(born in Mauthen, Carinthia in 1958)
Untitled, cardboard sculpture, signed, dated Zobernig 2002, cardboard, glue, 60 x 98 x 80 cm (depending on the positioning of the sculpture), (K)

Compare:
Heimo Zobernig, Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2003, page 101/ill. 290, page 121/ill. 243; page 156/ill. 442, page 277/ill. 625

Provenance:
Private Collection, Vienna – directly from the artist

... As a concept, aesthetics is more and more confined to the past. The necessity of the abandoned aesthetic is a defining trait; one tumbles about with the art historians on this isolated playground. This sense of ‘in hindsight’ makes aesthetics no longer definable as a utopian volition, but as a utopian projection. Such a displacement in thinking is the result of the becoming visible of complexity and interconnectedness; a system such as Art can no longer be analysed within clear boundaries. This becoming visible occurs, on the one hand, via methods of art theory, such as for example a socio-historical approach, or via developments within art which, in increasing measures, permit references to external values. These external values can come from a variety of fields, such as, for example, from a general theory of meaning or from a theory of the market (when this is the art market, this is then to be understood only as part of the market and not as part of art). The higher the degree in which art faces, or uses, mechanisms of evaluation that are not intrinsic to art, the more visible the ‘projectionability’ of the aesthetic programme becomes. The ‘projectionability’ of the aesthetic programme is also reflected, however, in the immediacy and directness of the aesthetic perception. When encoding and art-intrinsic possibilities of interpretation are present in a work, then the denotation of the system remains unscrutinised, since the activity of the system functions so smoothly and is so locally limited. When the manner of representation is direct and nothing else is happening off-stage, so to speak, then the process of the aesthetic attribution can no longer take place in the work of art. To suggest that this would be the end of aesthetics means viewing art-at least the art of the previous thirty years-as uninterpretable art. Significance could then only be ascribed to it in a completely art-external manner, and that would then be the end of aesthetics and also the end of art. I, by contrast, am a historian, I am a researcher. H. Z.
From the preface to the catalogue: Heimo Zobernig, Neue Galerie Graz/Salzburger Kunstverein, 1993