Herbert Christian Stöger
Inzwischen
Ein Lesebuch der Strategien zwischen Kunst und Literatur
Wien, 2002
 
Herbert Christian Stögers Arbeiten bewegen sich grenzüberschreitend zwischen Literatur und bildender Kunst. Ihnen zugrunde liegen anhand verschiedener Themen entwickelte Konzepte, deren bestimmendes Medium Texte sind. So entstehen z.B. Werkgruppen, in denen ausgewähltes bestehendes Textmaterial im Zusammenhang mit den jeweils geeignetsten Medien wie Video, Fotografie, Malerei ... im literarisch-poetischen Sinn verknüpft werden.

Mitwirkende Künstler /
Mit Beiträgen von:
 
Peter Assmann
Angelika Bartl
Petra M. Dallinger
Martin Hochleitner
Monika Leisch-Kiesl
Eleonora Louis
Dorit Margreiter
Beate Rabe
Christian Steinbacher
 
96 Seiten, Abbildungen
24 x 17 cm, Hardcover
€ 18,00/sfr 27,00
ISBN 3-85486-108-7

Inzwischen: das ist ein Bereich des Übergangs, des Nachreichens zwischen „was hätte sein können“ und dem, was IST. Vorab bekommen wir etwas wie eine Definition geliefert, ein abstract des Folgenden. Inzwischen: das ist aber auch ein Schnittpunkt, der die Möglichkeit einer Nahestellung wenn nicht sogar die Gleichzeitigkeit von inmitten und abseits repräsentiert, die in den Texten des Künstlers auch ihre räumliche Entsprechung zu finden scheint: „was mich antreibt zu bewegen steht alles rund um mich“.
Innerhalb dieses Schnittpunktes ist es die Mythologie, die großen Raum einnimmt – und das aus guten Grund. Es ist das Erleben der zentaurenhaften Welterfahrung, die das in Stögers Werk zentrale Aufeinanderprallen von Bild und Text verdeutlicht. Diese Elemente werden zu einer Einheit verbunden, die von einem Oszillieren zwischen den Polen Körper und Schrift gekennzeichnet ist.
Doch auch die Körper sind alles andere als einheitlich integriert. So sind sie im Video „Sauber. Macher. Innen.“ (2001) omnipräsent, während sie in der Installation „Das Wasser rinnt“ (1996) absolut ersetzt sind und das Einbringen einer virtualisierenden Leerstelle, um die die zelebrierten Geist-Körper flackern, ermöglichen. Eine Auseinandersetzung mit Nacktheit und Blößenwahn findet sich in „Beschreibung von Objekten gegen die Begierde Blick“ (2000). Hier meint und kritisiert Stöger den ungebrochenen, zutiefst pubertären Blick, der auf objektivierte Fleischoberflächen – und eben nicht auf Menschen – geworfen wird. Auf dieser Grundlage und über einen erneuten Antikenimport (Kalypso, Lysistrata) wird auch eine neue, doch keineswegs simplifizierende Behandlung der Geschlechterverhältnisse eingeflochten: „Per Knopfdruck öffnet sich seine Hölle, und, was der Magen nicht hält, bricht das Herz“.
Bücher dienen dem Künstler als Erinnerungsgegenstände von Sprache und Schrift, als Beweise der Unmöglichkeit einer endlichen Kommunikation. Besonders Wörterbücher werden für Stöger zu Sprachankern, die ein assoziatives Weiterbringen der Wörter geradezu herausfordern. Dieser lexikographisch-künstlerische Akt, der eine Infragestellung oder auch Auflösung vorgegebener Ordnungen erzeugt, führt zu Verschiebungen und palindromartigen Irritationen. Dieses Programm findet auch bei Arbeiten im öffentlichen Raum Anwendung: der Einsatz einer erneuten Verschiebung enthält die Möglichkeit der zumindest teilweisen Resignifizierung der vor-erinnerten prosthetic memory, die den Gegenständen und auch den Orten selbst innewohnt. Der Irrweg bei der „Suche nach dem Verlorengehenden“ (P. Assmann) wird so zum sinnvollen Umweg.
Mit dieser Haltung der Verweigerung fördert der Künstler das Gebären von Endlosschleifen, die eine Kommunizierbarkeit des Ich wahrscheinlich werden lassen. Das Wort und der Körper fallen zusammen, der Künstler selbst tritt uns hier entgegen; nicht zuletzt auch in den beigefügten Texten, die weit über den Werkskommentar hinausreichen. Den vorliegenden Band als Katalog zu interpretieren hieße ihn missverstehen: das ist ein Buch, einer der beschriebenen Anker.

Thomas Ballhausen

CENTAURS

Centaurs, hermaphrodite beings of Greek mythology, have got a horse body with a human torso – a form, seen through natural history, of two elements of different species. They are like a metaphor of our experience of the world as well as our world view: image and text, also two parts, form an inseparable unity. The continuous mix of those paradigms, which our perception constantly revises, has repeatedly confronted fine art and literature with the problematic, the necessity or simply the fact that pure visual images and linguistic formulations must be combined. In medieval representations the horse body could be built entirely out of words. That means: Not only can the body be seen as text, but also the contrary, the text as a body. With that the body will be attributed its own material existence - an existence, which equips the text with a three dimensional form with the characteristics of a substance. Language in 20th century art has in fact accepted three dimensional form and different existences in works of art. The projects of Herbert Christian Stöger deal with the bringing together of these our paradigms of perception in a poetical-aesthetical ‘play of relationships’. The three dimensional form of language mentioned above runs through the works with different solutions: possibly most obviously as a 20 page long letter relief in 18 bibles, which show the sentence “lofty concentrations” in allusion to the content of the used books. This form of language can also, as in the “descriptions”, be dressed in the form of an association to the portrayed motif added to stories or else thoughts, which are laid over the photographic image (of nudes) like a veil creating an illusion of space, whilst at the same time obstructing the voyeuristic view of the female body.
“here Hans washed his hands…” (from the project “Hans im Glück” [“Hans lucky-so-and-so”]) guides the entire text on four big sheets around four posts only revealing itself to the viewer from different view points, which he or she has to experience – language as an object and as a space for the observer at the same time.
The language in the “descriptions” is not only understood as material in the sense of the creation of a space, in which the sexes meet. But also the photography-text installation ”PATENschaft” (“GODPARENThood”) and the video installation “Das Wasser Rinnt” (“The Water Runs”), “Das Kamingespräch” (“The Chimney Conversation”) and “Über Ewas Reden” (“To Talk About Something”) are based on ‘relationships’ between couples as a motive. The artist is not interested in relationships with unambiguous communication; which catches itself in a web of words. Although the title “finite solutions” (Endliche Lösungen) implies relief, the twelve elements of images attached to a block, show exactly the opposite – if one imagines a change in the order of the single elements, fragments of text and image form of a loop, the mathematical symbol for endless, surrounded and run through by fragments of text.
Stöger portrays finite communication as impossible. Even the dialogue in the performance “Sauber.Macher.Innen” (“Cleaner.Man.Woman”) is based on a kind of declension of modal verbs and could be thought through as a loop. And on the “Plakaten auf Fahrplanrollen” (posters on rolls of timetables) one can read the sentence “…what drives me to move is written all around me…”, readable when turning the cylindrical corpus, evoked by contradictions in language – without beginning and end, just as would be suggested by the form of a book. Especially the book as a classical carrier of written language – from medieval manuscripts to futuristic images of language and concrete poetics – has functions as a place for a confusing conglomeration of image and text. This, in a part of Sögers work, becomes an important place for memory of language, for evidence of permanent change, for the elasticity of words depending on their use, for their family relationships to one another. For this artist the most appropriate are ‘word collections’ from a dictionary. In this way a memory room for the dying “cross words” is formed, in which, through artistic attention they can be again available in our use of every day language.
The cross, cut out of card board (as a traditional lexical sign for increasingly rare used terms), makes the view of the wall behind accessible, in order to use space in its double meaning, namely in a sense of three dimensional space and a time space and it is this space that makes language as a historical process comprehensible.
The fixed linguistic order, set by the dictionaries, is dissolved through the additions (eg. “stay”) and shiftings (“to talk about something”), carried out by the artist. The same goal is met by using double meanings of words, which are confusing especially in public spaces, where they give directions in well-known labellings: So on the way to a chemist one might find the sign ‘gtiffitg’ (‘psoissnuos’) and therefore think about the fine border between remedies and poisonous substance; or it may raise awareness of the change in meaning of words with the same spelling in another language, which transforms the German word ‘Gift’ (present) into ‘Geschenk’ (gift) in the English language. But also here, in a piece of work about a locality, the artist is interested in the possibility, of getting memory moving through language and at the same time baning memory from language – memory eg. on specific events which with the help of a kind of ‘publication’ become productive, but nevertheless through the aesthetical language game intimately protect the character of knowledge, for each viewer, if knowing or not (“Erst Als Es Nacht War” [“Only When It Got Dark”] ). In front of us we have got an aesthetically used language, which succeeds in its literary form as a fixed framework of the ‘stipulated‘ language, and shakes it, an aesthetically used language, which becomes most obvious through regulations by society in their work of censorship. Left over verbs from a literary censored text point to the effects such processes have on our actions and our daily actions, but at the same time show the pure visual quality of censored sheets.
In the youngest piece of work methods and interests cross over: The presentation of a literary material (“Lysistrata”) gives rise to a visualised debate with questions about violence of war, death and the strategic use of the body. The meeting of the ancient world and the 20. century, from theatre plays to the female neglection of the body and executed enemies of Hitler from the military rows of the 2. World War, is being interconnected into different little work groups referring to each other. Again, the encyclopedia serves as a source for sign-topologies. Here, the 13 crosses do not stand for memory of words, but for fictitious and historical events, whose acting characters follow the same goal, the rejection of deathly violence. The change between signs and meaning, which underlays many of Stögers works, is continued in 6 little silhouette heads: 6 women from the play ‘Lysistrata’ (over who the dark veil of violence was laid), are not made visible as individual characters, but as figures.
Images and language are shown in the whole body of work as equal factors of our perception and our understanding of the world. It is an Oeuvre of the Centaurs – of the images and words of our world view, whose link we are.

Eleonora Louis