Text zum Elektronischen Environment 2015/2016 im Rahmen der Ausstellung
Körper, Psyche und Tabu.
Wiener Aktionismus und die frühe Wiener Moderne
mumok – museum moderner kunst stiftung ludwig wien, Wien, 4. März bis 16. Mai 2016
Our electronic environment Murderer Redux is a freely associative chain of constructive, concrete-poetic video and animation loops on Oskar Kokoschka’s Murderer, Hope of Women and optically and acoustically filling the exhibition space. Our reworking of the piece has been adapted for the spatial situation of the exhibition Body, Psyche, and Taboo at mumok, Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien.
Murderer Redux stands primarily in our own tradition of a cross-genre thematic and formal deployment and language of forms that demolishes the boundaries between “art” and “pop.” However, the work is also amenable to the role of an up-to-date development of the actionist lineage leading from Kokoschka’s dramaturgy through the Vienna Actionism of the l960s to the present: Parallels to Kokoschka’s exaggerated theatricality can be found in it just as surely as formally aggressively articulated correlates of actionist manifestations that emphasize and alienate the body. Perhaps it is one and the same intractable spirit that stands behind these artistic decisions spanning generations. However the technical medium used to convey it is no longer satisfied with its function as a documentary preservative. It merges with its content and, with its original contributions, it becomes an active part of the action.
With regard to Kokoschka’s piece, Murderer Redux does not see itself as a direct transposition of the theatrical content or message into an electronic medium, nor even as a freer interpretation or reformulation of a dramatic intention. Instead, it corresponds to our overarching interest in constantly constructing new, autonomous aesthetic milieus and elements. lf these allow and utilize any external contributions at all, then only as triggers for formal particles within formal processes as in the case of Kokoschka’s text here. Beyond that, they formulate entirely new, distanced and expanded positions.
Die Übersetzung erscheint mit freundlicher Genehmigung des mumok
