Below a Picture
A linguistic study of the City of Graz’s art collection.
When one looks at the titles that visual artists have given their works from the time when the collection was established in the early days of the 20th century, one can clearly notice tendencies, vogues, and social realities. For instance, in the 1980s the impact of media becomes increasingly clear, and the preference for foreign languages changes over the decades… Titles that are a creative construction in their own right without intending to be the description of a work of art, have increased considerably to the present, and an artwork’s title is less and less synonymous for it.
Besides archival lists of thousands of titles of works from the collection [of the City of Graz] the edition comprises two texts based on the “linguistic material” of the titles of artworks from this collection.
Both texts were recorded and are now on the A and B sides of a 10” limited edition vinyl record. In the exhibition 72km+ at Künstlerhaus. Halle für Medien in Graz (2016/17), the work was presented as spatial installation with speakers inserted into the walls so as not to be visible and to spark the impression that the speaker’s voice were wandering around the space.
The edition (50 copies) is both a linguistic study of the City of Graz’s art collection and a small series of photographs of the empty archive space that, in the reader’s and listener’s imagination, evoke images of pictures and sculptures (book edition: unter ein Bild [Below a Picture]; vinyl record edition: fiktiver Archivar [fictional archivist]). The edition does not provide images of works from the collection. Both editions – vinyl record and artist’s book – come in a 30×30 cm slipcase.
The edition’s title “unter ein Bild” refers to a visual poem by Paul Celan that is part of the collection. Celan wrote the poem for a work of Vincent van Gogh, which in turn was the inspiration for countless poems by different authors.
The edition is considered as a prototype for linguistic studies of artistic work.