VIENNA.- Frederick Kiesler (1890–1965) not only fascinated his contemporary generation of artists and architects with his revolutionary, utopian ideas. The transdisciplinary contributions made by this Austrian-American artist, designer, architect, set and exhibition designer continue to influence the European and American avant-garde through today. Realized in cooperation with the Austrian Frederick and Lillian Kiesler Private Foundation, the
MAK retrospective Frederick Kiesler: Life Visions (MAK Exhibition Hall, 15 June – 2 October 2016) illuminates this trend-setting visionary’s fascinatingly complex body of work, his out-of-the-box thinking, his theory of Correalism, which he used to thematize the relationship between artwork, human, and environment, as well as his activities as an architect and exhibition designer.
Following the sweeping retrospective Josef Frank: Against Design, this reappraisal of Kiesler’s oeuvre is integral to the MAK’s efforts to take another look at the great visionaries of Viennese Modernism. Born in Chernivtsi, a multicultural city (then in Austria-Hungary, now in Ukraine), Kiesler began studying architecture and painting in 1908 at the University of Technology and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, but did not graduate. He celebrated his first big successes with theater and exhibition projects in Berlin, Vienna, and Paris. In 1926, in the hopes of being able to realize his visions, he traveled to New York, where he stayed for the rest of his life. The years he spent in Vienna surrounded by people like Otto Wagner, Josef Hoffmann, and Adolf Loos—and also to a significant degree, the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk—were key influences on all of his artistic and theoretical endeavors.
Since the beginning of the 21st century, the perception of Frederick Kiesler has shifted from a primarily architectonic reception to an artistic interest in his holistic concept. This includes the fusion of artistic and scientific insights and modes of presentation, and particularly his goal of doing away with the separation between autonomous art and real life. Kiesler innovatively grappled with the newest developments in film and television, just as much as with curatorial concepts and their radically new, pioneering design.
The thematically structured MAK exhibition FREDERICK KIESLER: Life Visions affords a view into the complexity of Kiesler’s work from the 1920s to the mid-1960s. The objects—stemming mainly from the extensive holdings of the Frederick and Lillian Kiesler Private Foundation, some of which have never been shown before—span the range from art projects, architectural visions, and exhibition design to store planning, furniture design, and media concepts, and also include poster and book jacket designs. Numerous archival documents give insight into his theoretical deliberations and innovative inventiveness.
During his time in Vienna, Berlin, Paris and his early years in New York, Kiesler was already working on a thoroughly broad range of design possibilities. His intellectual interests found expression in his theory of Correalism, which he developed in the 1930s, building upon what at that time were fresh applications of systems theory to the biological sciences. Kiesler’s empirical scientific deliberations about the sustainable design of the human-nature-technology relationship and its experimental implementation in artistic practice are exceedingly topical nowadays.
In developing the concept of the Raumbühne [Space Stage] (1924) on the occasion of organizing and setting up the International Exhibition of New Theatre Techniques in Vienna, he ultimately dissolved the spatial separation between the spectators and the actors and integrated both in a unified space. At the beginning of the performance, the audience circled around a floating stage. This “correalistic” instrument signaled a radical shift to a biomorphic language of form. By allowing object and person to interact in a shared “living space” and co-developing the concept of environment, Kiesler also radically severed the separation between human being and work of art.
Frederick Kiesler proposed a model for the city of the future with his Raumstadt [City in Space] (1925), which he developed for the Austrian theater section of the Exposition internationale des Arts décoratifs et industriels modernes in Paris upon Josef Hoffmann’s invitation. Representing the central object of the FREDERICK KIESLER: Life Visions exhibition, a 1:1 scale reconstruction of this futuristic model of a hovering city will be mounted in a space darkened with black curtains at the center of the MAK Exhibition Hall.
Design serves to promote health, and thus the wellbeing of society, is how Kiesler explicated his aesthetic intentions in his essay “On Correalism and Biotechnique. A Definition and Test of a New Approach to Building Design” (1939). By way of example, Frederick Kiesler developed his vision of the Endless House, which he regarded as the “nucleus” (similar to a designer’s “stem cell”) of architectural planning based on the human being.
Kiesler continued the practical implementation of his correalistic theory (“biotechnique”) in the late 1930s and early 1940s in the Laboratory of Design Correlation he founded at Columbia University in New York. With the concept of the Vision Machine he developed between 1938 and 1942—and which is also presented in the MAK exhibition—Kiesler visualized the process of art perception. “The Vision Machine,” explained Kiesler, “will enable us to classify the plastic creations of man. Since the Vision Machine tries to demonstrate the different constituents of seeing and imagery, it should facilitate the analysis and understanding of the various physiopsychological sources which are the origin of plastic arts.”
Kiesler’s characteristic “unity of the arts,” invoked in Vienna by Theo van Doesburg already in 1924, reached its zenith in 1947 in the total ambiance of the Salle de Superstition [Hall of superstition] in the exhibition Le Surréalisme en 1947 mounted by him in the Galerie Maeght in Paris. There, aspects of the “magical” were given a heretofore unknown dimension in Kiesler’s work.
His vision of the relationship between art, space, and spectator is illustrated in no small part in FREDERICK KIESLER: Life Visions through the Galaxies, wherein he included surroundings in a visual composition. Through this group of works he created in the 1950s and 1960s, Kiesler brought about a synthesis of painting, sculpture, and architecture based on the principles of Correalism. In their entirety they resemble the structure of planetary and stellar systems, which is why Kiesler dubbed them Galaxies.
His artistic and theoretical musings lend themselves as multifarious inspiration for contemporary interpretations through the fine arts. At various interfaces in the context of the exhibition, Leonor Antunes, Céline Condorelli, Verena Dengler, Lili ReynaudDewar, Apolonija Šušteršič, and Rirkrit Tiravanija enter into a contemporary dialog with Kiesler.
In the role of the Endless House, Lili Reynaud-Dewar dances around the model of a city for the future. The staging translates the principle of the Endless House into a realm of simple lines and planes of the City in Space.
Together with Janina Audick and Sachiko Hara as Black Widows, Verena Dengler developed the performative scenery Die Geburt des Bucephalus [The birth of Bucephalus] after an unfinished sculpture of Kiesler’s—herein scenery components from the art and theater realms are freely, in the manner of Kiesler, fused into a situative entity.
In an imaginary rhythm of handcrafted materials, textures, and forms, Leonor Antunes, echoing a design of Kiesler’s for New York retailer Saks Fifth Avenue, developed a model of a show window in the MAK Permanent Collection Vienna 1900 to illustrate his approach to modernism.
Céline Condorelli reacted to existing structures and let the The Swindelier (2015) act—a sculpture that models atmospheric elements under the rubric of the interplay of acoustics, form, and aesthetics.
Invited by Rirkrit Tiravanija, Karl Holmqvist, in the role of the protagonist Kiesler, will read from theoretical writings. In allusion to Kiesler’s self-representation, the artists selected the Floor & Wall Galaxy (1952) as a stage.
Together with Hild Borchgrevink, Nina Krogh, Linn Lervik, and Ida Uvaas, students at the Kunsthøgskolen i Oslo (KHiO, Oslo National Academy of the Arts), Apolonija Šušteršič initiated the action group Stefi Kiesler. The focus is on a calendar entry about a meeting regarding the ultimately not implemented Magic Show.
