[artinfo] Postmedial Condition, Neue Galerie Graz

[e-Flux]

Neue Galerie Graz am Landesmuseum Joanneum

Postmedial Condition

Duration: 16 November 2005 – 15 January 2006

Curators: Elisabeth Fiedler, Christa Steinle
Scientific advisor: Peter Weibel

Back in the 1920s, painters, sculptors, 
photographers and avant-garde filmmakers first 
opened up the field of media art and declared all 
materials to be equal. Since the 1960s, the first 
generation of Austrian media artists, represented 
by names such as Adrian, Bechtold, Export, 
Gappmayr, Kriesche, Petzold, Rühm, Weibel, etc., 
has been making a very specific contribution to 
international art. What makes it so specific is 
the fact that the analytical traditions of the 
past – from the language analysis of the Vienna 
Circle to Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis – opened 
up discourses that made the critical analysis of 
the media possible and offered adequate 
reflection on the emergence of new medial forms, 
such as video, Expanded Cinema, or digital 
images. Taking up themes and/or questions 
relating to socio-culture, social analysis and 
media analysis, Austrian media art forms an 
independent unit. Ever since the emergence of the 
Wiener Werkstätte, Austria has held on to its 
tradit ion of merging the borders between free 
and applied art, architecture and design, 
sculpture and stage design, and this, together 
with the country’s strong media tradition that 
reaches from avant-garde films to virtual 
reality, has led to a pronounced orientation 
towards the postmedial in Austria. The term 
“postmedial”, based on Rosalind Krauss’s “Art in 
the Age of the Post-Medium Condition”, the 
subheading of her famous essay “A Voyage on the 
North Sea” from 1999, strikes us as particularly 
apt for characterizing the artistic practice that 
forms the conceptual basis of this exhibition. 
Artists operate between different media, 
materials, and functions; they adapt new 
production processes, mix different media 
characteristics, and create new reference 
systems. This process is not dominated by one 
single medium – instead, the different media 
influence and shape, and at the same time, 
reflect one another. Interdisciplinary processes 
that take place between the fields of drawing, 
painting, sculpture, photography, film, video, 
literature, architecture, design, Net Art and 
computer language are becoming the methodic 
principle. On the basis of 41 artistic positions, 
the exhibition wants to draw attention to a 
present development in Austrian art that will 
certainly constitute one more important 
contribution to the evolution of international 
art.

Neue Galerie Graz am Landesmuseum Joanneum
Sackstrasse 16, A-8010 Graz / Austria
T +43-316-82 91 55 / F +43-316-81 54 01
neuegalerie at museum-joanneum.at
<http://www.neuegalerie.at>http://www.neuegalerie.at
Opening times: Tue–Sun 10am–6 pm, Thu 10am–8pm