At the time of writing, the exhibition doesn't have a name, and I haven't seen it yet. Which of course is not necessarily the best precondition for a successful audio guide. No. But I also wanted to have the text of this sound guide in the catalogue, which will already have been published for the opening. So I can only partly help you now. I'll tell you however what I already know about what you see here, or maybe also do not see.
What will not already have happened, when you listen to this – this I unfortunately already know – is an intervention in the fundraising dinner for Secession that will have taken place in the main room the day before the opening. I did make dessert proposals, unfortunately the caterer didn't go for them. Although it would have been an elegant possibility to extend the exhibition into the main room, in order to – at least for the length of the consumption of the dessert – occupy it. I could not stretch the exhibition even briefly. I could not shift the dessert. Which is a pity. But, viewed in this light you have not missed anything yet.
To that which you can see, although at first something disappears in white. This I already know. This I knew almost at first. In the staircase to the Kabinett the somehow too good, dark grey, at least visually exaggerated mounting of the handrails – now there are two for security purposes – disappear in the colour of the wall. Thus the handrails in the best case hang in the air like the grapes which you're about to see. What holds you? The mounting is subtracted, disappears via a colour application. An absence that will be overlooked. The wooden rails seem more mobile this way. Almost as if I could throw them towards you. It would be nice, not only formally, if this intervention would become a permanent installation for Secession.
I anticipate here, even if I eventually grasp at nothing (a grasp into the toilet??). But what a tense, the future perfect, the perfect future.
Naturally this is also a bit of a conversation with oneself. You are not there yet, while I write/speak this. And I will not (not anymore) be there, when you listen to this. Thus we will not meet, or meet only somehow shifted, hanging, suspended. And still the voice establishes or exhibits a very particular closeness.
Now it is November or December or January, but as well September, October. Laying on top of each other September/October and November/December/January. Wrinkles etc.
Hi.
It will have become a lush exhibition, a lot of pictures. Fourteen maybe.
But this you see. You are long since upstairs. How is the light? Poor? Possibly it is dark depending on the weather and the time of day. Is there still daylight, or only stray street light, and that of the exit sign, and of the staircase? I don't know how much you see. This is namely a daylight exhibition, that needs – no demands exhibition weather. However its winter date maybe … Or you come back a little earlier and/or with better weather. Or you switch on your smartphone flashlight to see everything now. Although I don't like the idea of several smartphone flashlights moving in the room. They kill the mood for me. Or is this nonsense? I am sorry if it is much too dark. Just come again. In other words the staircase is brightly lit as you see or just saw, but in the Kabinett the light's not on. Which, except with bright weather, which doesn't happen too often at this time of year, and except after sundown, creates a fine grey contrast to the bright-coloured – I should limit the colours – almost clownish pictures – this would be cooler. Are they funny? Nothing but clowns. Haha? Only the green exit sign shines green. So it is also a movement exhibition. I hope this works. It will work. When you listen to this I cannot do anything anymore. Then everything will already be decided.
Maybe the winter date is not the best for this.
Removing the light is a reverse movement to the addition of colour on the mounting of the rails. And yet, twice, something is being removed.
The longer you stay, the more you'll get used to the darkness, see. Altogether I talk for about 15 minutes, take a bit of time.
The pictures show grapes and grapes in white chocolate. The grapes are huge.
I thought wine grapes go well with Austria.
They are photographs, pigment prints whose colours even in low light, appear radiant. For now I try to imagine the little daylight in the hallway in front of the child's room with test strips of older works that I mounted there.
I always wanted to play with the light of an exhibition, to co-address it, and this exhibition seemed to demand daylight. To waste the pictures as if I could afford that.
At the day of the opening, the 22nd of November, the sun will have already set by 4.08 pm. What one (of course) can already look up now for the whole future, at least till 2030. And at this time the pictures prefer not to function. They withdraw, realize themselves badly, or not at all. Anyways they are less able, fail in their being an image or at least their being exhibited, because the day is already missing. In the evening the picture is finished. Or the darkness opens the exhibition towards something else. And you will talk about it.
It can be that, on-site, I will have changed my mind, because the remaining stray light doesn't yield what I expect of it after all. But this would have been the plan, an uncompromising daylight, a movement exhibition.
A movement exhibition.
Cause of the weather etc. etc., the light.
And because of the desire, the drive.
Drives drive.
We look for a parking lot later. … Parking spaces as negatives of cars.
I also thought about showing pictures of parking lots. You drive me crazy.
I then want to park, pay, and go.
Parking lots are odd and cost money. Figures of sleep and of a death that is transient.
To not give away the spoon (kick the bucket), to only put it aside briefly.
Or yet disappear entirely like bubble tea joints (in bubble tea joints). What seems to have been a real possibility. Before. It's years ago.
Poof!
Or to crawl into a grape and be dead calm, melt.
And the pictures look back like foxes. As if they knew everything about you, and they knew it all along.
Read the room.
I am always opposite or across from a parking lot (like American Fine Arts in the 80s? really??) I've no idea how you feel.
A grape is a fruit, botanically a berry, of the deciduous woody vines of the flowering plant genus Vitis. Grapes can be eaten fresh as table grapes or they can be used for making wine, jam, juice, jelly, grape seed extract, raisins, vinegar, and grape seed oil. Grapes are a non-climacteric type of fruit, generally occurring in clusters, writes Wikipedia. They are an old pleasure. Furthermore, grapes are used in anti-aging cosmetics, because of the antioxidant blah blah … Wrinkles, etc.
You cannot eat these grapes, cannot lap up the chocolate. I also cannot say whether anyone would want that, whether they look delicious. Would you? I don't eat grapes, I have a consistency problem.
One needs to eat well. One never eats entirely on one's own.
The exit is marked.
It is calming that the exit is marked green. Thank you.
The pictures hang too high. It might be that this is not true. The room is too low.
An additional wall will interrupt the almost square floor plan and will have blocked the empty centre. Mirror panels on its back reflect as if drunk. In Jean Cocteau's movie ”Orpheus“ it says: Mirrors are the doors by which death comes and goes.
I will have seen the new Joker movie already. (Do you know Send in the clowns in the version of Judy Collins?). I only write/say this because Joaquin Phoenix (I thought River was so cool) was already in one of my texts, because of a movie and cars, or rather, no cars in Her etc. Sorry, this doesn't belong here or almost not. Party-clowns. You've got to go. Clownish already appeared earlier anyway. I'm (also) afraid I'm not funny enough.
Dark realities. The reality has no door. Neither does the Kabinett. Sliding doors don't count. You cannot bang them. And you cannot.., you cannot yank them open. They only save space and slide.
The reality has no doors. One cannot leave anything.
You don't go anywhere. Or don't come along.
Honking in the SUV doesn't change that either.
Doors are representations of exits (yes?, really??), also car doors. Anyway. Doors as difference. I am porous like a door. Doorly.
The pictures curl a little in their frames, because they are not mounted. This would be deadly. The pictures are sometimes porous. Maybe some of them sweat. Maybe there's a bit of white chocolate outside on the glass of the frames. What comes out of pictures. Which you could lick off. Or possible buyers have to clean them themselves, if they want to have them clean.
In Alle Türen Monika Rinck cites Jacques Lacan: J'ai longuement cherché dans tout les dictionnaires ce que ça voulait dire, une porte.
To grapple with something has the same origin as grape. In German the word Traube, grape, is possibly derived from Low German drūv(e), Klumpen (lump), which is not entirely clarified.
Formerly a rather wet process, today's digital photography almost totally lacks humidity. The paper used here doesn't bathe anymore in different chemical liquids, and doesn't have to dry afterwards for just as long. It is only touched by colourfast ink for short moments by the needles of the pigment printer and dries instantly. Which, besides painting, may as well explain my fondness for liquid in many of my pictures. And which, best case, is clumsily resistant, and not exactly progressive.
Liquid is the enemy of all devices, at least of most of them, the electronic ones anyhow. Humour is derived from the Latin word humor, or moisture. That now everything becomes drier benefits at least humour maybe. But liquid also signifies – see also Klaus Theweleit's currently re-issued Male Fantasies – the terrifyingly feminine, often used pejoratively in political discourse.
They say Lacan never stopped at red lights.
It was weakness that first led me to Photoshop. Absence of ideas. An exhausted leaning-against in Photoshop. To, even if out of (personal) weakness (really?), use/indulge in the corrections or filters in Photoshop (sic! - consumerism is killing us) exaggerates the digital of the pictures. And it underlines the sometimes clumsy/restless imitation/recall of an outdated photographic process. Old and sick.
Are reworked grape pictures more realistic? Deeply realistic through alienation? What do you think? Like the peculiar prolonged cadence of spoken text in movies by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet? Do they reflect a humanity that is capable of moving? They are not natural in any case, they communicate an absence, and underline the absence that is inherent in photography.
Or something to which we always come late and then in reality are only able to reach it as a picture. Photography describes a relation between light and delay. Neither make a good or tangible partner. It can be read as a figure of negativity or a medium for Aufhebung. We do not reach the grapes.
Or how passive-aggressive is photography?
The social relation does not exist.
I do not have a car (and don't want a cooking island). I do not join the dots, I don't want to. Or the relation between narration and negation is a fundamentally free one. Anyway.
You are in a different kitchen.
Are you still there?
Photography is amazingly passive-aggressive.
And the grapes (always) hang too high (for almost everyone), remain a promise, are not to reach like the positive magical effects of the trickle-down-effect. They trickle down-stairs and are not to be found anywhere. Never were. It is too dark here anyway.
The direction of white chocolate is also only down. From some of the grapes white chocolate drips down heavily. Downstairs it is dirty whitish or any colour or nothing at all. Except for white chocolate, not the one by Nestlé (boycott Nestlé!), nothing trickles down upstairs. The streets are not paved with gold.
The grapes must hang. Art does not have to do anything whatsoever. I want to lie down now.
Art has in the most positive sense the impossible position of not having to do anything.
One of the things I remember from being a child in the early 1980s in a Vienna, that was not only grey in winter, very close to an Iron Curtain, was that the streets were filled with lonely old women. One of the more visible traces of the Second World War. Even if you not consciously knew or thought about these old women's men's youths and their deaths it still, if faintly, was everywhere. As a leaden weight of the unsaid, buried in these wan and loose old bodies.
And I remember a postcard saying ICh hASSe den WINTER IN WIEN (I hATE the WINTER IN VIENNA). It was Franz Graf's invitation card for the opening exhibition together with Brigitte Kowanz of the gallery Hubert Winter in Vienna in 1979, what I just recently found out for this text.
And teenager nights at Heurigen some years later. In very black make-up and clothes, and very often in winter. There were less tourists there in winter.
You're still there? I hope you are still there. The invitation card by the way is a receipt for a clown collar that I bought years ago. The receipt is from winter 2008. You'll find the invitation card in the foyer. The receipt however is funnier than the collar. What happened in 2008?
What carries you? The title of the exhibition could be Was trägt Sie? (What carries you?). A question that I modified and borrowed from Heike Geißler's (!) book Saisonarbeit (Seasonal Associate). Maybe because it arrested me. And I have to add that Geißler used the word tragen, to carry, which is a little odd, but I like it a lot in this case, and it fits also with the grapes etc., but the English translation doesn't use the word carry, they only go for the figurative meaning of motivation, which to me seems to diminish further possible readings.
I unfortunately do not need the future perfect as much as I thought.
If, as anticipated, there is an additional accompanying programme, we will serve grapes. What comes out of pictures. You should come. And there will be a chocolate fountain with white chocolate that I could watch for hours without end.
The objet petit a, after Lacan describes the object cause of desire. I last described my playfully naïve reading of the possible effect of the objet petit a and the difficulties with it relative to the affinity between flush and flash and their phonetical a and ä, or their written u and a. Referring to that grape in English and Traube in German, which both have a little a in the name, would, in writing, evoke desire. What subsequently would make them happy, or to carriers of a cause of desire. Phonetically however not. Here the a of the grape becomes an ä and the a of the Traube becomes an au.
I don't know how much you saw. I hope it was not too dark.
I would/wanted to wear Gucci-tears. The ones from the autumn-winter 2019 show. They do not run down. They do not smear my mascara. Neither yours.
The stairs descend. An SUV doesn't help here either. But you could dance downstairs, and smile (or laugh).
What carries you?
_Lisa Holzer, 2019