Mathias Poledna
27 February - 21 April 2013
 |
| © Mathias Poledna
Installation view, Secession 2013
Photo: Margherita Spiluttini |
| | |
MATHIAS POLEDNA
27 February – 21 April 2013
Mathias Poledna deals in his work with connections between art and
entertainment, modernism in architecture, fashion and design, the
language of film and the history of exhibition-making, often taking the
specific historicity of these phenomena as his point of departure. Most
recently, he has been producing extremely concentrated cinematic
installations that develop complex tensions between their subject matter
and the associated references and cultural notions. The artist’s
interest in different ways of expressing modernity manifests itself in
the special, often highly diverse subjects in his work, ranging from
post-punk music to a rain forest in Papua New Guinea, and in the
aestheticism and extreme reduction of their formal idiom. Though always
new and in many cases created jointly with professional collaborators,
they often give the impression of found material, seeming to draw on the
visual language of the collective imagination of the past and the
present.
Poledna’s approach is characterized by a concise handling of cultural
references and historical connections combined with elements of
repetition, shifting, compression, and omission. Recurring motifs in his
film works include the suggestive impact of the projected image, the
tension between image and sound, and the complex interplay of popular
music and cinematic language. Linking to his interest in the
Institutional Critique of the 1960s and 1970s, his precise interventions
in the exhibition space often place constituent and auxiliary elements
of exhibiting—architecture, design, publication—at the center of his
practice.
For his solo show in the Secession’s Hauptraum, Poledna has developed an
installation of his film work A Village by the Sea (2011). His spatial
concept takes the symmetry of the historical architecture and amplifies
it by configuring the structure of the Hauptraum as an apparatus of
seeing, comparable with the inside of a camera. In stark contrast to
this rigorous arrangement, A Village by the Sea recalls an American
musical in the style of the 1930s. For this black-and-white film shot in
35-mm, a set was built on a sound stage in Los Angeles in the style of
an apartment of hotel suite interior of this period.
n a series of tracking and static shots with a classic feel, A Village
by the Sea presents two characters, a woman and a man, who appear to be
connected by an ambivalent, possibly romantic past. The motifs of
memory, nostalgia, and lost love that reverberate in the script and in
the restrained interaction of the two actors imply a world of extreme
artificiality, melancholy, and sentimentality that is only broken for
moments by a almost comedy-like ambiguity.
The song performed by the two characters is based on a chanson by French
composer and singer Charles Trenet that was specially rewritten and
arranged for this purpose as a duet in the style of the American
songbook tradition. The character and instrumentation of the original
were much altered, extended to an orchestral version with harp,
woodwind, and brass. The piece was recorded with a 30-piece ensemble on
the scoring stage at Warner Brothers, one of the few surviving recording
studios from this period of the film industry. While A Village by the
Sea is motivated primarily by Poledna’s interest in the American studio
system during the Great Depression, the film also refers to other
aspects of popular culture, including the concepts of "New” or
"Intelligent” pop in early-1980s Britain, or the reception and
appropriation of American film studio productions from this golden age
by French film d´auteurs in the 1960s.
Mathias Poledna (born 1965 in Vienna) completed his studies at the
University of Applied Arts and the University of Vienna. He has lived
and worked in Los Angeles since 2000.
Poledna’s work is represented in the collections of The Museum of Modern
Art (MoMA), New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; New
Museum, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Museum of
Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles;
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona
(MACBA); MUMOK, Vienna; and the Generali Foundation, Vienna.
www.secession.at http://artnews.org/secession/?exi=37474&Mathias_Poledna
|
