PETER LAND
May 8 - 21, 2000
 
 

 
 
The Vienna Secession is continuing its billboard project on the façade of the building, a project that gathers artistic statements by Austrian as well as international artists commenting on the political situation in Austria, with a work by Danish artist Peter Land. (Open letter to the Austrian president by the board of the Secession).
 
The Secession, a private and independent artists' association, is one of Austria's leading institutions for contemporary art. The building is a famous landmark. Taking into account that its facade is one of the most photographed sites in Vienna, we are using it as a platform for critical artistic thought and expression. The right-hand wing of the façade has again and again been used in the history of the Secession for advertising purposes in that exhibition posters of the Secession were displayed on it. Now this wing is provided for various artistic thoughts.
 
Peter Land started doing performances in 1994 and he has been exploring the limits of what is still fit to be shown ever since. He examines behaviour familiar to us which we can identify with. The work shown on the façade billboard consists of three photographs from the twelve-part series "The Lake" produced in parallel with the eponymous video in 1999. Both tell the story of a hunter (Peter Land himself) dressed in traditional outfit, with the customary equipment, who walks through a short stretch of forest, reaches a lake where he gets into a rowing boat, ties it to a pole in the middle of the lake and finally shoots a hole into the planks. Calmly, or even stoically, the hunter sits and waits as he goes down. The final scene shows the bow of the boat standing out of the lake and the hunter's hat floating on the water.
 
Against the backdrop of the romantic setting established by Land, the story we are witnessing is one of a journey into oblivion, a point of no return which the artist and protagonist stages with a good deal of self-irony and wit. The character played by Land is like someone out of a cartoon who exaggerates human behaviour, emotions and cultural gestures so that they become perceivable and comprehensible. In the framework of a romantic narrative he asks existential questions while laughing about himself like we laugh about him.
 
Peter Land calls the body of works he has created so far a long and painful journey into what, for lack of any better expression, he calls "the essence of his truth". According to him, it is what remains when all acquired cultural and social values have been exposed and dismissed. They have to be re-established or new ones have to be created, on new bases and with a maximum of awareness. This is what he considers his interests which have always existed in various shapes and forms under the surface of his work.
 


 

Further artists et.al.: Monica Bonvicini, Louise Bourgeois, Markus Geiger, Jochen Gerz, Renée Green, Joseph Kosuth, Paul McCarthy, Werner Reiterer, Heimo Zobernig.
 
 
For updated information please contact Matthias Herrmann, Sylvie Liska and Eleonora Louis at the Vienna Secession on +43- 1- 587 53 07.