FETISH
Heimo Zobernig
with an essay by Sabeth Buchmann
Three Star Books
Published Summer 2007
Press Release
ound and cleft. Quite simple, really, and yet the archetypal subject of pictorial fantasy and literary imagination, not to speak of the daily musings of lesser beings, of men and also women. The origin of the world.
When Gustave Courbet painted the genitals of a woman in 1866, limiting his pictorial subject to splayed legs and a central focus on lips and pubic hair, even his friends were scandalized, not to speak of a public that finally had occasion to see his work only at the very end of the twentieth century. Forever, it hung behind curtains or painted panels, the private pleasure of its varying owners.
Marcel Duchamp picked the subject up again, or laid it down, so to speak, in Etant donnés: 1° la chute d’eau / 2° le gaz d’éclairage an installation he worked on for the last twenty years of his life, subsequently acquired by the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Here too, such an uproar was caused that, even in the swinging 1960s, a vision of post-coital abandon could cause shivers.
The power of eroticism in art still dictates that ancient Roman artifacts of sexual nature are housed in a secret room in the archaeological museum of Naples, banished since their discovery in the nineteenth century.
Thousands of artists throughout history, including Caravaggio and Egon Schiele, have been slapped with fines and even prison for their licentious depictions.
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ans Schabus is from Vienna, as everyone knows since he took over the Austrian pavillion at the Venice Biennial 2005. The city he lives in has morphed in recent history from a sleek European backwater to a western frontier town as Eastern European borders opened. Stodgy old Vienna is getting some of it’s mojo back, and Hans is a part of that. He has long worked on complex interdisciplinary frontiers in art, creating hybrids and mash-ups of sculpture, architechture (as you can see above), installation and performance. His work is challenging and smart, as much so in it’s particulars as in the arc of his mid-stage career. His work is often about communicating psychological states and strategies spacially, i.e., about being an artist. But Hans’ work avoids the trap of self-referentiality because it remains based in objective correlatives of the unconscious. Imagine the young Freud, another Viennois of course, wandering around Hans’ installation (« Astronaut (be right back) ») in the main room at the Vienna Secession in 2003, or playing with trains in Hans’ atelier. At last, our Freud might think, an artist who understands my work! Maybe that’s why Hans is such a dreamer : he should have a sign that says DO NOT DISTURB ARTIST AT WORK over his head while he is sleeping. But of course he may be just taking a nap. Or he may be digging a train tunnel to the moon. Who can say, except Hans?
