Gärtnergasse

The Interchange

Exchange is to do with giving and receiving, whereas interchange, both in terms of definition and in the context of this show, means to replace, to put one thing in the place of another.

The Interchange is an intermediary zone. A strategically emotionless observation room. During production the project moved, somehow inexorably, away from dealing empathically with its subject. It became concerned with the production of an image, one that was recognizable but un-relatable.

The front (street) entrance to the gallery is boarded up internally and a corridor has been constructed to separate the bar and smaller back rooms from the main space. The gallery becomes a sort of dead end, a liminal area. Aesthetically The Interchange references both office and military spaces. The only window was treated with tinted foil as car windows or municipal privacy windows are.

The sound element, fundamentally a recording of the street outside the gallery, also contains a sample taken from sonar underwater imaging technology. This sound is incessant, forever sweeping, checking, scanning, surveilling and translating, turning sound and environment into image. Tied to a sense of unease, these sonic pulses emit from vessels deep below the surface of the earth, as removed from our world as it is possible to be.

The audio loop plays from a DVD player in the bare plasterboard corridor. The player is chained on to the same circuit as one of the corridor lights. During the seconds between the end of the loop and it beginning again one can hear the DVD cease to spin and the actual sound of the room and the road outside can be heard. In the gallery strips of carpet run from the floor to the electrical sockets pointing to the wider electrical grid.

Serving as a preface, installed in one of the outer rooms, is the photograph 'Untitled (green seats) '. An image taken through the back window of a car looking down onto the passenger seats. The print has a heavy green cast as if the car itself was submerged. This effort to look in is inverted in the gallery by the necessity to look out, also through glass.

Who can you trust in a world of lies? 

1938. After architect Victor Gruen fled Nazi Austria, like so many left-wing Jewish intellectuals at the time, he was looking for a way to smuggle European metropolitan values into the American suburban wasteland. Driven by his socialist upbringing in Vienna, he aimed to replace the avenues of horror with pedestrian-based urban centers. Instead, he created the first shopping mall. Described by some as the single most influential building archetype of the postwar era, it soon became the blueprint for a mental state of mind - the Sanatorium. 

2019. Our subject is here to remedy. A monument to ecstatic submission, she is the target and the dart, a lost fish in a magnetite current. A camera-man follows her impossible dérive. Together they saunter through warm and cool glows, baseline thuds, and smells that house the vacancy of youth. She undresses and redresses, rag-on-rag after rag-on-rag-on-rag. Identity drapes bare on her shoulders, codes tight to the chest. 

The Sanatorium is the motherboard, though the building is no longer of consequence. Its surplus is the cure and the cause, and individuality is a slippery pursuit. 


Veniet tempus, quo ista, quae nunc latent, in lucem dies extrahat.*

_{* Seneca: Lib. VII. c. 25., Introduction au magnétisme animal , Franz Anton Mesmer, Berlin 1814}

Spinner of Yarn

He tripped over his garbled shoelaces. A stack of folders filled with laminated charts and graphs got scattered across the steep pvc staircase. Down the spiral, out of sight. He tried to clutch on to some of them, while finding his center balance. His legs widly spread he found himself trapped between 3 sets of stairs. Slighty surprised he casually assembled his posture and started gathering up all the missing work utilities. Close call. That splintered nose from last summers hiking trip wasn‘t going to match the new pair of Eurospecs very well. For no apparent reason the spacious neo-gothic hallway connecting the administration sector with the south wing of the estate was buzzing with people. Slighty annoyed yet quite gentle he started elbowing his way across the anonymous mass. Bumping into members of the faculty while muttering something under his breath that might have been an apology. Soon enough he felt his grip around that chrome door handle.

Cut to;

Click. That hefty two panel door swung open exposing his eyes to a ray of sunlight. Through the triptych window located at the opposite side of the office room, it flowed across the extensive wooden interior. The backlight standardized all items set up in the space. Treating all members the same way. Simply reducing them to their silhoutte, therefore wiping out all differences in materiality and colour scheme. He stumbled over to his desk clarelessly dropping his shoulder bag on the floor. Its been a long day and he has no attentiveness left for handling thing carefully. His body feels rusty, maybe its yearning for wax, or some other kind of lubricant. However there was a stack of handed over assigments in front of him on his table desk, waiting to be corrected. Peering down he took his favourite red pencil and started revising the uppermost;

Nice description, actable dialogue. Some amusing moments; some sensitive moments. All in all, a script of well-chosen words. The story, however, sucks. The first thirty pages crawl on a fat belly of exposition; the rest never get to their feet. The main plot, what there is of it, is riddled with convenient coincidence and weak motivation. No discernible protagonist. Unrelated tensions that could shape into subplots never do. Characters are never revealed to be more than they seem. Not a moments insight into the inner lives of these people, or their society. Its a lifeless collection of predictable, ill-told, generic and clichéd episodes that wander off into a pointless haze.

Throughout the fourth assigment, his mind started wandering off while fiddling around with his drawing compass. The recurring blandness and similarity of the storylines made him lose his attention, let alone his enthusiasm. Storylines clogged with clichés, lacking progression and filled with stereotypical characters. Yawn! A golden opportunity to wander off to the City of Dreams and construct a narrative worthwhile.

Cut to;