„What is done to our individual life experience by means of high-tech, namely to let it dissolve its own experience in its experience, is also applied post-modernly to the social past, which thanks to high-tech becomes so recitable that it can be received immediately, as if one had travelled to yesterday, so that one is no longer from yesterday, but from after yesterday.“ – B.S.
„Of this it must be said: what is presented as drafted is here already practically closed in the draft – never open.
The necessarily selective traversal of the always instantly different river as a polylogy of artistic-aesthetic practices stabilises into the constant outflow of productions that can/are allowed to be thematised and commented on as artistic decisions – to become nonchalant but no longer negotiated (in the sense of processual vividness or, even more, actual – with respect to their potentialities – presence).
Above all, more and more technical (applied) new additions, whether as materials for informing and information or as tools for doing this (the means justify the means, the end is mediocrity), have been and are being integrated, concisely presented. There is necessarily an overlapping of sense data, mixing and cancelling, a „cross-over esotericism“ of pop-formalist content evacuation. Even an opposition of form-statement-institutions within a few decades or even years. Levellingly global in different places and for different groups.
In relation to the Western industrialised and everyday digitalised art world, however, the zenith is already well passed and tendencies are recognisable which, while not a retrogressive movement, yet correspond to the actually usable potential of supposedly innovative technologies; weighed against the statements actually obtained and produced in this way. Was that the choice then? Virtual therapy (self-empowerment) and infantilism instead of rationalization and technocracy? The living zoon politikon is desired dwindlingly small, should desire to give way to „anything goes“, adoring itself as an art figure, making aesthetic/more theological decisions or not making them, individualized collectively and throwing around and away from itself. Rather art figure without conscience (historical experienceability) than real (acting) person.
„Seen sociologically, a pseudo-political „colour-blindness“ independent of class? Who is going to shoot whom virtually? Just so.
The impatience of the bourgeoisie, jiggling at the world clasps, has passed loss at the short-lived longeurs of the last decades of the last millennium; and how could it revolt otherwise than as a history-less non-rebellion of the real postmodernist generations? To whom can all the utopias, efforts, constant toil (formerly the civilizing project) be left now? Is the old time still young? (Post-modernness faked for real.)
„Better one cannot …Because this always has, what appears aesthetically charming, the consequence of justifying itself, if at all possible, also ethically.*
Burghart Schmidt, Zeitökonomie des Individualismus (Wien, Edition Splitter, 1996), 86.
Cf. Umberto Eco, Kunst und Schönheit im Mittelalter (München, Carl Hanser, 1991).
Translated by: Jonathan Uhlaner
Participating artists: Lea Abendstein, André Baschlakow, Linda Ebert, Jurgis Gečys, Jeremy Glogan, Markus Krottendorfer, Alastair Levy, Sabine Maier, Erwin Polanc, Sarah Sharafi, Burghart Schmidt (1942-2022), Céline Struger & works from the collection and the collective.
Curated by: Robert Gruber, Martina Egger, Kathrin Hanga & Manfred Stocker
Exhibition Duration Part I: 15.05.2022 – 12.06.2022
Address and contact:
gottrekorder – association of artists
Rechbauerstraße 19A A – 8010 Graz
www.gottrekorder.com
