Lonely Facts
Muntean/Rosenblum
C-print (framed)
130 × 100 cm
1998
Acquisition 1999
Inv. No. 0061a
The work Lonely Facts of the artist duo Muntean/Rosenblum, is a relict of a performance, one of their tableaux vivants. The updated form of what used to be the favourite entertainment of Viennese society at the end of the 19th century brings together sculpture and photography, action with staging, artificiality with reality. The blue cloak is a cross between a Superman costume and a Playmobil aesthetic. How the relict out of a comic looks on a living model can be seen in the photograph.
Multiple ingredients for complex projects, unequal elements, historical and cultural references over-lapping one another characterise the work of the artist couple.
Another field of activity consists of drawn picture-stories that tell of the feelings, dreams and yearnings of young people, and examine lifestyles with almost ethnographic curiosity.
Muntean/Rosenblum are samplers. They consider how to use given material and how something new can be created from it. They love big gestures, the pathos of the body and great emotions; they develop chains of motives, structures of their own.
The artists are concerned with reformulation of the classic formulas of pathos in relation to the body, an excursion through the supermarket of contemporary gestures. They react to the media mediated cult of the perfect body using the figurative as the most powerful provocateur of emotions. In an era of simulation and cyberspace, in an era when humans as the medium of communication are losing themselves in virtual spaces, they place their trust in the presence of the body.
The meeting of an artificial toy aesthetic and nature is the turbo-charger in the system and the confrontation of emotions and rationality, of content and form, drive it forward. In the end, that it works so well has to do with the humour and the irony that Muntean/Rosenblum bring to the seriousness of the situation.
Brigitte Huck, 2005 (translation: Tim Sharp)
Continue readingExhibitions
Mimosen - Rosen - Herbstzeitlosen. Künstlerinnen Positionen 1945 bis heute, Kunsthalle Krems, Krems, 2003
There is something you should know. Die EVN Sammlung im Belvedere, Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna, 2000
Publications
evn sammlung 95–05, Cologne 2005, p. 228–233
Muntean/Rosenblum. Where Else [on the occasion of the exhibitions “Muntean/Rosenblum. Where Else” Secession Vienna, January 27th – March 19th 2000, and “I'll Always Tell You the Truth Unless, of Course I'm Lying”, Kunsthaus Glarus, 22.1. – 19.3.2000], , p. 22
evn sammlung. Ankäufe 1997 – 1999, Maria Enzersdorf 1999, p. s. p.