In his work Michael Goldgruber has been dealing both theoretically and practically with the thematic field of the panoramic visual regimes and the dispositions of viewing. The material manifestation of this field, which also incorporates the topos of the sublime [das Erhabene], are mostly architectural representations. How are these dispositions and representational systems of view and panorama reflected in contemporary cultural codifications, media pressure and in a broader sense also in patterns of perception and behaviour? This is the key question to be dealt with by international artists in the group exhibition in Forum Stadtpark.
The works shown cover photographies (Bashir Borlakov, Christoph Grill, Mathias Kessler, Hiroyuki Masuyama, Margherita Spiluttini), video and film (Sigi Fruhauf, Michael Goldgruber, Richard T.Walker) and installation-based positions (Ulrike Heydenreich, Michael Höpfner, Daniel Zimmermann) and a text by Thomas Ballhausen, written in literary-fragmented form, on romantic leitmotifs as well as terms and themes on the panoramic. This text will be presented as an installation based display in the form of a spatial leporello.
Themes of the exhibition are the longing and the promises for “subjectivizing the beholders” by the means of aesthetic perception; the dispositions and architectures of viewing work as materialized “objects” of this longing for the experience of an “immediate”, a “real” image of nature. This is a paradox situation regarding the conditional mentality of all perception, especially with regard to this mode of perception – it is in fact the architecture of view that does stands as a clear visual directive in the midst of the landscape.
The spectrum of the artistic approaches ranges from evident dictates of leisure activity to constructions of the pretending of an immediate and authentic experience of landscape and nature to representations of the “sublime” in real gender and power relations. Furthermore the exhibition covers the verbalized transfer and creation of metaphors of social hierarchies (e.g. pyramids as a representation of social structures, upper class figurations as the “sublime” peak of society ...). With regards to its content these thoughts are the basic framework of the exhibition.