"They bang you over the head with this stuff. At ten in the morning, I just don't feel like looking at another sculpture about female circumcision." The person talking is David Harper, and the discomfort he's describing is his own, in reaction to some generally-identifiable motifs of contemporary Austrian art: fear, pain, dark sexuality, frank psychology, and politics. In preparation for "FÜNF RÄUME," his second curatorial project at the Austrian Cultural Forum on East 52nd Street, Harper spent a week perusing the catalogues of about a hundred Vienna galleries in search of something else.
His choices were soft-voiced, site-specific, and loyal to themes from pre-war painting and sculpture. Valentin Ruhry's Adaption (2011) is a set of false electric outlets and cable ports that grinningly mirror the already-superfluous white squares on the other wall.
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| Valentin Ruhry, Adaption, 2011. |
Zenita Komad and Michael Kienzer pushed images around from mirrors on a cluster of desk chairs, toying with light and space from non-objective points of reference like a Cubist painting.
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| Zenita Komad and Michael Kienzer, The empty mirror, 2011. |
Other homages to high Modernism could be seen in Esther Stocker's and Clemens Hollerer's work, where rooms are filled with thin, flat-lines of bold color and sharp-edged polygons.
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| Clemens Hollerer, On the other side, 2011. |
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| Esther Stocker, Untitled, 2011. |
My favorite was Stocker's installation at the atrium of the building, a series of parallel black plastic straps that hang down at various corners from the ceiling.
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| Esther Stocker, Untitled, 2011. |
David enthusiastically pointed out how much the piece, viewed from below, resembles the cover of the Joy Division album Unknown Pleasures:
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| Esther Stock, Untitled, 2011. |
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