Ortsbezogene Kunst: Statement by Michael Kienzer

About the works of Michael Kienzer

Michael Kienzer arranges curios, parts of various metal, wooden or glass plates, grids, rods, rollers, rail fragments, pipes, building blocks and construction fragments, industrial waste, a sewing and a washing machine, prosthetics, carpets, erasers, foam, adhesive tape, drawings and photographs; all of which seem to tell a story that contains surreal, Dadaist twists and links. Each material has its own quality, temperature, hardness, volume, and dynamic, which we can perceive physically.

Kienzer associates abstract material forms with model-like houses, churches, lorries, tanks, aircraft carriers, organ pipes to create ingenious floating states that are heavy-duty and connected, but do not appear to be permanent. Kienzer uses reduction, fragmentation and fragmentary elements to create catchy settings that keep us curious time and again. Rolling, buckling, knotting, and condensing are parameters of his works, which subtly manifest momentum within a standstill that is in movement. It is about the forces that act between the materials. We see momentum that is stable but appears fluid, suggesting the possibility of change at any time and yet is clearly positioned.

Michael Kienzer attended classes held by Josef Pillhofer, one of the few abstract sculptors in the Wotruba School, at the School of Arts and Crafts in Graz, where his interest in, and questioning of the complexity, fragility and multi-layered nature of the world was already evident from his early youth. He then went to Berlin, where he lived and worked for several years in the autonomous Kreuzberg art and culture centre before moving to Vienna in the early 1980s. Starting from Pillhofer's questioning about how spatial manifestation emerges from two-dimensional images, about how a block-like object can be collaged into a surface, and how a surface can fold back to form a body, he breaks rules: such as being bound to use a plinth or precious materials, thus extending the validity of sculptural constants.

Based on Auguste Rodin's democratic widening made by using a ground-level representation of the Burghers of Calais (1889) at eye level, and Pablo Picasso's assemblage Guitar (1912), in which curios and shaped items were combined to form a new image, and Marcel Duchamp's first-ever readymade Bottle Dryer (1914), an industrial object that was declared to be a sculpture, completely new possibilities have opened up for the concept of sculpture. Abstraction and objectivity, industrialisation and gesture, spirit and physicality are polarities that had been explored in various possible forms by abstract Expressionism, Minimalism and Actionism.

Michael Kienzer develops his multi-layered, specific language of forms on the basis of his engagement with this art history, and his familiarity with the thinking of Joseph Beuys, Franz West and Bruce Nauman. As a sculptor, he is always concerned with the essential issues of sculpture, which can be gesture, coatings, assembly, installation, object or another setting. It is about the relationship of these settings to space, about different dynamics and ambivalence. Painterly aspects are just as important as surfaces, material density and tension. At the same time, his clear, often expansive manifestations are always inherently temporary, as if they were possible forms for exploring our existence. In his investigation of the properties of materials, Kienzers scrutinises and questions physical forces and their relationship to one another to the utmost degree possible and puts them under stress.

This stress, time and duration are decisive factors in his work. The inherent possibility of timed cancellation of an actual state evokes uncertainty on the one hand, whilst opening up new ways of thinking about unforeseeable scenarios on the other. Despite their precise execution, nothing seems to stand still, but rather situations appear like open memories. In this way, Kienzer combines standstill and departure, daring and failure, the given and the optional: as signs of upheaval and constant change.

In his work, humour arises from the combination of offhand objects placed in constellations, which reject all pathos and convey openness instead of closure. Exposed to these intermediate conditions, his works lay no claim to eternity, ultimate meaning or narrative structure. Rather, it is the provisional, or the enigmatic that keeps us in suspense, despite all the precision and thoughtfulness. This fragility is also evident as a painterly aspect when Kienzer delicately deforms thin sheet-metal foils in various colours and positions them on top of each other, held together by magnets alone.

Condensation and compression are just as important to Kienzer as the legibility of individual parts as a whole. Nothing is hidden, everything is comprehensible and transparent. Kienzer's works hang or lean against walls, connect walls with floors, or are structures in space or that span spaces.

Shifts in dimension, meaning and value are made clear in Kienzer's work through various scaling and material choices. By creating matchbox-sized, miniature vehicles, model-sized architecture or toy technology, Kienzer changes scales and proportions and emphasises the relativity of meaning, sense, quotation and overall context. If he casts logs, rails or brick parts in aluminium, as an industrial material, which rejects the heroic power aesthetic of bronze or iron, their value is increased. If he gives oversized pedestals to two toy cars of different sizes, which actually represent the conceptual sculpture, he makes their relationship and value uncertain. This reversal of relationships raises fundamental questions about social norms, appreciation and their skewing, as does by integrating broken glass plates, fragments of industrialisation or discarded machines and their parts. Ennoblement, value and respect for leftover material through spiritual skewing is redefined and made complicated here. Regular items exist through a cohesion of individual parts, which Kienzer's art gives them in a very specific way.

This involves explicitly sculptural issues of pressure, balance, limitation or volume. In this way, an architectural model can become a sculpture when tilted, so its function shifts and takes on a different meaning. Positioned on a metal crossbeam, which leans against a wall at an angle like a ramp and meets painted concrete blocks, the absurd mixture of different objects, speeds and formats triggers unexpected associations and contains references to the surrounding space and to the viewer.

Language is another important factor for Michael Kienzer. The proximity of Austrian visual art to literary criticism, the philosophy of language and poetry since the end of the 19th century is also clearly recognisable in his work. In his works, which also involve the structure of language, he quotes and describes the ephemeral within our thinking and speaking, our provisional nature in our being. He strings words or phrases together, and condenses them using glass plates, for example, but also uses language for his picture titles such as Melted into the surroundings, Sculpture design, Movement or Scene and gives a name to a fusion with space, or with the surroundings, in which everything can become a sculpture, with all its sketchiness.
(Text by Elisabeth Fiedler)

www.ortsbezogenekunst.at


The course "Thinking with and learning from Kunstraum Weikendorf I+II"
and the resulting exhibition is a cooperation between the department of Site-Specific Art / University of Applied Arts and Kunst im Öffentlichen Raum – KOERNOE / Kunstraum Weikendorf.