Untitled (broom and glass)
Lois Weinberger
two painted objects, broom and glass
broom: ca. 170 × 35 cm, glass (for five litres): h 30 cm, ø 20 cm
1992
Acquisition 2013
Inv. No. 0248 ab
Lois Weinberger is an ethnologist of natural fringe areas. Itʼs about civilizationʼs space, migration processes and the relationship between nature and art. Lois Weinbergerʼs art is poetical fieldwork, precise investigations of the succinct. A broom leans in the corner. Next to it there is a white colored glass standing on its head. A poster is hanging behind both objects that depicts both objects – the poster doubles the reality of the items and, at the same time, alienates them through the distance and shifting in the image. The poetry of the ordinary is typical for Weinberger, but also the political reference concealed in a still-life. In the poster published and distributed by the Salzburger Kunstverein, both objects are seen in association with other things. Some of them are concrete-filled plastic-bags that assume the form of minimalist sculptures with pop-cultural skins. The brushwood broom is a countrified tool and in the context of the exhibition, a folkloristic, pre-industrial utensil. For Weinberger, it is a metaphor for a Modern political strategy. Is not cleaning – of form, space, design – a central idea of the artistic avant-garde? Are not the erasure of the past, visibility and the cult of pure basic concepts part of their momentous dynamic? The pairing of the broom with the glass, the spatial still-life, unifies the dimensions of purity with that of rural origins to a mute, but telling, sensory arrangement. The glass is also empty and, like history, standing on its head – at the same time it is white, like the spaces in which art is currently presented.
Thomas D. Trummer, 2015 (translation: Virginia Dellenbaugh)
Continue readingExhibitions
Wallpaper #6, evn sammlung, Maria Enzersdorf, 2023
Publications
evn collection. 95–2015 Jubilee, Vienna 2015, p. 377 ff