Never leave Vienna without the kiss, Viennese people will say to you. By the kiss they mean Gustav Klimt's legendary painting, prestigiously placed in the Belvedere Museum, just a few steps away from Daniel Hotel, where I stayed for almost a week attending the third International Museums Workshop (organised by the Austrian Federal Ministry for Europe, Integration and Foreign Affairs and the Graz-based Museumakademie). This year the title of the workshop was Audience Development; sessions took place in the two beautiful cities of Vienna and Graz from 27 to 31 October. The workshop included museum specialists, curators and art critics from different Arab countries including Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Morocco, Algeria and Egypt. Audience development is the art of catering to existing and potential audiences. Elke Atzler, head of the department of multilateral cultural policy at the ministry, addressing the workshop participants, said that audience development involves various work fields, ranging from curators, facilitators, agents to public relations and press officers. Questions of how to attract new audiences while strengthening the commitment of current audiences in the long term, how to reach the public and how to ensure the audience is adequately informed about exhibitions and events were discussed at length. “While museums often serve the past, art institutions have a great potential to serve as institutions of the public sphere, as civil society platforms. What can be done to transform a museum to a public hub that serves as a dynamic forum for debate and exchange?” wondered Bettina Habsburg, the head of the Academy of Museums in Graz. The last round of the workshop had taken place in Tunisia in 2013 and concentrated on the role of public spaces in the light of recent political developments in the Middle East. Public space has become an important platform for free speech and opinion. In Tunisia, participants experienced the significance of streets and squares as a platform for artistic and political activities, and as a place for societal participation. *** My journey into Vienna's unique contemporary art scene started with the ultramodern architecture of the Daniel Hotel. My first field trip was to the Museumsquartier Wien, which is the world's largest complex of art and culture. The Quartier is not just a space to exhibit magnificent paintings and statues, it is also a space for life, a spiritual place that offers a wide range of events and programmes, from the performing arts, architecture, music, fashion and dance to literature. Visitors (approximately 225,000 a year) can enjoy a day full of events whatever their interest. The spacious area filled with 18th- and 19th-century structures was once was a royal palace. It demonstrates a striking mixture of old and new, from Baroque to cyber, with an ultramodern seating area attracting the young, and includes every conceivable specialisation of museum, with shows directed at children and others focused on digital culture. Opened in 2001, the complex was renovated by architect Manfred Wehdorn, who preserved the Baroque buildings representative of Viennese small-scale architecture, leaving many of the cafes and restaurants in the area with the distinctive arches and ceilings of the period. One of the reasons behind the international popularity of the Museumsquartier is an initiative that took place in 2009 to present multinational exhibitions. Free shows are held regularly in cooperation with the Federal Ministry for Europe, Integration and Foreign Affairs and other cultural institutions. The Quartier 21 artist in residence programme has invited some 450 international artists living for months at a time in the Museumsquartier to complete projects since the program was launched in 2002. In a quiet city like Vienna, where urban contradictions are at a minimum, street art integrates seamlessly with Museumsquartier activities — this, despite the fact that there is absolutely nothing to complain about, at least on first impressions. To attract more youth, as a significant component of the prospective audience, Street Art Passage Vienna was opened in 2008, curated by Nicholas Platzer, to form a bridge from Spittelberg, a centre of Vienna's street art scene, to the Museumsquartier complex. This space, buzzing with activities and exhibitions, is a forum for international and local street artists. After taking a tour of the spacious court, we headed to the Leopold Museum, one of larger art museums attached to the Museumsquartier, which boasts masterpieces of the Vienna Secession union of Austrian artists, formed in 1897 after breaking away from the Association of Austrian Artists, as well as modernist and Austrian expressionist works. The 5,000 exhibits were collected by Rudolf Leopold (1925-2010) and his wife Elisabeth over five decades. Consolidated in 1994 by the Republic of Austria and the National Bank of Austria, Leopold houses the largest collection of Egon Schiele in the world together with major works by Gustav Klimt, who is supposed to be his spiritual father, as we were told by the museum's guide. Standing in the roomy, light spaces before original paintings by Schiele and Klimt was a dream came true. It was interesting to find out that, until the day the museum was inaugurated, the Leopold family lived with the paintings and used the furniture and objects exhibited on a daily basis. *** “In the postwar era there were other significant and pressing issues than the arts. And in the 1960s there was a new avant-garde movement. Up until 1980s, there were very few galleries and the scene was quite local. But this has changed in the 1990s, which were a turning point and represent a big change in the history of art production and in the spread of private galleries in Vienna,” said historian Bettina Hasburgh, who added that the period also witnessed a change in outlook regarding international trends as well as theory production and discourse. A new policy was also adopted to create “state curators”, who were given budgets to establish new art spaces. This pushed the scene forward, generating unprecedented dynamism. Hasburgh explained to me in person how, in the 1990s, a generational change in the professorship in art schools, the Vienna Academy of Art especially, and in the development of art theories, led to the transformation of the art scene. The city centre and the Fourth District, where I spent hours walking and stepping into the small private galleries that spatter the area, most of them established in the 1980s and 1990s, I realised, are partly due to an ambitious program established by the state in recent years to encourage museums to play the role of collectors and purchase works from small galleries, helping them to flourish. Galleries are all represented in the Vienna International Fair for Visual Arts, which takes place in early October, facilitating sales and direct interaction with new international trends in the world of art, she noted, moving fast from one spot to another. As a multicultural metropolis in the heart of Europe, Vienna has a vibrant contemporary art scene. With cutting edge programmes and regular participation in the international art fairs, these galleries have contributed to developing the image of Vienna. *** One project, Curated by Vienna, was developed as a collaboration between selected Viennese galleries and international curators. Its objective was to strengthen international networks of galleries, curators and art institutions and foster new ideas and endeavours. After its successful start in 2009, Curated by Vienna is being held for the sixth consecutive year, with 20 Viennese galleries presenting exhibitions conceptualised by international curators. This year's concept is the intersection between architecture and art — The Century of Bed, inspired by an article by the renowned architectural historian and theorist Beatriz Colomina, being this year's theme. Citing a 2012 article in the Wall Street Journal, which reported that 80 percent of young New York City professionals work regularly from bed thanks to today's extensive digital technology, Colomina deduced that a unique horizontal architecture has taken over between the bed inserted in the office and the office inserted in the bed. Questions like what the architecture of this prison in which night and day or work and play are no longer differentiated and in which we are permanently under surveillance even when we sleep in the control booth are materialized in different ways by curators involved in the project, as they critically question and negotiate the bed as a site of social, cultural, artistic, psychological, medical and sexual transaction. Luca Lo Pinto, the founder and editor of NERO magazine and a curator at Kunsthalle Wien, believes that for the last twenty years, neither space nor matter have been like they were before. We must expect that great innovations will transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our notion of art. In Real Life is the title of the exhibition created by Pinto in the context of The Century of the Bed at the Christine Konig Gallery. In Galerie Meyer Kainer, on the other hand, the exhibition begins with the disappearance of the bed as a form. Born in 1966, Rachel Harrison, one of the participating artists, lives and works in New York. She presents five Framing Devices, which are a sequence of stubbornly functional forms that hold down nylon cords stretching to various points on the gallery walls. The works project from their brightly colored anchors and describe the edge of an invisible beam. Harrison's installation exposes the edge as a zone of support and limitation. They are inscriptions of leverage, tracing the geometry of a placement to come. In another gallery, the Elisabeth and Klaus Thoman, with an exhibition entitled Little Nemo, the bed is viewed as a symbol of associative, surreal thought, a freezone for daydreams, the subconscious and extrasensory experiences to run their course. The walls of the gallery are covered with cartoon drawings by Winsor McCay that were published in the New York Herald from 1905 to 1911 — a marvellous scene recalling childhood and playfulness. Installations are dispersed throughout: huge nails, huge blankets framed in the shape of breasts, a huge potato-like nose hanging from the ceiling. I left the gallery wondering, where does the art scene in Egypt really stands by reference to such fast growing conceptual work. In Galerie Mezzanin, a video piece announces the title of the exhibition, Ready to Sleep. This is Mia Lunzer's first public presentation of her long-term research project on the cinematic history of sleep and dream research. Film and text fragments are assembled into a visual essay in the context of The Century of the Bed, guided by the assumption that through the film technology of the 20th century sleep is no longer perceived as a passive or a mortified state, but as an active, re-animated one. This shift of perception, the artist believes, results from the integration of the cinematographic concept of time and movement, which subsequently leads to an analogy of brain and video engineering: the brain as a camera projector. The Blue Times is a group exhibition featuring the works of 30 international artists, based on the principles of a chamber of marvels/a study room. It consists of objects from the natural sciences, handicrafts and pop culture, with the colour blue functions as a kind of thread, tracing its way through evolving stories. *** My quick five-day tour of the museums and art galleries was finally concluded in the beautiful city of Graz, where I attended a debate at the Institute for Art in Public Spaces in Graz on the possibilities and kinds of speech addressed in cultural activities taking place in public spaces. During the debate, many questions were raised on the definition of a public space, how to approach and deal with it, and who the prospective audience is. Elisabeth Fiedler, head of the institute, says the institute welcomes initiatives for cultural projects from different parts of the world. Fiedler burst into a laughter in response to my question of how the institute can attract an audience in such a freezing weather. “Actually,” she said, “it is one of our biggest problems. But we organise most of our activities during summertime, when it is cool to show off the arts.”
