2015 Hannah Black

Wie vermutet ist der Warteraum voll. Die Beine sind zum Lesen überkreuzt, das Heft senkrecht auf den Oberschenkel aufgestellt. Mit Daumen und Zeigefinger halte ich mich jeweils an einer Magazinhälfte fest und lasse dabei die Unterarme mit ihrem eigenen Gewicht nach unten sinken. Hannah Black schreibt hier, es gäbe immer noch Versuche beziehungsfähige Roboter zu entwickeln. Weil menschliche Beziehungen aber arbeitsintensiv und gefährlich sind und weil sie aus vielen rätselhaften Beiträgen bestehen, würden sich diese Roboter nicht sehr bewähren. Man hätte ihnen die Form von Frauen, von Haustieren, von Dienern und die Form des Schreibens gegeben; ob die aufgezählten Kategorien etwas gemeinsam haben oder nicht, bleibt hier offen.

Hannah Black is an English artist and author interested in the condition of being bodied and the registration of reality, world history, and personal history in narration. Her essay “Social Life” was published in the German contemporary art magazine Texte zur Kunst, in the 2015 issue on Media.

Hannah Black, "Social Life“, Texte zur Kunst, Issue 98: Media, 2015 

Ohne Titel (Halbes Wiener Kastenfenster)

Ein Vorhang ist eine relativ große vertikale Fläche im Verhältnis zum Raum, in dem er auftaucht und zu den Personen, die sich im Raum aufhalten. Üblicherweise ist er größer als die Öffnung in der Wand, also größer als der Ausschnitt vom Dahinter, vor dem der Vorhang auf- und zugezogen wird. Dabei hängt er, fällt er von oben nach unten in Falten, rechtwinklig zur Architektur, die den Raum herstellt. Direkt von vorne trifft Licht auf ihn, vergleichbar wie auf ein gemaltes Bild. Es dringt durch sein Material hindurch auf die hintere Seite und macht ein Bild, dass man sich in dem Moment, in dem man vor dem Vorhang steht, vorstellen kann. Gerafft, gebunden, geformt und fallend verändert der Vorhang den Lichteinfall von draußen in den Raum und dadurch die Stimmungen und Beziehungen zwischen den Elementen innerhalb und zu sich selbst. Das und die Tatsache, dass sich auch der Vorhang mit der Zeit, zusammen mit den anderen Elementen im Raum, kontinuierlich verändert, bringt seine natürlichen Eigenschaften ins Spiel und lässt so einen Abstand zur Beschreibung entstehen, zur eigenen Handschrift und zu den Versuchen Ausdruck zu vermeiden. (2016)
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A curtain is a relatively large vertical surface in relation to the room in which it is hanging and to the persons inside. Usually it is larger than the opening of the wall, larger than the cutout of what is behind, of what is to be covered and unveiled by the curtain. In doing so, it dangles, it drops top down, perpendicular to the architecture which builds the room. Light illuminates the curtain as if it was a painting. It seeps right through the material to the other side behind it; one might conceive that image on its reverse side while standing in front of the curtain. Folded, tied, shaped, and falling, the curtain has an effect on the sunlight entering the room, and in this regard it changes the moods and relationships between the elements within. This and the fact that a curtain, like every element of a room, changes continuously with time, brings its natural qualities into play and creates distance to its description, to the process of writing, to one's personal style, and to the experiments of avoiding expression. (2017)

Constanze Schweiger, Untitled (Halbes Wiener Kastenfenster), 2016
Curcuma and paprika on canvas, 120 × 135 cm
Part of the exhibition Schneidig#1

Untitled (convey Regular, convey Regular Italic)

Weil du fragst – meistens bleibt wenig Zeit für das Schreiben, genauso gut lässt es sich aus dem Alltag auch nicht wegdenken. Der Auftrag zu einer Arbeit mit Schrift kommt von einer österreichischen Buchgestalterin. Sie hat vor einiger Zeit eine Schrift entwickelt, die nach gegensätzlich Kriterien ausgerichtet ist, um in verschiedenen Umsetzungen möglichst gut lesbar zu sein; Offset- oder Laser-gedruckt, eventuell projiziert oder ganz einfach am Bildschirm. Dazu fallen mir einige Texte ein, die mit den täglich anfallenden Aktivitäten Lesen, Schreiben und Veröffentlichen in Verbindung stehen, wie sie Hand in Hand gehen und nicht getrennt zu denken sind, wie wir sie mehr oder weniger irgendwie alle täglich tun. Ich stelle mir vor, man könnte Beschreibungen zu den Texten in dieser Schrift auf Stoff veröffentlichen, in einem Raum ausbreiten, danach aufrollen, in einer Ecke abstellen, nach und nach ein Stück davon abschneiden und wieder andere, anders verwendbare Objekte daraus produzieren lassen, eine Tasche oder ein Behältnis für ein Buch. Mir kommt das nicht so sehr anders vor als das, was wir so und so täglich mehr oder weniger alle irgendwie machen, beobachten und fühlen. So könnte man am Ende Behälter daraus herstellen, in die man alles mögliche oder einfach Bücher hineintun und mit sich tragen kann.
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Because you asked – actually there is not much time for writing, while one can not think of a day without it. The assignment of an artwork involving typography came from an Austrian book designer, who some time ago, developed a font family on opposed criteria. It is designed for versatile applications and works homogeneously in various common formats and media; printed in offset or with an office printer, possibly projected or simply on the screen. A few texts that relate to the daily activities of reading, writing, and publishing come to my mind; how they go hand in hand, as they are inseparable today, like one practices them more or less continuously. I figure one could write descriptions of these text sources and print them in the mentioned font on fabric, disperse the fabric in the exhibition space, then roll it up, deposit it in some corner, gradually cut of parts, and produce other, differently destined objects like a tote bag or repository for a book. It does not seem so different to what we all so and so, more or less somehow do, observe, and feel. In the end, one could fabricate containers into which you can put anything or just books you want to carry with you.

Dinge, die

Vorhang ... Absurd pathetische Form ... Bild ... im Aufheben am schönsten. ... hinter dessen Blende die Dinge faulen können zu Kunst ... Das was sie vorstellt und das was sie darstellt ... um sie allen anderen auszusetzen. (Excerpts from the book f by Jutta Koether, 1987, that where accompanying the exhibition Dinge, die)

Dinge, die Exhibition, Pinacoteca, Wien, 2016. Foto: Thomas Ries
Found textile (Barbara Post) stretched on frame 

2016 Christophe Lemaire

“The best for the most for the least.” It was said that Christophe Lemaire picked up on Charles and Ray Eames' famous thoughts in an interview September 2016 on the launch of his latest collection with Uniqlo. Originaly the Eames were referring with their pithy sentence to William Morris and his wish not to "want art for a few; any more than education for a few; or freedom for a few."

Lemaire's Men collections somehow remind one on the great style of socialist writer and designer William Morris. Now I'd say, even better, with Lemaire Arts and Crafts goes Mod … for a few coy and cool that at least romanticize on socialism and democracy? Outfits, contrived and fabricated carefully into wardrobe pieces for the ones that take a little bit of distance, as the designer puts it himself.


Lemaire, Men Spring–Sumer 2017. Music: Witch, No Time, 1973 (Can’t You Hear Me?, Now-Again Records, 2016)

1860s William Morris

In a publication by Catherine McDermott (Professor of Design at Kingston University in London and now director of the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York) on tradition and style in British fashion (Octopus Publishing Group Ltd, London 2002) one can find a photograph of the English designer, craftsman and socialist writer William Morris taken in the 1860s where he sits in a garden on a stack of wooden planks, encircled by different sorts of large scale textiles folded and nested beside him. McDermott finds in Morris a worthy example of the up to this day remaining middle-class English male disregard for fashion. "[His] look proclaims that one's personal values are more important than fashion," consequently opposed to the standards of the immaculate Victorian gentleman of wealth and respectability. We see him wear a loose-fitting wool suit and unstarched shirt, creasy plain trousers, practical and comfortable looking outdoor shoes, long ungroomed hair and beard – scruffy, disheveled but highly politicized like the creating and thinking man himself. In a later period of his life he adopted what McDermott calls a "more extreme version of dress" compiled from indigo-dyed shirts and a suit of blue serge, which later became the antetype uniform of a defined revolutionary.

1952 Ellsworth Kelly

In 1952 Ellsworth Kelly wanted to try something. According to his thoughts he produced Red Yellow Blue White. The work can be described as an early Hard-edge painting. It consists of five vertical panels separated on the wall and four occurring intervals of the wall surface between them. Each of the five panels is made up by a grouping of respectively five square-cut canvases; red, yellow, dark blue and white cotton fabrics he had purchased in the marketplace of a small fishing village in South of France, and which he stretched directly onto their supports. Following the strategy that he had explored in Paris with collages made from various found coated and uncoated colored papers, it is the only painting the artist ever did using actual industrially dyed fabrics of ready-made colors.

      In Random Order (October Books, 2003, p. 99) the art historian Branden Wayne Joseph takes up on Kelly's try and expects that he used the left over cloth from Red Yellow Blue White to make a dress for the artist Anne Weber. "Kelly's use of the same fabric for the dress of his friend Anne Weber only makes the equation between color and commodity in this particular work clear."

      All that remain of that dress are a collage by Ellsworth Kelly and a photograph of Anne Weber wearing it. In 2013 art adviser Sharon Coplan Hurowitz and women's creative director of Calvin Klein Francisco Costa worked with Kelly to recreate the dress as he had actually wanted it. It is composed of equally wide horizontal bands, made of modern fabrics in the fibers cotton, silk, nylon and elastane, rendered in a very limited-edition. As mentioned in Leslie Camhi's article In the Abstract: Ellsworth Kelly Creates a Limited-Edition Collection with Francisco Costa for Vogue, May 31, 2013, Kelly had anticipated within his works a way of “getting color off the wall and having it walk around the room.” The original intention remains present in the ten reinterpretations of the dress for Calvin Klein. One copy was donated to the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and one to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, whose permanent collection includes the work Red Yellow Blue White, the try that inspired the design of the dress at first.