KUNSTHALLE wien, karlsplatz
Treitlstr. 2, A-1040 Vienna, Infoline: +43-1-52189-33,

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4 February - 30 April 2000

Nauman turns this situation around and draws the line of the stage around himself and then his viewers. His "mental spaces" - as, for instance, in Dream Passage II - only function through the viewer, whose position he defines by means of his spaces and corridors, so causing a radical shift in the relationship between the artwork and the public. The work of both artists is thought through down to the smallest detail. All extraneous ornamentation has been eradicated to create a reality of bodies in spaces and states of experience that are more than realistic and utterly disillusioning. Their art has nothing to do with a sense of compensation, with reconciliation or with edification. Art takes over. Both argue from a position of deliberate social isolation, and try, or have always tried, to avoid the mechanisms associated with art and fame, and to radically question the role and purpose of art and artists.

The presentation brings together a wide diversity of media and exhibits. Scrap-papers, original manuscripts, booklets and books, sketches, drawings, slide shows, objects, TV pieces, videos, films, installations and environments alternate, complementing one another and creating a continually changing vista.

For the exhibition in Vienna, significant selections of manuscripts are being released from several archives for the first time. These documents include six notebooks for the novel Watt, which had an influence not to be underestimated on American Minimalist art and was particularly instrumental in strengthening Bruce Nauman's perception of space. These documents are to be presented along with photographs and first editions in over twenty showcases. This display will provide an insight into the profound extent to which Beckett's thinking was both conceptual and visually orientated. Fifty of Bruce Nauman's drawings are to be on view, mostly from the period 1966 to 1984, as well as sculptures and installations such as Dream Passage II. A world premiere: the large installation False Silence (from 1975), one of the central pieces in Nauman's ¦uvre, is being constructed specially for this exhibition and shown for the first time. False Silence is an impressive claustrophobic, long and narrow piece with "discomforting" triangular spaces. It is his only piece to employ corridors that are elaborated with spoken text.

Films and videos by Nauman and Beckett's productions for television and radio, as well as his only film, Film, with Buster Keaton, form a further major focus to the exhibition.

Curators: Christine Hoffmann, Michael Glasmeier
Academic assistance: Gaby Hartel

Catalogue
A catalogue is to be published to accompany the exhibition with contributions from, inter alia: Steven Connor, Raymond Federman, Sabine Folie, Kathryn Chiong, Joan Simon, Werner Spies, Friederike Wappler; in German, 248 pages, with approx. 200 illustrations and 8 pages in full colour; Wien 2000, ISBN: 3-85247-024-2

Supplementary Programme (status 17th January 2000)

Thursday, 16th March 2000, 7 p.m.
Book Presentation
Max Hollein: Zeitgenössische Kunst und Kunstmarktboom (Contemporary Art and The Art Market Boom), Vienna, Böhlau Verlag 1999.

Panel-Discussion (in German) on the theme Art and the Art Market
with Max Hollein (Guggenheim Museum), Gerald Matt (Kunsthalle Wien), Tobias Meyer (Sotheby's New York, Contemporary Art Department) and Iwan Wirth (Galerie Hauser & Wirth)

Friday, 24th March 2000, 8 p.m., in the exhibition "...the whole thing's coming out of the dark" Samuel Beckett - words/sounds & moving images Performance, live radio broadcast and CD with Natasha Parry, Barry McGovern and Raymond Federman and Uwe Dierksen
Concept and selection of text: Gaby Hartel/Klaus Buhlert
Conceived and directed by Klaus Buhlert
A co-production by Bayerischer Rundfunk/Hörspiel und Medienkunst, Kunsthalle Wien, ORF-Ö1, DeutschlandRadio, intermedium rec. and ZKM Karlsruhe.

fig: Samuel Beckett Arbeitsportrait; photo: Ilse Bühs/J. Remmler © Deutsches Theatermuseum, Archiv; Courtesy Deutsches Theatermuseum