Gernot Wieland

In his new film, Gernot Wieland addresses a process whose urgency we recognize, yet which has rarely been successfully put into practice: healing society from the traumatic legacy of male-dominated, colonial Western art history. And this is just one of many narratives that permeate the social order, continually producing and reinforcing structures of oppression.

The therapeutic tool of choice is the family constellation. Its representatives are ceramic figures that stand in for “Old Master” paintings, but also for mother, father, ego, Freudian psychoanalysis—and a fox. Perhaps this cultural-historical family constellation can expose mechanisms of power, but it does nothing to undo the loss. We don’t only lose people; Western art history itself is also built upon loss. Its scaffolding holds only by means of dispossession, colonial plunder, and the exclusion of marginalized groups.

Like a storyteller, Wieland’s voice-over meanders through memories that at times spread their wings and take flight as fictions, only to suddenly crash back down onto the ground of historical reality. His tragicomic film and collaborative lecture-performance draw upon his upbringing in postwar Austria during the 1970s and ’80s—an “environment of repression.” There is something childlike in the tension between humor and seriousness: children observe—and speak about what they see, bluntly. In his writings on Marxist children’s theater, Walter Benjamin attributed something revolutionary to the power of children’s gestures and words. Perhaps the melancholy in Wieland’s work stems from the sorrow of having lost this childlike perspective. Even when his film treats certain subjects with a light touch, there is never a moment when the weight of loss, violence, and trauma is not palpable—making the inner pulse, like thick blue veins on a hand—perceptible from the outside.

Text: Alicja Schindler