Heimo Zobernig's work exemplifies the potential and complexity of artistic practices that occupied a large part of the 1980s in Western Europe, a moment when artists began to take art history back on board. Growing up after the demise of Conceptual art, the Austrian artist is part of a generation for whom it was natural to reconnect with tradition, and in the mid-1980s Zobernig began an 'open artwork' in which various historical propositions of abstract art were at play (Constructivism, De Stijl, Konkrete Kunst, Minimal art). This led to a larger and lucid body of work that today covers an extensive array of experimental investigations in various media and exhibition making.

The return to tradition in the 1980s was fiercely attacked by Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, who accused artists of regressive attempts to restore the visual order to one that preceded Conceptual art.¹ To Buchloh, the embrace of figurative painting signalled the art world's amnesia, and was a negative move rejecting the critical implications of Conceptualism's attempt to eradicate the visual from art practice - an act of artistic purification. But this is not the case with Zobernig, whose return to art history was done from a perspective sharpened by the Conceptual project. Zobernig's work embodies the ambivalence and hesitation with which certain artists of his generation used and processed arthistorical sources. Conceptual art had confronted the naïve belief in the power and expressive potential of images, and this 'negative conviction' was carried on in the progressive propositions of the 1980s. In the same manner Zobernig's work possesses an undertone of scepticism about form as carrier of meaning tout court - something always seems to get lost along the way. This scepticism can be seen as a key to accessing the drives of Zobernig the artist, particularly his acknowledgement of the fall-out that accompanies the reception of the art object in the world. Zobernig embraces artistic misunderstandings, but in a methodological way. In his oeuvre, abstract art is re-enacted through ironic performances of different roles drawn from art history. The question is whether his abstractions, through the performing of such roles, could possibly forge a new relation to history.

'Stilleben mit Krone' ('Still-Life with Crown', 1983) was the title of Zobernig's first gallery exhibition at Junge Musikgalerie in Villach, Austria, a show marked by a contradictory approach to its inspirational source. This inclination recurs in his more recent work, where there appears to be both a wish to build on tradition and an urge to mock it. For 'Still-Life with Crown', Zobernig started from a painting by Max Beckmann - who at the time served as a role model for the 'neue Wilde', a young generation of German figurative painters - and was inspired by a graffiti he had seen on the façade of the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna of a stick figure wearing a crown and flanked by the sentence: 'nieder mit der Scheiss Bürgerlichkeit' ('down with the lame bourgeoisie'). Zobernig symbolically 'broke' the Beckmann painting into pieces, presenting the fragments as acrylic paintings and white plaster sculptures of objects such as a crown, a sceptre and a goblet.²

These early plaster sculptures resemble works by Franz West, whose Paßstücke - white plaster sculptures from the 1970s that are to be carried around in performative acts - were certainly familiar to Zobernig. Zobernig and West have much in common: both are Austrian and grew up in a politically and culturally conservative climate, to which they responded with work that mocks the idea of genres and their grandeur. Though Zobernig was born eleven years later than West, at some point the two artists saw the anarchist in each other and began to work together on various collaborative works and shows. But while West's 'disrespect' is presented in a relatively straightforward way - the image of an adult walking around with one of his sculptures makes you think of a child engaged in play - Zobernig's approach is subtle and indirect. If West were a jester, Zobernig would be a dandy. And whereas West has been consistently critiquing petrified aspects and concepts of figuration by infusing sculpture with performative elements, Zobernig has consistently broken down the vocabularies of abstract art.

This is especially clear in a large series of medium-sized paintings from the mid- 1980s that signalled Zobernig's artistic maturity. The individual works seem to prolong lyrical themes taken from paintings by canonical Modernists such as Man Ray, Kazimir Malevich and Joan Miró, with a cheerful lightness that I associate with improvisation in jazz. This body of work became a beacon for Zobernig, who showed the original installation with the paintings that he did in the mid-1980s again in 2002-03.³ What is important in these works, and in the paintings of the Modern pioneers that they openly refer to, is the sense of liberation that abstract art can convey, with forms and colours freely floating on a surface, like dancers in a space.

VAUDEVILLE

N: Someone's knocking.

C: Open the door.

N: My God, a black square.⁴

Heimo Zobernig's body of work is extremely diverse. It consists of sculptures, smallscale mock-ups of architecture, designs for two-artist and group shows, printed matter, art for public and private buildings, videos (shown as projections or on monitors), stage designs, performances, etc. All these works use simple materials and forms, and their execution is often both meticulous and casual - the surface of a sculpture, for example, might be partly unpainted, as if to indicate that, along the way, a decision was made to leave it unfinished.

What unites them in all their differences is their shared voice of surprise and mild bewilderment, as if they, in a curious exercise of self-reflection, were speaking to themselves, confessing their puzzlement about the place where they are and the subjects they address. A similar sense of bafflement can be found in the dialogue penned in the 1970s by two Dutch writers, Henri Plaat and Cherry Duyns, which echoes Zobernig's deadpan humour as well as a tradition important to the reading of his work: vaudeville. ⁵ Plaat and Duyns collaborated on a series of sketches for television, written and acted from the early 1970s to the late 90s by Duyns, the artist Armando and the performing poet Johnny the Selfkicker. The television series, Herenleed. Een programma van wanhoop en verlangen (Gentlemen Sorrows: A Programme of Despair and Longing), was inspired by circus and vaudeville acts.⁶

Vaudeville is a style of multiple-act theatre that flourished in North America from the 1880s through the 1920s. A typical evening's bill of performances would range from acrobats to mathematicians, song-and-dance duos to trick highdivers, giving the overall event a uniquely varied scope: music, feats of athleticism, magic, Shakespeare, comedy, operetta, banjo, acrobatics and gymnastics, animal acts and lectures by celebrities or intellectuals of every provenance. An essential element of many acts were the verbal gags, to which a mixed-gender audience would respond immediately, by booing or cheering. In the 1930s vaudeville fell into decline, partly because of the advent of affordable cinema tickets. Ironically, in the US the first movies were originally screened to large audiences in vaudeville halls.

With the extinction of vaudeville as a financially viable business, over the years its ideas and forms have transmigrated to other art realms and genres. One locus where they seem to have moved to is the abstractions of Zobernig. In true vaudevillian fashion, it seems possible to compose an evening's bill of the different manifestations of his work. A look at Zobernig's art through the lens of vaudeville shows that a similar punch of puzzlement is experienced: in his exhibitions it seems as if a form or a shape has just landed in the space, with the spectator surprised to find him or herself next to it. An example of this effect is an early series of untitled sculptures from 1986 that uses dry humour to mock Minimalist art. Made of toilet-roll tubes assembled into neat, pristine formations hanging from a wall, these inventive sculptures have a cool sensuality about them - even an unexpected eroticism, where tubes resemble limbs with secret openings. The works conveyed an upfront energy and courage - the guts any artist needs in order to put his hands on a venerable legacy.

Zobernig has been making work for over two decades, yet it seems to get younger as time goes by, as if the artist, year after year, were carving out the rogue within himself. As the work keeps on developing, an undercurrent of amused thought manifests itself: earnest ideas can be fun, it seems to be saying. This comes directly from the artist's formative years and his interest in and early engagement with theatre and performance. The recent reappearance of a performative element in the work, re-surfacing after so many years, shouldn't surprise us. After all, performance is often at its best as the cuckoo's egg, laid and hatched in others' nests, and one day just saying: 'Here I am.'

Recently Zobernig even 'performed' as a curator. He exhibited his own work in dialogue with, respectively, works from the collection of Tate St Ives, and works from the collection of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon.⁷ Both collections contain works from the classical Modernist period to which Zobernig is so often drawn, possibly because of what can easily be found in these early abstractions: the joy of experiment and improvisation. The exhibitions in St Ives and Lisbon showed a happy artist going back to his roots, chasing the free flow of forms pursued by the pioneers of abstraction.

Role play often occurs in Zobernig's work. For instance, in the Lisbon show a partition wall was taken down and turned into a plinth for a collection of Arne Jacobsen chairs and their anonymous derivatives, which were painted gold. The plinth featured all the scars of this operation, as nothing had been done to hide the traces of saws. Elsewhere a huge beam hung from the ceiling. Normally theatre lights are fixed to such a construction, but in this case it served to suspend three curtains in chroma-key colours (blue, red and green), which have since been used as a backdrop in some of Zobernig's recent videos. Here a background item - the beam connecting two separate gallery spaces - became a protagonist. Also remarkable was the way Zobernig dealt with the collection of the Gulbenkian Foundation: a selection of works he liked most was chosen from it, and each was hung chronologically on a line at eye-level, stretching across two oblong gallery spaces. As a result, some of the paintings stuck out in front of a hanging wall, their backs visible from the other side.

The exhibition became an ironic reflection on the ever-growing complexity of the art system, and the extent to which art economy, art discourse and the daily practices of art are intricately intertwined. The display of the works reflected the desire to take off and end this whole game, but at the same time they were condemned to fall back to earth. Just like the melancholic protagonists in the TV programme Herenleed, a sense of being lost is met by a mixture of Zen and Dada:

Armando: Do you know the four-times table yet?

Duyns: Yes, I have mastered it. A beautiful table by the way.

Armando: Exactly my opinion, nice to find someone who thinks the same.

Duyns: Ah, sir, the four-times table is my favourite one. I know it inside out.

Armando: I think it is the most beautiful of all the four tables.

Duyns: Yes, so do I. Though I've heard the five-times table may be very beautiful as well. Armando: Yes, there you've got it, that one I do not know. I only know four.

Duyns: So do I.⁸

DOUBLING

My experience of Zobernig's art began in the 1990s. I recall his shows of that era as being reticent, as if they were built around a void. Was this because of the artist's realisation that the ideals of the pioneers of abstraction weren't alive anymore? A room with his work could look as if it had been filled only with sparse forms or shapes, but in the emptiness around them things were always happening. A sense of the legacy of refined ideas and knowledge lurked in his exhibitions, as if the works were mirrors within this realm of shadows, constantly producing a double effect. This doubling actually occurred in his work on several levels. In the first place, there was the activity of reproducing formal and theoretical elements taken from art history in studio practice - an activity that has always been at the core of his work. Secondly, at a certain moment Zobernig started to make site-specific works that abstracted from and reflected on the habits and expectations we have of art spaces. These works can be read in terms of institutional critique, but their hallmark is a pseudo-naïve blandness that mirrors the material conditions of a given art place. A recent example is a group of site-specific interventions in the architecture of the deSingel cultural centre in Antwerp, which uses second-hand set materials stored at the site.⁹ This work, titled Stellproben(Set Attempts, 2009), was developed in response to an invitation by curator Moritz Küng, who in recent years has organised an international series of one-person exhibitions in a building that doesn't have an actual exhibition space. Zobernig's work doubled typical elements of a 1960s building that radiates confused futurism, with its large curved and anthropomorphic windows that seem to have come straight out of The Flintstones' Stone Age.

A third instance of doubling can be seen in more recent works, in which the artist holds a mirror in front of his own art practice and mimics the impulses that define it - such as his mixed exploration of different genres. A case in point is the video Nr 24 (2007), which offers a visual allegory of the meeting of painting and performance. Zobernig appears naked, engaged in a mock struggle with three antagonists wearing oversized jumpsuits, again in the blue, red and green chroma-key colours. Through this opposition, the work functions as a parable about the condition of the artwork in an age of digital technology. The figures threaten to waste Zobernig: they put tape over his mouth and genitals, wrestle with him, and heap art magazines and catalogues upon him until he virtually collapses. A reviewer described the video as a failure in its attempt to critique the art world: 'The atmosphere is alternately clownish and threatening, and despite its allusions to amateur theatre, poking fun at the body as surrogate object and performative vehicle (Wiener Aktionismus, for example), the video is not much more than a soft critique of the art world (as well as of the putative authority of the artist), and one defeated by the saturation of irony.'¹⁰ I disagree, however, and instead find something inspirational in the video's allegory of an artist losing track. The work emits raw energy and raw irony. Rabelais's crude laughter is projected onto the enterprise of abstraction and its fate in the twenty-first century. The work tells a story of both oppression and redemption in art - two sides of the coin that artists hold in their hands.

With the development of his practice throughout the years, a clearer image of Zobernig the artist appears - figured and spoofed by Zobernig himself. The cover of the book Austelung Katerlog shows him wearing sunglasses and posing self-consciously at a piano, as if he were an artist's stand-in, a body double - thus doubling again.¹¹ The image of the artist as a 'rebel' creates a specific contrast with the serious contents of the book, a publication that takes stock of a practice of abstraction. The fact that this activity of doubling has such a prominent place in his oeuvre is possibly a sign of the condition of isolation that abstract art finds itself in today. To create a perspective into his work, Zobernig had to build himself a house of mirrors where ideas and motifs reflect one another from any conceivable angle.¹² The point was not to get caught in the act.

DOS AND DON'TS

In the mid-1980s, at around the time Zobernig was making the works using toilet rolls, he also started a series of freestanding sculptures made of cardboard. The sculptures take the Minimalist legacy to a mundane, do-it-yourself level. A number of them were included by Harald Szeemann in his exhibition 'De Sculptura', where sculptural positions developed in the 1960s and 70s (Minimal and Conceptual art, Land art, Arte Povera, etc.) were shown in conjunction with pieces by young artists.¹³ 'Zoomorph' was how Harald Szeemann called a sub-group of Zobernig's works that consist of geometric figures in black-painted cardboard, suggesting forms taken from life, such as a cylinder placed on four rectangular legs resembling a hippopotamus.

These ambiguous shapes come with a long history. For example, you might find similar typologies combining the abstract and the concrete, the constructive and the organic in the artworks that decorate the corners of bridges in Amsterdam from the 1920s. These figures tell a story of domesticated constructivism. It is if they are saying: 'Here is an artist who tames shapes like a circus dompteur his animals.' Zobernig's series of sculptures has a provocative angle, as Minimalist art is ironically restaged, and the sobriety of its vocabulary is either understated or overstated. An exemplary work of this extreme is a plinth that has grown and become a tall sculpture, but which now is tarred and covered with feathers as if punished for his desire to become more than what it actually is (what the ancient Greeks called hubris).

Zobernig tends to make systemic bodies of work that comprise a repertoire of forms or utterances. These corpora mimic the rules, the dos and don'ts of art, addressing blind spots of visual vocabulary, combining genres that aren't supposed to mix, setting up a confusion of contexts. His work often suggests autonomy and self-reference, but these abstract aspects are eclipsed by its concrete presence, as once in a room his objects instantly set up connections with what is around them. A particular body of work focused on this mixing of contexts is a series of graphic interventions in art spaces, for which Zobernig printed Helvetica letters in alphabetical order on a gallery wall. The series started with 'A' at the EA Robbin Lockett Gallery in Chicago in 1990, and ended two years later with 'Z' at documenta 9 in 1992. The work imitated the look of many of the contemporary abstractions by which we are surrounded in everyday life - in fashion or lifestyle advertising - and which blend concrete and abstract qualities, signified and signifier. In 2000 Zobernig began working on a series of grid paintings. He wanted to emulate a painting by Mondrian as reinterpreted by Ian Burn - a member of Art & Language in the 1970s - in the painting Yellow Blue Equivalence(1965-66). This led to a series of works made with rich materials such as Swarovski crystals, with coloured linear oscillating patterns that created still and vibrant effects. This series writes a new chapter in the history of Op art, a movement that had virtually vanished from art history. In recent correspondence Zobernig wrote: The trigger was a picture in the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane in 2004. Before he went to England, Burn painted pictures in Australia using Mondrian's Composition with Grid 3 (Diamond Painting) of 1918 as template. Burn's painting at GoMA is a variation in dimension and colour and was described by him as 'bringing Mondrian to the Modern Space'. The lines become the foreground and background by using the colours yellow and blue. […]For me Mondrian's Diamond Painting is as much an icon of modernism as Malevich'sBlack Square - the grid stands for the topos of happiness and unhappiness in modernism. Earlier I produced adaptations of grids in the studio. The encounter with the picture in the GoMA led to a loosening up. In the new paintings, as soon as the palette of colours reaches a certain number, a mathematical solution is almost no longer possible, that's why I let myself go intuitively […]With the filling of space, the necessity of making a decision gets ever more unbearable; one of my paintings remains 'unfinished' as I no longer had the power to keep on working on it. The result takes on the appearance of the ornamental of art nouveau and the strenuousness of modernity.¹⁴

It is remarkable to see how Zobernig connects art tendencies coming from the opposite ends of the spectrum, the 'lavish' ornaments of art nouveau and the 'straight' forms of abstract art, in order to open new artistic territories. The fact that Zobernig combines Jugendstil and abstraction is not new - for example, a writer such as Mario Praz, in his study on the European interior, already pointed out a proximity between the two art forms.¹⁵ But Praz was making a connection through thinking, which is not quite the same as connecting them through making. Zobernig's explanation of part of his art practice reminds us that, in the hands of an artist, art is always an unfinished project. Or, as Paul Valéry observed: 'A work of art is never necessarily finished […] He [who has made it] extracts from it what is needed to erase it and make it anew.'¹⁶

In the Western art scene Zobernig's position is special but not unique. Other artists have revitalised traditions of abstract art, arriving on the scene in the 1980s and taking a stance in that decade. In the Netherlands there are two kindred positions that are worth noting: Klaas Kloosterboer and Harmen Brethouwer. Kloosterboer could be called a burlesque modernist. His tactile paintings, with their three-dimensional plastic forms (for instance, a coloured suit built up of various canvases and hanging from the ceiling) are rooted in an investigation of abstraction versus expression. He uses jocular rhetorical figures in his work to test abstraction and break its autonomy.¹⁷ In the 1980s, Brethouwer made a body of work that also examined the dos and the don'ts of Minimal art. His sculptures were ascetic, made of minimal amounts of chipwood elements and painted in a grimy green colour. These works are vehicles for projections and in them can be found a poisonous combination: Minimalist taboos of form seem to rest comfortably with an emotional sphere of Protestant repression and shame.¹⁸ Even earlier, around 1930, Malevich, inspired by Russian folk art, came to his 'vulgar' abstractions, tender images of figures with blank faces. It could be said that the degrading of the sublime and the recharging of abstract art through often unexpected sources has played an essential role in Western modernity. What makes Zobernig stand out is his ingenuity and ability to see and seize the pretexts for his art almost anywhere, making new beginnings and opening new possibilities for art at once. The ingenuity with which he has recalibrated the legacy of abstract art, and the fervour with which he continues to push its artistic envelope, makes him a postmodern master who shows how abstractions may appear anywhere. In Antwerp, in his show at deSingel, he built a booth that doubled a space made by artist Richard Venlet for a library. Inside the booth, visitors could watch a DVD of a performance called Heimo Zobernig explains to his double how to make a performance(2009).¹⁹ In this last case, as a bona fide vaudeville director, he literally asked his abstractions to take the stage.

— Mark Kremer