AS HEAVY AS THE HEAVENS

1. Introduction

The topic of the exhbition "As Heavy as the Heavens" will be gravitation in art. The old section of Graz draws its 'appeal' largely from the religious attempts to express the gravity of the earth as well as the attempt to transcend it, as staged in the sensuality of religious, in particular baroque cultural substance.

The metaphor of gravity and the attempts to transcend it looks back on a cultural and pictorial history that has produced extremely poetic imagery. In this history of creativity religion has provided important incentives. The weight of material existence and bodily experience are juxtaposed with pictorial motives of transcension, the angels hovering above, Christ's ascension, Mary's assumption to heaven, the Baroque ceiling frescoes (whose express goal was to extend architecture to heavenly realms) and the "frenzy" of the Last Judgment. With the emergence of the modern image of the world, these images were beset by an extensive crisis. The impossibility of reducing their motifs to an empirically provable consistency has, however, not had any negative impact on the thematic field of gravity. It remained a theme in art in the early stages of abstract art (Kandinsky, Malevich), later with the constructivists, with Yves Klein but also in a number of variations in contemporary art.

2. Developments in technology and the media have opened up new horizons of experience and new imagery in the cultural treatment of gravity. Beginning with the ascent of the hot balloon to space travel programs as well as the images of the new media some of the old, secret dreams of flying and floating have been fulfilled for man and modern society, but for the most part only their limits have shifted. Today's technological tools have not robbed the images negating gravity any of their poetic-visionary force. On the contrary, the desire to let matter drift off into weightlessness is greater than ever before. While the motifs that Christian pictorial history found for this have not been consummated by the advancement of intellectual history and technology, but it does take on a poetic-aesthetic quality, precisely in a time in which perception is being increasingly influenced by the transcending of the laws of gravitation.

 II. Structure and concept of the exhibition

1. The exhibition will seek to reveal an entire tableau of cross-fertilizations between art and religion by recourse to the physics' theme of gravity. This exhibition will present a novel juxtaposition of pictorial creations from the Christian history of paintings representing gravitation with selected exponents of contemporary art. One can expect unfathomed insights and contexts to emerge.  

2. The exhibition on these transformations of gravity will be subdivided into various sections in keeping with the present concept.

a) Fall

The classical pictorial motif that is used to illustrate gravity is the fall or tumble as expressed in the fall of the angel or in the fall of Icarus.

Moral dereliction or a form of hubris is, of course, also always associated with this, as in Hieronymus Bosch. In the 20th century, Max Ernst or Max Beckmann have given new weight to this theme and today, Roman Signer's imprints of his own "fall" contrast with this in a subtle, humorous way.

 b) Levitation

Drifting against the laws of gravity opens up aspects of surprising pauses in classical imagery, as in the pictorial motif of Christ's transfiguration (e.g., Raffael) or in the saints hovering above. Rene Magritte has poetically violated these laws in a number of surrealist paintings (e.g.,

drifting stones) as Giovanni Anselmo with real stones that are in a state of suspense. Jürgen Klauke or Sigmar Polke and Roman Signer have repeatedly offered similar pictorial experiences.

 c) Balance

Transformations of gravity with supporting matter. The clouds as podiums and the visualization of this different force, the supportive putto. One finds this model most frequently in a culture marked by the Baroque. But also Jesus walking on water and the corresponding contrasting image, that of Peter sinking, also thematizes force and counter-force of the surrounding matter. In the present, artists have used this old play of forces as an artistic theme. The materiality of sculptures of today do away with gravity precisely through their weight. The drawings relating to Yves Klein's air architecture create an artistic vision of this transformation.

d) Attraction

The poetic force of those old paintings that claim to resist the ultimate laws of gravity, of death,

is shown in a completely new light when they are presented as in this exhibition. In the painting "Christ in Purgatory", Adam and Eve are pulled out of purgatory and in some paintings of Mary the "souls" are dragged from the grave. Pulled by the hand of God Christ is lifted to heaven.
Traces of such a pull can also be found in some of Marc Quinn's rubber figures. The emotion of gravitation is a recurring theme in Bill Viola's videos.

 e) Vertigo

The implosion of gravitation, the transcension of gravity pursued to ist utmost in pictorial terms has found expression in the history of painting no where as stronger as in (primarily Baroque) representations of the last supper (e.g., P.P. Rubens). In contrast, Jurgen Schilling's rotating paintings torpedo every point of reference. And Anna and Bernhard Blume's photographs suggest that familiar lawfulness has been down away with through humor.

 f) Heaviness

The impossibility of transcending gravity can clearly be seen when dead
bodies are.

III. Spaces

The project is divided into three parts:

1. Exhibition in Landesmuseum Joanneum with examples of baroque, modern and contemporary art

2. In-Situ Installations. Commissions of artists to produce installations

in three chaples _ which will be renovated in time and then be open to

the public for the first time - and the international well known Mausoleum,

both at the Dome of Graz.

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