"To Each Time its Art, to Art its Freedom." The words of its founders still determine the Secession's exhibition program for this, the year 2000. In keeping with recent tradition, the Secession will stand by its complex and critical approach to a coming to terms with the diverse fields of reality in contemporary art today. The attempt to translate questions arising from the personal, the regional, and the medium-specific into a common language might be seen as the connecting thread of the different exhibition projects.

A characteristic feature of the way the Secession settles on its program is the democratic decision-making process instated by the statutes of 1897: the artists elected to the board (at present Manfred Erjautz, Matthias Herrmann, Johanna Kandl, Willi Kopf, Brigitte Kowanz, Anna Meyer, Constanze Ruhm, Stefan Sandner, Matta Wagnest, Martin Walde, Heimo Zobernig) invite other artists to exhibit. This makes a wide range of artistic positions possible; what they share is their striving toward a precision in artistic thought. All exhibitions are accompanied by a publication.
 
 
 
DIANA THATER
January 27 – March 19, 2000

 
Diana Thater, Delphine, 1999
 
Diana Thater's work turns on the subject of domesticated nature; her reference point is always that of the animal kingdom. In her installations, the video artist radically lays bare the technological construct of fiction. The concept of physical place in real space – a space she always looks at as the site of an ideological debate – is contrasted with the analysis of the classical picture space, which dissolves itself in multiple perspectives. The central question is: in what manner does the making of art work toward the domestication of concepts and in what ways does it oppose this civilizing achievement. In working with the history of nature not as natural history but as social history, she points out that nature is always a culturally determined concept.
Diana Thater, born in 1962, lives and works in Los Angeles.

 
MUNTEAN/ROSENBLUM
January 27 – March 19, 2000


Muntean/Rosenblum, Why Honey?, 1999
 
The work of the Viennese artists Muntean/Rosemblum betrays an interest (in terms of medium and method) in traditional genres inasmuch as it shifts, transgresses, and dissolves them. Their installations, which combine various media such as sculpture, painting, music, or photography, are conceived as part of tableaux vivants and remain as relics of each performance. The aesthetics of these environments are borrowed from everyday and popular culture, just as their narrative images tell of the dreams, feelings, and longings of young people at the end of the nineties. Their multi-media projects toss up questions on different levels regarding the state of the individual in our present.
Markus Muntean and Adi Rosenblum have worked together since 1992 and live in Vienna.  
 
 
MERLIN CARPENTER
March 30 – May 21, 2000


Merlin Carpenter, Survivors, 1999
 
The British artist Merlin Carpenter has moved, with his paintings, into the realm of a complex network between the art world and the world of consumer goods. He directs his attention toward what aesthetic consequences the boundaries between art and commodities, on the one hand, and the infringement of these boundaries, on the other, may have. Carpenter's interest is in the de-mystification of painting; on a formal level he insists that it be fully legible and that this formal level nonetheless be significant to the content: it decides whether or not anything at all is on the painting. One perspective of Carpenter's art lies, finally, in this de-mystification: instead of exploring and building-up meta-levels he suggests the continuation of the experiment of painting and patiently awaiting the results.
Merlin Carpenter, born in 1967, lives and works in London.  
 
 
GREGOR SCHNEIDER
March 30 – May 21, 2000
 

Gregor Schneider, Haus ur, Mönchengladbach-Rheydt, 1985-1999
 
Schneider's interventions in the substance of the modest "house ur" in Rheydt are, on the surface, hardly noticeable. Visitors may enter a succession of rooms without perceiving anything more than the more or less spartan interior and diffuse light behind curtains blowing in a soft breeze. The window is, indeed, slightly open, but it is an almost silent ventilator blowing behind it; instead of the sun, neon tubes give off light, and the view is not to the outside but to the windowless wall of an inaccessible room. In the layerings of walls, floors, ceilings, and windows history has become sedimentary and is only reconstructable at the price of its own destruction, without its ever actually having disappeared at all. In the Secession Gregor Schneider will reconstruct a basement room of his "house ur".
Gregor Schneider, born in 1969, lives and works in Rheydt, Germany.
 
 
ANITA LEISZ
June 1 – July 23, 2000

 
Anita Leisz, Installation, 1999
 
In her projects, Anita Leisz isolates individual texts or images and investigates their narrative relationships and semiotics. With her image/text systems she plays on different media and spaces as though they were instruments. Her symbols structure the walls of gallery spaces – they have previously defamiliarized public billboards; they have also been published in book form. In 1995, with "Den Rest", Leisz invented a fictional partner for communication, whose life became the subject of her narrative images. More recently, Leisz has foregone portrayals of images altogether. Her texts conjure up the traces of "something that appears to be present but is actually absent". By giving the fictional equal status with the real, Leisz allows the imagination of the viewer to take the place of spare artistic illusionism.
Anita Leisz, born in 1973, lives and works in Vienna.
 
 
FLORIAN PUMHÖSL
June 1 – July 23, 2000
 

Florian Pumhösl, Covering the Room, 1998
 
Florian Pumhösl reconstructs, in spatial installations, the originating conditions of an otherwise normally transfigured modern art movement. While earlier projects focused, for example, on alternative, "utopian" design and architectural concepts, or on the aesthetics of political exhibitions, his current work concerns the local and topographical incisions brought about by the transfer of infrastructure into non-industrialized areas. Through this discursive motif he shows emancipation and refusal to be part of the modernization process.
Florian Pumhösl, born in 1971, lives and works in Vienna.

 
MARK WALLINGER
August 8 – September 9, 2000
 

Mark Wallinger, Oxymoron, 1997
 
Mark Wallinger's often cited "Britishness" is demonstrated not only in his topics but also in his approach to them. Critically, and with irony, he analyzes the traditions and the value system of British society, laying bare anachronisms in societal structures. The world of sports – above all soccer and horse racing – forms the thematic emphasis of his work. The artist often turns to tried and true compositional formulas from painting, only to imbue them with new meanings. Wallinger makes use of a variety of media, from painting to photography and video to sculpture and installation, which appear in different combinations depending on the work cycle.
Mark Wallinger was born in 1959 in Chigwell, Great Britain, and lives and works in London.

 
RITA McBRIDE
August 8 – September 9, 2000
 

Rita McBride, Toyota, 1990
 
Rita McBride places her work somewhere between the realm of architecture, sculpture, and design. The materials take on a special meaning: McBride weaves refrigerators, automobiles, and fire ladders from willow rushes; she creates potted plants and chairs out of glass; and she casts miniature parking garages in bronze. These "estrangements" call the process of mass production and, in connection with it, our conventional habits of perception, into question. In addition, her miniature models of architectural structures reveal the concealed perfection of urban architecture. The artist is interested in the sociological consequences put into motion by certain architectural forms. For the Secession, McBride takes as her topic the immediate environment of the building by underscoring its character as an island.
Rita McBride, born in 1960, lives and works in New York.
 
 
MIRJAM KUITENBROUWER
August 8 – September 9, 2000
 

Mirjam Kuitenbrouwer, Auge (convex), 1999

Mirjam Kuitenbrouwer concentrates – in her collages of painting, photos, drawings, tape, and writing – various perspectives and points of view in interior space into a spatial continuum. Behind this stands her desire to bring to a synthesis the seen and felt space that is nonetheless shielded from the field of sight. At the same time, Kuitenbrouwer's interior designs and experiments in perspective offer a reflection on the medium of photography, arising through the analogy of camera obscura and interior space. In her most recent work the artist achieves her spatial concepts in three dimensions, creating utopian and surreal-seeming landscape and architectural models.
Mirjam Kuitenbrouwer, born in 1967, lives and works in Arnhem in the Netherlands.
 
 
DOUG AITKEN
October 18 – November 23, 2000
 

Doug Aitken, Diamond Sea, 1997
 
Doug Aitken's video installations occupy themselves with the relationship between notions of nature and culture. Aitken undertakes archaeological studies in a media landscape of the absolute present. He creates visual and spatial ensembles out of film, video, sound, and architecture by transferring conventions from one medium – such as the video cut – into another: that of architecture, which dissolves cuts in space. Aitken makes natural and city landscapes the protagonists of his work by examining their hidden narratives. Aitken's landscapes are never "natural"; instead, they are marked by social and civilizing movements, formed by technological and political context. Thus they become metaphors for the relationship between nature and technology, between landscape and mediascape.
Doug Aitken, born in 1968, lives and works in New York and Los Angeles.
 
 
AA BRONSON
October 5 – November 26, 2000
 

AA Bronson, Felix, June 5, 1994, 1999
 
In his work, AA Bronson often falls back on experiences he made as a member of the artists' group General Idea. On the one hand, these are experiences gathered over 25 years of making art together; on the other hand, they are about the shift in personal and professional reality brought about by and with the death of the two other members of General Idea in 1994. Thoughts, experiences, and dis-coveries normally kept secret are offered up to the public space (of art), made a subject of discussion, and displayed. What was once considered off-bounds (the private) is woven together with 20th century iconography (the public) to form a new vision of the self.
AA Bronson was born 1946 and lives in Toronto and New York.
 
 
WALTER OBHOLZER
December 7, 2000 – January 21, 2001

Walter Obholzer, Dumpling 7, 1998
 
The dialog between permutations of abstract images and ornament plays just as important a role in Obholzer's painting as the meaning/interpretation of space and places. Obholzer looks at the design element ornament as historical and sociological data, as a vehicle for expression and a society's vocabulary of forms. His formal systems turn the conventional idea of ornamental wall design on its head by virtue of the fact that he applies them onto aluminum panels rather than directly onto the wall. After this "intense flirt" (Markus Brüderlin) with the wall his paintings are separated from it again, moving from their station as a "decorative secondary topic" into the perspective of a "framed primary picture topic".
Walter Obholzer, born in 1953, lives and works in Vienna.  

 
 
PERMANENT EXHIBITION
Gustav Klimt: THE BEETHOVEN FRIEZE
 
 
 
For further information and photographic material please contact:
 
Pia Leydolt
Secession, Association of Visual Artists Vienna Secession
Friedrichstraße 12, 1010 Vienna
Tel: +43-1-5875307-10, Fax: +43-1-5875307-34
E-mail: presse@secession.at