Unterspiel
"Unterspiel" by Dana Samuel, Summer 2007, p. 103
In the novel Time’s Arrow, by Martin Amis, time flows backwards: exile gives way to homeland, Nazi death camps give way to mass births, collective guilt is traded for innocence. The trajectory of time and history becomes a space for play and fiction.
It is in this playful, fictionalized space that many contemporary Austrian—and German—artists find relief from the guilt still present in post-war Europe. In “Unterspiel,” an exhibition at the University of Toronto’s Blackwood Gallery and its satellite e-Gallery (and previously shown at the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver in 2005), the contemporary Viennese artists Catrin Bolt, Marlene Haring, Patrick Baumüller and Severin Hofmann, monochrom and Hans Schabus rethink, reframe and play with history. The curator, Séamus Kealy, is as playful as the artists themselves: unterspiel—an invented German word meaning “underplay”—connotes a mischievous turn.
For their performance installation Premature Burial as a Field Trial for Near Death Activities, in which participants are buried in shallow graves for 15 minutes, the artist collective monochrom received much attention—not least from the University of Toronto itself, whose bureaucracy insisted the work could cause panic and harm. The artists offer up more bureaucracy in return: a waiver for participants to sign absolving the artists (and presumably the university) from any liability.
Hans Schabus’s Western more subtly traverses similar territory. For this 2002 video installation, Schabus created a sort of wheelbarrow/sailboat to navigate the sewers beneath Vienna, the same sewers through which Orson Welles’s character Harry Lime attempts his escape in Carol Reed’s film The Third Man. Schabus evokes the film through his expert cinematography and his use of the film’s unmistakable zither soundtrack. His trek through Vienna’s underbelly runs on a loop, presenting a continuous journey of escape and arrival.
Other artists work with cultural stereotypes. Marlene Haring’s SEX DEATH NIVEA consists of Nivea cream smeared over the gallery’s glass entrance. The German skin cream has come to symbolize natural health, wellness and cleansing—its hyperbolic presence here stands for a manic obsessiveness in a context where hygiene has complex associations with death as well as beauty and health.
The other cultural stereotypes presented are perhaps more familiar to the Mississauga audience. Baumüller and Hofmann create a Viennese Würstelstand— a sausage hut. On display is documentation of a Vancouver performance in which the artists hand out sausages with sauerkraut, rye and all the fixings. Outside, between the main Blackwood space and the e-Gallery, students and faculty line up at Mike’s Doghouse—a distinctly North American–style hot-dog cart where ketchup and mustard on white bread are de rigueur. While the juxtaposition hints at our cultural similarities, the Würstelstand images, isolated inside the gallery, also raise the question of whether the underhanded prankishness of “Unterspiel” was mostly lost on this busy, hungry campus.
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