Blood - Spike Art Quarterly

»In London, academy graduates worked for eight hours, and then
they made art and organised small galleries«, says Viennese painter
Markus Muntean about his work in the English metropolis, then
adding: »In Vienna people are accustomed to subsidies and a comfortable
life.« With this description, the artist summarises the image
of Vienna as a protected workshop. For many artists, a longing for
the cool atmosphere of London and the bohemianism of Berlin
goes hand-in-hand with the pragmatic decision to live mainly in
Vienna. For half the year they jet from one exhibition to another,
for the other half they relax in the artist’s hideout of the Café
Anzengruber.
An immaculate support structure, a gallery scene of international
calibre, modern academies and well situated museums and
art exhibition spaces provide ideal surroundings for the production
of art. To find one’s way around this site there is no need for
any means of transport. The Vienna art world is less than two kilometres
long. At its centre is the MuseumQuartier (MQ). To combat
the conservative image of the city surroundings, the cultural
administrators and politicians took the Centre Pompidou in Paris
as a model for a cultural area for contemporary art, design, new
media and dance. In this way the MQ arose alongside the monumental
museums of the imperial age as a compromise between the
avant-garde and the enemies of progress.The flagship of this popular
leisure-time area is the Museum of Modern Art (MUMOK),
completed in 2001. Originally the museum, designed by architects
Ortner & Ortner, was intended to rise above the Baroque building
in front of it, but then it was quietly lowered into the ground. The
Kunsthalle Wien, which has undertaken the task to make contemporary
art popular, also moved into a building in the MQ. Right
next door is the Secession, the building that offers the liveliest exhibition
program. A few minutes’ walk away are clusters of galleries
in the Eschenbachgasse and Schleifmühlgasse.
Muntean/Rosenblum belong to the middle generation of
artists who act according to the principles of global contemporary
art. Their paintings, representing young people whose body language
looks like pathetic formulae emptied of meaning, cannot
be assigned to any local idiom in the art-fair cabinets of London
or Miami. Suffering from the reactionary climate of the post-war
world, a feeling which drove the artists of Viennese Actionism, the
only contribution Austria made to art history after 1945, has given
way to routine professionalism.
»In Austria the artist has no rights«, painter Maria Lassnig said
recently for the record. In her words, there are clear echoes of the
»Austria-plaint« once heard from the playwright and novelist
Thomas Bernhard. The alpine republic has veiled itself in the iden-
SPIKE ART GUIDE EAST 01 — 2009 Vienna
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Suffering from
the reactionary
climate of the
post-war world
has given way
to routine professionalism
Vienna