When time-travelers go into the past in science fiction films, they are usually warned not to intervene in events there: the slightest change could result in the present being no longer there, so that return would become impossible. Actually, though, the present proves itself relatively resistant to manipulations; it could be the result of various different pasts.
Based on ideas of this kind, Martin Gostner has assigned a second institution to the Viennese address Friedrichstraße 12: it is no longer only the Secession that is located there, but also an imaginary pub or cafe, the “Gasthaus Kupferpfandl”, which has been there for decades. Its program of events, advertised on posters throughout the city, reflects and follows the history of the Second Republic. When the V.d.U. (Verband der Unabhängigen – League of Independents) was recognized by the Allied Council, an invitation was issued to come to the Kupferpfandl for a “reflective meeting”; while Konrad Lorenz was accepting the Nobel prize for medicine in Stockholm in 1973, a pet show was taking place here; and contemporaneous with the glycol scandal in 1985, the pub was advertising “A large glass of wine for Burgenland!” And the guests here are just as average as the tavern itself: Gostner’s video projected in the Secession cafe shows them entering a flat above the bar almost by chance, first looking around curiously, then poking around and finally tearing up the room. After the destruction, the popular radio station Ö3 disseminates joviality undisrupted.
Naming possibilities rather than postulating truths—this is the approach that Gostner repeatedly takes with his works. In this, the posters are similar to the “Legends”, created in the early 1990s: typewritten curriculum vitae of fictive artists, which appear to be enclosures for letters of application. Stereotypes of failure and success in mediocrity guarantee the plausibility of these biographies just as much as their recognizability—it is easy to find motifs from one’s own history in them, which then becomes uncertain terrain in retrospect: if what is remembered and what is forgotten are two subsets of the past, the telling of them becomes a function with variables and repeatedly changing results.
His work for the Secession applies this method to the cultural memory of an entire country. Where the politics of memorial events construct a mythical national identity from history over and over again, Gostner’s fragments of the history of a tavern reveal what is concealed behind the tediously maintained facade of an Austrian special status: expediency, indifference and the notorious incapability of responding to difference and deviation other than with repression or ignorance. Grand politics and the everyday life of the common people are mutually contingent, whereby grumbling about “the ones at the top” is simultaneously the price and the reward for comfortable irresponsibility. Gostner avoids any edifying gesture in his work: it is possible to intervene in events, but intervention must be constantly rediscovered and reinvented. He shifts stories of detours, deviations, subtexts into the place of a linear history: “I do not take history as historiography, as what once was. (…) If you could see history as a plastic object, then I illuminate it from a certain angle and see. In that moment: I remember, I imagine.”
