Vienna’s Albertina Modern is the newer, more progressive counterpart to its stately sister institution, the Albertina Museum. Christabel Stewart surveys its opening collection and follows the threads of the city’s intertextual art scene.
Albertina Modern, Vienna. vienna.info
Text by Christabel StewartPhotography by Lucy Alex Mac
Albertina Modern is the new sister institution to the Albertina Museum – the official public opening of which was postponed until autumn 2020. It is housed in the former Künstlerhaus (or artists’ house) in Karlsplatz in Vienna, behind whose classical facade now sits a gleaming new museum. Three years under scaffolding, the building has been sand-blasted of any industrial discolouration and seamlessly renovated within. The original Albertina houses the imperial state rooms – opulent Habsburg living and entertaining rooms – that provide extraordinary and peculiar historical-physical interior “backgrounds” to springboard our experience of the socially nuanced moments of progressive experimentation in the temporary exhibition, currently an all-encompassing history entitled The Beginning: Art in Austria, 1945 to 1980. Works from the Vienna school of Fantastic Realism, early abstraction, Viennese Actionism, kinetic and concrete art, pop art, and social-critical realism, have been explored by genre, with solo rooms for singular figures of international note such as celebrated painter Maria Lassnig, and the lighter moments of Austria’s most famous export Franz West, whose “adaptives” invited viewers to pick up and fit his art pieces to themselves in spirited and unpretentious interplay.
The exhibition has a breadth of content that is quite over-whelming with moments that are quite disconcerting. It is clear there was a specific history of Austrian artistic innovation in this period that stands up to the historical reputations of Vienna Secession and Jugenstil. These include an earnest type of figurative realism, in which painters worked hard to educate their viewers through painstaking, and often quite harrowing, narratives that look to drastic depictions of the child victims of cruel psycho-logical methods. A painting entitled Life Unworthy of Life from 1974 recalls the killing (by starvation) of “disabled” children in euthanasia clinics, offering a powerful education in understanding just how Austrian artists came to terms with Austro-fascism and National Socialism.
Artwork from The Beginning: Art in Austria, 1945 to 1980, at Albertina Modern
As the timing of this visit was impeded severely by Covid-19 restriction, my mind wandered to another example of both experiencing and not experiencing a city: artist Tony Cokes’ free PDF A Vienna Guide, very generously distributed online in March/April 2020 during lockdown, though originally published for the popular and successful Vienna-wide curated by_ festival, which takes place every summer. Cokes was invited by curator Attilia Fattori Franchini, who had just moved to Vienna herself, but felt her knowledge of the city was still at surface level. Cokes’ resulting project – alongside showing one of his “text as image films” – was a book written mostly from sourced and culled text and information from TripAdvisor and other available online resources, which is a carefully woven staccato history of the city, interspersed with radical racial insights, reviews of techno clubs, bars and DJs. The result is a factual and fictional short story about a city he hadn’t visited in two decades, beautifully typeset on bright Factory Yellow paper stock sourced from a printer in Manchester. Kodwo Eshun, lecturer in contemporary art theory at Goldsmiths University in London, has asked why Cokes’ work, which has existed for over three decades, has had such a peculiar gap in reception until it was shown in the Berlin Biennale two years ago. Read this snippet of A Vienna Guide, which has been generously allowed to be republished here (with thanks to Tony Cokes, Felix Gaudlitz and Attilia Fattori Franchini), and allow it to take you on a critical cultural journey of your own.
Brighter moments of pop-fuelled commercialism, both celebration and critique are included, although pop itself was never defined as a self-formed movement in Austria. Responses to rebellions in youth culture, particularly the surprising portraits of proponents of the Black Power movement in the form of bright celebratory portraits by Robert Lettner and collaged moments that reflect the influence of mass media itself, or the growing power of the commodity world’s hedonism are especially evocative in Franz Zadrazil’s evocative shop fronts – strangely historical yet eloquent of the growing complexity and dominance of commercialisation of the city. Contrast this with Valie Export’s exceptionally powerful use of the street and consumer objects (the alluringly dangerous symbolism of the cigarette packet), vehicles for a radical feminist explosion of “direct art” or more simply, a subversion of real life.
Outside the museum I was lucky to find the offices of Sax Publishers open, a small publishing house Felix Gaudlitz co-founded, and whose books I have long admired. His gallery space was exhibiting US artist Jenna Bliss’ Late Responder, another meander through a city (in this case, New York). A quote from her text read, “I was taught to walk fast in the city, but I’m slower than Google predicts. It’s just the pace I fall into when I’m distracted. The street isn’t what it used to be, teeming with life, but it’s still crowded and unpredictable. I see my reflection in vacant and occupied store windows but pretend I’m looking beyond myself, inside. Then I start to actually look.” ◉
VALIE EXPORT, VALIE EXPORT SMART EXPORT, 1970/2000. Courtesy Albertina Museum
