Silvia Eiblmayr was awarded the Austrian State Prize for Art Criticism 2019
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Walter Seidl (WS): What are your thoughts on being awarded the State Prize for Art Criticism?
Silvia Eiblmayr (SE): Receiving this award is a great honor for me. I’ve never worked as an art critic in a journalistic sense, though I have made some contributions to art magazines. The bulk of what I write is for catalogs and for special occasions. And in light of this, I think that the jury understood art criticism more in the Anglo-American sense of an art critic who writes theoretically and reflects on art beyond how it’s done in journalistic writing. In general, I assume that the jury awards this prize for one’s entire body of work, reflecting not only one’s written output but other activities, as well. And in my work, the emphasis has always been on a combination of scholarship, teaching, curating, and publishing.
WS: The State Prize for Art Criticism was created only quite recently. Before then, there had only been the art critic awards conferred by AICA (the International Association of Art Critics), where you’re also a member, and theirs goes mainly to young critics. Writing about art and curating has changed drastically over the years, so what’s your perspective on these changes and the fact that this prize was created so late?
SE: AICA takes an approach that’s similar to my understanding of such an award. The combination of curating and writing has always been part of the rules set by AICA. Its successive boards have viewed this as a prerequisite for becoming a member from the very beginning. The job of curator has become increasingly important over the past few decades. At first, the term wasn’t widely used or known as it applies to contemporary art, but then schools for curating were established. I assume that it’s due to the present visibility and importance of our work that this state prize is now being awarded, because before there had only been prizes for writers and visual artists in literature and other artistic disciplines. Texts on art aim to mediate and translate art via the means of language. This is also mirrored in how educational programs and the mediation of art in museums has become more and more important. For a good 35 years now, museology has been concerned with how to mediate art to a general audience. Museums have more visitors than ever before, which can be credited to their museological programs and their efforts to achieve a better public understanding of art. However, in print media as well as on TV, visual art is being featured less and less. The debate on art was more substantial and intense, say, two decades ago. This is what can be observed in Austria if one looks back over the years. On the other hand, the number of art institutions and exhibitions has increased all over the country, to say nothing of all the new off-spaces. The same development also accounts for the increasing number of biennials, which makes it impossible to travel everywhere and gain a true overall impression. Hence, you can only deal with a certain segment.
WS: With an eye to segments and especially to the Kontakt collection, what are your thoughts on the representation of art and artists from the countries of former Eastern Europe before and after 1989? Have exhibitions—like “In Search of Balkania” (2002) or “Blood and Honey" (2003) in Austria—contributed to better visibility?
SE: Due to the fact that Austria borders on the countries of the former East and has specific historical relationships with them, its distance from them has never been all that great. An example of this would be the steirischer herbst festival in Graz and its “trigon” exhibitions, which included artists from former Yugoslavia (and Italy) beginning in the 1960s. These countries had been more or less familiar to me anyway (including as a tourist), and thus art from this region has played a role in my curatorial work ever since then, definitely including the period prior to 1989 and the fall of the Iron Curtain. For example, the exhibition Kunst mit Eigen-Sinn (art with stubbornness / art in its own sense). International Art by Women that I co-curated together with VALIE EXPORT in 1985 included quite a couple of artists from the “East”, from (then-)Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Poland and Hungary.
The exhibitions you mention as well as others have made a huge contribution to opening up perspectives, which has happened gradually since 1989. Over the course of this development, curators’ and institutions’ interest in these artists and quite generally in the postwar avant-garde art history of Eastern and Southeastern Europe has grown. Hence, the gap in international recognition and knowledge has been diminished over the years together with the advent of intense exchange that was eventually mirrored in the founding of Kontakt in 2004. The Austrian curators who’ve been involved in the making of this collection had already long been active in this field. And the Kontakt collection has now been growing for fifteen years. Its conceptual approach and present-day-state are the result of intense research by and knowledge of all the members of the collection’s artistic board as well as all others who’ve been participating in this project and supporting it over the years.
WS: With many of the important artists from Eastern and Southeastern Europe now having been more widely represented, such as in Sanja Iveković’s retrospective at MoMA in 2011/12 and Július Koller’s at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw in 2015/16 and at the mumok in 2016/17, to mention just two such cases, how do you view the presence of a younger generation of artists? Do their countries of origin still matter?
SE: In terms of the younger generations in the collection: yes, I do think so. These artists are dealing with specific post-socialist situations in their respective countries and also take an interest in their own history. In this respect, I think, it is a strength of the Kontakt collection to have concentrated and put its special focus on these countries from the “former East” (and Austria), making this collection one of the few that transcend the cultural and political borders that had, historically, indeed existed between the respective European socialist countries. At the same time, these artists and artworks are also being placed within an international context. This is an ongoing process in which the collection has been involved from the very beginning.
WS: But do you think that sufficient research has been done on the former Eastern Europe?
SE: There are excellent art historians, art critics, and researchers in those countries, but they’re working under very different conditions in terms of institutional and public support. So it has always been one of the goals of Kontakt and of the ERSTE Foundation to contribute to various projects.
The interview took place on the occasion of the award ceremony on October 28, 2019.
October 2019
Silvia Eiblmayr (SE): Receiving this award is a great honor for me. I’ve never worked as an art critic in a journalistic sense, though I have made some contributions to art magazines. The bulk of what I write is for catalogs and for special occasions. And in light of this, I think that the jury understood art criticism more in the Anglo-American sense of an art critic who writes theoretically and reflects on art beyond how it’s done in journalistic writing. In general, I assume that the jury awards this prize for one’s entire body of work, reflecting not only one’s written output but other activities, as well. And in my work, the emphasis has always been on a combination of scholarship, teaching, curating, and publishing.
WS: The State Prize for Art Criticism was created only quite recently. Before then, there had only been the art critic awards conferred by AICA (the International Association of Art Critics), where you’re also a member, and theirs goes mainly to young critics. Writing about art and curating has changed drastically over the years, so what’s your perspective on these changes and the fact that this prize was created so late?
SE: AICA takes an approach that’s similar to my understanding of such an award. The combination of curating and writing has always been part of the rules set by AICA. Its successive boards have viewed this as a prerequisite for becoming a member from the very beginning. The job of curator has become increasingly important over the past few decades. At first, the term wasn’t widely used or known as it applies to contemporary art, but then schools for curating were established. I assume that it’s due to the present visibility and importance of our work that this state prize is now being awarded, because before there had only been prizes for writers and visual artists in literature and other artistic disciplines. Texts on art aim to mediate and translate art via the means of language. This is also mirrored in how educational programs and the mediation of art in museums has become more and more important. For a good 35 years now, museology has been concerned with how to mediate art to a general audience. Museums have more visitors than ever before, which can be credited to their museological programs and their efforts to achieve a better public understanding of art. However, in print media as well as on TV, visual art is being featured less and less. The debate on art was more substantial and intense, say, two decades ago. This is what can be observed in Austria if one looks back over the years. On the other hand, the number of art institutions and exhibitions has increased all over the country, to say nothing of all the new off-spaces. The same development also accounts for the increasing number of biennials, which makes it impossible to travel everywhere and gain a true overall impression. Hence, you can only deal with a certain segment.
WS: With an eye to segments and especially to the Kontakt collection, what are your thoughts on the representation of art and artists from the countries of former Eastern Europe before and after 1989? Have exhibitions—like “In Search of Balkania” (2002) or “Blood and Honey" (2003) in Austria—contributed to better visibility?
SE: Due to the fact that Austria borders on the countries of the former East and has specific historical relationships with them, its distance from them has never been all that great. An example of this would be the steirischer herbst festival in Graz and its “trigon” exhibitions, which included artists from former Yugoslavia (and Italy) beginning in the 1960s. These countries had been more or less familiar to me anyway (including as a tourist), and thus art from this region has played a role in my curatorial work ever since then, definitely including the period prior to 1989 and the fall of the Iron Curtain. For example, the exhibition Kunst mit Eigen-Sinn (art with stubbornness / art in its own sense). International Art by Women that I co-curated together with VALIE EXPORT in 1985 included quite a couple of artists from the “East”, from (then-)Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Poland and Hungary.
The exhibitions you mention as well as others have made a huge contribution to opening up perspectives, which has happened gradually since 1989. Over the course of this development, curators’ and institutions’ interest in these artists and quite generally in the postwar avant-garde art history of Eastern and Southeastern Europe has grown. Hence, the gap in international recognition and knowledge has been diminished over the years together with the advent of intense exchange that was eventually mirrored in the founding of Kontakt in 2004. The Austrian curators who’ve been involved in the making of this collection had already long been active in this field. And the Kontakt collection has now been growing for fifteen years. Its conceptual approach and present-day-state are the result of intense research by and knowledge of all the members of the collection’s artistic board as well as all others who’ve been participating in this project and supporting it over the years.
WS: With many of the important artists from Eastern and Southeastern Europe now having been more widely represented, such as in Sanja Iveković’s retrospective at MoMA in 2011/12 and Július Koller’s at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw in 2015/16 and at the mumok in 2016/17, to mention just two such cases, how do you view the presence of a younger generation of artists? Do their countries of origin still matter?
SE: In terms of the younger generations in the collection: yes, I do think so. These artists are dealing with specific post-socialist situations in their respective countries and also take an interest in their own history. In this respect, I think, it is a strength of the Kontakt collection to have concentrated and put its special focus on these countries from the “former East” (and Austria), making this collection one of the few that transcend the cultural and political borders that had, historically, indeed existed between the respective European socialist countries. At the same time, these artists and artworks are also being placed within an international context. This is an ongoing process in which the collection has been involved from the very beginning.
WS: But do you think that sufficient research has been done on the former Eastern Europe?
SE: There are excellent art historians, art critics, and researchers in those countries, but they’re working under very different conditions in terms of institutional and public support. So it has always been one of the goals of Kontakt and of the ERSTE Foundation to contribute to various projects.
The interview took place on the occasion of the award ceremony on October 28, 2019.
October 2019