 |
The Piano Lesson
2012
Vilma Gold, London
Installation view
Josef Strau is an artist who writes and a writer
who makes art. He describes his work as an ongoing story and
as such much of his work is text-based and printed on pamphlets.
The printed and handwritten texts that cover his characteristic
white paintings and posters take the tone of intimate personal
revelation, but, of course, we are not reading someone’s
diary--the self that is revealed is a fiction framed by the
art object into which it is incorporated. Playfully manipulating
traditional aspects of literature, he attaches his texts to
cheap standing lampshades, customizing them with a coat of whitewash,
to create actively 'illuminated' manuscripts and other amusing
puns on the novel. The sheer quantity of language in Josef Strau’s
installations generates a certain logorrheic din. Yet his installations
are by no means chaotic, but instead rather modest or even cozy:
Floor lamps huddle near posters of typewritten text, discreetly
pinned up, strung on ribbons, or stacked in piles for distribution.
Strau’s work is sardonic intervention, a celebration of
contingency parading as ritual completeness. This aesthetic
fragility betrays its own purchase as a signifier: just as there
are concealed truths and uttered variances in the most digestible
of narratives, Strau’s anti-narrative deals in cogencies
(anti-ideational, anti-commodity) that beg consumpt
ion. |
 |
The Piano Lesson
2012
Vilma Gold, London
Installation view |
 |
iamb: the limbo of vanity
2008
Vilma Gold, London
Installation view |
 |
iamb: the limbo of vanity
2008
Vilma Gold, London
Installation view |
 |
John Kelsey, Gareth James, and Josef Strau
(...)
Portikus, Frankfurt
Installation view |
 |
John Kelsey, Gareth James, and Josef Strau
(...)
Portikus, Frankfurt
Installation view |
|
