Exhibition
Photocopiers made their way into modern offices in the 1960s and 1970s. It didn't take long before art became artistic potential and included the photocopy in her work. Conceptual art, for example, found photocopying the ideal medium to illustrate its ideas through the rapid multiplication of text and images. The photocopier remained a suitable tool in many areas: animation, archives, book design, typography, etc. Various effects such as compression, stretching, enlargement, reduction, color contrast, brightness, darkness can be achieved relatively easily and quickly on the copier. Technical innovations also made it possible to reproduce printed works on materials other than paper.
Three contemporary positions were shown in the gallery rooms, which took up the possibilities of multiplication with very different materials.
At the same time, the provision of paper and photocopiers gave visitors to the exhibition the opportunity to produce copy art.
Two anonymous projects in public space - a mail art project and a poster invention - were also part of this exhibition.
Tom Barth gave his room installation - tubes made of transparent foil copies interrupted by spirals - the title The circle does not close - about memory as imagination and vice versa. The final spatial installation went through several losses of reality or new discoveries of reality. Images and texts were photographed, the photos copied onto transparent paper, the copies rolled into objects and these installed in the room.
MB showed the work Surface/Bottom-Surface/Foot. An ensemble of 90 A4 aluminum panels was laid out on the floor. Aluminum cut and shellac on paper, wavy by moistening, copied on both sides and mounted and laminated on aluminum, the production also went through several duplication processes. In addition, the floor sculpture received its very own optical and haptic structure through the special choice of material.
In work group 5 examples, Christine S. Prantauer uses the technique of copying onto glass. 5 acrylic glass pictures were created, and by laying several glass plates on top of each other, a layering of different themes was made possible. Cover pages of Austrian daily newspapers were overlaid with invitation cards from international art institutions and with the numbers 1 to 5. For the artist, the three levels of the press medium, art and numbers inevitably mean interlinked systems.
Anonymous I put up his self-designed crossword puzzles in the city of Schwaz. Visually adapted to the traditional Swedish riddles, Anonymous I had constructed an unsolvable question-and-answer system. Not only did the riddle itself remain unsolvable, but due to the lack of an author, the unidentifiable posters in the city were a riddle to everyone.
Anonymous II sent a postal item from Brazil to all the addresses recorded in the city gallery's file: brown paper bags with a perforated bottom part with the inscription "...create privileges create censorship create privileges...". This was the start of a series of mailings that gallery addressees would receive over the next few years.
text: Andrea Hörl
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