Liquid/Havanna (autoassistente)

Organized by Michael Dobrindt and Markus Hahn

Manifesto: Fragmented opposition, competition in space, forms of spatial violence, soft skills. At precisely this point we consider a change in the politics of spaces and in the global, fundamentalist socio-cultural project of images and materials to be essential, in order to arrive at a newly negotiated perspective, a visual (im-) balance. This change ought to begin with a shift in abilities to act. We are on the way to our inner studio. Out of habit we are beginning to find everything suspect, which still has precise form. Something simple, inti- mate, urgent could be the highest instance. Films can play in the past, in the present, or in the future. 

When we say space, what we mean exactly is:
– hysteria
– diagnosis
– that a space can never be used as a means to an end for a collective or another person. That a space is merely a government in its raw state. Unlimited refusal is the only comprehensible political power of the moment. […]

Michael Dobrindt and Markus Hahn – both having trained in the classical representative processes of painting and sculpture – are distrustful of the monolithic presentation of singular artistic works. In the past few years – together with Anna Zwingl among others – they have developed a collective way of working under various names such as Sweat Room, Magicgruppe Kulturobjekt, die Arbeit des Materials, villa offdeutschland, flagship poly-vip etc., which is associated with bringing together various sculptural actions and materials from different contexts.

The Kunstpavillon also experienced the addition of an ensemble of items, artworks, everyday objects, found pieces from the gallery’s basement, smart aluminum BMW wheel rims, texts – in book form or read by the participants themselves or computer-generated voices. Anna Zwingl, Markus Hahn and Michael Dobrindt spoke about appropriation and the attempt to create a form of order; they took form-generating decisions in situ, sounding out the space’s direction of reading. Dialogues developed inasmuch as the various components were related to one another. Overlaps and simultaneity outshone singular meanings.

Visiting the Liquid/Havanna (autoassistente) page on the homepage of the Tiroler Künstler*schaft, it became clear that this was perceived as part of the space. Besides the manifesto in excerpts cited above, which was accessible as an audio file, the page included an extremely popular everyday report by a first-person narrator, probably male but with no closer definition, who dealt with cars, fast food, techno and drugs. In addition, we could access a large number of youTube links: illuminated BMW wheel hubs, “Amazing Places on our Planet” – a medieval cave church in Ethiopia, an interview with the psychotherapist J. L. Moreno about the 1963 book “The Words of the Father”, a freestyle dance in plastic flip-flops, the “World’s Most Bizarre Cows,” about a well-muscled Belgian breed of cattle, and also a 4’’20’ slide show with works by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner underlain by a pathetic soundtrack reminiscent of commercial film music. It continued with a trailer for the 2008 film “9 to 5: Days in Porn,” and an interview with sociologist Hartmut Rosa, who talked about the “unleashing of technology” and noted that we keep on falling for the promises of technology, which has often developed a life of its own. With every new achievement – whether computers or mobile phones – skepticism dominated at first. But after the “fall” we believed that we could use the technology with sovereignty and so expanded our horizon of experience until we became its slaves and started making phone calls while we were on Facebook and keeping seventeen other homepages open.

This was also how the Kunstpavillon’s space was used: as if innumerable tabs had been opened on three screens at the same time, with no apparent meaningful connection to each other. On closer inspection, however, there were two narrative threads, which were only seemingly unconnected: the high-tech, high-end production world of BMW with its fully automated production lines, ingenious accessories and the perfect marketing – which even conjures the most poetic names for its special paint colors, so that dreams are immediately evoked – and an interest in current art production, focusing on painting, in which similar mechanisms for the projection of desires proliferate. Classical questions of painting relating to image-finding and composition were compared to other production processes. Is the “awareness of the painting hand” not an automated process as well, a special, sometimes trance-like state?

For example, Tony Sunder sees text production as an extension of his painting. In his text he described image construction and working conditions on a TV film set. Daniel Domig’s paint- ing behind glass, with its reflective, slightly matt surface, was reminiscent of a monitor screen. Anna Zwingl translated movements made on touchscreens into space, and sampled watercolors reminiscent of calligraphy using Photoshop tools. Comic eyes seemed to look at us from Luisa Kasalicky’s gouache work, and the broad brush sweep was inscribed in red paint like an aside at the left-hand, bottom edge of the work. Very close by, in the painting on a mirror by Dobrindt and Hahn, a single stage of production, an expressive flourish of the palette knife, constituting less than ten percent of the surface area, also accesses “painting.”

Questions of rationalization, (self-)optimizing and automating were contrasted with a superfluity of possibilities. Fortunately, there was the advertising video for the HAPIfork, a vibrating fork that prevents us from eating too quickly despite the surfeit of impressions and objects on offer.

Exhibition Booklet (in German)