Page 107 - Art Review

Folklore: A Controversy with Works from the Collections

Museum der Moderne, Salzburg 7 October – 15 April

As a meditation on uneasy attachments to the strands suggest, requires filtering through the and losing their meaning. As such, Attia offers
past, Folklore could hardly have been more cerebral cortex before it tugs at the emotions. an unknowing counterweight to Kathi Hofer’s
sharply timed: it opened a week after Austria’s On occasion, fuzzy history and icy realism equally problematic traditional three-buttoned
Freedom Party (which was created by former meet in a single work. In their 20-photo leporello woollen alpine vests, hung on the wall and titled
members of the Nazi Party) won enough votes Neunzehnhundert_Ötvenhat (Nineteenhundred_ after saints and foreign cities, from 2016. These
to become half of a coalition government. Nor fiftysix, 2004), Anna Artaker and Lilla Khoor connect their wearers soothingly to the past, and
could it have been better located. Picturesquely flip between two sides of the region’s past, keep it alive; but, again, such a connection is the
alpine and castle-dotted, Salzburg still makes alternating scenes from the Austro-Hungarian bedrock of Austria’s dangerous nationalist streak.
tourist money aplenty off having been the nostalgia movie Sissi – The Young Empress (1956) Elsewhere the thematic context serves to
location for The Sound of Music (1965) – a video- with scenes of the Soviet invasion of Hungary lightly refresh such editioned-video warhorses
tape of which nestles among the works – and from the same year. Beside it, Erwin Wurm’s as Dan Graham’s Rock My Religion (1982–84) –
people around here still wear lederhosen. Still, one-liner Self-Portrait as Pickles (2008) directly his video-collage thesis that rock music extends
the show, which features some 50 works by skews national pride: it transmutes the artist an American religious lineage dating back to
28 artists, doesn’t simply disdain backward into 37 painted, cast-acrylic upright gherkins the Shakers – and Martha Rosler’s sardonically
glances but, rather, offers an unpredictably on plinths, turning a comestible beloved by violent upending of the woman’s traditional
gear-shifting take on nostalgia and tradition. his countrymen into a monotonous portrait role as cook, Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975),
The opening feint of David Hockney’s ghoulish- of the artist – and maybe Austrians in general though by the time we reach Rodney Graham’s
cartoonish drawings for Six Fairy Tales from the – as ridiculous green phalluses: naive dicks. concrete poem concerning Moby-Dick (1851),
Brothers Grimm (1969) aside, it achieves this Kader Attia’s Dispossession #2 (2013) cycles through one might fairly wonder if any connection
mostly using conceptual art from the museum’s slide images of looted tribal objects in ethnolog- between past and present is up for grabs here.
own holdings (and those of the Generali ical collections (such as the Missionhaus Maria But even in the stumbling progress one makes
Foundation, which it now stewards), plus Sorg near Salzburg, the wall text points out). On towards accommodating such a piece, Folklore’s
a smattering of ideological 1930s photographs video, a talking head discusses how these things curating has done its work. It makes the
of mountains, bearded elders and dirndl- are stored away in vast numbers in, for example, category a question, a problem: both unsettled
wearing fräuleins. The past, these braided the Vatican’s collection, rarely seen by the public and unsettling. Martin Herbert

Kader Attia, Dispossession #2 (detail), 2013, installation with slide projection and video (colour, sound).
© Bildrecht, Vienna. Courtesy Museum der Moderne, Salzburg

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