Focusing on the possibilities of photography in our seven-year-old new century, '21 positions' is the subtly suggestive name of an exhibition at the Austrian Cultural Center in New York, seeking to unfurl the state and direction of Austrian photography today. Despite its proximity to Germany, Austria has a photographic tradition that takes on board a separate set of influences from its neighbour's, aware of the context but outside the shadow of Bernd and Hilla Becher's highly influential typological studies.
Iris Klein, 'Wald', 2002-04.
On first glance the visitor will notice the almost ubiquitous lingering on the human shape. A different tradition, one that bears the mark of the more unorthodox angle of performance and body art, is revealed through the work of the artists here selected by Christoph Thun-Hohenstein, the acfny's director and curator. From Markus Schinwald's portraits of contortionists to Iris Klein's eerily human solarised prints of her trademark ghost-like puppets captured in the woods, the legacy of Viennese Actionism and Austrian artists' subsequent concern with the body's presence is palpable, but upon a second look, as equally prominent here is its cut-out opposite - the body's absence and the suggestion of pending loss, a rebellion and questioning of its meaning by abstracting the way 'body' itself is defined.
Lois Renner, 'Venus', 2006.
Some works do it all at once. Lois Renner's compelling photographs, trompe l'oeil images mixing objects set up in a miniature artist's studio with painted characters and with palettes of paint itself, are not just at the interface of painting and photography but are hybrids of the two strains. Whether present or absent, the body stays on our minds. The re-enactment of identity contained in Rita Nowak's stilted tributes to the male odalisque portrait winks back at art history and its constant resuscitation, and Judith Huemer's images of monks' creased black habits show a kind of transcendence - empty vessels ready to be imbued with new meaning, not having to either have or even see the body in order to convey a strongly ambiguous sense of being and of having been.
Lupe Nunez-Fernandez
'21 POSITIONS'
To 25 August.
Austrian Cultural Forum
11 East 52nd Street
New York, NY 10022
T: +1 212 319 5300
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