Fascination with the collective experiences

Year: 2015
Type: a confrontation of two artworks

I was invited to participate at the exhibition TRANS.form 5 in Künstlerhaus Klagenfurt. The idea of the exhibition was to invite young artists to set their current work into dialogue with selected works by former members of the Carithian Artists’ Association who are no longer alive.

My project deals with the perception of the crowd and the viewer’s own position and compares a variety of collective experiences from specific contexts of the present as well as the past. Their comparison opens questions about the specifics of social and historical circumstances and global geographic and social (dis)advantage.

Artist statement:

Fascination with the collective experiences

Of the works by Albert Zahlbruckner, I was attracted by the painting ‘Feiertag in Maria Saal’ (1934). Despite the fact that at first sight there are no obvious parallels between this painting and my work, I thought it would be interesting to confront it with my series of drawings ‘There is no society without spectacle’ (2011–). The open ended series of so far nine conceptual drawings which are based on photographs found on the Internet and depict various mass events (protests in New York and in Slovenia, desperate factory workers, spectators at a tennis tournament, customers waiting for the official release of the new i-phone, the audience at a rock concert, school children at prayer, refugees struggling for their package of food and refugees rescued from a shipwreck). All these scenes have in common a crowd of people at a special pleasant or unpleasant event. As the theorist Jean-Luc Nancy would say: there is no society without spectacle; or more precisely, there is no society without the spectacle of society . … There is no society without the spectacle beacause society is the specatacle of itself. One could say that the painting of the pilgrimage in 1934 is presenting the current spectacular event in the local environment of the artist.

Vesna Bukovec