1997

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“The relationship of art to society is not primarily found in the sphere of reception but rather in production. One major focus of steirischer herbst 97 is on projects of visual art and media art specially created for the festival. In this way it is possible for the festival to become increasingly visible as a site of production.
Festivals are characterised by temporal and local unity—their nature as an event—if we see our work as an open process—demands that we defend a conception of the event that can not be mediated by means of media. ‘An event is characterised by duration, it must not be separated from dead time … We are spectators of something that remains in the balance for a long time, something that dies not yet exist. It is not the media that can capture the event but rather art … dead time (here) is not between two events, it is in the event itself, it makes up its density.’ (G. Deleuze)”
—Christine Frisinghelli (original booklet translation)

In her foreword to the program booklet for steirischer herbst ’97, Christine Frisinghelli emphasized the importance of the festival as a production site—not only in the area of theater and music, in which commissioned works had played a role since the 1970s, but also in visual and media art. Roland Dahinden and Sol LeWitt created a joint site-specific work for the cylindrical domed hall of the Joanneum, entitled collaboration, and Players—TwiLite Zone, a performance and interactive installation for two female chess players, three pinball players, and three instrumentalists premiered at the Theatro in Sackstraße, after a text by Ernst Strouhal.

The artist collectives Granular Synthesis and Knowbotic Research created spaces for steirischer herbst with happenings and experiences that were supercharged and open for participation. The exhibition Zonen der Ver-Störung (Zones of Disturbance), curated by Silvia Eiblmayr, was dedicated to the phenomenon of the interleaving of active disruption and reactive consternation, while Endoscape Technoscope explored the relationship between techno and media art.

At Café Harrach, a temporary outpost, room installations by three artists that regarded the eye as an interface between the computer screen and the brain (after Baudrillard) were presented with the title Retina—Netzhaut. Martin Kippenberger and Jörg Schlick staged the joint exhibition Martin at Palais Attems—for which Kippenberger also created the poster, which shows an oversized egg on the bed of a pickup truck in a snow-covered landscape (the cover of the program booklet shows the artist himself sitting in the cab).

Program