reviews HELD TOGETHER WITH WATER
HeLD TOGeTHer
wiTH wATer:
ArT frOm THe
sAmmLunG
verbunD
M AK, VIEnnA
9 M Ay – 16 SEpTEM bER
Under the curatorial aegis of Gabriele Schor, Sean Rainbird and
Philipp Kaiser, the Austrian Verbund Electricity Corporation
has, since 2004, been building what it hopes will become an
internationally recognised collection of contemporary European
and American works. Its installation at the MAK represents
something of a first foray, then, for an institution not usually given
to such collaborations.
Schor & Co were given a free hand and a large budget
to put together a selection of works and a show according to the
maxim ‘strength, not breadth’. However, organised around two
central themes, Performance and Spaces/Places, it has impressive
breadth, too, ranging from the well-known (Cindy Sherman,
Hannah Wilke, VALIE EXPORT, Francesca Woodman) to
the less-so: a rediscovered Birgit Jürgenssen, alongside young
contemporary artists such as Kate Gilmore, Loan Nguyen,
Ursula Mayer and Laura Ribero. Moreover, though not all of
these should be considered feminists per se, there’s a strong
commitment to feminist practice and discourse here which, given
the collection’s origins, is particularly striking.
Photography is particularly well represented, not least due
to the curators’ admiration for the Bechers’ hugely influential and collectable typological series – for example, Urs Lüthi, Selbstporträt
(I’ll Be Your Mirror), 1972,
in Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler’s studies of small Berlin cinema facades from 2000 – a project
bW photograph on barite paper,
given still greater affective significance following Bernd Becher’s death shortly before the exhibition opened. In
90 x 60 cm. © the artist
Spaces/Places, Anthony McCall’s Line Describing a Cone (1973) is installed not far from Gordon Matta-Clark’s
graphic, photo and video documentation of three of his own projects, Conical Intersect (1975), Office Baroque
(1977) and Splitting (1974). Several of Fred Sandback’s large-scale investigations into spatial drawing from the
late 1960s to the late 80s scythe through the MAK’s cavernous exhibition hall to thrilling and unsettling effect,
while Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller’s slideshow installation Road Trip (2004) is an absorbing journey
through memory – our own and that of other people.
In Francis Alÿs’s enjoyable short film sequence Choques (2005–6), the artist repeatedly collides with
a dog in the street, seen from a variety of perspectives (including the dog’s); a counterpart and counterpoint,
almost, to David Wojnarowicz’s photo series Arthur Rimbaud in New York (1978–9), in which the peripatetic
poet’s wanderings are transposed to an off-season Coney Island, the Meatpacking District and the Hudson
River piers, in his exposition of late-twentieth century marginalisation.
Held Together with Water, the catalogue suggests, succeeds in ‘suspending the antagonism between art
and business’. Does it? Well… no, not quite, although you can be sure that if this collection were to have been
shown in London, corporate imprimatur would have been writ larger than the 1993 Lawrence Weiner piece
from which it takes its punning title (given the Verbund’s hydroelectric associations). Nor should we abandon
our critical judgements over the exhibition’s genesis in big business to appreciate, with a few exceptions –
Sam Taylor-Wood and Sarah Lucas spring to mind – its genuine quality. It’s a promising start, and it will be
interesting to see whether the collection can continue to make good on the work Schor and colleagues have
undertaken with such energy, and only a little hot air. Luke Heighton
137 Artreview
NEW Sept_REVIEWS.indd 23 7/8/07 15:59:48
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