Lisa Holzer (b. 1971, Austria)
What carries you?, 2020

Secession, Vienna, Austria / Visited 28/01/2020

Here I am excited to consider the whole exhibition as an artwork in itself. The prints themselves – as works on display – are not unimportant, but my main fascination and inspiration comes from Holzer’s way to stage the show and challenge a number of conventions at that.

“At first something disappears. The exhibition starts in the staircase to the Cabinet with a colour application that will be overlooked. The dark grey mountings of the handrails – now there are two for security purposes – disappear in the colour of the wall.” (Holzer in the show leaflet)

Holzer refuses to have any artificial light in the room and stages her opening at the exact time of the early winter sunset. She hangs the works “too high” in relation to the room’s proportions, adds additional wall obstructing the view and mirrors… something is added, something is removed… your internalised mode of “how to visit an exhibition and appreciate the artworks on the show” is unsettled… where do the works start and end here, what is to be appreciated and how?… When I read the leaflet after I left the show, I realised that I have failed to notice several of the deliberate elements – my habitual behaviour betrayed me even if I tend to search for odd perspectives where other people normally don’t. But I am not disappointed, rather encouraged. This strengthens me in my view – or interest – to place larger responsibility on the audience to make sense of and appreciate the works, not just complacently expect to be served readymade artistic messages in a conventional code in a conventionally designed space. Art does not have to be isolated in waterproof galleries, it is welcome to bleed into the world – and I want the audiences to be open and sensitised to those possibilities, to be able to have artistic experience regardless of whether it was intended by someone or not.

I am playing with variety of ideas how to do that, but not many have been realised or tested in real life yet. “Find the art piece” – a participatory piece where I challenged the audience to find my work in the room – would be the most complete attempt in that direction. Testing of pdf as artistic format would be another. But in most cases there are several layers of potential meaning in my work that I do not easily volunteer any clues about, hoping that there would be somebody in the audience who would make their own discovery – and maybe also help me to discover something I had not noticed myself.