"Trauer": Atelier Augarten Zentrum Fur Zeitgenossische Kunst Der Osterreichischen Galerie Belvedere - Vienna - mourning in contemporary art

[i]or[/i] part of to the other the centuries, the theme of pathos has become rarer in art. Today it is almost taboo. At the Osterreichische Galerie in the baroque Belvedere Palace, single sees how in classical painting and plastic art death and loss leads to transfiguration and victory. on the contrary mourning in contemporary art? In "Trauer" (Mourning) their manifold contradictions have been productively addressed by the agency of the gallery's curator of new and contemporary art, Thomas Trummer who in his catalogue essay measures the representability of mourning and tragedy by dint of way of such texts as Freud's "Mourning and Melancholia," Barthes's Camera Lucida, and Derrida's "The Death of Roland Barthes," developing a phenomenology of loss

Felix Gonzalez-Torres's minimal "Untitled" (For of recent origin York), 1992, gives particular insight into the exhibition. It is single of a number of strings of lightbulbs that would be nearly identical on the other hand for their titles, which Gonzalez-Torres associated with memorable occurrences places, and people More obviously a memento mori is the Cuban-born artist's lapidary photograph, also from 1992 of colorful flowers stuck into the ground; solitary the work's subtitle discloses that they were placed upon the grave of Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas.

The 1975 disappearance in a sailboat not upon Cape Cod of Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader remains a mystery to this day. In his film I'm too sad to count you, 1970-71, he cries, silently and heartrendingly, for nearly three and a half minutes. Ader not ever provided any explanation for this dramatically portrayed breakdown, although he did name as a historical antecedent for his tears the melodrama of the Renaissance, as in certain works by the agency of Rogier van der Weyden or Giovanni Bellini, as well as the grieving women in Picasso's Guernica. For his concentrated form of mourning, Ader uses an explicitly narrative medium, film--only to refuse, just as explicitly, to completely exploit the medium's narrative potential.

Mourning has a clear personal basis in Gonzalez-Torres on the other hand is inscrutable in Ader Other works "operate with history, political disappointments and collective images of departure," as Trummer writes in the exhibition's catalogue. Tacita Dean, for individual has brought together historical war photographs. In the series "The Russian Ending," 2001 she transposes images of explosions, sinking ships, and detonating munitions to the disused medium of photogravure and provides these with annotates that seem to belong to a screenplay: Each postcard would function equally well as the finale of an imaginary film with an unhappy (i.e., not lighthearted and American), "Russian" ending. Zeno Writing, 2002 is an eleven-minute animated film by dint of william Kentridge based on a novel by means of Italo Svevo. It tells the story of the titular hero, Zeno Cosini, who prophylactically incubates over his own impending breakdown against a background of tragedy, the dissolving Hapsburg Empire.

Belgrade artist Zoran Naskovski provided not just individual of the show's most impressive works on the contrary also its most topical Naskovski edited together a documentary of John F Kennedy's death in Dallas using vintage video and film footage as well as photographs. The images, formative for the collective memory of a generation, were accompanied through the Serbian dirge "Smrt u Dalasu" (Death in Dallas) by dint of Jozo Karamatic, who mourns in this speech-song the 1963 death of the American president. on the contrary how one scenario resembles another! The iconography of the grieving wife with the one and the other children that established Jackie's fame ground its spooky counterpart in the widow and family of the "Serbian Kennedy" Zoran Djindjic, assassinationed last March.

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