Archive: Wilder Raum
The Kunstraum Niederoesterreich had offered to put together an exhibition on the theme of “drawing”. Instead of the obvious attempt to find colleagues who each represent different a drawing skill in order to show the sheer inexhaustible spectrum of the medium, the project outline was pursuing the attempt to trace the conditions of an exhibition itself. Starting from a portrait of the institutional conditions, the gesture that attempted to give this project a face, led to the shadows thrown on paper by the relationship between studio, exhibition room and audience even before any decision had been made on what can and should be shown. Thus these shadows were rubbed out again and it was attempted to redraft these lines between artistic practice, exhibition and appreciation.
At the moment, what seems to be happening is the readiness of several artists to leave the conceptionof one of each of their works as it were “in store ” in the studio for a few weeks, in order, in a non-stereotypical experiment, to outline the artistic practice that becomes involved in the presentation of the medium of drawing. The experiment is intended to make it possible to show the spontaneity, the simultaneity of image realisation and analysis that is inherent in drawing.
Just as this process started sketchily, so the results emerge sensitively and in progress: there is a line that leads to a deadline at which the exhibition is to start, without yet being able to say whether there will be an exhibition at all. And then there is the cross-hatching for an exhibition period whose coordinates also make it possible to see this window of time simultaneously as a studio, exhibition and communication room. As wild the project may sound, the Kunstraum Niederoesterreichis just as eager to rise to the challenge of this experiment.
