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2010
collaboration with Manfred Grübl
drawing:installation
acrylic paint on aluminum, newspaper on wooden construction, carpet, record
approx. 3 x 7 m
record player with soundwork by Manfred Grübl
Biblioteca Vasconcelos, Mexico City, MX
As part of the Austrian-Mexican cultural exchange program, two exhibitions were held featuring works by Mexican and Austrian artists. The installation of drawings UNICAMENTE LA VERDAD, created in Mexico, was shown in the first of these exhibitions, at the Trakl-Haus in Salzburg. For the subsequent exhibition at the Biblioteca Vasconcelos in Mexico City, a work was realized in collaboration with Manfred Grübl.
Since the exhibition rooms contained no surfaces on which works could be mounted or room dividers apart from several movable glass walls, it was decided that the work, as an autonomous freestanding structure, would begin by defining its own situation. Before work at the exhibition site began, the artists planned the construction of two wooden walls set at an angle; a carpet, a record player, and loudspeaker boxes would complement the suggestion of a living-room scenario.
The wooden walls served as a surface onto which Manfred Grübl’s “Magazin Version Nr. 1”—a journal with writings by a variety of authors and artists—were pasted. The entire journal was glued to the wide wooden planks that formed the movable walls, covering the gaps between them. On top of this ground, which forms its own loose grid, Schwarzwald’s drawings—on paper laminated onto thin aluminum sheets—are attached flush to the walls with nails. The drawings, uniformly measuring 16 x 9 inch, are set into an overarching grid like units of a modular system. Individually or grouped in ensembles of two, three, four, or six drawings, they form an incomplete modular structure superimposed on the looser and more narrow grid of the journal pages. Although the sheets are not mounted seamlessly even within groups—the gaps between them, measuring .4 inch, articulate the grid, which virtually traverses the empty areas as well—they are in each instance comprehended by a shared illusionistic frame of the sort first used in VOL 1: DEPARTURE. The empty corners of the support mediums not occupied by the frames due to their perspectival tilt have been cut off in the respective sheets from each group.
Most of the drawings show moiré patterns, with superimposed blots in the ornamental color blue. Semi-transparent, they resemble blinds; this and the dominant black-and-white contribute to the integration of the blocks of drawings with the underlying layers of the pasted journal pages and the wooden wall, emphasizing the decorative character and residential comfort of the situation circumscribed by the wall. The turntable is playing a record showing the image of a dog on its entire face. The dog belongs to Manfred Grübl, who is conducting a conversation with her in Spanish (marge y gruebl—una conversación rudimentaria). Her name is Marge. In a portmanteau with the marginal character of the installation, which suggests a stage setting, the ensemble was given the title MARGENAL.