Lentos Art Museum shows “HAUS-RUCKER-CO LIVE again?

Thursday, 25 October 2007 23:59

Linz, Austria - The group HAUS-RUCKER-CO was founded in 1967 in Vienna by the two architects Laurids Ortner and Günter Zamp Kelp and the artist Klaus Pinter. The name was intended to refer to the home region of all three (Hausruck is a region in Upper Austria) and to describe their activity metaphorically as shifting old houses out of the way to make room for new creative possibilities. Officially the names of the members of the team were LAURIDS, ZAMP and PINTER.

The names were chosen to be striking, and a humorous way of dealing with the material is also evident in this approach. The following years were characterized by a multitude of activities that received enormous media and international attention and were an elementary contribution to redefining architecture and art. The group was active in the space of the museum and in public space: their theme was the Mind-Expanding-Program (“drug-free mind expansion”) and visionary urban design. Prototypes for new ideas of living and proposals for redesigning the human habitat were developed under the influence of new building materials.

In the exhibition “HAUS-RUCKER-CO LIVE again”, the Lentos Art Museum shows the main piece Giant Billiard and Oxer (cf. Pinter article), an obstacle in the form of a slanted room. This work from the exhibition staging LIVE (1970) triggers irritations as soon as visitors enter the exhibition space. The Giant Billiard, a hybrid of a giant billiard ball and a boxing ring, is a white pneumatic mattress 15 x 15 meters large and one meter high, on which there are three white, inflated balls made of PVC. The mattress can function as a stage, on which the people virtually become actors in the scene. The intention at the time was to break open the view immanent to the museum and playfully question the status of the recipients with this intervention. The museum as playground?

Nearly forty years later, the expectations of the museum visitors have been raised: in addition to its basic tasks (collection, preservation and research), a museum today offers high quality entertainment. With the presentation then, the “alteration of function in the museum”, the group achieved their first major breakthrough with a widespread impact: the show was seen by 18,200 people and generated an enormous media echo. In 1970 the artists brought their “built utopia”, their possible operating manual into the museum in the form of their objects in existence to date.

They set up their own world: “Live – Living in the Museum” was an exhibition that HAUS-RUCKER-CO staged in Vienna and New York. “We moved into the museum for the duration of the exhibition to reside in the exhibition spaces publicly. Residing meant for us at the time living with the result from three years of work. Translated to the reality of the exhibition, this resulted in a mixture of everyday furniture and usable objects along with devices from our own production.” Joseph Beuys’ “expanded art concept” suggests itself, with which the seemingly insurmountable division of art, life and society was to be canceled out.

On exhibition 16 November 2007 – 16 March 2008 at the Lentos Art Museum. Visit www.lentos.at/en/