GRAZ, AUSTRIA.-Neue Galerie Graz am Landesmuseum Joanneum presents Postmedial Condition, on view through January 15, 2006. Back in the 1920s, painters, sculptors, photographers and avant-garde filmmakers first opened up the field of media art and declared all materials to be equal. Since the 1960s, the first generation of Austrian media artists, represented by names such as Adrian, Bechtold, Export, Gappmayr, Kriesche, Petzold, Rühm, Weibel, etc., has been making a very specific contribution to international art.

What makes it so specific is the fact that the analytical traditions of the past – from the language analysis of the Vienna Circle to Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis – opened up discourses that made the critical analysis of the media possible and offered adequate reflection on the emergence of new medial forms, such as video, Expanded Cinema, or digital images. Taking up themes and/or questions relating to socio-culture, social analysis and media analysis, Austrian media art forms an independent unit. Ever since the emergence of the Wiener Werkstätte, Austria has held on to its tradition of merging the borders between free and applied art, architecture and design, sculpture and stage design, and this, together with the country’s strong media tradition that reaches from avant-garde films to virtual reality, has led to a pronounced orientation towards the postmedial in Austria. The term “postmedial”, based on Rosalind Krauss’s “Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition”, the subheading of her famous essay “A Voyage on the North Sea” from 1999, strikes us as particularly apt for characterizing the artistic practice that forms the conceptual basis of this exhibition.

Artists operate between different media, materials, and functions; they adapt new production processes, mix different media characteristics, and create new reference systems. This process is not dominated by one single medium – instead, the different media influence and shape, and at the same time, reflect one another. Interdisciplinary processes that take place between the fields of drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, film, video, literature, architecture, design, Net Art and computer language are becoming the methodic principle. On the basis of 41 artistic positions, the exhibition wants to draw attention to a present development in Austrian art that will certainly constitute one more important contribution to the evolution of international art.

This exhibition, supported by the State Secretary of Arts and Media in Austria, is a co-operation with Centro Cultural Conde Duque, Medialab in Madrid, where it will be shown from 8 February – 26 April 2006 during the artfair ARCO 2006 with Austria as guest country.