Artist:
Dorit Margreiter (born 1967 in Vienna, Austria; lives and works in Vienna, Austria).

Materials:
Video transferred to 16mm film (black and white, silent), and three black and white Lambda prints; dimensions variable.

Description:
“In her distinctive practice, Margreiter examines how art, architecture, design, film, electronic media, and performance correspond and relate to each other. Her work zentrum (‘center’) examines the role of the moving image and design in modernity using a number of mediums, including a 16mm-film installation, typography, and posters. The work is based on a broken neon sign reading brühlzentrum (the name of a modernist housing complex) that the artist found in Leipzig, in the former German Democratic Republic; the sign was set to be demolished along with the complex. The artist refrains from nostalgia and seeks instead to situate the aesthetics of socialist modernism in the twenty-first century. She has created a filmic reconstruction of the sign by lighting the scene and videotaping while her crew mounted reflecting foil on the broken neon tubes, thus bringing it alive once more.

“Resembling non-narrative, abstract ‘city’ films like Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphonie einer Großstadt (Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, 1927) or Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand’s Manhatta (1920), zentrum highlights the relationship between abstract film and design in video footage migrated to 16mm black-and-white film. The font used in the neon sign can be traced back, stylistically, to the stencil typography of the German-born American artist and designer Josef Albers. Margreiter created a font called ‘zentrum’ based on the sign.”
Gallery label from Performing Histories: Live Artworks Examining the Past, September 12, 2012–March 8, 2013, Museum of Modern Art, New York.

“The elements in Margreiter’s mobiles that comprise letters are scaled one-to-one with the now lost originals on the Brühlzentrum building. Suspended from cross-beams made from polished aluminium, they seldom align to form the shape of a letter: the sculptures consequently equivocate between word and image, information and abstraction. Although they reference both vernacular and fine art traditions—children’s toys, design artefacts and modernist sculpture—they are best characterized in relation to the doyens of their genre: Alexander Calder’s playful fantasies. In Calder’s mobiles, delicate components are cantilevered asymmetrically so that their hand-drawn arcs overlap like the branches in a weeping willow. When a counterforce is required, an element is introduced that makes a sprightly surge upwards like a twig venturing skywards. Notwithstanding their apparent defiance of gravity through a series of deft deferrals, their behaviour seems completely ‘natural.’ By contrast, their appearance is best described as abstract, given that Calder restricted his palette to a few crisp, vivid hues. Clearly hand-made, these irregular planar elements are fixed in place in what appears to be makeshift fashion, as if the whole composition had been casually and quickly put together. However qualified, their allegiance is unquestionably to the organic; Margreiter’s cleaves to the architectonic.”
—Lynne Cooke, quoted in website of Dorit Margreiter.

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