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The exhibition focuses on the 15 years of Peter Weibel's early work from 1964 to 1979. The aim is to trace Peter Weibel's artistic development as an internationally renowned media artist and conceptual artist from the beginnings through to the middle phase of the course of his work. He started out in 1964 as a visual poet and was soon transferring the structures of the visual culture from the page to the screen, at the same time retaining the model of language as a model of perception in the sense of structuralist and post-structuralist methods. Thanks to this linguistic input into his visual media works, he developed a critical impulse that turned not only against art but also against society and the media itself. This specific development from the page via the screen to gallery space - all happening as early as the 1960s - anticipated many of the trends that were later to be described as concept art, context art, institutional criticism and intervention.
In 1966 his work had already applied the participatory and interactive practices that led to the closed circuit video installations of the 1970s and the first interactive computer installations in 1980. As no other, it rigorously opens up the way for the performative turn of the closed object of modernism towards the open fields of action of the second modernism or post-modernism.
His work is not determined by autobiographical signature but instead by thematic areas and problem zones such as the mechanisms of perception and of thinking, the private world of the world of machines, the crisis in representation, in the image and the museum, the relationship between art, politics and the economy, the conditions underlying the system by which art operates. The result is a body of works whose plurality of method and coherence of issues produce the framework for a new concept of work and artist with a rare radicality. It has already influenced many young artists, and its impact is set to continue in the coming century.
Catalogue: published by Hatje Cantz; edit. Christa Steinle, Karin Buol-Wischenau
Further exhibition venues:
ZKM Karlsruhe, Provincial Museum of Upper Austria Linz, Exhibition centre Prague, etc.
Further stations of the exhibition:
Kunsthalle Budapest
Curators: Edina Nagy, Jozsef Keszman
Opening: Do. 24.03.2005; Duration: 25.03.-27.05.2005
Moderna Galerija Ljubljana
Curators: Günther Holler-Schuster, Peter Peer
Opening: Fr. 13.05.005; Duration: 14.05.-19.06.2005
