Human Stories

The Ludwig Museum Budapest – Museum of Contemporary Art shows seventy-one photographic works and paintings from the Austrian Essl Collection, a group of works by nineteen internationally renowned artists in their first show in Hungary. The pseudo-documentary quality of these photo-pieces and the theatricality of the staged image reveal a symbiosis of the medium that has determined the professional content of the current selection. It encompasses pseudo film stills in which the displayed portraits, scenes in city streets, architectural documentation and compositions of female nude figures appear as the fermenting ground for various ‘human stories’. As opposed to the exhibition of Henri Cartier-Bresson held last year at the Ludwig Museum Budapest, these photographs are not the narratives of ‘accidental’ snapshots, i.e. the subject is not identical with the object, but rather, the deliberate invention of the author is asserted in each image. These photo-works do not rest on the ‘decisive moment,’ but on test shots based on semiotic considerations, settings created in the wake of longer study periods. The form of the narrative is established in stories coming to life over a number of series.
Several artists exhibit serial works which operate with the notion of sequence familiar from cinematography. The parallel between the sequences of moving images as expressed in film (i.e. the series of motifs or ideas) and the photographic sequences is manifest in the identical form they take: the ‘sequence’ becomes a vehicle for the narration of stories. In this respect, works by the Australian Tracey Moffatt, the Belgian Marie-Jo Lafontaine, the Austrian Birgit Jürgenssen, or the American Nan Goldin, all possess a strong sense of narrative. Vanessa Beecroft’s photographs with their theatrical staging recall the performance documentation of the 1970s (e.g. Jürgen Klauke) where the perception of collective consciousness was manipulated via the interactive influence of different mediums and the artist’s personal performance. A personal performance is replaced by a medium-collage (theatre-photography), as Beecroft gives form to a stripped-down existence. Location is of great significance in the case of Vanessa Beecroft, Tracey Moffatt and Nan Goldin. The photographic series of staged shots, relating stories both when viewed together and when viewed one by one, function in front of an actual background, either outdoors (streets, sports grounds) or indoors (the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Kunsthalle in Vienna).
The Essl Collection is the private collection of the owner of the bauMax AG. Essl has also had a museum built in Klosterneuburg near Vienna, open since 1999, for his international collection primarily dealing with twentieth century painting.
Exhibiting artists: Vanessa Beecroft, Valie Export, Nan Goldin, Andreas Gursky, Ilse Haider, Gottfried Helnwein, Birgit Jürgenssen, Marie-Jo Lafontaine, Tracey Moffatt, Thomas Ruff, Shirin Neshat, Anne & Patrick Poirier, Lois Renner, Eva Schlegel, Sean Scully, Cindy Sherman, Thomas Struth, Rosemarie Trockel.