The exhibition at Area 53 (a gallery space in Vienna) includes contributions by 23 artists and writers. The participants were invited to respond to a text by Marc Hulson titled Free Association.
The term refers both to creative or psychoanalytic processes and to ideas of non-hierarchically structured organisation or community. Vienna could claim to be the birthplace of the first while Five Years aspires to exemplify the second.
A further, related, theme is 'the couch' as an iconic object or archetypical idea. There is an odd but compelling relationship between the Factory couch and the Psychoanalytic couch. Both are sites where the enunciation of the self is played out in relation to an impassive observer / interlocutor: with Warhol through self-image in relation to the camera; in Psychoanalysis through speech in relation to the analyst. The couch signifies as a space for reverie and drifting self-reflection. It also presents itself, along with its occupants, as a sort of artistic readymade. It represents a space in which stories are told or enacted and connections made or, equally, as a site of passive immersion - in images and information – and hence self-obliteration
Contributors:
Schady, Alexander (Creator)
Item Type:
Art Design Item - Video, Exhibition/show, Sculpture
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