Julian Turner – Ich merke mir alles, außer das Wichtige
March 10 – April 16, 2016
| Images: Courtesy of the artist and Vin Vin, Vienna |
"Problem: you've got this window. You need to
do something with it.
Solution: just put something in there. Anything. If
you don't have anything, just paint the window or get something printed."
(from: Vitrine Intervention at
Projectstudio Sint-Lukas, Brussels, 2013)
The
invitation card for Julian Turner’s first solo exhibition in Vienna reproduces
typical tiles of the German Democratic Republic. Its not-quite-monochrome green
reminds us of the not-quite-white of popcorn wallpaper. Like popcorn wallpaper,
it is decoration so commonplace, it might get away with not being decoration at
all. The clean flatness of modernist aesthetics is eased to fit the simple
working class home. The tiles go well with the fake stone grain painted as
background for Turner’s collaged canvasses, and with other cheap but efficient
ways to cover bleak surfaces.
Much
of Turner’s work reads as a taxonomy of accidental effects and improvised
solutions. Places, where such effects turn up, are construction sites,
billboards, public transportation, pubs and bars. Everyday functionality and
casualness turn quick fixes into permanent installations. Coincidences produce
elaborate, sometimes unintentionally funny situations. The temporary and
unfinished nature of these situations is most readily displayed, for example
when an old utility pole is replaced by a new one but the old, useless one is
never actually removed.
Turner
is experienced in infiltrating the aesthetics of contemporary art with his type
of casual imperfection. He founded Bar du
Bois – a hybrid of exhibition space, functioning bar, and ongoing
collaborative work – with Florian Pfaffenberger, operating its various forms
with Ann Muller and Andreas Harrer. The Bar’s most permanent instantiation was
housed in a 1950s building in Vienna’s first district from September 2013
through June 2015. The iconic globe lamps, gracefully displayed through the
space’s old shop windows, became Bar du
Bois’ signature feature. The annual awarding of Turner’s own version of the
Turner Prize (since 2011) completes the picture. The miniaturization of the
event introduces visible improvisation into the perfect representational
machinery of the official art world. In exhibition making and staged press
events, decisions and constructions are very temporary, but the impermanence is
usually disguised. We are used to surfaces being perfectly finished, each work
and label sitting in their proper places, press releases situating the artist
within the art historical canon, generating an air of stability and significance
for the work. Like a monochrome in comparison to the design of GDR tiles, the
relation between the ‘original’ and the model exposes different versions
fakeness, rather than reaffirming the authenticity of the seamless surface.
The
seats in the business class compartments of Austrian Railjet trains feel very
convincingly like fake leather. The black is somewhat flat, the smoothness of
the surface a little too artificial. But actually the leather is real. This is
the banality of the elite exemplified––the world observed by Julian Turner.
Barbara Reisinger