Imagining Modern Vienna
Two Recent Exhibitions
[T]he city is always a space already constituted and structured by symbolic mechanisms. (James Donald, Imagining the Modern City, 8)
Have times changed since the 1986 Vienna 1900: Art, Architecture and Design exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York?
The debate about Central Europe that re-emerged in the 1980s was nostalgic in tone. … The climax of this was definitely the Viennese metropole of the fin de siècle, the ideal of diverse artists bonded to each other and to the essential character of their time and locale as a myth, the myth of ‘a modern avant-garde not homeless, but integrated into a real community, Klimt and Wagner and Loos thus become tablemates of Freud and Mahler and Wittgenstein at an imaginary coffeehouse for a shining moment in the city that was the cradle of modernity.’ (Varnedoe 20)
This particular picture of Vienna as the cradle of elite-culture modernity, of Kaffeehauskultur, has become staple fare as a popular imagining of the capital of the Habsburg monarchy during its last decades (cf. Reisenleitner in spacesofidentity 1). We recently attended two high-profile exhibitions in which re-imaginings of Vienna as a Central European cityscape featured prominently: the Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis at the Tate Modern in London and Shaping the Great City: Modern Architecture in Central Europe 1890-1937 at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the Kunstforum in Vienna. We were wondering what kinds of visions of the city would emerge from the juxtaposition of Vienna’s modernism with other forms of artistic creativity in other “modern” metropolises. What we learned about the modern city as a generic concept was that it really does make a difference how we abstract from local specificities and what is compared. Two very different images and ways of seeing Vienna emerged in these two exhibitions.
According to organizer Iwona Blazwick, the Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis exhibition “explores the relationship between cultural creativity and the metropolis, by focusing on nine cities from around the world at specific moments over the last 100 years.” A quick perusal of the choice of these cities and specific moments – Paris 1905-1915, Vienna 1908-1918, Moscow 1916-1930, Rio 1950-1964, Lagos 1955-1970, Tokyo 1967-1973, New York 1969-1974, Mumbai 1992-2001, and London 1990-2001 – reveals an agenda based on a very broad, very traditional understanding of avant-garde art practice. The concept “modern” was applied so liberally that its meaning evaporated into some foggy notion of a burst of artistic creativity, rather than a more specific stylistic or socially informed concept that could serve as a brace for the potpourri of items on display. Each section was curated separately and seemed to focus on giving the artsy crowd the kind of stereotypes they would expect, so along with the Paris of the impressionists, the Moscow of Mayakovsky, the Rio of Gilberto and Jobim, the Lagos of Achebe, the Tokyo of Yoko Ono, and the New York of Warhol, we get (need we mention it) the Vienna of Freud and his friends, presented as a “City in Analysis” and buying in to all the myths that have recently been so forcefully challenged by, among others, Roman Horak et al. in their two-volume re-evaluation Metropole Wien: Texturen der Moderne.
While curators Richard Calvocoressi and Keith Hartley begin their section of the catalogue accompanying the Century City exhibition with a heading "TABULA RASA Fin de siècle Vienna," given their selections, it would have been more fitting to describe their Vienna as a mythic writing pad. We were greeted by replicas of the Loos House at the Michaelerplatz and Otto Wagner’s Grosstadtstudie, Freud’s couch (on loan from the London Freud Museum), a collection of Peter Altenberg’s provocative photographs and postcards, and drawings by Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka and Richard Gerstl, before entering a room representing the Viennese “coffeehouse scene.” A window the length of the room offered a magnificent view of the Thames and St. Paul’s cathedral, the strains of a Strauss opera (Richard not Johann – it was, after all, an exhibition on “Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis”) and the aroma of generic espresso (not Starbuck’s or Seattle’s Best – it was, after all, the Tate Modern) wafted through the air, and dainty, round wooden tables invited weary culture-seekers to become members of the charmed Viennese “Artistic and Intellectual Circles.” A plaque on the wall bearing this title informed visitors that:
Vienna’s coffee-houses played a pivotal role in the development and determination of avant-garde ideas. Intellectuals, painters, architects, musicians, writers and journalists met regularly in cafés like the Café Central or the Café Museum (designed by Adolf Loos). Such circles often formed around a dominant personality such as Loos, Karl Kraus, Sigmund Freud or the playwright Arthur Schnitzler. Members entertained each other with witty anecdotes, and discussed new discoveries and revolutionary ideas. The circles typically included people from different disciplines or art forms, leading to a rich, interdisciplinary exchange.
Membership had its privileges. Should we have chosen to accept this curatic interpellation, we could have enjoyed a decent cup of coffee and joined those whose yellowed photos adorned the surrounding walls: Robert Musil, Schnitzler, Egon Wellecz, Viktor Dirsztay, Hans Tietze, Wittgenstein, Schönberg, Freud, Kraus, Alma Mahler, Kokoschka, Loos, Schiele and Altenberg. We wondered what kind of rich interdisciplinary exchange would have resulted from such conversation, and who would have been first to storm out in disgust.
***
Negotiating the contingencies of modern cities and the manifold representations they offer is a daunting task, and altogether too often the temptation to resort to hackneyed clichés as stabilizing mechanisms that cozily fulfill their audiences’ expectations and provide a reassuring sense of nostalgia proves overwhelming. That there are other ways to approach the pedagogical task of de-familiarizing audiences while still providing captivating imaginings is demonstrated by the second exhibition we attended, which approaches the same challenges in a very different manner.
Shaping the Great City: Modern Architecture in Central Europe 1890-1937 is a traveling exhibition which could be seen at the Municipal House in Prague from December 15, 1999 – March 1, 2000, at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montréal from May 23 – October 15, 2000, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles from February 20 – May 13, 2001, and the Kunstforum Wien in Vienna from June 6 – August 28, 2001. Its organizing team from Montréal, Los Angeles and Vienna saw their project:
less as a definitive study than as a way to suggest avenues for research and to open discussion of the central issues [the exhibit] raises: How did modern architecture construct ‘meaning’ in relation to the complex cultural traditions, conflicting political agendas, and historical narratives of modernizing urban society in the cities of Central Europe? (Foreward to the Catalogue 7).
The cities selected for this demanding project were Vienna, Budapest, Prague, Kraków, Zagreb, L’viv, Ljubljana, Brno, Timisoara and Zlín. The exhibition was organized in two sections with an emphasis on “Reworking Traditions” as a means of finding out how they “engage[d] the history of their imbricated fabric.” This is at the same time a profoundly aesthetic, historical and political view on what these cities did in regard to shaping space, identities and visions; the displays lived up to the challenge by conveying a sense of these processes to visitors. Vernacular architecture, housing projects and infrastructural programs were presented on an equal footing with architectural “highlights,” so that the meaning and appeal of the latter were given a comparative as well as historical context.
Jaromir Krejcar,
Geschäftshaus, Prag, 1925-1928. (c) Kunstforum
Bank Austria
Vienna was represented in two chronological sections coinciding with the two major phases of its development at the beginning of the 20th century: the first section dealt with developments around 1910 and was entitled “Between Memory and Modernity,” while the second section presented “Red Vienna,” “The Social Democratic City” between 1919-34. Both sections were well-stocked, with an impressive number of display items ranging from city planning maps and brochures to promotional material, historical photographs and film reels. While no attempt was made to homogenize the planning, aesthetics or architectural movements, the presentation itself, the juxtaposition of the cities and the choice of display items made manifest for visitors the multi-layered quality of the periods. What all was going on in the architectural world at the time as well as all of the different aspects of city planning and modes of experiencing Vienna's transition to a fast-growing, “modern” metropolis were addressed in detail, yet carefully and without any claims to exhaustive treatment. The multiple influences stemming from particular and specific traditions, international or more narrowly Central European, that converged in the planned, contested and negotiated forms shaping the city and contributing to its manifold imaginings were presented.
Unlike in the exhibition at the Tate, Shaping the Great City: Modern Architecture in Central Europe 1890-1937 evidenced a clearly discernible concern with social issues and political developments, but historical traditions and artistic visions were taken seriously as well. The scope, the highly reflected and careful selection of material and the style of presentation of this exhibition goes a long way towards capturing (and, more importantly, making visitors appreciate) what is so difficult to grasp about cities: their constantly shifting shape, their planned yet random paths of development, and ultimately the particular offers of place identification they make – which ultimately makes them the preferred medium of modernity.
Links
Kunstforum Bank Austria: http://www.cezanne.at/home.html
Works Cited
Blau Eve and Monika Platzer. Shaping the Great City: Modern Architecture in Central Europe, 1890-1937. Munich, London, New York: Prestel, 1999.
Blazwick, Iwona. Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis. London: Tate Publishing, 2001.
Donald, James. Imagining the Modern City. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.
Horak, Roman, et al, eds. Metropole Wien: Texturen der Moderne. Vienna: wuv, 2000.
Varnedoe, Kirk, and Museum of Modern Art (New York N.Y.). Vienna 1900 : Art, Architecture & Design. New York: Museum of Modern Art; Distributed by New York Graphic Society Books/Little Brown, 1986.