Davide Balula (FR), Nikolaus Gansterer (AT), Igor Krenz (PL), Mahony (AT), David Moises / Chris Janka (AT), Fabian Seiz (AT), Roman Signer (CH), Keith Tyson (UK), Johannes Vogl (DE), Gernot Wieland (AT)
Curated by Severin Dünser

“Science Fictions” is the second part of an exhibition-series that started with “The Lab” in September 2007 in Vienna. The central theme of the exhibition in Vienna was the laboratory as a metaphor for artistic creation. The idea of serendipity and working strategies like trial & error were the starting points in the artistic process. The outcomes of these experiments in art (contrary to scientific experiments) were the test arrangements themselves. They are self-referential works, reflecting the act of artistic creation itself.

The show at Czarna Gallery in Warsaw focused on one aspect of the exhibition in Vienna: using the language of science to create works that turn their formal rationality into absurdity.
“O. T. (Marmeladenbrotstreichmaschine)” (Untitled (Jam Bread Spreading Machine)) by Johannes Vogl (born 1981 in Kaufbeuren, D, lives and works in Vienna and Berlin) marks the beginning of the show with a heap of bread and jam. The heap was produced by Vogl’s therefore built machine, which puts the bread on a conveyor belt, spreads jam on it, transfers it to the end of the band – and lets it fall. The machine creates a test arrangement for verifying or falsifying an exemplification of Murphy’s Law: is the probability of bread landing on the floor with the jam side higher than the other way around? The viewers have to answer the question by themselves – facing the pessimism inherent in Murphy’s Law and its psychology of perception background.

Chris Janka and David Moises (both born 1973 and live and work in Vienna) fight against the laws of gravity. Their “Vertigo” is a homemade rocket, driven by water and pressure. Like in other works before, they use common tools and materials for their production. It’s a quest for the romantic idea of the ultimate hobbyist creation, using ready-mades, combining them and turning boys’ dreams into artistic output. Together they already built jet-bicycles and a helicopter, Moises also did works like a chainsaw-driven bike or an experimental hovercraft with a leaf blower-engine. For “Vertigo”, Janka and Moises used a water tank, added tubes and an opening mechanism, enabling the activation of the rocket from a secure distance. Once the starting mechanism is released, the rocket takes off by setting free the pressure of the water, taking space age utopias to new heights.

In the first part of the exhibition in Vienna, Davide Balula (born 1978 in Annecy, F, lives and works in Paris) showed “The Apple Tree”, an installation consisting of several apples, all laying on small plates. They would be quite banal, if they weren’t on display in an exhibition, and – if they weren’t plugged to electricity. Dished up on plates, the apples invite to have a bite, and the artist takes the role of the snake, seducing the viewer like Adam and Eva. This institutional critique Balula expresses even goes a step further with the piece on display in “Science Fictions”. It’s the apples, again, but in form of a sauce, and canned. “Le Pommier Suite” conservates the electrified apples, enables them to be consumed. Balula turns them into products, while suggesting a rather strange way of transforming the apples to sauce by depicting the electrified apples on the labels.

Roman Signer’s (born 1938 in Appenzell, CH, lives and works in St.Gallen) video “Old Shatterhand” shows the artist entering a room, a revolver in his hand. He clamps himself into the belt of a body shaking massage machine and points the gun at a can at the opposite wall of the room. After aiming, the artist shoots 6 times, till all bullets have left the cylinder. Afterwards the viewer can see a close-up of the can at the wall – no bullet hit it’s target. The title of the video, “Old Shatterhand”, derives from a character of the books of Karl May. Old Shatterhand is the prototype of a western hero, a role model for boys and their adventurous dreams. The video works as a wonderful metaphor for the œuvre of the artist, his approach between childlike play and serious art production. At the same time it’s a test arrangement for the artist: proofing the playfulness of a child in an old man’s body, oscillating in the ambiguity of shattering: shivering and battering.

Last year, the Viennese group mahony (Andreas Duscha born 1976, Stephan Kobatsch born 1975, Clemens Leuschner born 1976 and Jenny Wolka born 1978, live and work in Vienna) was dealing with the romantic notions of expeditions and the explorers involved in these scientific journeys. Their work in the show – “Rekonstruktion des ältesten Stück Dings der Welt” (“Reconstruction of the oldest Piece on Earth”) – consists of a photograph depicting the oldest piece found on earth (approx. 80 million years), as shown in the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, and a reproduction of it made of clay and shoe polish. On the contrary to the original, the beholder is allowed to take pictures of the artwork, and while the source material in Greenwich is permitted to be touched, touching mahony’s reproduction would end up with brown fingers. With the work, the artists question the objective status of scientific reconstructions, be it models or theories, and give an answer at the same time, reconstructing an artifact just existing as an entity of time.

Keith Tyson (born 1969 in Ulverston, GB, lives and works in London) is often characterized as the “mad professor of art”, because of his obsession with physics, philosophy, probability, computers, astronomy, science fiction and experimentation. He adopts the methods and techniques of sciences, while also transforming their issues into works of art. On display in the exhibition is a compilation of “100 Artmachine Iterations”. The Artmachine was invented by Tyson in 2001, and it suggests potential ways of using materials by giving out descriptions of what to do with the elements the Artmachine was fed with before. Nevertheless, not all off the Artmachine Iterations are being executed – it’s still the artist choosing what will be realized, and what remains a concept. Trial and Error is a basic principle of Tyson’s way of creation, even though there is no known objective in the beginning of the process of generating artworks – it’s all about exploring potentials and describing the world by them.

Probabilities also play a role in the videos of Igor Krenz (born 1959 in Katowice, PL, lives and works in Warsaw) and his way of describing the world - especially if he tries to catapult a stone into a can until he finally hits the target (“Stone and Can”, 1998, 10 min. 12 sec.). His game with trial and error is taken a step further in “Fire is better than scissors”, in which he “proves” that fire is more suited to triggering off a chain reaction, at the end of which a bottle is burst by a hammer. In “Bad” Krenz verifies the badness of a stool-like vehicle, while he demonstrates “the double disappearance of the ball in parallel space” in another video. Evidencing that “only the left side of the screen exists” by letting a bottle burst on that side then just seems like a necessity towards the viewer. Krenz describes the world through the medium of video, therefore setting up experiments that play with the medium’s ability to represent reality and that question scientific methods like empirical proofing by drawing conclusions from inconsistent test series – and thereby transforms practical rationality into theoretical absurdity.

The compilation of drawings by Fabian Seiz (born 1975, lives and works in Vienna) also deals with the constitution of reality. Two of the drawings directly relate to each other, one saying “point of view”, and the other saying “points of few”. They describe the complexity of reality as a majority’s basic agreement on the conditions of the things that surround us, but founding it on individual positions. “Reality” could be interpreted as “the Other”, and as Lacan writes: “The Other is, therefore, the locus in which is constituted the I who speaks“ – what Seiz puts in discussion with another drawing asking “How can I say U”. A fourth drawing leaves some spaces blank on the paper, and the difference between black and white forms the word “name”, and thereby completes his discourse on reality as a vicious circle between the constitution of the I and the other, the signifier and the signified. While the drawings deal with philosophy, psychology and linguistics, the two sculptures presented in the show open up a field between the poles of astronomy, physics and visual arts. “Armillarsphäre” adapts the structure of an armillary sphere, an historical astronomic tool to measure coordinates in the sky or imitate the motion of orbs. In Seiz’ work, the viewer looks at paint instead of orbs, and the work becomes a cynical comment on painting and its dependence on the auratic artists’ brushstroke. “12. Natur” finally centers gravitation as a primal condition and function in the visual arts. On the one hand, the sculpture turns the normal order of things towards gravity upside down by placing glue on a brushstroke on a glue bucket but then standing on a pedestal, on the other hand it imitates the concept of naturalistic simulation in sculpture (it could be interpreted as a female sculpture on a pedestal). The sculpture therefore reveals the tendency of our perception to equate verticalness in sculpture with human appearance and at the same time admonishes us by the green pedestal to be aware of the auratization of an artwork and the artists’ stroke (as on top of the sculpture).
The works of Nikolaus Gansterer (born 1974, lives and works in Vienna and Rotterdam) mostly follow the aesthetics or logics of the laboratory. In the first part of the exhibition in Vienna, Gansterer exhibited the installation “Who Loves the Sun”, an experimental set-up consisting of books, potted sunflowers, a neon light, a reflection surface, drawings and a ventilator. The sunflowers were placed on stacks of books that built various ideological hotbeds for the plants – the goal of the experiment was to prove an interdependency between theory and the growth of plants. In Warsaw Gansterer confronts the visitor with another set-up: "Eden Experiment II: The Tree Of Knowledge“. A bonsai – a per se manipulated tree to become an artificial kind of plant – is located inside a plant breeding station that also contains a speaker directed at the small tree. A steady flow of sound is clashing on the bonsai, confronting the plant with death metal. The work plays with the ideas about affecting plants by sound, and thereby tries to prove these theories by creating an evil plant. While these two experiments may not end up in a verification or falsification of any theory, Gansterer establishes a seriousness in absurdity that makes it possible to raise questions about the correlations between the poles of nature (naturalness and biological determination) and culture (artificiality and self-determination) and their symbiotic potentials.

Seriousness in absurdity can also be used to describe “A Trip to Wales”, a video by Gernot Wieland (born 1968 in Horn, Austria, lives and works in Berlin, Germany). In the video a book’s pages are turned while a narrator comments on the contents. The narrator stays anonymous, while the books pages provide an intimate view on the notes of a fictitious character living in a psychiatric home. This character fakes up a trip to Wales, where he monitors birds and documents his observations (as well as personal insights) in form of tabulations and schematic drawings. Wieland’s presentation is accomplished by two works on paper that are, like the video, part of the larger project “2 kilometers west, 1 kilometer south, 100 meters straight on”. The project deals with science as a form of expression, a way to talk about the world and describe it. The seriousness of this precise language and its contrariness to the fictitious, mentally disturbed wanna-be explorer using it creates a tension that turns the character’s naïve practice into a romantic cliché of the explorer/researcher in former times. Even though Wieland’s character doesn’t lay claim to any conclusions or great discoveries, it’s the act of gaining information itself that he’s after.

For Gernot Wieland’s character, it’s a fictitious research that can be read as a subjective attempt to structure the things in the world – using a language that has the ostensible pretense of objective goals. Nikolaus Gansterer, David Moises / Chris Janka and Igor Krenz also use this language, whereas their experiments are not so much fictitious, as they are absurd in their aims. Johannes Vogel achieves his reductio ad absurdum by literally transforming a theory of experimental failure into a factual experiment set-up. While failure itself is also the aim of Roman Signer’s set-up, it becomes more of an existential issue in his video than an objective questioning about trial and error. Fabian Seiz and Keith Tyson gain the tension in their works by mixing scientific and artistic issues, and by using scientific methods in their process of creation at the same time. Davide Balula fakes a physical process and tempts the viewer to believe in her or his practical intelligence based paralogism and thereby evokes questions about the relationship between the viewer, the artwork and the involvement of the viewer’s preconceptions in the perception of art. mahony do not fake a physical process, but emulate a concentration of time in a piece of stone and thereby pose questions about the museum display, the object displayed and its relation to the viewer.

“Science Fictions” represent processes, working strategies and formalities that form contradictions by mixing science and art. This hopefully leads to new ideas that potentially go further than our result based understanding of scientific practice. In turn the impact can be a much broader way of thinking about the micro/macro scale while lessening our cynicism towards utopian ideals. Reality comes a step closer to our own science fiction.

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