markus schinwald

first published by a virtual biennale, line magazine

www.avirtualbiennale.tumblr.com

Markus Schinwald’s work focuses on the movements of the body - especially the ways in which these movements are governed by props and various surroundings. Furthermore, the artist extends this to an interest in the way the human body is embedded in cultural context, which expands into a psychological analysis. These specific preoccupations have culminated in Schinwald’s Biennale exhibition, for which he has created a labyrinthine environment, which houses and dictates the viewing of his painted, sculptural and filmic works. Schinwald classes this space intervention not as ‘an autonomous act,’ but rather ‘a kind of stage system or environment for the display of different works.’ Thus, the Austrian pavilion manifests as a stage/performer collaboration; the labyrinth becomes a platform, and the various works become the players. In his own words:

‘Though the pavilion was designed as a complete work, the individual works are not damned to be together forever. The paintings are a little bit more flexible on their own, and I'm trying to shift their emphasis with different projects in that they are sometimes more autonomous and sometimes marginal, like props. The architecture would hypothetically function on its own, similar to Bruce Nauman's corridors, but I like it as a type of punctuation.’

Schinwald’s construction is based on the principle of partitioning. By precisely positioning partition walls that hang from the ceiling, roughly down to navel height, the artist disrupts our everyday movement routines. The construction appears as an inverted labyrinth, which aims for spatial, bodily and emotional irritation, luring visitors into a maze of hollow alleys and narrow tube-like passage-ways. This use of long corridors and mis-leading spaces also cleverly mirrors the city of Venice itself, ‘aware of the Venitian way of “getting lost” in the  narrow alleys and streets.’ Because Schinwald employs white walls  suspended from the ceiling rather than sprouting from the floor, he creates an undeniable focus on the lower half of the human body. While walking around the exhibition, one can see a series of disembodied legs. This is further referenced by Schinwald’s suspended sculptures of severed Chippendale chair legs. The disconcerting focus is, according to Schinwald, a ‘sub-theme’ of the exhibition, decided upon by the artist in order to upend our concentration of the upper half of our bodies, despite our physical dependence upon our legs: ‘I think there is perhaps an uneven focus on the upper part of the body, and I wanted to shift concentration onto the lower half, which we use mainly for transportation and sexual activities. When you split the body in half, focusing on the mute half becomes some kind of choreography.’

The paintings that Schinwald displays in his architectural labyrinth have a disquieting, archaic despondence. Painted with muted tones, the artist reworks 19th century portraits, lithographs and nudes, affixing each figure with a ‘prostheses.’ He veils a woman’s head in white linen, or forces another woman into a correct posture by means of a chain and a leather prothesis around her chin. These images evoke a sense of anxiety, largely instigated by the understated acceptance of Schinwald’s painterly victims.

Of the filmic element of the Austrian pavilion Schinwald says: ‘if the novel is the literary equivalent of the feature film, then Orient is a kind of visual counterpart of the poem. The protagonists don’t act in a linear temporal sequence of events, but understand themselves as phrases of an emotional discourse.’ Orient is set in an unreal artificial ruin, in which modern architectural elements are integrated in a dilapidating hall. Five protagonists, in turn, move about the space, with motions that lie somewhere between slapstick and modern dance. Seemingly random moves will suddenly flow into abstract choreography, and serene gestures will suddenly become ridiculous. The film is subtle, and manages to avoid contrivance, the exaggerated postures and quiet rituals revealing themselves as a metaphor of an invisible demonstration of autonomy. Schinwald himself claims that he does not ‘wish to interpret too much into the film [himself], but what interested [him] was to take a ruin, a symbol of decay and abandonment, and use it against itself.’ 

Markus Schinwald has idiosyncratically described the work as ‘the head in neurosis, the crotch in psychosis.’ Despite its purposeful obscurity, Schinwald himself calling it ‘a rather crude metaphor’, this phrase fits perfectly, depicting a ‘schizophrenic side of the architecture.’ The exhibition is neurotic in the extreme, creating a matrix of self-awareness, second-guessing, realisation and disturbance, while simultaneously, one seems to float, at a complete loss from external reality.