PETER WEIBEL - MEDIA REBEL Warning! This exposition can change your life.

21er Haus 17 October 2014 to 18 January 2015

Peter Weibel, Mechanics of the Organisms – Organics of the Machines, 1994 Installation, Exhibition view Peter Weibel - Media Rebel, 21er Haus 2014 © Peter Weibel Photo: © Belvedere,

PETER WEIBEL - MEDIA REBEL Warning! This exposition can change your life.

The media artist, actor, theorist, musician, and museum director Peter Weibel, one of ’s “rebels” in the 1960s and 1970s, was awarded the Oskar Kokoschka Prize 2014 for his life’s work this year. His extraordinary art is characterized by particular themes, such as mechanisms of perception and thinking, the “apparatus world” as a world unto itself, the crisis of representation, the picture and the museum, the relationship between art, politics, and the economy, and the conditions governing the art world. The exhibition at the 21er Haus communicates the various chapters in Weibel’s art to the viewer, rather like an Orbis Sensualium Pictus.

The 1960s in Vienna

The rejection of sociopolitical conservatism with its traditional gender and class roles manifested itself in radical upheavals in the arts in the late 1960s. Unconventional thinkers started to break up and merge the hitherto strictly separate genres of art and architecture. The human body became a key medium and motif for performative and space-related forms of art that critically questioned the relationship between the individual and his or her environment or tried to redefine this in a visionary way.

It was in this milieu, and in the wake of the Vienna Group and Viennese Actionism, that a young art and architecture scene emerged whose protagonists, in view of the innovations in society, science, and technology, advocated experimental and alternative ways of life and forms of art. Peter Weibel, who was born in Odessa, was one of the most active figures in this scene. These artists no longer hid behind their works but appeared as part of the overall concept that did not distinguish between actors and recipients. Weibel, artist, curator, and art theorist, who has been Director of the ZKM Center for Art and Media Technology in Karlsruhe since 1999, was a rebel of a specifically Austrian sort during the 1960s and 1970s. For these rebels’ attacks on the government were combined with a touch of the absurd and a distinctly Viennese mix of applied psychoanalysis and “Central Cemetery” melancholy.

Peter Weibel: Media artist, actor, art theorist, musician, museum director

Weibel’s work is not characterized by an autobiographical signature but by particular themes and problem zones, such as mechanisms of perception and thinking, the “apparatus world” as a world unto itself, the crisis of representation, the picture and the museum, the relationship between art, politics, and the economy, and the conditions governing the art world. In the plurality of its methods and the coherence of the issues it addresses, his oeuvre presents a new and unusually radical concept of the artwork and the artist. This has not only influenced many young artists to date, but it will also continue to do so in the twenty-first century.

It is characteristic of the multi-talented artist Peter Weibel that he was awarded the Oskar Kokoschka Prize 2014 for his life’s work, although very few know, let alone are in the position to judge, his art that is indeed exceptional. The exhibition at the 21er Haus therefore seeks to communicate the various chapters in his oeuvre to the viewer, rather

like an Orbis Sensualium Pictus, an encyclopedia of the visible world in pictures. Weibel’s work, “sensualistic” in the true sense of the word, depends on interaction with viewers and calls on them, like a vade mecum, to examine themselves with the same questions the artist poses. For Weibel does not take the world or reality at face value. Ever since childhood, he has been indefatigable in his questioning and analysis, arriving at his own conclusions by drawing on various disciplines and testing the limits of actuality, which he clearly distinguishes from reality. The tasks he sets himself are often interlinked, as the nine chapters in the exhibition seek to reveal. Word & Paper, Destruction in Art Symposium 1966, Actions, , Photography, Media Art & Media Theory, & Expanded Cinema, Music, and Objects & Installations are the labels given to the merging sectors that do not, in fact, wish to be thus confined.

The display at the 21er Haus

The exhibition design responds to the transparent structure of the building and its raw character. Installations requiring darkness, such as Music of Anomaly – Voice of Humanity (1982), are to be presented to the public in sea containers, while objects, such as the Wheel of Reality (1988), the highly political Austria Room (1982), and the Mechanics of Organisms (1994) are shown in the light-flooded open space. In Music Exhibition, the Belvedere is recreating an installation Weibel devised in 1975, in which he reacts to the music appropriated by the Nazis and their atrocities. The fundamental constant of the exhibition is a metal system of shelves, based around the geometry of the containers. It is to be seen as an open encyclopedia about the artist that can be expanded at any time and in any way. Photographs, documents, objects, multimedia works, writings, apparatus, and – many films – convey Peter Weibel’s artistic intentions to the recipient. From whatever side the viewer approaches the display, from whatever spot he starts to explore the artist’s interdisciplinary work, he will, despite this widely spreading network, never lose the thread of the Orbis Sensualium Pictus, which so characterizes Peter Weibel’s work.

A PDF of the catalogue is available for download at: www.21erhaus.at/press (login: pr2014)

GENERAL INFORMATION

Exhibition Title Peter Weibel - MEDIA REBEL Warning! This exposition can change your life.

Exhibition Duration 17 October 2014 to 18 January 2015

Venue 21er Haus

Exposition Organizer Alfred Weidinger

Contact 21er Haus Schweizergarten, Arsenalstraße 1, 1030 Vienna T +43 (01) 795 57-0 www.21erhaus.at

Opening Hours Wednesday and Thursday 11 am to 9 pm Friday to Sunday 11 am to 6 pm Open on holidays

Regular Tickets € 7 (21er Haus) € 21 (21er Haus yearly ticket)

Public Relations 21er Haus Public Relations Claudia Bauer T +43 1 795 57-185 M [email protected]

Complimentary images can be downloaded for press purposes at www.21erhaus.at/press (login: pr2014).