At the Secession artwork and poetry clinch in Ugo Rondinone’s ring

“Poets and artists express a view of the world as a collage of passing fragments, there is no bigger picture or a linear logic here, only transitory images and words, seen as if rushing past the windows of a train”. With these words, spoken in a crowded press conference, Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone described the frame behind his new curatorial project, titled Artists and Poets, which is taking place at the Secession, in Vienna.

 

This time Ugo Rondinone didn’t need “Carte Blanche”, as it was mentioned on the title of the first show he curated – “The third mind, carte blanche à Ugo Rondinone”, Palais de Tokyo, 2007. In the years that followed his inaugural curatorial attempt, the experiential correlations that an artist’s mind can formulate have resulted in exhibitions that could have never been realized by a curator, for the simple reason that artists are driven by the necessity to create something radical, thus making more challenging shows.

 

It follows that, surprisingly, Artists and Poets is neither an exhibition about words of concrete poetry, nor about other linguistic or textual pieces. Taking for granted that art and poetry go together developing the powerful and spiritual notion of creativity, Rondinone makes use of the poetic license by defying geographical limitations as well as historical conventions.

 

The exhibition setting consists of eight rooms where the artists are placed in pairs, with each artist represented by a considerable amount of works, encouraging the dialogue between the different movements and eras of art that the show surveys.

 

Only a work is presented alone, being also the only literally poetic work in the show. John Giorno’s Dial-A-Poem, a poetry installation that extends on a local level, beyond the walls of Secession. The first time that Dial-A-Poem was presented to the audience, was in 1969 at the New York Architectural League, when a phone number gave access to answering machine recordings by American poets. To adapt it to the Artists and Poets show, John Giorno collaborated with the Vienna Poetry School, creating a work comprised by recorded poems by Austrian writers – when we dialled +43 (0)1 58 50 433 we listened to Sophie Reyer’s, Nun.

 

The interactive experience of the Dial-A-Poem is taking place on the first floor of the show. Things downstairs are more solid, with painting and sculpture taking possession of the space. After a while you realize that the most thought provoking thing about this show is the curator’s brilliant choice of the artists that are presented in the same room.

 

In the main space Justin Matherly’s work seems affected by Rondinone’s sculptural techniques. The New York based artist presents a series of large sculptures made of cast concrete, sitting on crutch-like objects, and symbolizing the ambivalent dipole of weakness and power. His sculptures are surrounded by Bob Law’s monumental works of British Minimal Art. The work mister paranoia IV 20.11.1970 (no. 95) is one of the highlights of the show, a blank canvas featuring a black outline as the only information, finished with a date, proving the significance of modesty in abstract painting, and how rare is this feeling today, despite the abundance of abstract painting in art.

 

In the next room, Ugo Rondinone decided to juxtapose two Austrian artists from different generations. Gerwald Rockenschaub’s geometric paintings that established him as one of the leading figures of New Geometry that took place in Vienna during the 80’s are enclosing a life-sized wired chairs by Fritz Panzer. Panzer’s intention to replace the lines of the pencil with wire and realise three dimensional drawings is not visible from the physical appearance of the work. On the contrary, looking at the reproductions of the sculptures in the catalogue of the show, Panzer’s works look almost like optical illusions.

 

Some of the most discussed works on exhibition are the intricate painted stamps from fictional countries on black background by the American artist Donald Evans. The dark backgrounds of Evans’ paintings are transformed in the space to a dark formalistic abyss by Heimo Zobernig, rendering this room one of the most interesting of the show.

 

The conceptual ambience of the main ground floor seems pushed aside by the infernal instincts that take over the first and the second basement of the Secession only to be inverted again at the end of the show, where Andrew Lord’s remakes of ceramics by Paul Gauguin meet the gem of the building, Gustav Klimt’s “The Beethoven Frieze” – the representation of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony as interpreted by Richard Wagner.

 

Elsewhere, one could see Tamuna Sirbiladze’s neo-expressionist paintings that were initially presented at the Galerie Lisa Ruyter (2012) pairing up with Fritz Hartlauer’s occultist symbols. The colours, almost absent in the rest of the show, are concentrated in the room dedicated to Andra Ursuta and Michel Williams. Ursuta presents her most recent work, “Waiting Area”, which consists of a series of sculpture with massive casts of the artists behind bearing a variety of colours over them. The artist’s purpose to set against the boundless idealization of the body gets blurry when the subject of the objection is once more an “idealized” butt, even if it belongs to the artist herself.

 

In “Artists and Poets” Ugo Rondinone’s art is presented although his works are not there. The exhibition creates a formalistic continuum having as a core Rondinone’s own practice and personal life – perhaps it must be said that John Giorno is the artist’s life partner. In this regards one can wonder whether it is possible for the artist-curator to overlap self-reference in order to create something beyond his own mood board.

 

February 19, 2015