The Austrian Cultural Forum is a nontraditional space for a nontraditional beauty contest. The Examiner was on hand for the opening of "Beauty Contest," the show's participants everyone from the legendary photographer Cindy Sherman to the video artist Kalup Linzy, these two accompanied by a bevy of Austrian artists whose work is hosted by the Forum courtesy of Musa, The Art Collection of the City of Vienna. Beauty, says the Forum, is here both -- paradoxically -- extracted from and commenting on associations that render it traditionally female, that give power to the beautiful, and that consider beauty strictly linear and one-note in its expressions of gender and desire.
Situated between the Forum's two sets of front doors is a a work by the Swiss-born artist Clarina Bezzola, whose work, though usually performative, is here an installation that nods to the late Alexander McQueen's record-shattering summer show</a> "Savage Beauty" at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. When I walk alone in the streets..., Bezzola's work, displays quite literally a lady in red at the Forum's front windows, but a lady decapitated and of misshapen form. Sissi Farassat's Rio 2 (2003) imposes sequins on a picture of a so-called "beautiful" woman. As Birgit Jürgenssen puts it in her contribution to the exhibition, "Everybody has his own point of view," though Matthias Hermann rather sardonically twists this classical protest of the male gaze into something that feminizes and masculinizes men, as it were and as excerpted below, that combines and takes a chisel to gendered and sexual binary.
This bit of quirk by curators Berthold Ecker, Claude Grunitzky, and Andreas Stadler carries with it some Cindy Sherman irreverence and pink butt-cheeks made of straws from Katarina Schmidl, but it also accompanies a more somber note that runs throughout some of the exhibition's most devastating pieces. Lisi Ponger, in Meet me in St. Louis, Louis(2000), photographs a woman with eyes closed tight against the viewer, and against the artist, and against the photograph that surrounds her with animals colored, like her and the picture and, says Ponger, "Louis" and "me" and you, in black and white.
"Beauty Contest" is at turns hilarious and devastating, and deserves a visit before the show's close on January 3. Exhibition information is below:
WEDNESDAY SEP 21, 2011 - TUESDAY JAN 3, 2012
Presented by MUSA Vienna and
Austrian Cultural Forum New York,
11 East 52nd Street (between Madison and 5th Avenues)
New York, NY 10022
OPEN DAILY, 10 AM - 6 PM. FREE ADMISSION.
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