Michael Schuster (A)
AUFEINWORT
(a brief word)


AUFEINWORT, 2010
(a brief word)
Installation (unrealized)
Polystyrene, LED-lighting, black painted wooden
construction

Hauptplatz, city hall
Published during the exhibition in:
Camera Austria, Graz; Der Standard, Wien; Kleine Zeitung, Graz; gat.st

The plan was to emblazon “AUFEINWORT” in onemeter-high letters above the main entrance to Graz city hall that faces Hauptplatz and to light up this word in color at night. After permission had been denied due to reservations regarding monument preservation, Michael Schuster’s work is now in circulation as a photomontage in an advertising campaign that pretends that it was in fact carried out.
The original intervention – both text work and sculpture, communication and installation – was designed as a public invitation to reflect on the different speaker positions in and about the public sphere. What gives rise to the necessity to speak out anyway? Do we still feel encouraged (by art) to speak out ourselves? Is it not “we,” as the public, who should increasingly take politicians aside to talk about “our” reality in “our” language? Combined with a scrutiny of the fundamentals of art production (sculpture, typography, color), the work thus addresses its “word” to the public sphere so as to underscore this word, speaking, debate and conflict as the core of any public, political dimension. That the work touches on a hotspot within this field of issues regarding the relationship of art, public sphere and politics was made clear by the very decision not to grant permission to carry it out at this site. As such, this central urban place is withdrawn from a discourse on its critical scrutiny and repositioning in urban, public space, and hence precisely from the debate on art, the public sphere and politics that Schuster sought to initiate with his work. The photomontage thus confronts urban reality (as the original intervention ‘in situ’ would have done) with its pitiful depoliticization as a space of consumerism, entertainment and tourism; a space from which politicizing speaker positions are excluded, a space in which questions of participation in public speech, participation in the construction of the public sphere itself, are increasingly suppressed. “AUFEINWORT” would in any case have encouraged public reflection on these – and other – questions as public, and publicly relevant issues.








Commissioned by steirischer herbst
In co-operation with the Center for Social Research at the Karl-Franzens University Graz & Institute for Contemporary Art (IZK) of Graz University of Technology
With thanks to Hans Kupelwieser
Project supporter Land Steiermark
Project sponsor Think!, Gebrüder Weiss & Alpenländische Schilderfabrik


24/09 - 02/11
Utopia and Monument II

Fri 24/09, 5 pm
Vernissage at the exhibition pavilion, Tummelplatz

6 pm
Performance
Paulina Olowska
Onethousandsixhundredand-
seventeen Neons in Warszawa

Andreas-Hofer-Platz
(Roof of carpark)

Interventions of the Institute for Contemporary Art
at the exhibition pavilion


Thu 30/09, 4 - 7 pm
Performative Input

Thu 07/10, 4 - 7 pm
Installation

Admission free



Michael Schuster
Born in Graz (A) in 1956.






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