does a display mean on which nothing takes place? It is a “blank surface.” Then again, what is a “surface” as such? Why—to take an anthropological perspective—has the flatness of the surface emerged as the fundamental medium of aesthetic and cognitive visualization? Why are surfaces so closely associated with play? What, that is to say, predisposes the surface for the creation, with and on it, of a wholly different reality?
Sybille Krämer is professor of philosophy at Freie Universität Berlin. From 2000 to 2006, she was a member of the Wissenschaftsrat (German Council of Science and Humanities); between 2005 and 2008, a permanent fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg (Institute for Advanced Study) Berlin; in 2010/2011, a senior fellow at the Internationales Forschungskolleg (IFK), Vienna. She sits on the panel of the European Research Council, Brussels, and is a member of the senate and the steering committee of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation, DFG). She has led several projects sponsored by the DFG in the field of the theory of media and the symbol. Her work focuses on philosophy and mathematics in early modernity; the theory of the mind and consciousness; interpretations of the computer; the theory of the sign and media; the philosophy of language; and foundational issues in the cultural sciences.
Oberösterreich and Salzburg, since 2010.
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4 p.m.
Exhibiting exhibiting
Lecture by Beatrice von Bismarck
The exhibition as a medium: since documenta 12 (2007) at the latest, that has become a popular turn of phrase. It not only shifts the focus of attention from the different elements an exhibition assembles to the latter in its entirety, but at once also raises questions regarding the relationship between an exhibition and the act of exhibiting as well as the exhibitors. Who or what, we may ask, takes on the function discourses in media theory describe as that of the “messenger” in this context, and how does that happen? One important consequence is that a field comes into view in which the participants in an exhibition—exhibits, for instance, as well as the display, the institution, the curators or viewers—elaborate and deploy forms of opacity in response to one another. Joëlle Tuerlinckx’s practice will define the point of departure for these reflections.
Beatrice von Bismarck (Berlin and Leipzig) teaches art history and iconology; since 2009, she has also taught in the postgraduate program “Kulturen des Kuratorischen” at the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig. From 1989 to 1993, she worked in the department of twentieth-century art at the Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt am Main. From 1993 to 1999, she was at the University of Lüneburg, where she co-founded and co-directed the university’s “Kunstraum.” She is a co-founder and, since2000, co-director of the project /D/O/C/K, Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig.
Oberösterreich and Salzburg, since 2010.
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5 p.m.
Closing discussion with Emmanuel Alloa, Beatrice von Bismarck, Gernot Hertl, Sybille Krämer and Georg Schöllhammer
The entire event will be moderated by Vitus Weh.
Vitus Weh, b. Donaueschingen/DE1965, studied in Hildesheim and Berlin. Has lived in Vienna since 1994. Freelance art critic, organizer, and exhibition manager; past work includes Die Utopie des Designs, Munich, 1994; Kunst auf der Baustelle, MuseumsQuartier, Vienna, 1998 to 2001; Global Tools. Design im Zeitalter der Intensivstation, Vienna and Helsinki, 2002; re:LEVIATHAN. Visuelle Formierungen von staatlicher Macht, Vienna and Düsseldorf, 2003. Founding editor of the journal springerin. Hefte für Gegenwartskunst. Editor (with Markus Wailand) of Zur Sache Kunst am Bau. Ein Handbuch für das Durchqueren der Standortfaktoren Architektur, Kunst, Design, Staat, Wirtschaft … (1998). Lecturer at the University of Arts Linz. Conceptual work and organization of architectural competitions for quartier21, Vienna (since 2000; initially with Markus Wailand, then with Thomas Edlinger). Artistic director, quartier 21 (since 2002).
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