Peter Weibel
the open work 1964-1979
25 September – 21 November 2004
Neue Galerie Graz am Landesmuseum Joanneum
Neue Galerie Graz am Landesmuseum Joanneum
Sackstrasse 16, A-8010 Graz
Opening: Friday, 24 September 2004
Curators: Gunther Holler-Schuster, Peter Peer
Peter Weibel, “police lies”, from the series “attacks”, Vienna 1970 Peter Weibel
The exhibition focuses on the 15 years of Peter Weibel’s early work from 1964 to 1979. The aim is to trace Peter Weibel’s artistic development as an internationally renowned media artist and conceptual artist from the beginnings through to the middle phase of the course of his work. He started out in 1964 as a visual poet and was soon transferring the structures of the visual culture from the page to the screen, at the same time retaining the model of language as a model of perception in the sense of structuralist and post-structuralist methods. Thanks to this linguistic input into his visual media works, he developed a critical impulse that turned not only against art but also against society and the media itself. This specific development from the page via the screen to gallery space – all happening as early as the 1960s – anticipated many of the trends that were later to be described as concept art, context art, institutional criticism and intervention.
In 1966 his work had already applied the participatory and interactive practices that led to the closed circuit video installations of the 1970s and the first interactive computer installations in 1980. As no other, it rigorously opens up the way for the performative turn of the closed object of modernism towards the open fields of action of the second modernism or post-modernism.
His work is not determined by autobiographical signature but instead by thematic areas and problem zones such as the mechanisms of perception and of thinking, the private world of the world of machines, the crisis in representation, in the image and the museum, the relationship between art, politics and the economy, the conditions underlying the system by which art operates. The result is a body of works whose plurality of method and coherence of issues produce the framework for a new concept of work and artist with a rare radicality. It has already influenced many young artists, and its impact is set to continue in the coming century.
A catalogue published by Hatje Cantz accompanies the exhibition. It includes texts by Hans Belting, Bazon Brock, Ursula Frohne, Boris Groys, Gunther Holler-Schuster, Peter Mahr, Brigitte Huck a.o. (editors Christa Steinle, Karin Buol-Wischenau).
The Neue Galerie Graz also presents:
Skrein Christian: 68 – artists. legends. photographs
2. 10. – 31. 10. 2004
Neue Galerie im Hof
Jean Tinguely: The Great Spiral / Hommage to New York
7. 10. – 31. 10. 2004
Neue Galerie Studio and yard of Neue Galerie
Cameron Jamie: JO
10. 10. – 24. 11. 2004
Neue Galerie im Kuenstlerhaus Graz
steirischer herbst
Contact:
Neue Galerie Graz
am Landesmuseum Joanneum
Sackstrasse 16, A-8010 Graz
T +43-316-82 91 55 / F +43-316-81 54 01
neuegalerie@stmk.gv.at / www.neuegalerie.at
Opening times:
Tues – Sun 10 a.m. – 6 p.m., Thur 10 a.m. – 8 p.m.
