Marc Adrian Ben G. Fodor St John’s College Oxford UK ...lauragottlob.altervista.org/potemkin.pdf · St John’s College Oxford Incipit Vita Nova / The Potemkin Project raises the

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TOTAL POTEMKIN

St John’s College Oxford UKKendrew Quad Barn 1 pm - 6 pm15 February – 28 February 2014opening: 14 February 2014 at 6 pm

Curator: Laura Carlotta Gottlob

Marc Adrian Ben G. Fodor

St John’s CollegeOxford

Incipit Vita Nova / The Potemkin Project raises the question of a new

ideal orientation, starting out from the ‘old’ and partly failed utopias

of the 20th century, as manifested in buildings and monuments.

In this project it is not a matter of documentation. The representation

and construction of historical architecture serves here rather as an

artistic medium, as a tool.

Semi-fi ctional architectural models are linked to photographic works

and drawings on wall fragments, which represent the equivalent of

archaeological fi nds. For the fi rst time, connections between the

‘leftist’ and ‘rightist’ totalitarian systems of the past and the current

excesses of ‘mammonism’ are comprehensively articulated from an

artistic point of view.

“Fodor’s work has its place in the international genealogy of important

artists who, over the past ten years, have repeatedly tackled motifs

relating to the interplay of ideology, architecture, and buried utopias”,

writes Georg Schöllhammer, curator of Manifesta 2010 (among other

exhibitions), and editor of the documenta 12 magazines.

“Fodor does not succumb to the ideological sentimentality of a lost

paradigm that has to be recovered – and that is what makes his work

so exciting. Nor does he succumb – as others do – to the fascination

of an architectural language, whether it be that of modernism or

classicistic fascism. It seems that, for him, it is rather a matter of

Ben G. Fodor / Hudiscovering the moments of demolition, of deconstruction, and of the

archaeological fragmentation, as it were, of these utopias.

For example, in the drawing of an incomplete Potemkin staircase

that has become an archaeological entity. This is gradually seen from

a future perspective, with the staircase as a fi nd; in this way, the

staircase is projected into the past. On the other hand, it becomes, in

a sentimental way, a picture again – once the ideological semblance

endowed by society’s use of it has been removed.

Fodor never speaks of their purpose, but rather of those shell-like

formulas which are still associated with them, even if they have long

since ceased to be employed.

Between Peenemünde and Guantanamo there emerge quite peculiar

connections linking the suspension of utopias and the continuation

of architectural metaphors in other worlds.”

*Taken from Georg Schöllhammer’s interview with Ben G. Fodor. The complete text will be published at the start of April 2014 in the artist’s book Incipit Vita Nova / Kerber Verlag

relief ʺPalast der Republikʺ Berlin © Ben G. Fodor, 2009

In the decades after the Second World War, the Viennese artist Marc

Adrian (1930 – 2008) was – even from an international perspective

– one of the most innovative of his generation, as a painter, graphic

artist, experimental fi lm-maker, installation artist and poet. Before he

was even fourteen (!) Adrian was called up to the Wehrmacht and

experienced the last months of the war on the western front. “Like

many other artists of the Neo-Avantgarde in Europe, this experience

provided the decisive impulse for him to turn towards rationality,

analysis and multimedia”, writes Peter Weibel, Director of the Center

for Art and Media in Karlsruhe and one of the most knowledgeable

experts on Marc Adrian. “The rebellion against authority, against

the law of the father, and against repression is celebrated in various

forms of liberation: of the picture, the body, eroticism, the senses

and the subject.”*

From the early 1950s, Marc Adrian produced paintings that actually

moved in the eye of the beholder. His ‘sprung perspectives’ are

abstract works of (illusory) architecture, in which rhombic and

cuboid forms produce the optical effect of jumping around. The

technically sophisticated verre eglomisé montages, using squared

glass and refl ective slats, display a different image at every angle

they are viewed from. Adrian developed this principle of interaction

ten years before the term ‘Op Art’ was coined for this type of art.

Marc Adrian / AAdrian participated in the legendary MOMA exhibition, entitled The

Responsive Eye (1965), which was dedicated to this tendency.

He was one of the fi rst artists to use methods of mathematical

programming – algorhithms and permutations – for graphic lettering,

experimental fi lms and poetic texts. From 1967 onwards, this already

involved the use of computers. In 1968 Marc Adrian exhibited in

London, as part of the equally legendary show Cybernetic Serendipity

at the ICA.

In the estimation of Peter Weibel, “there are few artists in the world,

who can match Adrian’s status as a pioneer of programmed art”*.

* From the monograph Marc Adrian, published by Ritter Verlag in 2007, on the occasion of the Adrian retrospective at the Neuen Galerie Graz in the Landesmuseum Joanneum

rotated still from the fi lm ʺTotalʺ © Marc Adrian, 1965

Avantgarde Films by Marc AdrianFrom the late 1950s onwards, Marc Adrian was, together with Kurt

Kren, Peter Kubelka, Ferry Radax and Peter Weibel, one of the

protagonists of Austrian experimental fi lm, which received a great

deal of international recognition.

Adrian produced some 40 artistic fi lms, ranging from a few minutes

in length to more than an hour long. They include lettering fi lms,

which play out combinations of a few words or syllables, and fi lms

composed of geometric coloured areas, which Adrian himself

regarded as a continuation of painting with fi lmic means. “I do not

believe that colour is in better hands in painting than in fi lm. Why?

They are simply different media”. Perhaps Adrian’s best-known fi lm

of this type, Black Movie (1957), consists exclusively of fi lm intro

material in various colours.

In other fi lms, Adrian employs, almost excessively, the body and body

fragments. Pornography, blood, faeces, dissected organs, a nail in

a penis: such sequences, edited into a rapid series and repeated

The Orbit Position of Ben G. FodorBen G. Fodor’s art, like that of Marc Adrian, transcends the use of any

one particular medium, and is extremely varied in the visual means it

employs, which range from photographic tableaux to wooden objects,

from drawings to installations in the public space, to completely new

initiatives in the fi eld of performance.

Marc Adrian and Ben G. Fodor – the two artists both knew and

respected each other – shared the urge to radically question our

visual habits and, in doing so, also that view of the world to which

we have become accustomed ever since the discovery of central

perspective. With the spread of the mass media – through the use of

a conventional camera view – this ‘old’ perspective of the world fi nally

seems to have become obsolete. Ben G. Fodor is an artist in search

of a new way of seeing, in an age when we can sense a change

of epoch. In cycles such as noosphere (2007), his work redeems

the real utopia of an unknown view of familiar things. In large-scale

photographic works, real and familiar objects and landscapes are

ad nauseam, achieve what the artist formulated in the fi rst lines of

a poem in 1951:

“we play the songs you don’t want to hear.

we show you pictures you don’t want to see.

we scream words you shouldn’t understand.”

In the 33-minute fi lm Total (1965) one can still sense an echo of this

anger at a society which, even after the war, was once again trying to

impose the same old reactionary ‘total’ order that had in part caused

the war in the fi rst place. According to Marc Adrian, Total is to be

understood as a protest against his education. An education which

“left me in totally the wrong place. It simply did not prepare me for

the society around me, which should of course be the purpose of

education ....”*

Total is unimaginable without Marc Adrian’s intensive study of

Viennese Actionism. He fi lmed, or photographed, the actions of Mühl

and Rudolf Schwarzkogler.

* Marc Adrian. Das fi lmische Werk, edited by Otto Mörth. Sonderzahl Verlag 1998

experienced as totally foreign, unearthly scenarios. As if someone

had come back from a transgalactic exile and were viewing the Blue

Planet as it had never been seen before. This is where the experience

of exile comes into play. More than thirty years ago, Fodor fl ed to

Austria from Hungary, which was at that time under Communist rule.

“When an emigrant leaves his homeland, he loses all homelands.

However, this deep initial sorrow may, after a certain period of time,

change into euphoria. Into that life-accompanying euphoria, which is

associated with the freedom of migrants (Vilém Flusser)*.... I occupy

a ‘satellite position’, an ‘orbit position’ in relation to the world.”

Fodor’s search for a new way of seeing coincides with the search

for new social horizons in an all-embracing sense. It is around this

question – and that of the role of utopias in general – that the project

Incipit Vita Nova (quoted after Dante) revolves, from which the work

to be seen here has been taken.

* From Fodor’s artist’s book noosphere, Salamon Verlag 2007

Dorothee Frank

TOTAL POTEMKIN exhibition at St John’s College Oxford curated by Laura Carlotta Gottlob Marc Adrian Ben G. Fodor

TOTAL POTEMKIN

St John’s College Oxford UKKendrew Quad Barn 1 pm – 6 pm15 February – 28 February 2014Opening: 14 February 06:00 pm

Marc Adrian Ben G. Fodor

opening 14 Feb 2014 at 6 pmopen daily 15 Feb – 28 Feb 2014 1 pm – 6 pm

TOTAL POTEMKIN St John’s College Oxford UKKendrew Quad Barn

Marc Adrian Ben G. Fodor

Curator: Laura Carlotta Gottlob

The exhibition TOTAL POTEMKIN presents two European artists, Marc Adrian and Ben G. Fodor. Both the two artists in this exhibition are

tenacious and consequential in pursuing the totality of their objectives, however far apart they may be in the way they use their chosen

medium, in their intentions, and in the generation they belong to.

Since the late fi fties, Marc Adrian has been investigating shapes, sounds and colours via the medium of technology. In the sixties he began

to explore conceptual dimensions and the poetics of kinetic art, the precision of which he preserved in his creative activity in the years that

followed. His work continued to be one of rational progress, scrupulously considered and communicated.

Ben Fodor’s research employs photography, drawings and installations as a means to investigate, enhance and pursue the artifi cial dimension

of reality. In this exhibition, he makes use of the clichés of dictatorships: once devoid of their original messages, they take their place among

the many unusual aspects of the world, combining both the past and reality. Elements of political and metaphysical order are merged in a

work based on time rather than history, even though it does also make use of history. Just as Roland Barthes would have liked it.

This exhibition is organised by St John’s College Oxford and ZKM | Center for Art and Media - Karlsruhe with support of the Austrian Federal

Ministry for Education, the Arts and Culture.

Austrian Federal Ministry for Education, the Arts and Culture

Curator: Laura Carlotta Gottlob