Anne Schmidt
Radiated, creature, champagne, shaggy, clump
Diploma Exhibition 2023 | Academy of fine arts | Vienna
In my diploma exhibition Radiated, creature, champagne, shaggy, clump 2023, I use a variety of media. The basis of my work is my year-long, artistic research on the question of whether we can succeed in distancing ourselves from the normative images of desire in consumer culture and contracting affective structures of desire .
In the conceptual novel "Me after two anal orgsms", 2023, published by Edition 502, I record this research in auto-fictional style. My choice of genre is about linking sociological theory with lived experience. The exhibition refers to an opening scene in the novel, and sculpturally transposes it into space in the form of a repetitively molded advertising ice cream cone. I also transfer the further process of publishing the novel, such as editing and my relationship to its content, into the space. Thus, a chainsawed wooden piglet was created as a coping mechanism to deal with the 914 comments from the editor.
The installation of the sculptures in the space is dictated by the infrastructure of the academy, which, in order to prepare the space for the diploma, has the walls painted white and specifies 1.5 meters of wall space for this purpose. For the diploma examination I will empty a bucket full of tennis balls and loose plaster, the distribution of which will mark the positions of the jury in the room. In the exhibition text I deal with reading and being read.
As part of the exhibition, I am organizing the symposium "Lost Elements of Official Ceremonies", in which authors and artists deal with language. I promote the event with my own dyslexia by not accepting suggestions for corrections for the posters.
Radiated, creature, champagne, shaggy, clump
Installation, text and performance by Anne Schmidt
Behind me,
at the window,
there is always such a nice lunch break conversation.
When I‘m about to work, there‘s laughter and noise, scratching cutlery in plastic containers, funerals,
whose specific names are lost to me because of
the tinting through the glass.
Just like what I actually want to say.
A laugh, bright as elder others fall in,
a language that breaks off,
“delicious“ (Friederike Mairöcker, 2018).
To beginn I wanted to suggest having a playmat in the room, for all of you who also work. I found this one in the room. Now I alternate kneeling and lying on it.
Today I stretched my head into a hollow body and read on a trial basis from “Checkout 19“, a book that I‘m excited about because of the description of how to read. I got into it because I read a lot of newspapers, often until half past three in the morning.
It then has nothing at all to do with new publications and daily politics and tipping points, but rather with this sleep app I used to have. Anyway, I excitedly scrolled through “Checkout 19“. The reading sample seemed to say exactly what I would like to say about my diploma:
This way of opening a book, sitting in the grass. That‘s it. “Opening a book and sitting in the grass“ was exactly what I wanted to say, what I have done, and wanted to know if it is familiar to you.
That‘s when the author (insert name later) went so far as to write that the first-person narrator or the we-narrators, the identification characters,
we-narrators, the identification characters, wouldn‘t even read the book probably, but would just gather some words together, in the sense of collecting, “words that need no further explanation, that pass our eye one by one.“ That‘s what I wanted to write about reading. In the first line of this text.
I want to add that I don‘t want my book to be read that way. Mine takes two, three hours, during the night, in the dark. It is not for vacation, it is for a weekday, for working hours, it is for not sleeping and not being able to. So that it is not clear whether reading already anticipates the next day.
Of course, I also wanted to say something about the content. If anyone asks what it‘s about, I‘ve already thought of a few things: Literature only begins when you can‘t tell what it‘s about (International Laureate).
The book is far from me. You can‘t read it. It is a trashy novel.
I distance myself from this person, the author, Anne Schmidt, the first-person narrator, An, in love to the point of unattainability, she fucks page after page a Martin, climatologist, to at least have something to do with climate activism, to avert the global warming depression, entangles herself in an ego-dystonic disorder, gives herself up for psychiatric treatment, gets high, moans, steals, smokes, dies, plans how to report her rapist, pukes, howls, drinks. Love, the very big emotion. “Delusion, that has to do with turning the page, chasing from one page to the next, escape, complicity“ (Ingeborg Bachmann, 1977). That also about how I want to be read.
And now about how I will read: That‘s why I told you about the carpet. There I would like to talk about the fantasy, how a person imagines how everything will be, that is one of the smost powerful activities.
This carpet has already been all sorts of things and will probably never be more than a set piece in the text.
Too bad, because before I wanted to paint the carpet tennis-field coloured, I have construced therefore already a daily plan for tomorrow, which has destroyed the one to make each week a pig, three piglets and a sow (teats and claw) from tree trunks by chain saw.
A physical effort that I am quite happy to have snatched from my imagination. It should be emphasized that I got to the sows in the first place, because the editor added 914 comments to my manuscript, and I thought going through them was my job.
Several things Maggie Nelson lists as binary, the all-too-familiar facts, of course, but also just knowing an answer to a question.
Because, she says, words change their meaning depending on who is speaking. In case the question still arises how these waffle ice bodies, that are already begin to resolve, came about, let‘s talk about the beach (the synonym of longing).
In particular, of this beach where Yvonne Rainer has a nuclear family posing for group photos that fall apart and reassemble. If we were to look over at them while running, from a distance, we would think that they are the lucky ones over there. Who have achieved what we hoped to achieve, who are not me, and also not as alone.
We would be concerned with the question that Yvonne Rainer asks in “Film about a Woman who...“, 1974: How can we succeed in taking a little distance, in becoming a political subject in order to gain more understanding, and condradict the places and images of longing given to us?
I wanted to have a storage here, accessible only to those who work, a stock of goods, off-season, use value, no aesthetics. I once worked making the ice cream cones in eight-hours a day in 2009, before I had a notion of arts. When all I knew was the longing and being afraid to be an artist in the same time. Then it also wasn‘t art, but for the purpose of advertising.
A subjectification of the consumers, so they say: “Ah, over there is ice cream, I want two scoops“. Then, while eating, the fulfillment of the fantasy narrative of the lightness of summer.
I had been interested to see how the form was doing, after studying and being educated. So the backdrop of plaster ice bodies has changed. The space that is available to me. The discussion that I open. The cast has remained the same.
This film in which the actors/ actresses are asked to wait: Rashid Masharawi, “Waiting“, 2002. To the annoyance of the actors/ actresses who want to play something: “It‘s enough.“, “Enough.“, “If you wait longer, how do you think you would wait?“.
I wanted to talk about the detour, the turning- away-form-reality, escapism, before I start to work again on the “Procrastini pig“, for which I want to have time, because I have become fond of it. Which I mention here only because it has claimed an outstanding name that speaks for itself.
