Mind Expanders: Performative Bodies Around ‘68
MUMOK, Vienna, Austria
In his posthumously published book Building in France (1995) Siegfried Giedeon recounts the experience of approaching a train station. Observing trains coming and going, people departing and leaving, the great thinker starts wondering: ‘Where is the architecture? You see certain elements, but where is architecture? Nowhere. What we’ve got are just ways of channelling streams of movement. There is no such thing as architecture.’ The history of architecture (and not only architecture) can be read as the history of swelling or diminishing movement streams, with some mighty channels drying up, or other trickles of data turning into torrents (or torrentz).
‘Mind Expanders: Performative Bodies Around ‘68’ at Vienna’s MUMOK focusses on the long 1960s as the exemplary decade of radical change: socially, architecturally and performatively. Recognizing the imbrication of these three disparate fields, the show brings together examples of speculative architecture and radical performance art in line with the sentiment of the cheesy (though plausible) exhibition title. It’s expanding our minds, man… Nervously categorical, the curators (Edelbert Köb, assisted by Tina Lipsky and Rainer Fuchs) actually split the two hemispheres of their hybrid show across separate floors: the architecture features on the third floor, while performances lurks in the basement.
The link between architecture and performance art is an elevator. In his manifesto Delirious New York (1978) Rem Koolhaas claims that the elevator gave rise to the skycraper and, therefore, to what he calls Manhattanism – technological change underwrites social change. Koolhaas doesn’t otherwise feature in the show (a shame, since his 1972 Architecture Association project Exodus, or Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture, a Bataillean zone of excess projected into the middle of London, complete with sex baths and Running Man-style death arenas), might have shaken things up a bit), but the rest of the usual suspects appear. For example, Archigram and Superstudio, playing their now-customary roles as ready-made signifiers of architectural radicalism, are both present, completely cut off from contemporary issues. Thirty-five years later, Archigram’s Plug-In City (1964) seems about as cutting-edge as Tang. The acid-fried Californian group Ant Farm (who are currently experiencing something of a revival) are more refreshing; the Barbarella-esque efforts of furniture designer Bruno Gironcoli are inviting, but, naturally, are not allowed to be touched. You are allowed to admire ‘60s Utopian architecture, but you are not allowed to inhabit it.
Downstairs, the performance art floor tells its own story, indexing the ubiquitous period recourse to two major strategies: nudity and blood. In The Lips of Thomas (1976) Marina Abramović whips herself; in Meat Joy (1964) Carolee Schneemann frolicked in gore. You can’t expand minds, of course, without bathing in viscera, but a little goes a long way. For this reason, the exceptions are the most refreshing: the two works by Peter Weibel and Valie Export, both of which suggest fine ideas for weekend activities. Weibel is now the head of the illustrious ZKM in Karlsruhe, while Export is a professor of multimedia performance at the Kunsthochschule für Medien in Cologne. But back in the ‘60s, they were lovers and partners. In Tapp- und Tastkino (Touch and Taste Cinema) (1968–71), performed in ten European cities over three years, and documented by video, Export stood on a street with a box around her naked upper body, as Weibel invited passing pedestrian traffic to fondle her. In Aus der Mappe der Hundigkeit (From the Portfolio of Doggishness, 1968) Export led Weibel through Vienna on a leash, as someone took photos.
The most memorable work in the architecture section is also by an Austrian: Hans Hollein’s collage of a Rolls Royce fender in the New York City skyline (Rolls Royce Grill on Wall Street, 1963)). Today Hollein is of course a respectable establishment architect: a typical destiny for yesterday’s avant-garde, which in fact drives the production of canonizing exhibitions like this one. The question is whether displaying a roll call of experiments-conducted-earlier is supportive or repressive of new ones.
MUMOK is located in Museum Quartier, a vast fortified area devoted to the consecration of past art in which all practical art is forbidden. The area is dotted with strange, yellow-sofa things: ‘Relax!’ states the silent injunction. ‘But not too much.’ Behave like you would in a graveyard.
Daniel Miller
Responses
There are no responses yet for this article.
