1999

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“The investigations into repressed hegemonic demands and complicities of modernism, the difficult question as to the way we deal with the other and how we incorporate and exclude minorities, the emergence of hybrid identities and the disturbances of the body, reflection in the artwork as a product based on the division of labour and on the conditions of its production. Artists, whose works constituted the core and reason for this necessary reorientation over the years, have shown us one thing: the parameters of artistic expression must be redevised again and again depending on their circumstances. The profile of steirischer herbst, thus network that constantly needs to be remade, could only develop because it supported the fragile, fleeting existence of artistic work with its own precarious autonomy. The mutual estimation of all participants is an essential condition for this. These are net conditions that allow us to create a programme that sets complexity as quality, that intelligently pits itself against the pressure of the culture industry, and which co-authors what has not yet been laid down in its historical importance. A contemporary audience that insists on participating in constituting the works has a right to more than simple truths and prefabricated experiences. These are the realm of mass media and political interest.”
—Christine Frisinghelli (original booklet translation)

The second to last edition of steirischer herbst in the 20th century and the final one with Christine Frisinghelli as artistic director focused on current Internet Art and the avant-garde roots of the festival. In the exhibition netz_bedingung (net_condition), Peter Weibel examined the conditions that media, communication, and economies are subjected to by the electronic network. Christoph Gurk’s project Re-Make/Re-Model: Secret Histories of Art, Pop, Life, and the Avant-Gardewas linked to earlier events in the festival. It showed the new interest of artists and theorists in the long-discredited concept of the avant-garde, in the conditions underlying the creation and development of “minority” forms of expression, and their connection to performance art.

This included a first complete retrospective of the restored films of Jack Smith at the Schubert cinema; Dub Housing, a sound installation and photo exhibition on Afrofuturism and Afro-Diasporic pop cultures from London at Camera Austria; the project Billowy Sleeves from Chicago; and the sequence Cross Gender / Cross Genre by the Berlin group at Palais Attems, highlighting the period between 1966 and 1974. In this context Mike Kelley presented a lecture as part of his video installation Unisex Love Nest. There was also a symposium with Douglas Crimp, Terre Thaemlitz, Ultra-red, Mike Kelley, and others.

Ulrike Ottinger created the staging and stage set for Johann Nestroy’s magical farce Das Verlobungsfest im Feenreiche (The Engagement Party in Fairyland) at the Thalia theater, and William Kentridge, following his participation in Peter Weibel’s Inklusion : Exklusion (Inclusion : Exclusion) in 1996, returned to Graz with a solo exhibition at the Neue Galerie. One of the secret sensations of steirischer herbst ’99 was the opening concert by the “ingenious eclectic and wunderkind of pop music,” Van Dyke Parks, on the Kasematten stage (program booklet).

Program