Heinrich Dunst
A. B. a. P. / Antonio Banderas as Picasso
26 Jun - 31 Aug 2019
HEINRICH DUNST
A. B. a. P. / Antonio Banderas as Picasso
26 June – 31 August 2019
The exhibition A. B. a. P. / Antonio Banderas as Picasso is a play of references with shapes as placeholders and stand-ins for other shapes and contents, and questions the identity of the shape. Heinrich Dunst is therefore setting a new focus, one that represents a shift in his previous projects. Within his arrangement, previously known elements examine the question of materiality and immateriality, of industrially prefabricated shapes, and shapes of the art industry. The scope is broadened to other concepts and matters, i.e. Issues particular to the media, the avant-garde, fashion, authorship, and the politics of shape. ‘Scans and digital prints are the translating mechanism of copying, their doubles, the transformation of materials and their travesty.’ (H.D.)
The first room of the installation is dominated by a horizontal row of enlarged black-and-white film frames, a fragment from the 1960 film "Arnulf Rainer" by Peter Kubelka. At the time the avant-garde film maker shocked the Viennese public with six-and-a-half minutes of apparent audiovisual anarchy. His experimental film explores the four elements of cinematography: light, darkness, sound and silence. At a screening of the film at Vienna’s Gartenbaukino in 2013 Kubelka handed out strips of film frames to the audience in order to make the materiality of the film palpable and, at the same time, draw attention to the demise of analogue film. Dunst scanned the fragment that had been found on the floor of the cinema theatre, enlarged it to a height of 60 cm, and loosely pinned it to the wall as a paper printout. Monochrome images painted onto Dibond, of the same size as the frames, are placed alongside as one-offs; the words ‘Film, Volume, Marx, Word, Abstraction, Door’ reference Dunst’s agenda up on the wall.
The encounter between industrial material and reproduction is also a feature of the second room. Doors from the Bauhaus lean in a more or less flush alignment on the two walls opposite; on one of the doors a print of the proven pink-coloured insulation boards echoes the original industrial product featured in the first room while another door provides a mount for a printed film strip with the doors copied in, this time horizontally. The way the doors turns matches the way terms can be spun: ‘Doors are words.’ Mounted on the third wall are name and idea tags with a monochrome image and a newspaper photo featuring a banner with the words ‘Je ne suis pas’ (‘I am not’).
In the third room the play of references that encircles the ‘Dunst’ identity and authorship – prefigured already in the LOGIN with a vertical upward arrow – is taken to the next level: Heinrich Dunst as a model for the summer collection brochure of Mühlbauer, the hatmakers, with a large pink-coloured ‘A’ accompanying the print.
A. B. a. P. / Antonio Banderas as Picasso
26 June – 31 August 2019
The exhibition A. B. a. P. / Antonio Banderas as Picasso is a play of references with shapes as placeholders and stand-ins for other shapes and contents, and questions the identity of the shape. Heinrich Dunst is therefore setting a new focus, one that represents a shift in his previous projects. Within his arrangement, previously known elements examine the question of materiality and immateriality, of industrially prefabricated shapes, and shapes of the art industry. The scope is broadened to other concepts and matters, i.e. Issues particular to the media, the avant-garde, fashion, authorship, and the politics of shape. ‘Scans and digital prints are the translating mechanism of copying, their doubles, the transformation of materials and their travesty.’ (H.D.)
The first room of the installation is dominated by a horizontal row of enlarged black-and-white film frames, a fragment from the 1960 film "Arnulf Rainer" by Peter Kubelka. At the time the avant-garde film maker shocked the Viennese public with six-and-a-half minutes of apparent audiovisual anarchy. His experimental film explores the four elements of cinematography: light, darkness, sound and silence. At a screening of the film at Vienna’s Gartenbaukino in 2013 Kubelka handed out strips of film frames to the audience in order to make the materiality of the film palpable and, at the same time, draw attention to the demise of analogue film. Dunst scanned the fragment that had been found on the floor of the cinema theatre, enlarged it to a height of 60 cm, and loosely pinned it to the wall as a paper printout. Monochrome images painted onto Dibond, of the same size as the frames, are placed alongside as one-offs; the words ‘Film, Volume, Marx, Word, Abstraction, Door’ reference Dunst’s agenda up on the wall.
The encounter between industrial material and reproduction is also a feature of the second room. Doors from the Bauhaus lean in a more or less flush alignment on the two walls opposite; on one of the doors a print of the proven pink-coloured insulation boards echoes the original industrial product featured in the first room while another door provides a mount for a printed film strip with the doors copied in, this time horizontally. The way the doors turns matches the way terms can be spun: ‘Doors are words.’ Mounted on the third wall are name and idea tags with a monochrome image and a newspaper photo featuring a banner with the words ‘Je ne suis pas’ (‘I am not’).
In the third room the play of references that encircles the ‘Dunst’ identity and authorship – prefigured already in the LOGIN with a vertical upward arrow – is taken to the next level: Heinrich Dunst as a model for the summer collection brochure of Mühlbauer, the hatmakers, with a large pink-coloured ‘A’ accompanying the print.