GUITAR

GUITAR – Light refracts, sound flows. Fishing for music.
The installation Gitarre [Guitar] (2021) operates as direct reaction to a location and its givens, creating connections between the sculptural intervention and the particular circumstances with its structure.

A set of guitar strings that touch the water, drawing large coloured bows from their positions on six (existing) pedestals, call for various interpretations depending on the position and view:

Seen from the path looking onto the water, they appear as long fishing rods painted in bright colours. From the bridge, a rainbow with light from behind. The point of view changes perception. Time transforms light and colour. CM

Neuer Kunstverein Wien presents new works by Claudia Märzendorfer.
At the centre of Märzendorfer’s work is her interest in the processual, the shifting, the dissolving and disappearing; the irretrievability of a fleeting moment that can only be inscribed in our memory and revived. While she has been working and experimenting for many years with materials associated with the idea of the impermanent, the uncontrollable: melting ice or flowing ink, her new work at NKW literally freezes time and the past.
With her sculptural installation PS at Neuer Kunstverein Wien, Märzendorfer refers to the history of the exhibition space, which was once a car showroom presenting the latest models of the German luxury sports car Porsche. Her exhaust cloud floating in the room evokes memories of the former use of the space. Fifty floating casts of oil canisters – some of which are delicately overdrawn with ink and made of ceramic material – intensify this reconstruction of the past. 12 framed sketches accompany the sculptural installation. PS denotes horsepower, speed, mobility, change. But PS also means the labelling of a text appendix and plays with this double meaning.

Märzendorfer’s installation decelerates time, indeed makes it stand still, and transports the viewer into an exhibition that appropriates the time format of extreme slow motion. With the absence of cars and her focus on their relics, Märzendorfer thematises the dialectic of presence and absence, mobility and immobility and reality and perception. The cloud of exhaust fumes from the emissions left behind, frozen into a sculpture, transports visitors, as Märzendorfer says, into the everyday or childhood phenomenon of seeing images in clouds. The invisible becomes visible.
As Bordieu taught us, the view of things depends on the viewer. Every culture, every person is part of the knowledge and opinion machine of social perception, as well as a number of other internal and external circumstances that are constantly changing and in motion due to the multitude of perceptions. Nothing is completed, no body, no knowledge, drive in drive out. Text: NKW/ CM

Every building, every street, every city can be a sea of lights.

A sea of lights (Lichtermeer*) for Willi Resetarits: as a musician and activist, he epitomized the cultural scene from the 1970s onwards, the so called Kreisky years – the time I grew up in and beyond – like no other. People began to overcome the brown stink with culture and a de-tabooed language. Various anti-terms were a common method of creating a progressive, modern society and to counter vative blinkered thinking. Anti-hierarchy to strengthen democracy. One discussed anti-capitalism, formed the anti-nuclear movement and began to engage with various marginalized groups in a process that is still trying to address issues of inequality in a constantly changing to this day. Social engagement was seen as the social supreme discipline.

A critical mindset ment formed the bridge between the middle classes and the proletariat and became social common sense. This process was supported by the center of society which guarded against political extremes. Willi Resetarits was at the forefront of these movements. A version of thinking society that was courageous and warm-hearted. It made a profound contribution to modernization and tried to make inclusion in Austrian prosperity possible across the board. We felt safe on the island. Everything that united society was within our grasp close at hand, so there was no doubt that with attitude you could do anything.

Excerpt realization/design: …The number of these circular bright areas created by the color and running into the grey of the background corresponds to the number of people who could stand in a sea of lights on 172 square meters and whose lights shine on the ceiling 688 people / 4 per square meter and 1 dog. The illuminated areas are between 5 and 15 cm in size (see total ceiling mirror). The overall picture is also reminiscent of the lights of a house, a city or a starry sky. (See illustration ceiling view.)

Technical implementation of the partition and documentation. …For the documentation of the overall project, pupils aged 7 to 14 from the adjacent Innerfavoriten educational campus were invited to take part in a participatory project. The invitation to the pupils will be sent in writing via the management of the Favoriten educational campus. (see below) . The task of the children & teenagers is to draw a sea of lights. The drawing is to be executed on A3-sized paper in free interpretation. The paper will be provided to the campus for the task. All finished drawings are collected, counted and scanned and digitized.

This joint and participatory part aims to bring the Kunst am Bau project directly into society and young generation. The up to 1,200 drawings (with approximately 1,200 students between the ages of 7 and 14) with a sea of lights are the core of a book PDF that will be printed three times by September, one of which will be sent to the library in the Willi-Resetarits-Hof, one to KÖR WIEN (=project organizer) and one to me to document the project. The cover and endpapers feature the photographs of my Kunst am Bau design. The PDF of the book with the digitized image files will be sent to KÖR WIEN and the City of Vienna or the district and can be used by them or serve to document the Willi-Resetarits-Hof. The Lichtermeer book of the Kunst am Bau project Willi-Resetarits-Hof sets an example for a lively creative coexistence at the site, its namesake and living together (at this site).

Later, the adolescents can go into the library with their friends under the sea of lights and discover the drawings they have created among a multitude of “sea of lights”drawings in the book.

CM 2024

* the term stands for more humanity. First  Lichtermeer (“sea of lights”) 1993, with around 250.000 people at Viennas Heldenplatz:  In 1993, the first so-called “sea of lights” took place with around 250,000 people at Heldenplatz in Vienna,  people with lights, lighters, flashlights, mobile phone lights at demos and concerts. Willi Resetarits was one of the organizers.

As a child, I was able to look at wallpaper for a long time. Where a pattern begins and where it ends. I discovered shapes that could also have been other pictures. I continued to play with patterns everywhere in my childhood as a counting disease. Every day on the street, on the way to school with asphalt sections and cobblestones that you were allowed to walk on or had to avoid! I knew exactly how many steps my house had, counted the tiles in the bathroom, when I lay in the bathtub every evening and swam in the cozy waves. My eyes searched for rhythms that followed a logic, or even several, that seemed seem appropriate and right. This precise search for systems is for children in the foreground of thinking and shapes them. Later, when they grow up after finishing elementary school, they are allowed to change these again. This overturning of rules, this questioning of what was first established, the abstraction of things and recognizing that some things are different from what they have known so far, makes you grow up.

Much later, around the 2000s, on walks with my child, I stopped for a long time cars of the same brand that had a small, running rabbit * on the back. Small bugs and snails were saved from our perspective when we found them on the asphalt and took them to the surrounding parks. We were about as big to the little animals as a whale next to a human child. But we never considered taking the running bunny, which was now clearly a picture, to neighborhood parks, after all, it was just a picture. The children will understand the sculpture as an offer to abstract. They will see things that are perhaps something completely different.

DESCRIPTION OF THE PROJECT, ARTISTIC IDEA:

A Blauwalkind  (blue whale child) is as big as the Harlaching elementary school. The Blauwalkind  is integrated into the architecture of the building, around the shaft and on the shaft wall. Its sculptural representation extends across the floors of the building, sculpturally forming the belly of the whale in the area of the canteen and the schoolyard.

Like after a leap out of the water its blow can be seen on the glass of the all-weather square: Drops of water foiled around or around or on one of the glass walls. As art in architecture at the school, it can also be a symbol of the times in which water and species have a special significance, with the blue whale being one species that must be protected.

A picture showing a whale in full size is difficult to make out. Many views show a piece of the back of the whale, as in the presentation of the a piece of the back sticking out of the water or the blowing whale jumping out of the water. The blue whale is up to 30 elephants in size, as big as thousand people and larger than many a dinosaur. It weighs up to 200 tons, tons and weighs more than all the children at our school put together.

When he “sings”, his voice is louder than an airplane on take-off, and he can drink 80,000 liters of water.  It is the largest mammal, even the largest animal on earth. The heart of a whale is as big as a car with a rabbit *. The primary school building in Harlaching is as tall as a blue whale child of primary school age is long. If blue whale parents swim close together, they would be about as long as the elementary school.
From the bottom to the top, the blue whale child is continuous over five floors of the shaft wall in the floor sections on the wall. The pupils are see a blue-grey flute (= tail fin of the blue whale child) in the basement, which resembles the outline of a large bird or the shadow of outstretched wings. On the other side, south of the shaft wall on the ground floor on the plastic white “belly side”, you may discover the shape of a tree house in the dining room growing through the ceiling. Possibly they will recognize a bright waterfall due to the surface, they may recognize a bright waterfall that seems to come down from above. Each of the waves of the outer skin  is reminiscent of the shape of a blue whale, blue-grey on its back and with its white stripes on the side of its belly break hall. The handmade wave sections are laid on the walls like tiles and like tiles and have delicate, colorful nuances. The pattern structure resembles the of water and waves in the sand. Wherever there is water, there is life on on our planet. It is mostly blue and complements the orange color scheme of the school. From the canteen to the schoolyard, you will find a large belly. Its wooden frame construction is planked with plasterboard, on which the castings are laid. When whales breathe, they emit a bubble (= air-water fountain), which can be seen above the “water surface”. In its representation at the school on the all-weather pitch, this is attached to the roof as a foil on the fencing glass enclosure.

CM 2023

Claudia Märzendorfer has always been interested in the movement and changeability of sculpture. Her meticulous work is often characterized by the use of simple materials. Movement and change can be found in a number of examples in nature: some motifs also seem to find a choreographic template in her work, whereby the artist offers a number of variations on paper in her extensive series of drawings – here she drew the ink black beauty figures in ink – their coming and going, appearance and disappearance, and provided the milk and ink as material for the drawings.

For a few years, my studio was housed in the former R. G. Atelier. Everywhere on the floor and walls were the traces of several decades of work with the colors yellow red blue; a few days before I moved out, I installed the temporary work without an audience: concrete castings in combination with ice castings, the red, the green, the blue and the ugly.

In the end, the situation collapsed, and I took some photos in the studio at the end. CM 2023

In photographs, films, and wall pieces, space and image are yoked together in a temporal axis. The pop effect, like deconstruction, is the principle that runs through Märzendorfer’s works: repetition and displacement of the possibilities of interpretation, often in a full-scale representation. No image, in her art, is ever a self-contained object, decoration on a wall; no book is pure reading, no sculpture, a work meant to last forever. A restlessness inherent in what the “material” as such implies is given form, and its manifoldness is made the plot of the representation. This principle applies to Märzendorfer’s use of her materials, including titles and subjects.

Post Studio is a mise en abyme, presenting a repetition with variants.
The photograph shows several individuals in the rooms of Claudia Märzendorfer’s studio.
In the foreground sits the artist, looking toward a cropped globe. Other people and artists from the building are part of the scenery, in varying positions in the image and the suite of rooms. They gaze forward into the camera, directly engaging the beholder in mute eye contact. Next to the artist, in the foreground, a picture hangs on the wall that shows almost the same scenery, on a smaller scale, a nested representation that repeats ad infinitum.
In the game this structure initiates, the protagonists change their positions in the room in each repetition of the picture within the picture hanging in the foreground, getting smaller and smaller, plane by plane, in the rhythm of repetition, until the representation becomes unrecognizable. At the center of each image, in the center of the studio, stands a sculpture, a hardened water cast.
Along the rooms’ floors and walls, one reads text and labels, communications whose function is explained by the studio setting. In the context of the photograph, their meaning undergoes variation: POST STUDIO, perfect vanishing, LISTENING LOOKING …

…Ah, human, who cares. It’s about the big picture. And our success proves we’re on the right track with our work, we take what we can get: the cities, the headlines, the TV stations, the squealing of thousands of fans … that’s what it’s about! And the currents work without electric current, they’re fast, they cut through the red tape, they pack a punch, they’re energy-efficient! Felix, Ike, 2008.. …

..The urban oasis, a holdover from a different era, is a piece from another world, though the present is pulsing against the enclosure. The city’s largest park surrounds it, but in the immediate vicinity, on the urban periphery, luxury apartments are going up where horses live today. And from the heart of the enclosed studio park, as though from the center of the clock’s face, the point where the hands are mounted, you can watch how the world all around you is changing day by day in the rhythm of cranes and excavators…

…00:05 a.m.
…It was late. L. had already headed back to her studio, W. was tired, and before we trudged back, each to her studio, our paths through the nocturnal park lighted by fireflies, U. parted by saying: “We should take a photo. Naked, undressed, with your fair-trade solar lamp in hand.”

The result is invariably somewhat disconcerting. We confront things here that undermine the self-assurance of what already exists. It all calls in question the dependability of the stuff we are used to. Cavities released from the plastic that enveloped them take the stage as objects. We encounter a world of things that has passed through something, that has left something behind. That is also why it keeps eluding our immediate grasp. The ice formations make for a literal experience of this elusiveness. They melt before the beholder’s eyes, they cannot be held in place, they trickle away. Then again, the shapes molded in plaster and wax, too, cannot readily be grasped. Liquid materials have set into solidity, the liquid has nestled into shells that are no longer present, has hardened and, as a solid, attests to a world beyond synthetics and plastic. This solidity is beautiful, enchanting, precious, and fragile. FOUNTAIN is solidified wax while also waxing celebratory: the sculpture is a paean to the simple and magical material.

Wax models are traditionally used in anatomy, where they are known as moulages, and figure in religious contexts as well: representations of the Madonna, the Sacred Heart, crèche figures. Sculptors embed wax models in fireproof materials and melt them out. The material for the sculpture—in most instances, a metal—is cast into the resulting cavity. Claudia Märzendorfer inverts this process, casting wax into the cavity. The result is a sculpture that has none of the solidity of sculptures cast in metal. Like other works by Märzendorfer, it is exceptionally delicate. Its surface is vulnerable, tender, a body on the verge of being-other, of melting away, of falling apart. All that is hard and solid here only seems to be, for this world is highly sensitive and forever exposed to the risk of disintegration. Metamorphotic processes play out under our eyes, cavities are transformed into solid bodies, solid bodies, into precarious existences that might change the determinacy of their form at any moment; a temperature that is a few degrees warmer is all it would take.

There is nothing figurative about Claudia Märzendorfer’s sculptures. And yet they bear a much closer relation to the human body, and indeed to the bodies of all living beings, than any naturalistic representation. They draw our attention to the precariousness of our own existence. And they are beautiful, wonderful, enchanting. That is why there is no better time for FOUNTAIN than our present with all its perils and uncertainties. And there is no better place for this sculpture than the scene of a celebration of the beauty, miracle, and magic of life.

Gustav Schörghofer

The work AROUND THE LIGHT (2020) illustrates the changes of the light over the course of a day, which is at once also a reflection of the earth’s movement around the sun. For twenty-four hours, a picture of the sky was taken every 8.19 minutes—the time the sun’s light needs to reach the earth—from one and the same position, for a total of 175 pictures.

160 of these photo-graphs are now presented, or more properly speaking projected, using two Kodak carousel projectors that hold 80 slides each. Bridging the divide between interior and exterior, they literally bring light into kunsthaus muerz’s windowless nave. Soft cross-fades let the artist create a temporal continuum as the movement of the sun recorded by the pictures and the rotation of the carousel tray come full circle.

One source of inspiration behind this work was presumably the artist’s study of the so-called cyanometer: a measuring device developed in the late nineteenth century that was designed to gauge the intensity of the sky’s blue color.

Appia Stage Program is a concert program with compositions and recordings for the medium of ice recordings.

In 2019, Märzendorfer accepted an invitation from the artistic director to the legendary Festspielhaus Hellerau. In the large hall, the “Appia Stage Reloaded” festival was the last time the stage developed by Adolphe Appia and the stage lighting developed by Alexander v. Salzmann (1911) was rebuilt in its original location. The Temple of Modernism was a magnet and center of the avant-garde at the beginning of the last century. A utopian place that has had a lasting impact on “light – space – movement” to this day. The list of artists who lived and worked in Hellerau reads like a who’s who of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Appia Stage Program is an arrangement from the Frozen Records archive and more recent recordings for two turntables. The length of the concert of around 30 minutes is matched to the original lighting with thousands of light bulbs behind the stage fabric, with the ice records on the turntables literally melting into the sound as they played.

Made of ceramic plaster and cast in moulds made from everyday plastic waste, plastic bottles conclomerate in dazzling whiteand all kinds of packaging material. The impression made by the objects varies depending on the shape and colour, from ice floes of rubbish. Märzendorfers sculptures confront us both tangibly and by assiciation with tze littering of nature and the melting of the polar ice caps. …

There is something fascinatingly alluring about this sculptures, with there stringly smooth and silky sleek white surfaces, so much so we just wantnto touch them. their extraordinary appeal lies in the disconcerting realisation that theyare attractive and repulsive in equal measure. …

Verena Kaspar (Curator), 2019

In the literary work entitled Frankreich (france) Claudia Märzendorfer uses a witty, fantastical and bizarre form to discribe the scenes of an operation contucted on a whale. The sea mammel has swallowed a chunk of „france“ and may die as a result. France alludes to one oft he largest accumulations of plastic waste in the ocean; indeed, the total surface area oft he Great Pacific Garbage Patch was recently likened to that of this western European country. In attendance around the operation table are Dr Boeing and Dr. Microsoft. Listed in the protocol oft he surgical intervention are the items found inside the whale, including computers, notebooks, i Pads and iPhones, garden chairs , and an entire set of suitcases studded with rinestones. The latter was anable to prevent the „Brexit by May“ oft he right kidney… Märzendorferst ext is packed full af allusions to capitalism and consumerism. She articulates the absurdity oft he moment as we witness tremendous concern over the impact of environment destruction colliding with our unbridled and unabated consumerism. The arrangement oft ext, image and object composed by the artist is captured and rendered in the artists characteristic black and white, tob e studied and scrudinised inside the display case.

Part of the Exhibition Text „A Blazing World“ (KunstHaus Vienna, 2019) Verena Kaspar Eisert (curator).

production, Märzendorfer opens another chapter in the history of instrument destruction, dedicating herself to an instrument that comes with very different (pop)cultural OK Linz, presented in the exhibition Sinnesrausch, 2019
Curators Genoveva Rückert and Kathi Lackner

Music develops in the dimension of time. Ephemerality and transience are central themes in Claudia Märzendorfer’s ice sculptures and videos about the destruction of instruments.

As a radical statement, the performative destruction of a piano has been a staple of art history. When Claudia Märzendorfer dismantles a grand piano, she takes an intently focused rather than a brute-force approach, and the documentation of the process on film lets us see and hear the instrument’s individual lingering resonance. Smashed to pieces, 2018, shows how a complex instrument is transformed into an aggregation of components—loose forms, bereft of all function, lie arrayed on a hardwood floor that, in this context, recalls the preprinted staffs of an empty music sheet. In a new and artistic connotations: the electric guitar, whose destruction is typically a theatrical gesture of masculine violence. She combines the two videos by replaying the sound of the piano dismantling through a guitar amplifier.

Still of the night, 2019.
Text: OK

For the Birds / Pour les oiseaux – is an art project in public space with many contributors:

A group of visual artists, writers, architects, and musicians who were invited to participate, will create an aeronautic sculpture garden – an airborne Werkbundsiedlung. Their respective bird houses are individual contributions to a collective sculptural installation. An artistic reflection.

Artists 2019, 2022, 2023:

Azra Akšamija & Dietmar Offenhuber/ Dave Allen / Sam Auinger + katrinem / Miriam Bajtala / Miriam Bajtala / Udo Bohnenberger / Catrin Bolt / Cordula Bösze / Barbara Brandstätter / Ruth Cerha / Regula Dettwiler / Elisabeth Flunger / Andreas Fogarasi / Grete, Toni, Nicole / Maia Gusberti / Elektro Guzzi / Judith Fegerl / Anne Hardy / Rosa Hausleithner / Johannes Heuer / Edgar Honetschläger / Rudi Klein / Kluckyland / Simona Koch / Susanne Schuda / kozek hörlonski / Evelyn Loschy / Stefan Lux / Lotte Lyon / Claudia Märzendorfer / M&S Architects – Uta Lambrette / Maja Osojnik / Kunstkollektiv RHIZOM / Almut Rink / Peter Sandbichler / Hans Schabus / Toni Schmale & Wally Salner / Ferdinand Schmatz & Annelie Gahl / Ed Schnabl / Stefanie Seibold / Abdul Sharif Obdulwafemi Baruwa / Nicole Six & Paul Petritsch / Steinbrener/Dempf & Huber / Carsten Stabenow – tuned city / Andi Strauss / the next ENTERprise / Sophie Thalbauer / Sophie Thun / Viktoria Tremmel / Herwig Turk & Gerhard Huber / Anita Witek / Werner Würtinger.

University of Applied Arts Vienna- Students: 2021 TransArts,  2024 Sculpture and Space; 

smashed to pieces is the cinematic recording of the dismanting of a concert grand piano, as carried out collectively by several paticipants. One is witness to a concentrated action, a focussed live act, one in which the form of the instrument is gradually altered – from a compact functioning structure to a loose assemblage of divers forms that now, presumably free of any function, could be channelled toward other uses.

The chosen camera perspective is a frontal image, which permits a view into the space from above. The film is projected 1:1 onto the floor oft he exhibition space. In experiencing the work, the viewer and camera perpectives thus become identical, while visitors that enter the exhibition room itself become live participants in a certain sense, interacting with the cinematic scene as in a sort of hybrid image. The action was documented live acoustically by means of contact microphones affixed to the instrument – the polyphony created in the course of the decomposition of the grand piano was used in the composition oft he soundtrack.

Countless piano demolitions have been carried out and described over the past 150 years by musicians, writers, performance artists and illustrators. The cinematic installation at hand operates on this foundation. These acts are always about making a radical statement and thus adopting a stance in relation to the world. Much more than dealing with the mere coaxing of sound from the instrument, these efforts are instead about the reverberations within the individual, with the instrument serving as the organ of demonstration.

Liszt has a broken nose,
Schoenberg is black,
and Beethoven’s ears are deaf as a rock.
Since we’ve been waiting for so long, have spent many a concert evening here, observing the comings and goings, we’re brought out for a group picture. To be dusted off just for once and come down from the pedestal, to be carried through the halls. Many of us have never met in person, and some hate each other’s guts, while others invoke each other’s authority. We typically spend the concert nights in the hallway. No one’s given us tickets, we’d certainly be interested in a subscription, but we don’t have the money. Not that that’s unusual in the business. Maybe a modest orchestra standing-room ticket sometime soon …
“What do they call it today? Eu…?”
“Where’s Mr. Beethoven got to?”
He should be in the lobby. Probably hasn’t heard a thing about the photo op. We’ll leave room for him when we line up for the camera. Worst-case scenario, if he can’t come, they can photoshop him in. …
Summons to all musicians permanently present at the Vienna Konzerthaus:
A photograph is to be taken; the composers’ convention is scheduled for May 2018 in the Schubert Hall.

Project sketch:
The Vienna Konzerthaus’s corridors, auditoriums, and halls are stocked with a vast number of musicians’ busts, including Liszt, Schoenberg, Beethoven, and many others. These busts are manifestly the works of different sculptors and date from different periods. Their form, material, and size aside, the execution of the heads cannot be equated to the musicians’ oeuvres.
Summoning the musicians for a convention is a venture that—if one imagines a real-world meeting of these masters from different eras, setting aside the dimension of time—builds suspense through its singularity, like the event of a rare conjunction of the stars.
The silence that hangs over the photograph of their gathering lets the beholder sense some of the resonance and the dissonance that might be generated between those depicted in it if the image were not an image, if bronze could speak to stone.
The sculptures representing composers that are normally installed in different places throughout the Konzerthaus, at elevations that put them on an equal footing with real bodies, are collected for a group portrait and photographed in the Schubert Hall.

Claudia Märzendorfer Ein Quadratmeter Land, 2017 [One Square Meter of Land]

In her works, the Austrian artist Claudia Märzendorfer deals with processes and transformations as well as the subject of transience. A trained sculptor, she uses various media and materials (such as ice, ink, steel, sound, and photography) and techniques (such as knitting a car) that are often elaborate (and time-consuming) in their production. She integrates the subject of time as a basic element and theme into her works. Märzendorfer has gained renown for her objects made of frozen water. Water also plays a crucial, if not immediately obvious, role in her work Ein Quadratmeter Land [One Square Meter of Land], which has been specially commissioned for the exhibition Visions of Nature, as water constitutes the most important (inorganic) component of the various meadow grasses that the artist photographed. For this project, Märzendorfer walked across an alpine pasture and with rigorous oversight took exactly framed pictures of one square meter. She thus parcels pieces of land with almost scientific care and transfers true-to-scale representations of them into the exhibition space for us to examine. This approach reminds one of Karl Bloßfeldt, who—himself a trained sculptor—attempted to capture “primordial forms of nature” in the plant kingdom. In contrast to the dead plants in Bloßfeldt’s studio, Märzendorfer’s meadow pieces are brimming with life and energy. The artist deliberately opted for a season in which the grasses grow in all their glory. An enormous diversity of colors and forms is represented on these small patches of the planet’s surface (the entire area of which is 149,430,000,000 sqm). The fascination triggered by these images is surprising—after all, what is represented here is “merely” a few ordinary patches of grassland. However, they contain so much awe-inspiring complexity that our image of nature is elevated to sublimity. Visitors may also take home one square meter of land, with coordinates between 38° and 40° north and 27° and 29° east, by tearing it from a 5,000-piece poster block on the floor—a piece of nature as a souvenir. Grass types pictured in the photographs: Timothy-grass (Phleum pratense) Tall oat grass (Arrhenatherum elatius) Cock’s-foot grass (Dactylis glomerata) Smooth meadow-grass (Poa pratensis) Red fescue (Festuca rubra) Jointleaf rush (Juncus articulatus)

Verena Kaspar (Curator)

______________________________________________

Nature, organic matter – consists mainly of water. Photographs – historical and contemporary – can also be called frozen images of a point in time. To describe Claudia Märzendorfer’s working method, one could therefore conclude: Märzendorfer makes performative installations out of frozen water, and undertakes excursions with other material with the same consistency. For example, by walking across fields, scanning them, dismantling spaces and reassembling them. In 1.Q.M.LAND, an entire field was roamed in this sense, recorded and dissected from the perspective of a surveyor. This is usually done in square meters, as are the individual photographs in the work. The vine-covered survey was taken in a 1:1 format, each 1x1m, from a bird’s eye view.

1.Q.M.LAND defines the contradiction between the noble idea of what nature means to us and the constant temptation to exploit it by transferring “one square meter of land”, of this 5,000 square meter meadow with meter-long and rare grasses, from the outdoor space to the indoor space of the exhibition. With a m3 high block, to 10,000 posters, the 1x1m large images of these meadow parts are made to disappear with the participation of the exhibition visitors through the demolition and appropriation of the meadow leaves.

Auf Seite A und B sind je ein gesprochener Text.
Beide Textarbeiten beziehen sich auf das Archiv einer Kunstsammlung.

Solidaritätskonzert mit 2 Plattenspielern

9´ Eisschallplatten, 12´ Minuten.

Rhizom – Palais Attems Graz, Juni 2017

Tonspur [Sound track], 2017, is a series of eight ink drawings on washi, handmade Japanese paper. Vertical lines in black, white and a subtle grey run from left to right, spreading across the sheet of paper. Some lines are drawn powerfully and straight like incisions from top to bottom, then again delicately like fine seams; sometimes the lines are short, creating a dense field, next to these longer ones deflect; in turn others seem to follow a diversion and deviate from the straight line – like a sound wave that transmits across a water surface. Just as in her serial drawings, which by means of varying straight lines address topics such as repetition, compression and creating rhythm on a page, and which can be found as album covers for bands thilges3 and Polwechsel, here too musical themes resp. the question of recording sound itself: both in the sense of notation and sound track, play a role.
Contentwise these graphic works are closely related to the artist’s sculptural work, which present a momentum of resistance – be this a supposedly wrong choice of means (for instance in the case of the ridiculously time-consuming and complex handmade, that is knitted, production of a lorry’s spare parts), the transitory and temporary nature of her objects (many of them are made of frozen water and ink, one of the artist’s preferred materials), or the claim of everything to be contained in nothing, as demonstrated with the piece white noise (2009). This is a spatially extensive shelf full of empty books – the book of all books – that each shows a very fine sound track on their edges. The music typewriter (2012), on the other hand – a prototype of Arnold Schönberg’s notation typewriter designed by the artist and cast in frozen ink – notes during the process of melting away an ever new score of its own disappearance on the stack of notation paper it is placed upon.
Thus, an equal alternation between drawing and recording/noting runs like a consistent line through Claudia Märzendorfer’s oeuvre. Whether or not the series of drawings Tonspur (Das Verschwinden der Maschine im Geiste der Musik) [Sound track. The disappearance of the machine in the spirit of music] should be considered as a parallel thread of thought or continuation of one of her three-dimensional works, is not defined by the artist.

The cardboard box with the record and drawing is covered with iridescent bookbinding and contains the sound recording in vinyl from an ice record
a drawing print from an ice record.

Reisegruppe schöner Männer [Travel Group of Handsome Men] is an experimental set-up – or gesture – in which, just like a composition, Claudia Märzendorfer playfully combines elements that could be the main components of larger groups of works.

Sketches of a Windscreen on two US-paletts, 2016

What do you do, stranded in the midst of nowhere? In the midst of anywhere.
Standing next to seven US-paletts, Wotruba is thinking aloud. He makes a sketch with motor oil. At least there’s enough paper, and the petrol station even has a photocopier. Those from the beginnings are still the best! His plan is bold: Thirty of the records put on ice, among them hits like Rasberry Fields Forever and Wotrubas Erben, will be melted and formed anew. Sure: All water under the bridge. Still: Should the plan work, one could make progress with the new, improvised screen. It‘s a run against time. Somehow, everything is connected and interdependent …
Reisegruppe schöner Männer [Travel Group of Handsome Men] is an experimental set-up – or gesture – in which, just like a composition, Claudia Märzendorfer playfully combines elements that could be the main components of larger groups of works.

The “Musictypewriter” finished the sketches (score IV) to the Composition. the record is ready. Nothing can stop us.

neunten November 2015
Werner brachte mir mit einer Sackkarre Wotrubas Agave,
wenig später erhielt ich dann auch Wotrubas Oleander.
Er begleitete die Angelegenheit mit den Worten, dass er die Pflanzen damals beim Wechsel der Bildhauerschule von Wotruba zu Gironcoli gerettet hat. Die Umstände werde ich hier nicht weiter ausführen (…)
Jedenfalls ist über die Jahrzehnte aus den “Wotrubaschen Pflanzen”, seiner Nachkommen und vielen Anderen ein sehr besonderer Garten entstanden.

Claudia Märzendorfer
Raspberry
Kunst im öffentlichen Raum – Haus des Lebens, Ybbsitz

Ausgangssituation

Bereits seit dem 12. Jahrhundert ist die an der niederösterreichischen Eisenstraße gelegene Gemeinde Ybbsitz ein Ort der Schmiede. Dank ihrer topographischen Lage an drei Bächen und umgeben von Wald war die Versorgung mit der für die Metallbearbeitung notwendigen Wasserkraft und Holzkohle stets garantiert. Zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts ließen sich hier erste Metallindustriebetriebe nieder.
Bis heute spielen Schmiedehandwerk und Metallbearbeitung eine wirtschaftliche und vor allem identitätsstiftende Rolle in der Gemeinde. Mit der Vermittlung von Wissen rund um das Thema Metallbearbeitung und Handwerkstradition hat sich Ybbsitz in jüngster Zeit auch als Ort der Begegnung etabliert. Als elementare Voraussetzung für die Bearbeitung von Eisen spielt Feuer eine bedeutende Rolle für die Gemeinde.

Idee

Sieben bunte Fahnen ragen hoch über das neu errichtete Gebäude „Haus des Lebens“ in Ybbsitz hinaus. In den Farben des Feuers gehalten bilden die Fahnen ein weithin sichtbares Zeichen. Zugleich markieren die in denselben Farben lackierten Fahnenmasten den neu geschaffenen Platz und stellen eine Balance mit dem am Marktplatz gelegenen Brunnen her. Ohne Wappen und Symbolen sind die monochrom gefärbten Flaggen zunächst frei von Zuschreibungen und signalisieren Offenheit und Vielfalt, ihre Bewegung steht für Lebendigkeit. Dies sind elementare Voraussetzungen für ein gutes Miteinander, das Ybbsitz als „Ort der Begegnung“ verkörpert und wie man so sagt, sich „an die Fahnen“ heftet. Die bunt lackierten Maststangen unterstreichen die Attraktivität des neuen Platzes als Ort des Versammelns.

Die im Wind wehenden Stoffbahnen lassen im Zusammenspiel an ein loderndes Feuer denken. Die stetige, fließende Bewegung der Fahnen erinnert an flackernde Flammen und so verfehlt selbst die künstlerisch abstrahierte Repräsentation eines Feuers nicht die beruhigende Wirkung, die sich auch einstellt, wenn man in die lodernden Flammen eines Lagerfeuers starrt.
Im Theater sind von unten mit Luft in Bewegung versetzte Tücher eine bewährte und beliebte Methode um Feuer darzustellen. Theaterfeuer. Im Theater greift man überhaupt oft und gern auf Tricks zurück die helfen eine Illusion zu erwecken. Beispielsweise Rhabarber: Von Statisten mehrmals hintereinander gesprochen, wirkt Rhabarber Rhabarber Rhabarber wie ein fernes Stimmengemurmel. Das funktioniert auch im Englischen: rhubarbrhubarbrhubarb… und erfüllt dort ebenso wie hierzulande am Theater diesen Zweck.
Das Geräusch, das die im Wind bewegten Fahnen erzeugen entspricht dem Knistern von brennendem Holz. Möglicherweise könnte man auf der Bühne dieses Geräusch durch die mehrmalige Wiederholung des Wortes rrrasberrry rrrasberrry rrrasberrry mit rollendem r und zischendem s imitieren? Jedenfalls überlagern sich die Klänge der wehenden Fahnen und des nebenan plätschernden Pollingbachs und bilden einen eigenen Live-Soundtrack.

Die titelgebende Rasberry ist auch die Bezeichnung einer der für Fahnen und Fahnenmasten gewählten Rottöne, nebst strawberry, citron, orange … rosa, weiß und schwarz. Schwarz wie Kohle und wie Ruß.

Umsetzung

Alle sieben Fahnen haben eine Länge von 6 m, variieren aber in ihrer Breite zwischen 100 und 200 cm. Die obere Stoffbreite ist am Ende der Fahnenmasten montiert. Der gewählte Stoff ist für den vorgesehenen Zweck geeignet, d.h. riß- und wetterfest.
Eine zweite Garnitur zum Wechseln wird mitgeliefert.
Fahne und Fahnenmast sind jeweils in derselben Farbe lackiert.

Die Fahnenmasten sollen in Zusammenarbeit mit einer der ortsansässigen Schmieden / Schlossereibetriebe produziert werden. Durch die Einbindung eines solchen Handwerksbetriebs hat man die Möglichkeit einer individuellen, für die künstlerische Arbeit „maßgeschneiderten“ Gestaltung, die sich von industriell gefertigten Fahnenstangen abheben. Die Masten sind 13 bis 15 m hoch und überragen somit das „Haus des Lebens“ um gut einen Meter. Sie sind direkt, ohne Sockel, im Boden verankert und auf einer Fläche von mind. 6 m2 unregelmäßig angeordnet.
Die finale Anordnung wird mit der Kommune abgestimmt, gegebenenfalls kann auch die Anzahl der Fahnen adaptiert werden. Es sollten jedoch mind. sieben Fahnen sein, wie im Projektvorschlag.

Vier fotografische Aufnahmen der leeren Räume für die zukünftige Neuaufstellung der Kunstsammlung Graz
Jeweils Schuss und Gegenschuss

Teil einer mehrteiligen Auftragsarbeit für die Stadt Graz
bestehend aus
– Fotoedition “das leere Archiv”
– Textarbeit + Publikation “unter ein Bild”
– Schallplattenedition “fiktiver Archivar”

Eine sprachliche Betrachtung der Kunstsammlung Graz

Beobachtet man die Wahl der Titel bildender Künstler seit den Anfängen der Sammlung im frühen 20. Jhdt. kann man deutlich Strömungen, Moden und soziale Gegebenheiten ablesen. Beispielsweise werden ab den 1980er Jahren Medieneinflüsse zunehmend ablesbar, Fremdsprachen wechseln einander in den unterschiedlichen Jahrzehnten ab. … Jene Titel, die eine eigene kreative Schöpfung sind – ohne “das Werk” direkt beschreiben zu wollen – nehmen bis heute deutlich zu. Immer weniger ist der Name eines Werkes ein Synonym dessen.

Die daraus entstandene Edition beinhaltet zu den archivarischen Listen mit den tausenden Titeln der Sammlung zwei Texte, so gesehen gebaut aus dem “Spachmaterial” der Werktitel dieser Sammlung.

Beide Texte sind auf die Seiten A und B einer 10 Inch Lackplatte in limitierter Auflage eingesprochen. Im Rahmen der Ausstellung 72km+ im KM-H Künstlerhaus Graz (2016/17) wurde das beispielsweise auch als räumliche Installation mit mehreren unsichtbaren Wand-Speakern gezeigt, die den Eindruck erwecken, als würde sich die Sprecherstimme im Raum bewegen…

Die daraus entstandene Edition in der Auflage von 50 Stück ist eine sprachliche Betrachtung der Kunstsammlung Graz in den Räumen des leeren Archivs bei der Bilder und Plastiken im Kopf des Lesers ( Edition in Buchform: unter ein Bild) und Hörers (Edition auf Schallplatte: fiktiver Archivar) entstehen.

Von Werken der Sammlung sind keine Abbildungen in der Edition zu sehen. Beide Editionen – Schallplatte und Künstlerbuch – sind mit einem Schuber im Format 30 x 30 cm.

Die Namensgebung “unter ein Bild” der Edition bezieht sich auf ein Bildgedicht von Paul Celan aus der Sammlung. Celan schrieb das Gedicht zu einem Werk Vincent van Goghs zudem wiederum unzählige Gedichte unterschiedlicher Personen entstanden sind.

Die Edition versteht sich als Prototyp für eine Sprachanalyse künstlerischer Arbeit.

Märzendorfer manufactures objects out of frozen water or ink: ephemeral sculptures whose disintegration begins the moment they are presented. The ice pieces are an “anti-idea” against that of sculpture, the epitome of the three-dimensional image created for eternity and frozen in time. The artist sets images in motion and creates situations that, thanks to their instability, contain the seeds of moments of surprise.
The eleventh ice piece, or perhaps more properly snow sculpture, in Märzendorfer’s catalogue raisonné, titled Snowman, black, undergoes transformation both of its shape and its phase of matter. A classic three-part snowman, dyed with ink, melts over the course of the exhibition opening. To the artist’s mind, the figure, simple as such (graphically speaking, it is composed of three circles; in three dimensions, of three spheres, as seen also in the related paintings), is a pop icon and critically endangered: the reduced human likeness brings today’s urgent social and ecological challenges into focus.
The snowman looks out of place, not just because of the season and because it has been set up in the interior; its black color, too, is baffling.
What remains in the end is the narrow shipping crate in which the inky water pools, forming a plane in the volume, as though one might take the snowman—or what is left of it—along, put it in storage, or even buy it.
The liquid is a gleaming black, its surface reflective like a mirror; with a view to the political situation, the flat image framed by the box, too, fuses the social and economic situation.
Then again, the snowman ink collected in the well-like crate might also be used to write many a story, filling the pages of book after book, like the blank pages of the black books stacked up in an peculiar pattern on a bookshelf in a matter of form.

cadavre exquis/ kollektive Collage, 2016

Jeannette Pacher, Curator

The poster work consists of four b/w photographs showing the area behind the container building on which they were affixed and allow the viewer to look through the building:

On the north-facing upper edge, the east side of the container, protruding metal structures made of transverse and longitudinal shaped tubes can also be read as closed window openings.
The display of the poster-sized photos in this structure on the east and west sides of the building thus opens up the container to the grounds behind it. The posters open up the view through the building.

The posters thus reverse the view and expose it. Previously, this view was closed and opens up to the viewer in black and white. At the same time, the closely spaced series of images captures the movement of passing by as if through a ribbon of windows.

The series of photographs displayed side by side in the metal structure of the building draws together to form an image surface and uses graphic and textual elements of a spatial plan, with which the artist alludes to the constantly growing construction measures and buildings in the surrounding area.
“five to twelve at a quarter to two” – the text in a kind of plan window that is inherent in the photos – is therefore also to be understood critically and ambiguously.

The exact shift of the photographic gaze through the position of the camera – frontal to the image in the back of the building – is also like a visibly slight change of position “from window view to window view” and thus the movement of the observer is also visible in the entire image area.
She captures the moment and finally recaptures the “frozen image” at the exposed corner point of the upper edge along the building – just as this can happen again and again through the memory of a place or an event, with a slightly changing view.

WANDABWICKLUNG

Possibly land surveyor K. is an employee of friend S.’s City Demolition Industry, Inc.

BIG Conference 200 m corridor
Internal Elevation T. to A., righthand wall
and 02 to 22, lefthand wall according to plan Wandabwicklung.
Actual size drawing

In City Demolition Industry, Inc., an essay by Japanese architect and writer Arata Isozaki published in 1962, the steadily increasing number of traffic deaths in the city is worrying S., a hit man. As a killing machine, traffic competes with S.’s trade and insults his professional honour and, ultimately, is critical for his changing the sector. In order to eliminate competition friend S. establishes City Demolition Industry.

Land surveyor K., the protagonist in Franz Kafka’s unfinished novel The Castle, is in turn struggling for his existence to be acknowledged by the inscrutable and, as it turns out, inaccessible authority of the castle and its administration. While the castle represents a perfidious and perfectly organised world, Kafka’s description of the vain endeavours of land surveyor K. orbits around a void centre, the city, society. What if he had now found his calling as an employee of City Demolition Industry? What if he had countered these lost efforts with a positive turn toward destruction, resistance, action?

Claudia Märzendorfer’s temporary wall drawing Möglicherweise ist Landvermesser K. Angestellter des Instituts für Stadtzerstörung GmbH des Freundes S. is an approach to visually translate the technical term Wandabwicklung [internal elevation]. This term, which can be found on floor plans of the BIG building, is taken literally here, as if one were unwinding the wall. Thus, the outlines of all recesses such as doors, windows, edges, sockets, ventilation dampers, notches and bulges are reduplicated, and as a result the corridor’s heterogeneous structure is concentrated in its entirety. The wall drawing covers the complete length of the corridor on the second floor of the BIG building which connects the old and new structures. The continuity of the drawing is sporadically interrupted, in other patches the rhythm of the lines is densely woven, at all times it mirrors the existing architecture.
The drawings appear like traces of urban dust. With a brush the pigments were applied straight to the wall. Their presence is reminiscent of the absence of another object – like the traces on the walls so typical for vacated flats, for instance – but also of the transient reduplication of an object by its shadow. To realise the drawing in form of a ‘dust work’ means to emphasise the context of urban space and its constant change.
Wandabwicklung. Möglicherweise ist Landvermesser K. Angestellter des Instituts für Stadtzerstörung GmbH des Freundes S. is so far the most extensive in a number of dust works with which Claudia Märzendorfer addresses issues such as transiency, conservation and destruction, disappearance and restart and deals with these in her distinct material language. She started making dust works in 2003 with action Painting; most recently the artist realised a number of ‚dust shelves’ in Vienna titled Tomorrow ist auch ein russischer Tag (2010).

By the way: Due to the submission, “the production and preservation of this art work are completely innocuous and non-toxic”.

Jeanette Pacher

Publikation:
SILENT RUNNING/ lautlos weiter
published by Revolver Verlag VV Berlin
Auflage: 50
http://www.revolver-publishing.com/w3NoM.php?nodeId=1378

Edition:
SILENT RUNNING/ lautlos weiter
Sammler Edition/ special edition: 2013
Auflage 5: Druck auf transparentem Papier
unframed, in Box/ gerahmt oder in Holzbox

Shared Space

The concept refers to the building’s peculiar architectonic situation and examines the sense that people make of it. A trace is drawn and marked out throughout the building, across floors, walls, ceilings, façades: another building. That other building, which stood on the site in the past, was overwritten. Above, below, to the left and right, that building is still visible (especially) at night. The earth used to be flat, and the world used to be bigger. The space remains, with or without structure.
The old building’s three-dimensional plan is brought into being in the mind by the (new old) lines, inscribing the old structures in the new space. Here or there, a niche emerges, a wall where no wall exists anymore. Sometimes a wall of the new building rests on an old one.

From the labyrinth to the shared space, architectural considerations typically aim at subdivisions, interventions, intelligent solutions designed to lend social areas in particular a lucid—or mystifying, as the case may be—cast.
This execution employs lines to give rise to an imaginary space in three dimensions within the entire building; it is legible across the levels, the façade, in the interior and exterior, leading the beholder in and back out. The lines traverse the entire building, and as art-in-architecture, they are not constrained to an assigned definite location. The imaginary space is frequented by the users no less than the new building. The spatial (sub)divisions established on the visual plane by the lines may also prompt the users to temporarily revive certain aspects of the old building’s organization.

The concept is intended as an overall plan. Not a solid work of art but an artistic deliberation. It responds to the new, no longer purely functionalist building (post-functionalist: atriums, allocation classes, rest areas) and does not declare itself a work of art in the sense of a separate and self-contained creation. The hand-drawn line is instead meant to be an instrument of communication, oscillating between wayfinding signage (providing spatial orientation in complex built structures) and a trace that narrates the space’s history.
A signage system of the sort the execution resembles is often needed only in rudimentary form in (Austrian) schools. Affixing signs identifying some things is helpful; it may also be confusing, especially for young people, and that may be okay.

Wayfinding signage establishes identity, establishes interrelations for the users.
This element of the line is visible only where the old building’s outlines meet the new lines and surfaces of the new building. When no surface or line coincides with the historic structure, no visible line results—except in the mind, as a thought, imagined conjunction. When conjunctions, when lines are up in the air or vanish in the middle of a room, they are invisible, remaining suspended in the air.
The silhouette of the demolished segment of the old schoolhouse that is being partly enlarged, partly rebuilt from the ground up serves as the guiding line in the plan. The design draws a trace, spurs the imagination and frames a look back at history, loosens the lines of the new architecture and, like all learning and teaching, revisits the existing old body … turns back the clock, encourages inferences concerning a permanent progress of bodies if fact and knowledge, and lets us see the old in a new perspective.

The objective is to convey that nothing that is created and conceived comes into being, or could come into being, without prior knowledge and without earlier achievements one can build on; and that any human achievement is subject to change, to make room, in an ongoing evolutionary process, for something new, for development and enlargement at the hands of the next generation.

Shared Space, art-in-architecture competition, BRG Krems, 2013

CM

welcome to the magnificent machine of mankind moving along the thread of life fortyfour miles into the woolly wilderness of the purring  motor silently driven on and on by locomotive breath don’t get tangled up

for the motor

Prosa 2013 Ruth Cerha

In April 1909, Arnold Schönberg submitted his design for a notation typewriter at the Austrian Patent Office but he didn’t have the spare cash for its registration. This, and a formal error presented the artist, who was facing difficulties at the time with an insurmountable obstacle. As a result, this invention of Schönberg, who later would gain worldwide fame for his twelve-tone music, remained a theory only outlined.

Over time, several considerations and attempts were made to design a typewriter for musical notation. So-called notation-typewriters wouldn’t only be useful for composing; they would also offer great benefits for the production of transcripts and copies of musical scores. However, the mechanical reproduction of musical notation remained unsolved until the 1960s and 70s when, finally, modern photocopiers allowed for a reproduction of scores on a large scale, thus making these affordable for everyone.

Around a hundred years after Schönberg’s attempt to have his invention patented, Claudia Märzendorfer discovered the patent specification and blue prints in the Schönberg Archive in Vienna. Inspired by his idea, and desiring to give Schönberg’s machine, which had been buried in oblivion for such a long time, a form at last, following the specification’s details the artist designed a prototype. She then produced a cast in frozen ink, her music typewriter. This artwork celebrated its premiere at the Austrian Cultural Forum in New York in 2012, when the melting sculpture of frozen ink wrote, freely improvising, a score on the stack of sheet paper that it was placed upon (music typewriter, score #1).

The unusual connection between the two, who each works (worked) in times of great social change and radical economization and was confronted with the concomitant issues of recognition and funding of visionary artistic work that often, however, is waved aside as useless, is described in the Ö1 radio feature from 2013, Der Gedanke kann warten, er hat keine Zeit [The idea can wait, it has no time].

Like all her frozen works, the ‘prolonged volatility’ of a sculpture, which appearance is steadily transforming like in a long, quiet film – this first becomes apparent with the condensation on its surface when it turns white, then a glossy black and gradually an amorphous shape – arouses great fascination. Here, a specific form of resistance against the general imperative of acceleration is to be noted, as well as a critical reflection on highly topical issues such as reproduction, authorship, and copyright as well as archiving and its storage media. These topics have played a role already for a while and in many of the artist’s works, for instance das leere Archiv (The Empty Archive, 2015–16), Frozen Records / Frozen Archive (since 2005) and a series of installations with hand-bound books and book-shelves that explore the idea of the library as a storage of knowledge: white noise (2008) or Code (2005/07), for example.

John Cages liebe zu Pilzen ist weithin bekannt. Das von ihm in Kooperation mit einer ZeichnerIn entstandene „Mushroom Book“ wurde in geringer Auflage aufgelegt.
Beschrieben werden hier Schopftintlinge. Diese Myzels haben eine so faszinierende Anmut, wie Objekte aus Tinteneis. Passend zu ihrer besonders fargilen Erscheinung wachsen sie nur zu frostigen Temperaturen.
Sie verhalten sich auch während ihrer kurzen Sichtbarkeit wie zarte Objekte.

Vorerst in blendendem weiß mit zarten kristallähnlichen Fransen, mit der Zeit verwandeln sie sich in eine kaum wiederzuerkennende Gestalt.
Pechschwarz, tropfend entschwinden sie wieder, ziehen den Hut, bis weit hinunter.

Übrig bleibt nichts als ein Fleck aus zarter Tinte, eine Zeichnung am Boden.
Irgendwo werden sie wieder auftauchen, die Myzels ziehen unterirdisch ihre unsichtbaren Kreise, wie Melodien bei denen es Pausen gibt, in der Erwartung auf ein wiedereinsetzten des Verklungenen.

Die Seltenheit macht einen besonderen Wert, auch 4’33“ kann man nicht kaufen. Auf Märkten ist auch der Pilz so gut wie nie zu sehen.
Nie weiss der Zuhörer des Cagen’ Stücks was ihn exakt erwartet.

Projektbeschreibung:
Eine Auflage von gebundenen Büchern, gebunden, der Deckel aus dem jeweils selben Material. Die Bücher liegen in 2 Stapeln aneinander. Das oben aufliegende Exemplar ist geöffnet und bedeckt dadurch die unteren Bände. Die nachgeformten Pilzobjekte in Tinteneins gegossen, zerschmelzen am Buch.
Die Tinte derselben wird aus Schopftintlingen gewonnen.
Bei der Seitenansicht der objekthaften Bücher, entsteht der Eindruck durch die lebendigen, stark strukturierten Papierschichten, dass die Pilze auf vielschichtigem Erdboden stehen wie Papierlamellen
Das Papier gleicht durch seine Materialität durchschnittenen Erdschichten.

Installation im Raum:
Leihgabe eines John Cage Originals (mushroom book) in der Gegenüberstellung seiner Interpretation.

Die Wandzeichnung wird aus den Pigmenten Eisenoxydschwarz, Kasslerbraun, Grafit, Aluminium und Elfenbeinschwarz mit dem Pinsel direkt auf die Wand aufgetragen. Die zeich­nerische Spur, die sich dadurch ergibt, er­scheint wie aus typischem Stadtstaub hergestellt. Ihre Präsenz erinnert an die Abwesenheit eines anderen Gegenstan­des, wie beispielsweise die Spuren von abge­hängten Bildern an einer Wand, aber auch an die flüchtige Verdoppelung eines Gegenstandes durch seinen Schatten. In ihrer Materialität ist die Staubarbeit per se temporär. Die Entscheidung, die Wandzeichnung in Form einer Staubarbeit umzusetzen, soll den Kontext des urbanen Raumes in seiner steten Ver­änderung unterstreichen.

Die Bibliothek als Inbegriff für Bildung, Wissen, Diskurs, Neugierde, Ideenreichtum ist Gegenstand der neuen Arbeit von Claudia Märzendorfer, White Noise. Schon mehrfach hat sich die Künstlerin dieser „Einrichtung“ – in der Doppeldeutigkeit des Wortes als Institution und als Möblierung – gewidmet; die Installation eines konzeptuell wie formal speziell entwickelten Buchregals für das Stift Admont scheint demnach eine folgerichtige Konsequenz zu sein.

Was wäre das Buch der Bücher? steht als Frage und Ausgangspunkt der Überlegungen. Mit einer fast mathematischen Logik und Konsequenz folgert Claudia Märzendorfer, dass nur ein leeres weisses Buch zugleich die Summe der Inhalte aller Bücher repräsentieren kann. Hier steht die Leere aber nicht für das Nichts, oder gar als (noch) zu beschreibender Raum, sondern – wie der Begriff ‚white noise’ in der Akustik eben auch den ganzen hörbaren Frequenzbereich beschreibt – für alles. Rauschen.

So sind denn in dem hier aufgestellten Buchregal lauter leere Bücher zu finden, einzig mit einem Schutzumschlag, auf dem die Frequenzkurve für weisses Rauschen zu lesen ist, überzogen; aufgestellt oder liegend – die Stapel zeigen den BetrachterInnen jedenfalls immer jene vier verschiedenen Ansichten eines Buches, die es zu bieten hat (Deckel, Rücken, Schnitt oben und seitlich). Die Anordnung der Bücher folgt (im Gegensatz zu früheren, hiermit verwandten Arbeiten) keiner bestimmten Regel oder Codierung, ganz der Entleerung bzw. Aufhebung eines Inhaltes entsprechend.

Konzeptuell verdichtet sich alles in der formalen Gestaltung des Buchregals: In seinen Proportionen folgt es dem Goldenen Schnitt eines mittelalterlichen Satzspiegels. Der mit Büchern (=Text) gefüllte Bereich beschreibt exakt die Verhältnisse von Bundsteg zu Kopfsteg zu Außensteg zu Fußsteg einer aufgeschlagenen Doppelseite – daher auch das Leerfeld in der Mitte. Die Regalböden sind hier als Zeilenraster zu lesen, und die Bücher selbst entsprechen denselben Maßverhältnissen, sie sind nur entsprechend proportional verkleinert.

Man hat es hier also mit der idealen dreidimensionalen Darstellung einer Doppelseite eines Buches zu tun, wobei – um im Assoziatonsfeld von Text / Buch / Bibliothek zu bleiben – die „Sprache“, die diese Idee vermittelt, wiederum Buchobjekte sind.

Entered from the elevator, everything is located on the ground floor.
A story of horizontal and vertical one-to-one relations.

Each poster pad shows a black-and-white photograph – in a 1:1 relation to reality – of the wall that is directly behind it.
And behind: the wall that is directly behind the wall, and behind the wall that is directly behind and opposite the wall, and behind the wall that is directly behind the wall behind, and then the wall that is exactly opposite the wall behind; and behind, then, the wall that is directly behind the wall, and behind the wall that is directly behind and opposite the wall that is behind the wall and exactly behind the wall that is behind. Directly behind the wall and behind, then, the wall that is exactly opposite and then the wall behind (at least as it were in mid May 2015) …to the wall where the last wall in the sequence of walls of the Landscape and Public Space Department adjoins the wall of the Architecture Department.

Directly next to it a second pad with a poster-filling, 1:1-sized black-and-white photograph of the wall behind (as long as no one tears it off/down) and the wall beside the wall that is on the wall directly behind it, behind it, then, the wall behind (as long as no one tears it off/down), and beside it, also on the photo beside, the wall that is the wall beside (as long as no one tears it off/down), and behind, then, the wall opposite and beside (as long as no one tears it off/down), and then the wall that is directly behind the wall behind (as long as no one tears it off/down), and beside it the wall beside (as long as no one tears it off/down), and then the wall that is exactly opposite the wall behind (as long as no one tears it off/down), and behind, then, the wall that is directly behind the wall, and behind, then, the wall that is directly behind and opposite the wall that is behind and beside the wall, and directly behind it the wall behind (as long as no one tears it off/down), directly behind it the wall and, then, behind it the wall that is exactly opposite (as long as no one tears it off/down), and then the one behind (as long as no one tears it off/down), and then the wall behind the wall beside the wall (at least as it were in mid May 2015) …to the wall where the last wall in the sequence of walls of the Landscape and Public Space Department adjoins the wall of the Architecture Department.

Claudia Märzendorfer, 2015

cadavre exquis, 2016

Wall piece consisting of 200 black-and-white posters à 120×80 cm

With her work, Claudia Märzendorfer sets sculptur(es) in motion and creates situations that due to their volatility entail moments of surprise. Her sculptural works produced in form of casts of frozen water and ink, are exemplary for this approach. In turn, she segments and slits up space in pictures and in doing so, deconstructs familiar viewing habits. In life-size wall drawings and in photographic 1:1 reproductions the artist literally scans rooms. For this, the spaces are first visually captured and divided into sections according to a defined grid, only to then re-assemble the photographic reproductions in a new way. For Märzendorfer, this mode of spatial exploration constitutes a possibility of understanding. The more general question of how we conceive the world and shape our surroundings runs like a common thread through her oeuvre.

The large-format wall piece cadavre exquis, which Claudia Märzendorfer realised in 2016, shows a section of a suite of rooms that runs through the former post office building in Bregenz, which was defined and documented in a series of photographs by the artist. The building now hosts, among others, the Bildraum Bodensee gallery, where the work that consists of 200 black-and-white posters was presented.

For the site-specific collage, 200 life-size photographs were plotted on 120 x 80 cm large sheets of 80 grms paper, sorted and piled and then nailed to the wall. In multiple layers and dense rows the posters hung one upon the other and side by side on the wall, and together created an overall picture of the suite of rooms.
The height was given in three rows – A (top), B (middle), C (bottom), the width was organised in seven columns, while the depth of the photographed space could vary and defined the number of layers of posters. Visitors were invited to flip through the images, to reveal those poster images that lay beneath the top layer, possibly also to pull off a poster and to take it with them, and in doing so they modified the overall image each time. For ever new visual combinations and random views were created, comparable to the playful method of producing images and texts practiced by the Surrealists, which they named cadavre exquis.

For the publication in hand, which is conceived as documentation of the poster piece that spread across the whole wall and is published as edition of 100 copies, the concept of fragmentation and spatial reconfiguration (as described above) has been taken a step further, this time in order to adapt the photographic reproduction of the suite of rooms for the linear structure of a bound printed work.
Here, instead of their simultaneous order from top to bottom, next to and behind one another on the wall, the in total 21 batches of posters are organised and bundled that, when turning the pages one is lead from the position top left (A1) to bottom right (C7). Each turn the pages first follow the order of layers (depth) and only then switch to the next batch of pictures in reading direction, and this pattern is repeated until the last batch. As a result, the publication is structured in 21 segments divided by inserted sheets with according captions. Depending on the number of walls that are located in row in the respective spatial alignment, the sections count more or less pages.

Jeanette Pacher

Konzept für die Ausschreibung einer Wandzeichnung:
Der Ausstellungsraum wird von einem Kunstfälscher weiss gestrichen.
Dies geschieht vor der Installierung weiterer Werke.
Der Kunstfälscher wird für die Arbeit mit dem Ausstellungsbudget bezahlt,
er bleibt unerkannt und verrichtet seine Arbeit in den Nachtstunden, während keine andere Person vor Ort ist.

Das Projekt wurde nicht realisiert.

At first glance, the series of photographs entitled Portraits does not fulfill the viewer’s expectations. There seems to be nothing to see, at least not a portrait in the classical sense. However, if you take a closer look – if you examine the first superficial perception – your own facial features unfold on the shiny black surface. The viewer sees him/herself with more or less surrounding space or even people present.

The portrait exists in the respective form only for the moment in which one sees oneself in it; in the next moment the supposed emptiness returns – or there is another person in the picture. The classic hanging of the pictures (known as “Petersburg hanging” or “Baroque hanging” in the jargon) as well as the formal simplicity of the pictures point to a certain generality, namely that everyone is portrayed in them per se – those who have the fleeting experience directly on site as well as those who remain invisibly concealed in them.

Jeanette Pacher

perfect disappearing

The sculptural installation as accompaniment to the performance emereged as a reflex to the musicans electronicsound world. Ice suitcases and iceboxes is not an illustration of a cool musical but an investigation of the transfer of objects into the system of a performance. it is an attempt, in ist production highly complicated and fragile, without guaranteed sccess. A leap into cold water. The selection of the objects stands in a close relaion to the claim of the ensemble thilges3 not to choose conventional locations for their performance, but to make use of highly frequented public venues, if possible. Corresponding to the embedding of music into acoustic context of a train station, CM plays with the conditions and asssociations of the environment. the train station as a transitory zone, a station on the way – not the destination – people come into view and disapper again. Every-day objects are positioned, in which typical embodiments of the scene can be recognized. items one would expect, suitcases and bags; with which expectations are connected. relocation as a possibility of change. Music can´t be held, it remains. Are endless loops objects? Only once the train departs we can hear it, unless we are on it, but that doesn´t take us closer to our desires. C.M.´s suitcases and iceboxes fade away with the duration of the musical performance. They melt during the performance, content included. Objects on the move, staged objects. Perfect Disappearance. Static movement. Many relations are stimulated, some of it is explained, by music, but not all.

Reiner Zettl 2000

Eisdisko Klangturm  Neues Regierungsviertel St. Pölten. Mittendrin der Klangturm, unterteilt in bunte Abschnitte, unglaublich kühl und weit weg von Wien. Ein stiller Ort. Elektronik und Phantasie stehen im Vordergrund, beschreibt der Folder des Klangturms sein Programm. Das Brasil von Niederösterreich nennt der Kurator und Leiter des Klangturm sein Haus.

Seit der Performance perfektes Verschwinden gab es die Einladung vom Kurator des Hauses zu einer weiteren gemeinsamen Arbeit zwischen Claudia Märzendorfer und den drei Musikern von Thilges 3.

Die Gebäude Klangturm und Bibliothek begrenzen an zwei Seiten ein Feld. Die Seite zur Bibliothek hin hat etwa 20 Meter im rechten Winkel dazu die Turmseite misst ca. 10 Meter. Ein rechteckiges Feld, durch das Maßverhältnis ein Korridor der nicht nur scheinbar vom Klangturm seinen Ausgangspunkt nimmt.

In den wenigen Stunden in der die Installation gänzlich in gefrorenem Zustand sein wird gelangt man nur über die Eisfläche in
den Klangturm.
Musik zieht durch….. Korridor.
Im Foyer werden Schlittschuhe verliehen.

Die Eisfläche ist aus der Vogelperspektive Leinwand eines Bildes dass sich ähnlich einem Mosaik aus gegossene gefrorenen Platten zusammensetzt.  Möglich ist es auch die Fläche zu spritzen und das Bild darunter schon vorzuskizzieren. Banner rund um das Eislauffeld sind diesem Sinne folgend der Rahmen des Bildes und werden genauso in die Gestaltung miteinbezogen.

Aus den Ecken kommt der Sound.

Geplant 2002 für die lange Nacht der Museen und zur Eröffnung des NÖ Landesmuseums

The model is an interplay between the four side views of the object and the silver tones of the painting.
Plaids (Decken) is part of a series of works in which the sculpture is set in motion and possibilities alternate within a defined range, with four views and colors varying in each of the twelve objects. The pattern on the object is the template for the rotation of the object.

from A to B

Public transport: a place for having fun. Jokes: the shape of words giving shape to images. Fleet of foot and keen of eye, jokes will split hairs in a split second. They dissolve what belongs together and join what is separate. Humour: a form of expression variously determined by culture and class, a measure of social acceptance. The project was developed for the city of Graz. The location: the busses and street cars of the municipal transport service. A few years ago, LED screens were installed in the entrance areas of all busses and street cars criss-crossing the cityscape of Graz. The commercials broadcast via these screens are meant to help passengers while away the time it takes to get from A to B. Throughout the project’s duration, these commercials will be replaced by jokes. Which jokes will be screened will depend on the time of day and the individual busses’ and street cars’ specific coordinates at a given moment. The selection will also be adjusted to the different routes; a sociogram of the public transport system might come in useful here. It is to be hoped that the fun will not only keep increasing from stop to stop but will continue and expand into offices schools, apartments, cemeteries, madhouses, hospitals, waiting rooms, etc.— wherever ticket-holders and fare-dodgers come together to discuss the news of the day.

C.M. 1994; Submitted to—and turned down by—the city of Graz, Cultural Capital of Europe 2003

Bildhauerei ist für C. M. von Beginn an eine in Fluss gesetzte Herausforderung zwischen der ikonisierten Moderne und der des Widerstandes vor dem, des finalisierten Werkes, gesetzten Erwartungen. Ihren Arbeiten bleibt das organisierte Verwirrspiel verdauerter Gegenwart mit dem Bild des vergänglichen Schönen, dem Warenwert des künstlerischen Produktes fern. Reflexibles Aufzeigen verlorener Ursprünglichkeit – verbunden der Sehnsucht des vorausschauenden Teilnehmers seiner eigenen Gegenwart entsetzt die Künstlerin den Betrachter ihrer Arbeit aus rationalen Räumen in seine künstlerischen Befindlichkeiten.

Einzig im Moment der Sichtbarmachung kodierter Wirklichkeit behaupteten die Ordnungsbilder ihrer Erfinderin den Status des handelnden Ich.“ Alles kann ein Bild von Allem sein.“

Ludwig Wittgenstein, zumindest für den kurzen Moment, den freigesetzten Phantomen lustvoll zu folgen.

Werner Würtinger.

Eisiger Haushalt   Das Haus ist der Ort an dem wir uns geborgen fühlen. Besonders wenn es als unser kindliches Ideogramm auftaucht, gelernt als knappes Zeichen mit minimalen Bestimmungen, vier Wände und ein Dach vorzugsweise weiß und rot, steht es für Zugehörigkeit und zeigt klar jene im Zuge des erweiterten Wohlstandes erfolgte Vereinzelung der kleinsten Einheit: Die Familie im Einfamilienhaus.

C. M. beschäftigt sich seit einiger Zeit mit dem Haushalt, mit jener Arbeit, die privat und daher immer noch unbeachtet geleistet wird aber Zusammenleben erst möglich macht. In täglicher Routine erfüllt, schafft sie keine festen Tatbestände sondern ist aufgehoben im ständigen Vergehen des Erreichten. Sie muss immer wieder wiederholt werden und findet kein Ende.

Haushalt und Haus der unabschließbare Prozess und das Bild von Identität, der zementierte Begriff, stehen einander diametral gegenüber. Häuser, vor allem die in unserer Vorstellung, leben länger als wir- üblicherweise nicht jedoch wenn Energie notwendig ist, ihre Form zu erhalten. Jene Energie kontinuierlicher Sorge im Haus, der Haushalt, muss das Haus als materielle Struktur selbst erhalten, weil es sonst instabil wird und verschwindet. Wie Eis in der Sonne eben. Welche Temperatur haben überhaupt Ideen?

Viel Lärm um Nichts/ much ado about nothing

…is a soundsculpture published 2005, Kunsthalle Wien, sculptor Claudia Märzendorfer in cooperation with the electroacoustic band thilges3.

2006, they portraits a cities music scene. 20 musicians/composers add their voice to a master composition from Claudia Märzendorfer and Nik Hummer. the master theme was played on a trautonium (an early electric/electronic instrument) Each single voice is transfered into a record out of ice. During the performance with four prepared turntables the sculpture was permanently changing its shape. so did the sound. (2006)

“Now I know this idea of records made out of ice serves no practical purpose. It’s definitely not the format that the global music industry is looking for to entice the buying public away from free downloads but I love it. It ticks so many of the boxes that I enjoy ticking at the moment. For a start it is impermanent. It is of the moment. There is nothing left but water that you can either drink or, more symbolically, wash your hands with. Or, with the water shortage, you could use the water again to make another record.” Bill Drummond KLF/the 17, ( 2006)

thanks to: Bill Drummond, Hans Groisz, Remco Schuurbiers, Helge Hinteregger, Robert Jelinek, Susanna Niedermayer, Jeanette Pacher, Peter Rantasa, Christian Scheib, Carsten Seiffarth, Ske – Fonds, AHT Kühllogistik, MICA and all composers…

Composers (2005- 2025):

Noel Akchote, Martin Brandlmayer, Frieder Butzmann, Bernhard Breuer, Cordula Boesze, Dorit Chrysler, Christof Dienz, Electric Indigo, Christian Fennesz, Raviv Ganchrow, Clementine Gasser, Gammon, Manfred Hofer, Franz Hautzinger, Helge Hintergegger, Jurisic/Steiner, Katharina Klement, Klaus Lang, Robert Lippok, Wolfgang Mitterer, Michael Moser, Judith Unterpertinger, Maia Urstad, Maja Osojnik, Phillip Quehenberger, Matija Schellander, Nika Schmitt, Martin Siewert, Sara Zlanabitnig, thilges 3, and many others…

The enclosed images show variable clippings of the work in progress and will, when finished, show a set table with the dimensions of 1,5 x 4 metres. The plate is set together by lots of single objects, moulded with frozen ink and then arranged on the table.

Banketjes. A painterly still life

The enclosed images show variable clippings of the work in progress and will, when finished, show a set table with the dimensions of 1,5 x 4 metres. The plate is set together by lots of single objects, moulded with frozen ink and then arranged on the table.

What, in the Netherlands, was declaimed more or less descriptively as a type of still life or banquet despite a certain reflexive displacement in the allegory, should become a much stronger indicative character in Claudia Märzendorfer’s project “Banketjes”. There is hardly any other situation within a civilized society which is so strongly regimented than consuming food together. A number of devices with a class-specific grade of differentiation allows us to take up an adequate distance towards our respective needs in order to be regarded as socially acceptable. The company at table is an analogy to society and the articles on the table are the protagonists of a story line which can be followed by the observer.
Claudia Märzendorfer’s interest in moulding objects using a material which appears strange in this context is by all means affirmative with regards to the surprising glossiness and brilliance of their surfaces. The delight of presenting, of staging the special is, however, counteracted by the processual character of frozen material: it elapses.
On the contrary to the Dutch still life which, with regards to the permanent change of appearances of reality, wants to create hold points for reflexion, Claudia Märzendorfer ist trying to converge the devices and the object of reflexion which is permanently in flow. In successful moments of this venture, one may possibly perceive epical beauty.

when he threw the knife into the sun
With als er das Messer in die Sonne warf[when he threw the knife into the sun] Claudia Märzendorfer has developed a modular system for a construction set. Four slightly varying basic types can be combined with eachother to form simple geometric units, prototypes: once these remain abstract, sketch-like, then again they assume a distinct form, for instance when the fragile objects are reminiscent of ladders, a chair or a frame.

Principally, the ice casts offer the possibility of serial production; this is continued with the idea of making an assembly set that, theoretically, can be combined and extended infinitely. The parts are reproducible, but never identical. De facto, this leads to divergences; divergences that are unpredictable but not unintented by the artist, they are rather part of the concept. als er das Messer in die Sonne warf follows the cinematic, compositional logic, in that the artist understands the exhibition space as a kind of ‘stage’ on which she, in the course of an exhibition, can arrange and re-arrange new spacial constructions made of ice, and in doing so creates a series of different situations.

An overall picture of this performative installation as such can hardly be experienced live. als er das Messer in die Sonne warf describes a moment that seems to be out of control, and at the same time impossible, somehow ‘wrong’. Due to ist narrative, poetical quality, the exhibition title could just as well be the title for a film, or for a piece of music.

Jeanette Pacher

The birth of the library and the empty archive

As a rule, children start to read by having someone read a book to them. In this sense, having someone read to you is a kind of reading where the reading is delegated to someone while you simply listen to what is written on the page. You read by having someone read something to you. Should some of these books, now, turn out to be worth reading or listening to (which is the case if you insist on having the same book read to you over and over again), then you might begin collecting them without ever actually having read them. What we then get is a library, or rather the seed of a library; and though for the time being this library is unplanned, it is still there, whether or not one has read or been able to read the books. Later on, when you start reading for yourself (and, at first, to yourself), there will always remain some books that will be deemed worthy of inclusion in the idea of the unplanned library. Weeks go by, years go by, and the library will keep growing. At this point, it would be premature to indulge in speculations about a possible order informing this unplanned library. For now, let us instead simply postulate that the idea of the library boils down to selecting those books which, having accompanied the reader for a while, have left a memorable trace in her or his consciousness—by opening vistas onto spaces and epochs that lie beyond one’s everyday life or by helping the reader to conceive of everyday life itself as something outside the time-space coordinates that supposedly circumscribe it. However, the idea to include a book in a library (no matter how unplanned the library) will always draw sustenance from the possibility that one day one may read it or simply pick it o” the shelf—if only to open it at random, read around in it without actually reading it, and then put it back—back where it belongs (without really belonging exactly there), back to where—in a definitely unplanned fashion—it has found its place. What begins here is a library that was never planned as such and rather appears like a commonality of books. However, as the books grow in number they also grow together, and they do so in such a manner that the library grows out of them. In this sense, the seed of the idea of the library is already there in the individual book— just as the idea of the translation is already there in the original. Continuing this line of thought, we may say that a library translates books into a spatial language, a language capable of providing a book with an address. This address, though always there in the book from the very beginning, is nevertheless unpredictable. A book that has proved worth reading needs an address, a home, a place, no matter how independent it remains of this place. It is the book’s autonomy with respect to the place it requires which makes the library such a seminal institution, since the library constitutes a space within a space where the thing contained exceeds the limits of the container both in terms of space and time. The library annuls the very space it inhabits. Paradoxical though it may seem: to enter a library is to leave a room.

An act of entering becomes a gesture of leave-taking. To spend time in a library is to make oneself at home in the exterior. And this applies to all libraries that !t the description of being unplanned communities of books that have somehow grown together—despite or maybe even because of their differences. Now, the idea suggests itself—and this is the point from which the work of Claudia Märzendorfer takes its departure—that one may confront the idea of the library itself and give shape to this space within a space. The library understood as an unplanned community of books; the book understood as in need of an address: these are the premises from which the idea evolved to develop a book about the idea of the book, a book, that is, that would be about other books without threatening to usurp their place. The solution was a book consisting of blank pages, an unwritten book. This ‘unwrittenness’ has nothing to do with the modernist idea of the empty book, the ultimate book à la Mallarmé1, which, itself unwritten, was to incorporate all books that ever have been or ever will be written. By contrast, the unwritten— albeit bound—books of Claudia Märzendorfer embody the prototypical book: the book as book. These are individual books, each one standing on its own, regardless of what is not written in it and cannot be read out of it. No more is required than to recognize the individual book in the prototype. The individuality of the various prototypes is further underscored by the graphic notations inscribed on the books’ edges. While they may remind us of seismograms or frequency curves, the notations’ purpose is purely associative and undirected. They signify, yet they do so without a”ording any clues as to what the content of the book could or should be. The writing has wandered o” the page to the edge of the page, leaving the page itself blank. Paper is thus described as a medium inscribed with meaning. What remains is the book as signifcant and signifying object. These books neither can nor need to be read, just like the books that once were read to us by others. They will end up in one’s library or in one of the libraries Claudia Märzendorfer has installed in various places. What Claudia Märzendorfer repeatedly accomplishes with these library installations is the opening of a space within a space, the marking of a diasporic space that internalizes the promise of an exterior. The library as diaspora. Unwritten and unreadable, these libraries refuse to be either accessed or appropriated—just as any book that has just been read points to the possibility that it might be read again. In this sense, no book, whether written or unwritten, can ever be exhaustively read. Every act of reading only defers the next act of reading to another day. The seemingly fixed lines stand revealed as a mere fixation on the act of writing and reading itself. The seemingly manifest and fixed character of language invites being reinterpreted as something “uid and ephemeral. Nothing remains then, except the imprint a book leaves in one’s memory, an imprint that will change as soon as the next reading will contribute additional levels of meaning that had gone unnoticed before. And this is the point where Claudia Märzendorfer’s books and libraries turn out to be kindred in spirit with her ice sculptures. Music records made of ice. Suitcases made of ice. Sculptures on a journey, sculptures that at the very moment of their disappearance through melting can be seen, read, listened to; once they are gone, the idea of form and meaning is sustained only through remembrance. What remains of these ice sculptures is the experience of a reading process. Going beyond the structuralist conception of the world as text—which entails that all our perceptions are tailored to our need to find meanings—these readings in the medium of ice point to the difference between the momentary act of reading and the knowledge of the unreadable.

Claudia Märzendorfer’s books and libraries thus confront us with objects which, by refusing to be exhaustively read, all the more urgently remind us of the act of reading; by contrast, her ice projects dramatize the manifest act of perceiving against the background of the object’s disappearance. The book that is denied its readers, the sculpture that is denied its object. On the one hand, we have a library of unwritten books; on the other hand, the ice sculptures hallucinate an archive of ephemeral and disintegrating objects—an ultimately empty archive, that is.
The only archive capable of storing these ice sculptures is the air we breathe—a climatic challenge, if you will, conjoined to the idea of reading the sculpture by inhaling it. If the ice sculptures leave the premises at all, they do so only as breath and experience.
Attempting to think these two seemingly contradictory Figures together—the preservation of unwritten books in a library and the storage of disintegrating ice sculptures—one realizes that the two converge in a concept of time. Like the act of reading, the process of disintegration delineates a horizon with respect to events. The beauty here lies in the two different speeds informing these events. While we may race through a book or read it very slowly, the unplanned growth of the library appears to stubbornly follow its own course. Similarly, the empty archive grows and grows, no matter how fast or how slowly the ice sculptures melt away. Both Figures are of a processual nature, both Figures embody different time schemes.

The minutes and hours are just as present as an awareness of years and decades. It is this yoking together and interweaving of different chronologies which is the hallmark of Claudia Märzendorfer’s work, no matter what material and medium she is working with at the moment. It is no exaggeration to say that all her work insists on joining together and keeping in balance these various vectors of time— the ephemerally performative anchored in the present and the virtual archive, which by definition looks beyond the present. It is only through the interaction of these different chronologies that a space is created which invites us to find a mode to deal with time and to read space itself as a figure of time. We may therefore conclude and summarize: whether she works with ice or books, Claudia Märzendorfer’s true medium is time. Given that the artist comes from a sculptural background, ‘time sculptures’ may seem an appropriately descriptive name, yet this term has the drawback of being too abstract and planned to capture the different horizons of events. Maybe this question should be passed on/delegated to the empty archives and the yet unwritten books.

Andreas Spiegl

1 Cf. Stephane Mallarmé’s book, ‘whose realization, though, never made it beyond the first stage of conception. […] The book implies the disappearance of the exterior in the whiteness of the nothing by means of which the work a#rms itself and in doing so also negates itself. […] Since the book … contains the sum of all books, and since in its capacity as the Great (or
Pure) — yet unwritten —work it must exclude the world (just as it excludes chance by accepting it as a necessity), human
beings as subjects and agents of history have to be excluded as well – in fact, their disappearance is required if the work is to
come into and stay in being at all.’ (Felix Phillip Ingold: Das Buch im Buch, Berlin 1988, p. 7)