After World War One an area in Carinthia’s south east, where the majority of the population spoke Slovene, was claimed by the SHS state (the “Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes”). On October 10, 1920 a plebiscite decided upon the national future of these parts: just under 60% of the population living there voted against secession and for union with Austria.



On the occasion of the K08 exhibition we the course of the border as it was then planned examine on the basis of the map of the plebiscite. Visiting and walking the length of that frontier line is being documented photographically. By analogy to cartographic methods we put a certain screen across the map, thus defining place, viewpoint and line of sight of the photos.




The internal Border, 2008 was produced in conjunction with the exhibition “K08: Emancipation and Confrontation — Art from Carinthia from 1945 to the Present”.



Group Show

Curator: Silvie Aigner

Starting point:

The competition advertised for redesigning the film studios at the campus of the University of Music and Pictorial Arts called for questioning and redefining the studios’ location within the campus and its position in the city.



Project:

The exteriors of the film studio (Uni Campus) is temporarily filled with people, like in movies’ crowd scenes. For such an operation the actual presence of people is needed (i. e. the corresponding translation): The idea is to have 5,000 people come to the campus during a set time of two hours. The realization of this idea corresponds with organising a film production. Yet, this set ends with the moment of “Film ab!” (Camera is rolling). (It is of importance to the concept that the set is exclusively experienced here and now. The potential “Camera is rolling”—“Film ab!”— is not carried out).



There exists no documentation of this project. No documentary evidence remains, be it a construction, a film or photographs. The project materializes through personal account and imagination.

Statics and Extras



Extras is the name commonly given to those people who augment a scene without themselves actively appearing. Those who contribute to the liveliness and realism of a picture without stealing the show from the leading actors. Extras are indispensable for framing action as a kind of moving background to the extent that they lend solidity and cohesion, in fact a kind of statics. For the foreground action they should not be more than living wallpaper but for the unity of a picture they represent almost something like a supporting foundation. Thus the placing of extras in a scene does in fact seem to have something to do with applied statics.



The name “extras” is significant. Those special additions which contribute to improving fittings and comfort. but also to optimising the basic functioning of an act, a scene or a setting through the specific added value that they bring with them. Extras could also be seen as special picture surplus — those supporting components which are not in themselves necessarily seen but without which a noticeable emptiness and fragility would prevail.



Only when one specifically addresses the role of extras does one get on the track of the functional connection of a picture, the interplay of figures and background, of plot and its location and of dynamics and immobility. Only focus on the many inconspicuous extras enables the opening up of the fine motor activity of a pictorial ensemble.



Film ab!<font color="#FFFFFF">.</font> by Nicole Six and Paul Petritsch starts out from exactly such apparently minor matters. Minor matters and digressions which shift to the centre of events and effectively undermine the common connection of meaning between an architectonic setting and its primary action components, from its artistic environment to the actors to be encountered there each day. The shift which Six and Petritsch make with their Kunst–am–Bau<font color="#FFFFFF">.</font> (Art on the Construction Site) project on the campus of the University of Music and the Performing Arts, Vienna, includes several levels: location-specific<font color="#FFFFFF">.</font> — related to the production site of the film studio, pictorially grammatical — with the targeted generation of a mass scene, and not least artistic–architectonic<font color="#FFFFFF">.</font> — instead of a permanent design intervention an ephemeral event takes place. On all these levels they divert attention towards special surpluses, to extras in the sense described above, who would not straightaway be expected in a Kunst–am–Bau<font color="#FFFFFF">.</font> connection, but who instead show all the more clearly where its most neuralgic and sometimes trouble-prone places are.



There is firstly the location itself, the cubical new construction of the
film studio building on the campus of the University of Music and the Performing Arts. How tempting it must have been to fill the plain, mostly window-less outside walls with all kinds of reference materials from film and media contexts. With reminiscences of cinema history, samples of subjects negotiated at this spot or perhaps even as an advertising space for the student works produced inside. None of all this. As qualified architects Six and Petritsch do not intervene in the grid–like design and geometrical balance of the facade. Instead they see the surrounding space of the building, a newly acquired place, as their primary play area — a forum of a special kind which calculatingly only permits itself to be used by a certain number of people.



Film does not necessarily mean a star cast, but sometimes also anony- mous mass production, and where, apart from this central outdoors space decorated with the new construction, can such a thing be realised? By taking up a method of film staging, Six and Petritsch do not only show the functional context of the building but shift it in the direction of a special form of staging, mostly reserved for very expensive (or very cheap) productions. Film and masses, the latter usually only experienced at the reception end of the medium of film, are brought together in one of their original overlapping moments.



As already suggested, a basic shift is at work in this combination. In the context of film the masses, or the extras embodying them, usually function as the background to a storyline — as an anonymous, undifferen-tiated foil, from which the protagonists stand out in their individuality. In contrast there is a line of film history, coming from early cinema via Benjamin and Krakauer to the Soviet revolutionary film in which the masses can themselves become an actor. Not as part of the setting or social basis of a scene but as a collective subject, which sees itself as an entity of the plot — as impressively demonstrated in Eisenstein‘s Battleship Potemkin and October.<font color="#FFFFFF">.</font> To stage a mass as a mass and not as the background for a special scene enters this cinema historical tradition — incidentally a tradition which appears to be more and more forgotten with the prevalence of the Hollywood film. Or if not already completely supplanted, then threatened to be confined to certain genres such as historical and costume films.



With Film ab!<font color="#FFFFFF">.</font> Six and Petritsch recall this moment of the collective subject without individual protagonists or storyline specifications. However, in contrast to Eisenstein and Co., they leave the political purpose of this subject completely open. They do so by as it were hollowing out the foundations of the form of staging of mass scenes. It does not only remain completely unspecified for what<font color="#FFFFFF">.</font> reason 5,000 extras should gather on a May afternoon in 2007 — except in fact to generate a mass scene, but also any kind of instructions are omitted, both for those present at the location as well as with regard to possible documentation of the event. The framework of action is confined, so to speak, to the pure formality of the transaction of a contract — for example, one of the “main acts” of the project is that each individual is paid his/her promised fee as an extra. Following this, also regulated by contract, the campus is cleaned to remove all traces of the event in no time at all. An audio–visual documentary is not planned by the artists but is also not expressly prohibited.



Two things are brought to expression by this opening up or infiltration of the staged mass event. In the first instance a bridge is built between the above–mentioned tradition of cinematic “mass subjectivisation” and the spontaneous action with a situationist touch. Spontaneous may not be the right word here because the event was minutely planned for months but the staging of a mass gathering, simply for the sake of gathering, certainly has features of the line of tradition which stretches from aimless wandering about the streets to sit-ins at short notice and so–called “flash mobs”. Nowadays every more sustainable or longer term perspective on such forms of action may have evaporated but Six and Petritsch put exactly this lack of a common agenda or a collective project up for discussion by exposing the temporary formation of a swarm of people and its subsequent dissolution as almost a formal act void of any form
of content. In Film ab!<font color="#FFFFFF">.</font> the mass is stripped of any power; at the most it
still bears superficial features of deflated power fantasies. But even this phantasm quickly dissolves to nothing, the more so as the action men- tioned in the title, the actual shooting of the film, does not take place.



With this gesture, which totally concentrates on transience and the nature of the process, the Kunst–am–Bau<font color="#FFFFFF">.</font> idea not least experiences a decisive shift. A main criterion of this idea still seems to lie in how a built structure can be used for visual, sculptural or other creative interventions. The concept behind it sees architecture primarily as a kind of screen to which art can be applied with a brush or a projector. The problems which this poses, especially when buildings change their function or the layers applied to them begin to crumble, are well known and need not be repeated here.



Six and Petritsch do not avoid this basic idea but radicalise it. It is not that the newly constructed building is a screen but the whole environment of the building in which the new structure only occupies one place (even if is central). Instead of being a projection surface, it give the conceptual impulse for the action Film ab!<font color="#FFFFFF">.</font> and functions — not permanently but only for the duration of one afternoon — just as much as a part of the staging as the whole surrounding area.



Film ab!<font color="#FFFFFF">.</font> makes the Kunst–am–Bau<font color="#FFFFFF">.</font> concept dynamic in that nothing adheres to the building except the potential memory of it having been the setting of a mass scene: not as a once–and–for–all stipulation but as an exemplary stimulus to manifold imaginary uses. These may be transient and variable but because of this they are in no way less explosive. Instead of putting a permanent stamp on architecture, they point towards its ideal expandability and what are today perhaps unforeseeable ways of using it.



The 5,000 extras thereby take on a catalytic function. In that a mass of extras — one time, randomly and temporarily — fills a campus for one afternoon and then leaves again — this variable occupancy is shown. In this way the extras make a kind of background story appear which — open to a variety of uses — lends the built scenario an additional dimension. It is as if the statics of the place depend above all on this variability and flexibility, as the many extras brilliantly demonstrate.

The Sava and the White Cube



With their display for the Belgrade presentation of the Art Collection of Erste Bank Group, Nicole Six and Paul Petritsch created an imaginative space which ingenuously follows the logic of presented art.



The Museum of Contemporary Art, an important component of New Belgrade, was opened on the left bank of the Sava River in 1965. Ivan Antić and Ivanka Raspopović had designed this manifesto–like building in the spirit of international structuralism, following the CIAM Conference of 1959, which had brought together the most important positions of the European modernist avant–garde. It was a master-piece for the self–image of socialist Yugoslavia and the third way, which the multi–ethnic state had rhetorically assumed between the blocs towards such significant modernist architecture. The design even develops sculpture and pattern within itself as a free sequence of rooms, a museum made up of a path and space with visual connections between the floors and to the exterior (to historical Belgrade on the opposite bank). It was an ideal mantle for the spatial fantasies of modernist art, particularly the sculpture of those years, which more and more also became the state art in Titoist Yugoslavia. And to bring it into connection as a place with more open display requirements of modern painting, this building forms, so to speak, the counter thesis to the art of those of the avant–garde beyond the Iron Curtain and in Austria and Yugoslavia who were critical of modernism, who were to be presented in the Erste Bank Group exhibition.



In its historical references, this was the complex starting point that presented itself to Nicole Six and Paul Petritsch for the design of a display for the Kontakt collection in Belgrade. An ideologically outdated architecture, which is nevertheless strongly and rhetorically present which had also seen better days from a conservation point of view, and the two remained—monolithic in its gestures and totalitarian in its basic structural concept. A collection had to be integrated into it, which in its significant parts stands in contradiction to structuralism and the abstraction of high modernism that the building embodies. A collection which places works which have only gradually been taken into the western canon in a conceptual tradition and which—because of their contextual and local position among other things—have the potential to question it radically. It is a collection representing artists who critically faced the various modernisms of their local contexts from the 1960s.



In the first presentation of the collection it was the motif of the wall, which divided and structured one of the large side halls of a standard floor of the Vienna Museum of Modern Art, which operated both as a metaphor for avant–garde development at the time, divided into blocs, and as an ideal picture presentation surface for the often small formats—the intimacy due to the opportunities for public presentation and production. The location for this was a building with a rhetorically only apparently informal exhibition architecture, which in its use of material and space—monumentally excessive in its mantle and its interior economically and rationally following the product logic of an office building—is derived from a neutrally conceived investment architecture of the 1990s. This wall was duplicated by an oversized surface on the floor designed as a presentation table, so to speak a wall laid in the room, a wall lying on the floor on which a parade of objects which were able to evolve from such diverse, logical aesthetic and production connections as Yugoslavia of the late 60s, Bratislava of the same period and Prague of the leaden 70s. A polylogue rich in lines of sight arose between the lying and the standing wall, the side cabinets with media works and the work groups arranged loosely in the space at the walls of the museum. The neutral spatial logic of the un–specified cube which the Vienna museum presents strategically foiled this staging and created a stage rich in references for the presentation of otherness and the parallel development of artistic avant–gardes in Eastern and Southeastern Europe which was able to develop pictorially beyond practiced post–war writing of history which western museums often imagine as still unbroken.



For the presentation in Belgrade and at a historical moment that may have felt claustrophobic for many of the former Belgrade proponents of the new art practice of the 1970s who are represented in the collection, Six/Petritsch chose a contrary strategy: the precariousness of their arrangement lies in the inversion of the museum. The display concept takes the contrary historical position, like a parasite in its own house, so to speak, to the exemplary model of a structural architecture that allows open viewing relationships. Nicole Six and Paul Petritsch answer the question of a Belgrade perspective on art from the area of the former Warsaw Pact and Austria by denying an open view. In this exhibition architecture, the modernist opposite of a white cube—a spatial continuum clearly defined through viewing and relationship axes, such as the Belgrade building—is almost barricaded from the inside by four 1:1 models of white cubes. In the structure of the standard floor of the building they force themselves narrowly against the walls of the exhibition rooms like boxes set up as a second opposing frame and reverse and center the fluid lines of sight, also directed to the outside, of those passing through, which was favored by the design of the 60s. The new stage boxes made of white-painted chipboard held together with wooden bolts whose floors, made of the same painted chipboard, are raised above the level of the museum floor and which the visitor sometimes first reaches via new, long corridors which arise between the parasitical structure and the original construction, create a neutrality almost without context in which the works of the collection are placed in relationship to each other almost like chamber pieces—intimacy instead of agora and public appearance. Also the good view to the outside, with which the museum brings together the old and the new city, is broken and the views over the city appear as commentaries of critical picture constructions.



The dividing lines are sharp, the interferences large. At the same time this intervention by Six/Petritsch also expresses the borders between paradigms. Criticism finds its expression itself in the construction of the display without having to trouble post–modern metaphorics or sidestep into neo–modern neutrality. The historical transition between the two forms of display is an image for the interrupted and discontinuous history of the avant–gardes that the collection brings together and thus enters a formal dialogue with the art, which follows parallel developments. With this paraphrase of the western white cube Six/Petritsch have not only placed an image for the attack which art started upon it in the spaces in the grid structure of a building of high modernism. The corridors between the substance of the old building and the intervention of the display then almost become a symbol for cultural difference and translate the perspectives of the collection into an architectonic abstraction. In this way the real space of the museum is transformed into a metaphorical space and the real space of the display—that of the white cube used in the exhibition architecture of high modernism—suddenly becomes a theoretical space.

Risk, Deprivation and Groundless Endurance



Architecture and sculpture are grounded. Buildings and three-dimensional works of art stand on the ground, are erected on foundations or placed on bases. Their links with the earth are just as important as their vertical extension. It surely cannot be accidental that, since time immemorial, metaphors of standing, sitting and lying as applied to buildings and sculpture have been widely used to express certain thoughts. Building on solid ground would appear to be a logical metaphor of safety and stability. By contrast, classic Western thought lacks verbal imagery for expressing phenomena of an inherently different kind, for qualities that combine the firm with the movable, the architectural with the psychological, the established with the unfathomable. These phenomena, rather than conventional architectural categories, are what matter to Nicole Six and Paul Petritsch. They focus not on erecting, installing or siting, but on existential conditions in which stability has begun to crumble, in which security is undermined in order to allow states of disorientation to be registered and investigated. The two artists like to render such states through the depiction of space. A lack of firm structuring and a feeling of bewilderment become especially apparent in spaces that have neither boundaries nor coordinates. Such sensations also occur in situations that disrupt human actions and perceptions, either rendering them useless or at least seriously threatening them. Six and Petritsch subject themselves, and hence the viewer, to extreme conditions of this kind. In their work they generally expose themselves to states of risk in which they are apparently deprived of space, in which bearings are lost and automatic assumptions no longer apply.



How can risk be expressed in artistic terms? How can a work of art impart the feelings of astonishment and horror involved, the fear and insecurity? How can deprivation be conveyed? Six & Petritsch concentrate on how the body expresses inner awareness of external phenomena. Taking psychological and physical stress as their starting point, they use their own bodies as a test case. Their principal tenet is as obvious as it is phenomenological: people have space. They encompass space and they displace it with their bodies. Unlike architecture and sculpture, which are inert, people can make space tangible. In other words, they not only displace space, they also perform actions in it and appropriate it. In doing so, they generate new spaces and fix them—through movement and other activities, for example, but also through failing to act. Extending beyond the limits of our bodies, our senses, too, encompass space. We become aware of this whenever we speak, pant, listen, look and so forth. Perceptual acts that involve space reassure us vis-à-vis reality. Yet the moment they move beyond certain limits they are jeopardised and eventually obliterated by distance. Seeing knows no echo, listening no horizon and speech no communication unless it is vouchsafed a response. All too rarely do we register the fact that the signals we transmit are meaningless without feedback, that they must reach something outside us that returns them. Only that which has not been lost in infinity can be seen, heard and spoken.



Six and Petritsch seek to abolish the security provided by such responses, to undermine communicational control, to find places and situations that are largely indeterminate and unexplored. The artists thus have a penchant for sites that tax perception and the senses to an exceptional degree: expanses of grey ocean, a gap between buildings, a boundless landscape of ice, an empty, whitewashed room and now, in Bregenz, a featureless, artificial, concrete space bathed in cold light. Places like this, low in stimuli, expose the limitations of humanity’s supposed mastery of nature and show it to be illusory. Whenever human appropriation of nature meets its limits, active physical mastery and the visual exercise of power soon give way to self-doubt and confusion. Only when paths mapped out by the Self become indistinct, when perception and the body are threatened with extinction, when we find ourselves in a state of sensory and physical deprivation—only then can loss of orientation via our surroundings lead to a reflection of, and reflection on, our inner selves.



The paradoxical notion of ‘endurance’ embodies this state and reveals its workings. Endurance requires effort, effort directed both outwards and inwards. Anyone wishing to endure must come to terms not only with external factors, but also with themselves. Endurance entails both active resistance and passive power. Bereft of feedback, we are reduced to a state of pure being, to inactivity, to waiting and to observing our own pointless motions. Six & Petritsch make us party to excursions into lifeless environments that correspond to our inner world and its split character in that they evade our perceptual grasp. In such spaces, deprived of responses and the possibility of escape, the Self is experienced more intensely, as an ambivalent, ungrounded subject that adopts a defensive attitude towards something that is not really there.



Nothingness cannot provide feedback. Opposition to nothingness is affirmative only in the sense that a double negative is affirmative and it is therefore experienced physically as effort and psychologically as senseless. An early video of Paul Petritsch on a frozen lake articulates existence in a space offering no responses by showing the protagonist combating something not present, a type of art prefigured in the 1960s in the work of Bruce Nauman, Chris Burden, Bas Jan Ader and Timm Ulrichs. We see a person cutting a circle around himself in the ice. The effort involved is revealed by his heavy breathing, leaden movements and increasingly frequent breaks. The little round disc by which the forlorn hero separates himself from the outside world is a substitute for genuine resistance. The circular abyss opening up around him is centred in his person, offering a contrast to geographical description, which deals only in straight lines and knows no centres. It would be a mistake to assume that this symbolises human beings as the measure of all things. Six and Petritsch do not see it as their task to uncover the centre of humanity or its inner spaces. On the contrary, they seek to investigate the experience of boundlessness, bottomlessness and arduousness undergone by the Self when exposed to extreme situations and to show how this expresses itself externally. The artists’ approach therefore differs fundamentally from that of architects from Vitruvius to Le Corbusier, who took the human body as a yardstick and thus failed to incorporate, or deliberately excluded, the experience of infinite space.



The disc on which Petritsch stands, and the abyss it ultimately signifies, is defined by a mark in the ice. The surface is flat but, cut from the ice, will eventually tip fatefully. This floe, wrested from a hostile infinity and an obdurate material world, will mutate from an object fashioned with a great expenditure of effort into a bottomless pit, from a platform into an abyss. The obstinate endurance that constitutes the protagonist’s resistance is horizontal in orientation: it opposes the world laterally. Thus, the vector involved, like the other two bodily motions favoured by Six & Petritsch, tottering and falling, is quite different from that entailed in erecting something. A sequence of photographs showing Petritsch leaping through a hole in a wall into a gap between buildings offers another example of the same thing. The images record this dangerous jump, and the fear and courage it involved, but not the moment when Petritsch hits the ground. The fall results from the disappearance of a secure base. Despite the dispassionate aesthetic, the photographs give expression to factors of disorientation that feature constantly in Six and Petritsch’s work: unfathomableness, bottomlessness, irresistible pulls, loss of balance, the inevitability of disaster and the limitation of personal activity to ‘semi-deeds’.



Eschewing words, Six and Petritsch use an eloquent language of signs, usually bodily signs, to record such states. This art may remind one of Expressionism in that it addresses endangerment, disaster and angst, but it goes beyond Expressionism by transforming these elements into components of a self-induced, profoundly introverted kind of risk. Other associations arise. One thinks, for example, of heroic nineteenth-century images of workers who symbolise the confidence and determination of their class. Six and Petritsch, however, show not the positive value of work, but its senselessness. Similarly, the Romantic aura of grey, metaphysical mist enveloping the icebreaker and his surroundings in the video is subverted by the cool, matter-of-fact way in which the scene is documented. The boundless totality of nature, the Self’s numinous opposite number, is not evoked lovingly in details that stand for the whole; rather, it is ignored, as someone is shown performing a pointless act that has been insufficiently thought-through and is clearly the result of desperation. Sentimentality is excluded completely. We can only guess what has driven the protagonist to engage in his fateful activity, yet he conveys the impression that the work must be done, even if it proves fruitless and may cost him his life. He will perish, with no firm foundation for the ice on which he stands and with no firm foundation for his act. His work is not constructive: it is creating nothing and will not help overthrow the existing social order. If successful, all it will achieve is an end to fear.



Anyone entering emptiness—a landscape of ice, a bare, box-shaped room, the open sea, a cubic void, the desert—is in search of an ideal platform for minimising the world and themselves from a particular viewpoint. Siting ourselves in places that defy precise location disrupts our feelings of self, our orientation in the world and our sense of belonging to others and society. With nothing but bareness, such remote places might seem to offer us a higher form of existence through renunciation. In fact, all that is open to us is to probe space in a series of inherently contradictory, relatively aimless bodily motions and to ascertain the presence of nothingness. In other words, by occupying the space with volumes and perception, we ensure that it retreats still further. As with every retreat, nearness will eventually metamorphose into farness, presence into absence, achievement into oblivion.



In his site-specific work in Bregenz, Petritsch will place himself in such an exceptional situation. He will spend six days in the bare exhibition space on the fourth floor of the Kunsthaus, filmed by six video cameras. He will not communicate with the outside world. His observation of his own body will be the only apparent interaction with his surroundings. The longer he stays within the concrete walls, the more Petritsch will lose control and lose his Self. He will sit down, lie down and adopt other positions not in order to take up a pose or make a point, but because he cannot escape his body or the functionless room into which he has delivered himself. Here, as elsewhere, he will consciously embrace what most people are generally anxious to avoid: states in which there is no feedback and no possibility of escape, vulnerable states and in-between states. This indefatigable seeker after meaning does this because only when he encounters space in the intangible form of a vacuum and void, only when he confronts it in a way that makes him loses his equilibrium and his customary experiential framework—only then can that space become a mirror and vehicle of the Self.



In large-scale, real-time video projections visitors to the Kunsthaus will be able to observe Petritsch in the grey surroundings of the room. By the time they do so, however, this physically and psychologically exhausting event, during which nothing happens, will have run its course: the protagonist is to leave the room before the exhibition begins. Hence, viewers will see a document of something that already belongs to the past. The images will be a none the less precise record for that, testifying to the pain of this self-experiment, to the silence, the perseverance, the endurance and the angst. The room the artist exposed himself to will be turned into its own Doppelgänger, the cameras removed and their place taken by full-size membranes that put visitors in a state of spatial confusion. The work is best understood as an attempt at combating fear, at coming to terms with angst, through an almost monastic process of focusing on activity that consists of nothing more than doing nothing. For outsiders, this individual’s state of being abandoned to himself will be perceptible only indirectly, via medial presentation, not through personal experience. The humiliating conditions willingly embraced by the protagonist will appear merely as visual data symbolic of the existential helplessness, groundlessness and inscrutability that Petritsch himself actually experienced and that the Self can never really escape.

[…] For Kunsthaus Bregenz—as an icon of contemporary architecture an ideal case of stylisation and alienation—Nicole Six and Paul Petritsch develop a work in which it is a matter of experiencing architecture in a one-to-one situation. For the viewer this is made comprehensible via media with real-time consistency. The basic idea is not to exhibit something at the Kunsthaus but to confront the building, which is seen as a functioning organism, with something which is also physical and in the last resort in fact one‘s own body. Paul Petritsch takes six days time and experiences the third upper floor of the Kunsthaus in its pure form, empty of art, between two exhibitions. Six cameras positioned in the room record the situation from various angles in which Paul Petritsch is occupied with himself. There are blind spots and overlaps so the artist is sometimes not filmed at all or else duplicated. While Paul Petritsch, as the protagonist, spends his time in the exhibition room, which he only leaves to eat, shower or visit the WC, Nicole Six follows the six-day course of the project almost at the other end of the camera via monitor in the basement of the Kunsthaus. For the exhibition visitors the cameras are replaced by projectors directed at projection surfaces (the representation media). Thereby the situation recorded is repeated in belated, simulated real-time. Like Petritsch himself, the viewers must make a decision about where they stand and how long they stay in the room. Sometimes there is something to be seen on the projections, sometimes there is not. In architecture such as that of KUB which denies a view to the outside, its interior life (art or person) automatically takes centre stage. Visitors are made aware of this through the filmic and exemplary playback of the room in which they are located. Viewers see and experience themselves in a mirror.



The project is comparable with the works Raum and Longitude/Latitude by Six/Petritsch. In the video Raum, where the physical law of gravity was suspended, the experience of space and movement is tightened in time and the spatial perception linked to the body is intensified. On the ship there were moments of pause and of elongated movement through which the two artists were at sea for six days. It is surprising that Paul Petritsch compares his experience of the sea and distance with the KUB room of only 450m2. Contrary to his fear of an experience of constriction, the exhibition room opened up for the artist: “You have nothing to do and you look into an incredible distance.” Here the perception that viewers bring with them takes effect. Depending on the individual assessment, they see the window-less room as a cell or a refuge and the time spent there as horror or luxury. The work leads back to one‘s own perspective in exemplary fashion as renarration, by revealing the conscious breathing in of architecture as lunacy or a “coming to oneself”. This approach is certainly minimalist. But it is existential at the same time because being thrown back to one‘s own physicality evokes questions of meaning. The arrangement and simple setting of the screens in the exhibition room follows the original film set which was designed according to the objective criteria of an overview. The 216 DVDs on which proceedings were filmed are the archival side of the work. Through these storage media and the set of cameras and projections the project becomes possible to follow and reproduce. The medium in itself does not provide any fruitful survey data, it is not an end in itself. The sparking point lies in the overlapping of the presence and the movement of the artist with that of the exhibition visitor. Through the people in the room it becomes a vague spatial situation in which presence and absence balance each other. Through the experience awoken in the cone of light which orients itself to reality to scale, reality becomes a stage on which a one-man show duplicates the experience of architecture: Petritsch is neither a prop, a piece of furniture nor an artwork, he is present. The film is neither a remake nor simulated experience but simply a recording of what happened. But like Nicole Six, who followed the recording via a monitor, due to the medium the viewer remains separated from the original experience. Here is shown the sad existence of representation which can only show a pretence of being human. On the screens—the resonators of our imagination—the body becomes alienated and recedes. While the white cube ultimately also leaves aside the viewer as a threat and architecture theory avoids human presence (that is, emotionality) like the plague, the work by Six/Petritsch provides an alternative model for surveying space. The basis of this is real experience, independent of whether this is subsequently connected to media or imagined. Its simple urgency, its life circumstances reach the viewer. And on the other hand you simply take six days‘ time at a stretch.

>It is a fascinating mathematical paradox that the volume of a real object is limited, but the calculation of its surface may tend toward infinity—the smaller the scale, the more bulges and gaps fold up and the larger the surface becomes. Six and Petritsch undertook to trace this phenomenon when measuring the studio they were given to use on a half-year scholarship in New York City. Instead of the usual square meters, they chose the standard DIN-A4 sheet as a basic unit of square measure for the room which—as it turned out—was comprised of 2,478 such units. Photographed piece by piece and represented in original scale, they add up to a book of as many pages: an object in which space implodes.



Six and Petritsch respond to the challenges of the new city by taking their own bearings: using a simple structural survey of their immediate environment and transforming space into a book, they create a tension-loaded relationship between the encountered physical struc­ture and its detached representation, bet-ween the encompassing above-and-beside and the linear one-after-the-other, between the whole and the detail. White walls page after page. In the repetition of the apparently ever same, space starts disintegrating. This abstraction process, the dissociation of the physical poses a challenge to a keen eye. They gaze fixates on the smallest uneven spots and irregularities in the plaster, and in the vast expanse of the wall surface sockets, ledges, water pipes and mains become points of attraction. At these points, the studio designed as a White Cube in anticipation of presentations yet-to-come of art yet-to-be- produced loses its neutral ambience—space turns into this space. In recording the given setup, Six and Petritsch also inscribe space with the DIN A4 grid and the logic of the book. The DIN-A4 page, a paper industry standard, is the usual copy shop duplication size and hence defines their feasible possibilities of producing an artists’ book. From these given circumstances, they develop a pattern for their minimal, but systematic intervention into space. The drawings on the walls, the floor and the ceiling are simple typographic marks: register quoins and page numbers. The register quoins play a special role. Normally, they define the size, the body of a book. While their usual purpose it to merge in the trim line and to survive in this from only, as a line in space, their significance multiplies in the interweaving of the contexts of book and studio space. For they make the new system of coordinates visible. Taken for itself, each little quoin marks a separate place, indicating “here” and the “presence of the one who drew them”. With similar consistency, the numbering of the individual fields on the walls does not follow the usual reading direction, but starts from the right bottom, in front of the feet.



The artists’ hereness, their physical and mental presence in the studio space becomes discernible in small inaccuracies. Despite representation at a one-to-one scale, the surfaces are not really congruous. The reason for this is not so much the laborious and tiresome process of the meticulous measuring of the room and the resultant mistakes, but lies in the realization itself. Aside from overlaps and doublings, there are camera-induced shifts in the grid. The central perspective of the camera focus makes projections in the wall appear distorted and moved farther insidethe frame. This can be seen, for example, in the register quoins which sometimes do not disappear on the trim line but seem to leap in to the picture from the margins of the book, thus embodying most clearly the difference between concept and implementation, the gaps in the system.

The works of Nicole Six & Paul Petritsch are always closely linked to the question as to the role of the artist subject and the status of the art work itself and its disposition in the field of art. The respective situational context in which they find themselves as personae and that demands that they operate (strategically) as acting artistic subjects is key to the development of their process-oriented works. These works are characterised by a critical self-questioning within which the artists deal, among other things, with specific role allocations and with the concomitant expectations of a “body of work”. This reflective approach to their own being-there and doing is once again the focus of a three-part work in Graz: this piece methodically combines questions of their own constitution as a subject with “emplacements” in space, in the truest sense of the word. This work was created in the course of a six-month stay in New York. […] Six and Petritsch respond to the challenges of the new city with a siting. With a simple survey of their immediate environment and by transforming the space into a book, they create a mutual ambi­valent relationship between the physical entity before them and the detached representation, the compre­hensive superimposition and juxtaposition and the linear succession, the whole and the detail. Page by page of white wall. In this repetition of what seems to be always the same, the space begins to disintegrate. This process of abstraction, the dissolution of the objectual challenges the investigative eye. The eye finds its points of anchorage in the minimal bumps and irregularities in the plaster, and in this expanse sockets, wall projections, water pipes and wires become events. The studio, that was designed as a white cube in anticipation of a later presentation of art that would be made here, loses its neutrality at these points—the space becomes “this space” (Annette Südbeck). The fact that Six & Petritsch were concerned not only with recording the space itself in a supposedly objectifying process—the photographic document—but also with physically measuring it, is demonstrated not only by the reali-sation of the Raumbuch itself, in which—due to the camera technology—we see shifts and duplications at the edges, but also becomes visible in the documents accompanying the Raumbuch: in the course of this painstaking work, they created a video tape, “I‘m too tired to tell you”, that documents nothing but exhaustion (and contradicts the notion of the creative, productive artist as much as it conversely maintains clichés of the artist as an idler). What is more, there are photographic documentations of performative acts in which the body of the artist “fitted in”, as it were, to the space with the aid of a commercial building slab (called “Two by Four” in the U.S.A., which provided the title of this work). In their methodical approach, Six & Petritsch orientate themselves among other things by the formal aesthetic strategies of now historical concept artists. In some of their works, for example, they directly quote prominent works of concept art: the video work “I‘m too tired to tell you” refers to Bas Jan Ader‘s video work “I‘m too sad to tell you”, while in this context “Two by Four” is reminiscent of Valie Export‘s “Body Configurations”. Further links can be found, referring for example to “Mail Art”, that was beginning to emerge in the 1960s/1970s also in the context of concept art. The painstaking documentation of specific, in some cases pre-ordained sequences of time and action for lengthy periods is another common concept art practice taken up by Six & Petritsch. Taking up and continuing conceptual strategies, that the artists sometimes combine with performative acts and that — according to Thomas Trummer—in some cases are accompanied by consciously induced “states of danger”, serves them as a kind of self-questioning and self-assurance as visual artists.



In: „First the artist defines meaning“, Curators/Text: Reinhard Braun, Maren Lübbke-Tidow, Group Show, Camera Austria, Kunsthaus Graz 2006;

In “Longitude/Latitude” Paul Petritsch and Nicole Six have documented an Atlantic crossing on a freighter. Starting from Le Havre, close to the zero meridian, they recorded the non–eventful journey across the ocean with photographs and cartographic notes. Every twelve hours—on the dot—they threw a message in a bottle into the sea. This contained a form, an envelope and a dollar bill. Three of the bottles were actually found and returned to the senders. They give details of where and when they were found and a private message. Immeasurable space and time detached from reality rock personal foundations and produce the need for the security of fixed coordinates. Six/Petritsch sent out messages and at the same time opened themselves up to existential reflection.

The space faces inwards.

Where the transformation of the public realm in urban space is a subject being addressed every­where at the moment, this analysis concentrates on the closest four walls, as the basic unit for the appropriation of space. Neither defined historically nor culturally, this space turns out to provide a level of reality in this context—rendered virtual by the movement, it is only topical in the individual preoccupation with it. Urban architecture, its surface freed from the actual function as a projection surface for various imagined and staged scenarios, is reduced to mere material. This space is a real stage. Between weightlessness and gravity. As an arena for self–presentation, here the two positions, of the self and the surrounding space, flow into one another. The person “understands” the space, apparently free from the effects of gravity, in every dimension—floor, ceiling, wall. The theory of relativity for this accelerated space dislodges any spatial definition.

A man is cutting a whole into the ice

— he, literally, cuts away the ground from under his feet.




The tedious and strenuous work on the layer of ice is recorded on video in full length. An activity, completely unspectacular, is recorded rather casually, contrary to the stunt, as a shot of adrenalin, or to Actionism, to use a picture from the Arts, where action culminates in a spectacular climax.



The basic idea for the “series of attempts to open space” comes from the intellectual interest to define in a precise way, how space and the body are interrelated. The question is: What happens, if one interferes fundamentally with a solid structure. With their intervention Six and Petritsch translate this question radically 1:1. Perhaps, indicating laconically on or questioning ironically their everyday work, our everyday actions …



But it is also a question of materiality versus immateri-ality, which manifests itself in the working with the material: The reflecting surface of the ice materializes only through the work on the surface, through its destruction. The intervention in the material creates only transient, temporary marks, which remain as isolated traces at best: The ice layer closes again or melts away.



How is this—seemingly futile, even absurd—action perceived? It doesn’t need any heroic gestures, seems rather —with a wink—a boarder–line action. Is this situation a tragic one in it existential, rather radical resolution? Is it frightening? Comical? Or simply boring? Is a “micro-revolution” taking place?