I met Marleen and Michael, a young couple who work under the name of Studio ASYNCHROME, in their two-floor studio in the catacombs of Schaumbad. The space had a healthy mix of packed artworks in boxes, coming from or going to exhibitions, and works in progress. Michael and Marleen had studied architecture, and their exhibition preparation showed that: A model of the Kunstahalle Graz where they recently showed some of their artworks, offered a bird's eye view of the layout, how visitors navigated the space, since most of the works were two-sided drawings and displayed off of the wall. The skylight drew us to a large table in the the center of the studio.
Studio space is always the first point of entry when I visit artists in any city other than New York. In contrast to Michael & Marleen’s enormous studio, it's fair to say that production is different for 99% of artists in New York. Studio ASYNCHROME got out of graduate school four years ago, and have a two-story, 800 square foot space to produce and store artwork and have visitors. By explaining what it was like to work in New York City, I inadvertently reminded or convinced myself of why there: the people to meet. The sheer number of amazing people. The frequency of meeting amazing people. The ideas and projects of impressive people. But not the studios, or rather lack thereof.
The works in their studio were representational drawings made of collaged situations, all rendered with monotone comic-book aesthetics that included text bubbles as well as text fields, graphs and data visualizations. They describe their work to be about utopia, informed by research in urban planning, economics, politics and history. When I first heard this I was reminded of that period in 2009-2012, just after the period when exhibitions about “archive” were hot (2002-2005), when utopia was brought back into the spotlight. And, in hindsight, the Obama period was more utopian than how the world would descend. But Studio Asynchrom’s meditation on utopia is more related to the contemporary state craft of the European Union and geopolitics than the imaginary of urban plans or manifestation of universal humanistic ideals, e.g. Buckminster Fuller, as previous manifestations of utopian study have focused. ASYNCHROME’s recognition utopian limitations is most clearly seen in their works installed for the Neue Galerie’s Kunstraum Steiermark 2018. The title of the work, EU-topia, is written on one of the drawings with the logos major tech companies comprising the homophone.[3]
Their exhibition, “Autopropaganda, or Capital is a Bad Meditor,” was shown at Kunsthalle Graz. The show was comprised of drawings printed on UV plexiglass. Each work is an arena for a mash up actors or icons who represent a power player or generic servant within power structures. A rendition of Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People is extended with a pile of skeleton bones and the flag bearer aging with each step, like a Steps of Life painting with only allegory toward death. In another work the busts of the Koch brothers loom on the horizon behind a geodesic dome surrounded by a wall of that is tumbling down as a group of militant youth in the foreground search for someone to beat. The characters of these works look lifted from a Google image search, pasted into a collage and re-drawn by hand in order to homogenize issues of color, pixelation, and copyright, though attention to perspective, plane and scale are handled less rigorously. The attraction to symbol and icon are as dehumanizing of the people in these drawings as the statistics about artificial intelligence or authoritarian governments, which are pasted into the background.
Michael gave me the catalog, which is divided into five parts: resistance, influence, awareness, border?, and distribution. The essay by Wenzel Mraček frames their work within the Foucauldian theory of dispositif, the structural entities that maintain power over the social body. (In most English editions of Foucault, ‘dispositif’ is translated as ‘apparatus.’)
"Only one aspect of many statistical surveys that are relevant in such a context is that more turnover is generated worldwide from data volumes today than from business with crude oil. If one understands the amounts of data with information potential as working capital in this sense, Studio ASYNCHROME concludes that capital is a fairly "bad mediator." Conversely, calculated self-presentation is based on targeted amounts of data to a large number of users. This is how individuals and global corporations spread Autopropaganda." [2]
Graz has been good to Michael and Marleen; they had steadily showed their work in many institutions and exhibitions, including the Steirischer Herbst 2018. Strategically, they were thinking of Graz as their base of production but had aspirations to be working internationally, as a way to avoid the size and opportunity limitations of being in a smaller city (even though Graz has disproportionately more opportunities than most cities of its population). While many may simply leave Graz for the larger art scene of Vienna or Berlin, it’s not clear which option is better: having a large studio in a small pond, or a small fish in a sea.
After meeting with Michael and Marleen, I met Markus Wilfling in his studio just down the hall. Markus’ artwork could not be more different than Studio ASYNCHROME’s. Markus was making a silhouette portrait of himself for a collector, inspired by the silhouette portrait of Alfred Hitchcock. The work in progress was made of rubber strips that were stacked and glued together with contact cement.
Our visit together was primarily directed by a monograph of his work that he gave me. It was helpful since his huge studio had work from all eras of his practice and in states of being built, disassembled, packed, stored, suspended, mounted or taken apart.
The monograph, “Zwischen dem Raum,” spans Wilfling’s practice to the date of publication, 2009.[4] Thematically, his work uses form and symbols to play with the visitor’s expectations. His work was easy to like and even more easily accessible; he makes public art. His physical mirrors–artworks that make a situation appear as if mirrored, but were actually adjacent installations reversed–were either cliche or pioneering; I’ve seen dozens of artists who did that in the late 1990s, but who knows who was the first. Yet even these were still enjoyable.
Wilfling is as adept using symbols as he is distorting their meaning through traditional sculptural tools of space, texture, material and placement. In the sculptural lineage of the 1990s and early 21st Century, I saw his works comparable to Gabriel Orozco, Maurizio Cattelan or Mel Chin. Markus has been prolific in this fertile realm for decades, which may explain why some of his best works are the most recent, including a public urinal that diverts urine back onto the shoes of the pisser. While I was visiting, he was simultaneously constructing a portable roulette table.
Wilfling’s shadow objects–a duplicate object positioned near quotidian object–are exemplary of his practice: this work needs no wall text, no introduction, no instructions or curators to defend it. Many works are without title, not because of a formal protest against titles, as one finds in the Ab Ex movement, not as a protest that an artwork can, indeed must, speak for itself, but because these works operate on vocabulary that uncomfortably universal to the movements of relativity or contextuality that would follow it. Movements that referenced Foucault.
This epoch of artwork, often referred to as visual conceptual art, visually and thematically shared more in common with Dada's use of symbols and belief in the capacity to communicate through universal visual means than Conceptual Art. Systematically, the 1990s artists like Orozco or Chin did not continue the discourse of the 1966-1977 Conceptual artists of systems, language or philosophy. The 1990s artists didn't share the central critique of commodification of art that the conceptual artists of the 60s and 70s shared (perhaps in part because the latter were marginalized from the commercial scene while the former were embraced by the exploding art market). What caused Conceptual Artists to make landart, particularly their exclusion from commercial galleries, and make large-scale works was by the 1990s already being integrated into a heavily-funded public art program in many major cities. The works of Wilfling, Orozco and Chin are highly "finished," compared to artworks from the Conceptual Art movement of the 60s and 70s. The craftsmanship of the 1990s paralleled an aesthetics of industrial production; the hurdle was to mimic or alter this handless aesthetic to the point that the interfering hand of the artist disappeared. The suggestion was the familiar environment was totally manufactured, machined and standardized and, in order to reach the uncanny, the humorous, the clever or the alternative, which summarily comprised the role of these artists, an aberration was embedded in this landscape. But in order to interrupt, materials and mastery over these materials, was necessary.
"If we consider the method and practice of shifting perception, of both delightfully and intelligently deceiving, to be characteristic of Markus Wilfling, then the space outside the doors of artistic rooms, mouth the aesthetics of everyday life, provides a field of action which allows him to bring these concerns into sharp focus."[5]
There's an interesting evolution or shift that can be seen between the visual language of studio ASYNCHROME and Wilfling. Both rely heavily on the signifier and the signified but find their repository in vastly different spaces. Wilfling collapses the particular in the general through domestic and familiar spaces while ASYNCHROME finds the general in that which is globally shared on the Internet.
Thursday marked the first of an annual series of protest in Graz against the ruling state government of Sebastian Kurz. Studio ASYNCHROME made the central banner for the marchers; Markus planned to join the procession. The protests were planned for every second and fourth Thursday of each month, meeting in Lendplatz and weaving through the city. After a series of speeches, the crowd of mostly students began a cacophonous march that sounded more like a parade than a protest. The bystanders looked on appreciatively, smiling in the neon light of the Ferris wheel as I left the crowd. The footage I shot would represent the protest against the Speicherkanal, a conflation that would frame protests in a larger context of social discontent.
