Installation / Projection
art victim
Wolfgang Becksteiner
Tue, 27.4.2010 8 pm
Failed prevention of addiction presented by Wolfgang Becksteiner.
115 artists, collectors, gallerists, museum directors and curators are at the focal point of Wolfgang Becksteiner’s initiative artvictim, which is being presented for the first time to the public as an installative projection at MAK NITE. Becksteiner worked on this project for over two years, and initially invited 246 representatives of the culture industry to participate.
Becksteiner’s individual portraits, compressed into four symbolic sub-groups, employ subtle irony to make clear the ambivalence of individuality and anonymity in the art world, causing one to think back to the classifications devised by German photographer August Sander (1876–1964). Sander, in the portrait project Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts [People of the 20th Century] from the second half of the 1920s, made the attempt to visualize the societal structures of his era in a typological fashion.
In this work, consisting of a cubic installation with four projective surfaces and adapted specifically for MAK NITE, the individual images will be projected in rapid sequence and at a nearly life-sized scale, with a computer voice constantly calling out the names in alphabetical order. At regular intervals, the text “Die Module der Kunst und ihre Gesichter” [The Modules of Art and Their Faces] will also be heard over the PA system; this text was written for the project by Grazbased art researcher Werner Fenz, who draws analogies to the work of August Sander.
