'Temptations' - at the Vienna Art Week 2009

A seductive serpent looms – jet black eye against glistening white skin – at the centre of the text on the poster announcing Vienna’s largest festival of art, the Vienna Art Week, a largely private initiative, which will be making its fifth year anniversary this 16-22 November.

An initiative of the internationally renowned Vienna-based auction house, Dorotheum, this year’s motto, “Temptation for Art“ was designed by Art Cluster Vienna to play up the variety and complexity of special events that had been drawn up as a collaborative venture by several member institutions – following the pattern that they had set up when they formed the Cluster six years ago.

“It’s a hugely inventive programme with hardly any public subsidy,” reports festival artistic director, Robert Punkenhofer. “It makes art live from the engagement of the members of the Cluster themselves.” As in the past five years, the organizers aim to catapult Vienna as a metropolis onto the radar screen of international art by bringing recognized artists, critics and curators from abroad to encounter the vast and diverse local art scenarios plus an array of provocative performances and high-calibre panel discussions.

“The linking of business, art-makers, cultural institutions, and research in the projects of the Vienna Art Week shows that economic success and artistic ambition are not antithetical,” commented Austria’s Minister of Art, Culture and Education Claudia Schmied, seeing the creative potential of art an asset for entrepreneurial success. “I see this as a key to the future and especially that, in cultural political terms, international exchange also involves the young.”

From its short history, and judging from the industrial derivation of the cluster idea, the festival seems driven by business energy and the common prayer: “… and lead us not into the temptation to fragment, or we divide our commercial potential and strength.”

But that is not the case, insists Punkenhofer. “The goal is not only to highlight the best of the best in Vienna’s art world but especially also to give due emphasis to the place of visual art.”

Clearly, this re-branding is an effort to position Vienna beyond its clichéd association as the world’s city of music. What then distinguishes this fifth anniversary from previous and other European art festivals is a shift in tone. “The first three years may be considered somewhat elitist, because they were specifically oriented to insiders,” he explains. “Last year, there was an opening up,” integrating more galleries and small studios and spotlighting alternative spaces.

“The most interesting developments in contemporary art is in off-off scenes,” he continued, like Vienna’s 16th district, around the Brunnenmarkt, “in spaces that are neither gentrified nor commercialised.” This is how new partners emerge such as KÖR Public Art Vienna, Advanced Minority Cubicle, COCO (Contemporary Concerns), K48 – Offensive for Contemporary Perception, and Song Song. In the 3rd district, Ursula Maria Probst will present artists-in-residence at “The Center of Attention – Art as Sociotopie”, a project to further socio-dynamic spaces and inter-creative linkages where issues of cultural identity and aesthetics are raised. The more established institutions like the Albertina, Belvedere, departure wirtschaft, kunst u. kultur GmbH, and the Essl Museum respond with innovative and special programmes. The Kunsthistorische Museum, Vienna’s Museum of Fine Arts, is a case in point.

“Vienna Art Week’s programme should tempt visitors to wander through the dense and complex programme,” says Sabine Haag, its recently appointed director. Here, there’s “something for everyone,” starting with the old masters and the baroque through the modern past to the contemporary.

Still, she sees the traditional as what makes the city unique: “the presentation of its imperial heritage... spectacular treasures... from the house of Habsburg.” So what’s new? Her response was immediate, “New media and innovative methods of display,” using space to enable museums to present art in new ways. For example, a workshop at the KHM will show finely collected textiles and demonstrate traditional techniques of tapestry and carpet weaving. And she, herself, will guide a tour through the museum’s collection of sculpture and decorative arts the “backstage” repositories under restoration, which will not be open to the public for at least another couple of years.

“Within such unexpected and modern contexts, more people can be drawn into philosophical insights and psychological backgrounds and thus, into a wider understanding of art,“ she contends. Among alternative spaces, she mentions Vienna’s 2nd district and the focus on “street art”.

Video-DJ artists of Sound Frame will host a Live Event at the Prater Sauna where Feldkirch musicians will meet Detroit’s Crosstown Rebels and Spectral. At the Hotel Le Méridien, Nicolas Chenus, editor of Graffiti Art Magazine in Paris, will lead a panel on “What’s Street Art Doing in a Gallery?” At the Passagegalerie of the Künstlerhaus, a magazine, Paper, will be presented as a performative and genre-crossing project. A do-it-yourself workshop in Raum D/quartier21 will show how sex machines, teledildonic devices, and orgasmotrons can be produced at home.

Aside from curator-guided tours of special shows and permanent exhibitions, city walks to public art spaces, visits to studios of architects, designers and fashion-trend setters, there will be daily previews of auctions at the Dorotheum where the president of Art Cluster Vienna, Martin Böhm, is a managing partner.

And, on “Dorotheum Day” guests will be invited to two major exhibitions at the Mumok: one, the ERSTE Foundation project on “Gender Check – Masculinity and Femininity in the Art of Eastern Europe after 1960”; and the other, “Interstices – La Colección Jumex, México”, which features works by artists from Latin America. ERSTE Foundation, which has been engaged in counter-cultural studies and social change, will also host the exhibition on “Balkanology…” at the Architekturzentrum Wien, where participants to the 17th Congress of Architects can encounter urbanization and new architecture in Central & Southeast Europe. Boris Marte, member of the Board of the ERSTE Stiftung, says, “we believe that this kind of opening should be kept high on the cultural and social agenda as a way of leading others into temptation and risking new ways of viewing art”.

An exhibition promising surprises is “Urban Clash, Politics, Art and Daily Life Around 1930” which the Vienna Museum will hold at the Künstlerhaus, “showing a time when different worldviews collide,” say the Kultur-und Medien Projekte duo, Christian and Nadia Rapp-Wimberger. They report their own astonishment that the Alpenverein in the 1920s excluded Jews, who were not even allowed to go to certain parts of the Alps.

Other discourses worth watching out for are “Art Content Versus Art Market Dynamic” with panelists Clare McAndrew, cultural economist and founder of Arts Economics, Dublin, and Carmen Jiménez, curator of the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao as well as Russian artist Erik Bulatov who will lecture on the Mumok exhibition “1989, End of History or Beginning of the Future? – Comments on a Paradigm Shift”.

Ute Meta Bauer, director of the MIT Visual Arts Programme, will debate issues and the challenges art production faces today at the University of Fine Arts. And, at the Kunsthalle, acclaimed Austrian mixed-media artist Erwin Wurm will debate with others on the ”Status quo of Austrian Video”.

“Temptation is all around for every artist,” says Wurm, a professor at Vienna’s University of Applied Arts and whose “One Minute Sculptures” and “Fat Car” keep him high on the art scene’s watch list. “I’m being tempted all the time, it’s wonderful to be addicted to art.”

Entry free for all events; bookings a must: www.viennaartweek.at