An enriching visit to Vienna

A little trip between Graz and the Austrian capital where I got to meet other art critics felt so intellectually stimulating

I’ve often wondered what it is about Vienna that makes it one of my favourite cities in the world. I have this blood rush-blood gush feeling within me whenever I’m en route to there. Perhaps it’s because I am privileged to have a sense of continuity from my first visit in 2018, when I happened to meet an artist named Marlene Hausegger at Parallel, an alternative contemporary art fair that takes place alongside the main Vienna Art Fair. She happened to be preparing for an upcoming residency in India and we bonded so organically. Ever since, her gorgeous top-floor apartment in the third district has become my default home whenever I’m in the Austrian capital. She remains, somehow, for me a witness, someone I met right on the cusp of my return to South Tyrol in 2018 in order to meet with my partner, with whom, at the time, I’d had an intense long-distance flirtation. We were meant to spend some time together to explore the contours of the intimacy we had been evolving since we had first met. My relationship with Marlene has progressed parallel to my involvement with my partner. She and I have watched each other transform over the last three years. I would be seeing her in Vienna this time for the first time since I moved to Italy in June last year, so the anticipation of arriving from Graz was so much more compounded.

I often love to claim that if I were offered a choice between living in Berlin and living in Vienna, I would choose Vienna hands-down. It is the more unpopular choice, given Berlin’s reputation as a contemporary arts hub, and a nest for a diverse range of artistic practices. I like Berlin, but I love Vienna, in some inexplicable way that isn’t logical or cannot be rationalised. Maybe I like who I am when I am there, or how the city has this political edge, and a feminist history that excites me. Or something about the people I know there, who excite me with their imaginations and their warmth. It could also be the extent of my interactions there with art itself, the kind of interventions I have experienced there that my skin remembers. There are certain rituals that I seem, inadvertently, to perform when I’m there, like visiting the Theseus Temple in Volksgarten, to see what installation they have at that moment. This time there was an immersive labyrinth installed by Susanna Fritscher, an Austrian artist, made of porous silicon-threaded ceiling-to-floor walls that seemed harp-like in their construction and whose basic pattern mirrored the temple’s neo-classical interior. It was wonderful to walk through and experience the illusion of the structure moving with your body as you sought the way forward and back, and to arrive at the opposite end of the entrance and look back and see the world outside differently than when you came in.

At an under-construction facade, somewhere in the first quarter, near Stephansplatz, I saw a cross-stitched declaration by possibly the same artist whose work I had encountered on my last visit. It read, “As long as he makes the cash while I work for change, I will be a feminist.” I actually enjoy not having too much context, and how the work functions as a rhetorical intervention within a public space. I recognised the aesthetic as the same as I had seen during a 2019 visit, also on a facade that was being reconstructed. I am unsure if the statement is meant to be ironic, sarcastic, or if it is supposed to carry the weight of a truism. I like the tension of not knowing, and of how it performs by extending the thought, asking you, as a reader, to contextualise it.

This little trip between Graz and Vienna felt so intellectually stimulating, not necessarily just because I got to be exposed to some challenging artworks, but because I got to meet other art critics and to spend time with them breaking things down, honing our criticality and sharing with each other what we do in order to keep ourselves autonomous, and survive financially. I think it was really the first time since I have been ‘based’ here that I got to experience a sense of collegiality, and of mutual respect, and to feel like I was part of a community of similarly minded intellectuals who were all conscious of their privileges and their limitations, and who each had so much to contribute that was unique. I felt solidarity, and I also felt among these peers a shared passion towards art and literature. I felt reminded of how art criticism is a vocation unto itself, and each one who dares to embrace the precariousness it often involves, does so while negotiating complex dilemmas involving complicity and conflicts of interest. It excited me to learn how different critics negotiated these ambiguities. I loved that our conversations took place outside of institutional set-ups, while having lunch, or a drink, or while walking between exhibition sites. The whole experience reinforced my commitment to being an art critic, even as I accept it is only one part of my larger identity as a creative person and a feminist.

Deliberating on the life and times of Everywoman, Rosalyn D’Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx
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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.

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