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2000
drawing:installation
mixed media on paper
120 drawings
32 x 24 each
Amtshof, Feldkirchen, AT
The creation of this installation of drawings was occasioned by a political development. The exhibition Synkopen was held in the summer of 2000. In elections held in late 1999, Jörg Haider’s right-wing populist party FPÖ had become the second-strongest faction in the Austrian parliament, and in early 2000, the conservative party ÖVP, after long negotiations and despite its promises to the contrary before the election, joined the FPÖ in a coalition government. Austria’s cultural scene, traditionally highly dependent on the culture of state subsidies, entered a period of vociferous political awakening against the right-wing coalition. The Viennese Academy flew a black banner with the letters “Widerstand” (“Resistance”) on its façade. Any member of the cultural and intellectual classes knew how to tell good and evil apart, except that drawing this distinction became a little less easy when newly elected FPÖ functionaries showed up at various cultural events to hand over bouquets and checks.
The participation in the group exhibition featuring six artists was the result of an invitation from the artist Renate Ritscher. The exhibition was held at the Amtshof in Feldkirchen, in Haider’s home state of Carinthia. The general climate of a well-meaning but superficial political awakening in the art scene provided the occasion for this examination of the superficial site where the distinction between the self and the other is marked: the face categorized as the enemy (Feindbild means the concept or, more literally, the picture of the enemy). The 122 drawings in the installation, uniformly measuring 13 x 9 inch, are mounted as a block in four rows well below eye level, like a form of wall paneling. The individual sheets represent critical recreations of motifs from Lavater’s doctrine of physiognomy. The antiquated idea that a person’s character can be detected in the visible proportions of the face—an idea that has been irreversibly politically contaminated by its adaptations in the racial theories of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—functions as an allegory of the political and moral categorizations of self and other on the basis of features of cultural socialization.