performative bodies and utopian architectures

Hans Hollein, Erotische Architektur. Drawing/Watercolor. 1969.

Last chance to see Mind Expanders at the Museum Moderner Kunst in Vienna! Always committed to the conversation between contemporary art and its history, this exhibit breaks the grandparents of performance art out of the vault to show how the relationship between art and space has evolved. Until August 30, MUMOK is exhibiting works dealing with the boundaries between performance, visual art and architecture in the 1960s and 70s, when artists first began to cross them. The ‘happenings’ of American artists Claes Oldenburg, Carolee Schneemann and Serbian-born Marina Abramovic, all featured, were neo-dada precursors to performance art that truly installs the human form in art’s spatial landscape. The exhibit's artists and architects then stretched the human creative impulse past art into the design of physical environments, to project their own visions of utopia into architecture. This exchange between art and space will expand your mind through the exploration of four main themes: “Space and History,” “Space and Art,” “Space, Color and Light,” and “Space, the Public and the Private.” Pieces focus on the human body but also the individual in the face of social bodies, interacting with the world.



Marina Abramovic, Performance The Lips of Thomas, 1976

The self-described grandmother of performance art, Marina Abramovic often bridges the gap between herself and the audience and her interest in the possibilities of the mind embodies the exhibit. In one of her taxing and more gruesome performances, The Lips of Thomas, Abramovic carved a star on her stomach before a fit of self-flagellation and then laid on an ice cross below a space heater that exacerbated her bleeding. Clearly alluding to punitive religious practices, she uses the body as a medium to bridge individual and societal anxiety.



Carolee Schneemann, Eye Body, 1963

MIND EXPANDERS
Museum Moderner Kunst
The exhibit will close August 30, 2009
Museumsplatz 1 1070 Neubau, Vienna, Austria
Daily: 10.00 a.m.­–18.00 clock
Thu: 10.00 a.m.­–21.00 clock