Last night das Land Steiermark held the annual ceremony for the arts, which included the category of awards for the resident artists from abroad. On the way down into the Neue Galerie in the Universalmuseum Joanneum, Vera and I were talking about the right to be forgotten and the distinction between the American obsession with taking photos and the fledgling European concern for digital privacy and owning one’s image. We entered into a schilcher-propelled social situation and were soon ushered into reserved seats at the front of the house. The ceremony got underway. I understood very little of the obligatory speeches made by the master of ceremony, the director of culture, or the introduction about the artists, including myself. I felt like I was in a bad dream in which I was in class and about to take test for a language for which I had been ill-prepared. But what could have been nascent anxiety was constantly undermined or aborted by the performance group, das Planetenparty Prinzip, who were hand-delivering each award to the stage, augmenting the event by 30-45 seconds per awardee. For the first five awardees, the interruption was charming, wonky and strange. The master of ceremony was enchanting; sarcastic and sincere. She seemed to tower over the audience, who seemed to be enjoying the raucous. By the fifteenth award and ongoing speeches, I was wondering if this would ever end, and hoping Prinzip would speed it this up, or whether this wasn’t a creative addition at all but a necessary component of all award ceremonies in Austria. At the stage, I took a selfie bomb with the other artists in residence.
Editing the footage of Martin, Romana, Werner and Gunter made me feel like a moderator of this dispute, as if my project could either side with one or none of them, anger all of them, or appease their inability to come to an agreement. At my core, I know that this isn't my role as an artist, nor is it the requirement of the work, nor my interest in this mess, but it would be dishonest to say that, in contrast to the otherwise anonymous, cool and detached disposition of Grazers, the moments I spent talking to these individuals did germinate a sense of intimacy, even friendship. And that it must be my cynical New York nerves that suspected this may have been a calculated, intentional process–how each participants entrusts in my the delicate handling of their image.
The compromise that I've since realized is not really a compromise at all, but a re-conceptualization of the issue. While at first I sensed that the debate was what constituted environmentally friendly design, i.e. sustainable power, a livable city, or an ecological aquatic state, now I think that the issue is the membership to a system of thought–what system we use to conceptualize our surroundings, and which cycles that we are trained to identify. Systems may have static or dynamic elements, but each component’s membership (meta or discrete) is, by definition, constant. Systems can be linear or cyclical. The components of a system may be conceptual or three-dimensional objects, but the system itself is a mental construct without dimension. The activists were thinking of ecological cycles. Holding Graz was focused on the man-made sewer system. TU was preoccupied with engineering a variation of a flush system that acted as a storage system.
A cycle is a system that necessarily repeats. Clocks, astronomical bodies, biological functions. While church bells institute time punctuality to religious reverence, Pavlov's salivating dog is the metabolic cycle hacked.
[1] Das Planetenparty Prinzip
https://planetenparty.at/