Maybe it was the need for a break, maybe the sun finally making a comeback, that kept all but four enthusiasts including myself away from the writing workshop Tanja Dückers was holding this Saturday at the fortress. This turned out to be a blessing, as Tanja took the time to pose a whole bouquet of tasks and made us read out all our works aloud. Starting with a description of our children's room we moved on to the apartment of an old lady recently fallen in love and an encounter of the same lady with a cat to practise dialogue. Also images and mental illnesses were used as inspirations. Tanja was a miracle of patience, listening wholeheartedly to our creations, picking out small imperfections and praising formulations she especially liked. Her inviting smile made it possible for me to lay off the nervousness about exposing myself on such a personal level. We all eagerly awaited to hear the texts of the others, and the next task. When we walked out, we were a bit exhausted after the flood of words and ideas, but very happy about having participated and the encouraging words we had received from nobody less than a real writer, although she would protest at this distinction, to our astonishment we noticed it was already 4 pm. We had spent about 6 hours writing. Tanja, thank you very much for sharing your time and energy with us.

After an initial introduction of the panelists, Virginia Fraser and Destiny Deacon to her right. Dan Perjovschi and Rebecca Morris to her left, Hildegund Amanshauser posed her first question, the role of technique in their work. Where Virginia, coming from a journalist background but heeding the call to art school later in life, says „my technique is arrangement, and finding things“ and Destiny talks about how everything just sort of happened and all of a sudden she found curators banging on her door, Dan Perjovschi explains how he had to unlearn his classical painters education and fight against his craft slipping back into his hard-laboured for new technique. Rebecca Morris, on the other hand, still uses the realistic painting techniques she was taught, but for creating something altogether different, abstract. „There is so much more you need aside from techniques, like gut feeling.“ Asked about the role of techniques in teaching students and the methods for doing it, she says she teaches what paint can do and how to get it what you want it to do. She might have also wanted to teach abstract art because it was a class she always wanted to attend herself, but it wasn’t offered. „ We mostly give feedback, and create stability between all those different people attending our class“, says Dan. „We give them a starting point for their ideas, to try whatever they want to try.“ Virginia explains how they took their students to the dark room as „most photographers don’t do this any more, they pay somebody else, and we wanted them to try it.“ Destiny adds praise for their students, and ventures that they have become like family. A lady in the audience asked about what trends they see concerning skills, and where these are going. Virginia once more got back on the topic of buying skills, something she says is „ a topic that upsets people when talked about, as skills are used but not credited.“ „ As an artist, you have a responsibility, there is no excuse for ignorance“ Destiny simply says. In the eyes of Rebecca Morris, the „just come and do your thing“ is a romantic notion people still hang on to, but the demand for skills is there and rising. Dan brings up an interesting point. To him, no matter what skills you have can be brought into an aritsitic vision. In the end, it seems like skills are important, but artist have to decide on their own which ones to use and how. I for one would have wished for a more direct discussion between the artists, as they seemed to have quite different views.

Perfoming the Artist – Work, Professionality and Myth: Bruce Nauman

In her introduction Hemma Schmutz, director of the Kunstverein, pointed to the gap that exists between the precarious working and living conditions of todays’ artists and the medial production of artists as stars. Between these poles of myth and reality Beatrice von Bismarck discussed the work of Bruce Nauman and unfolded in her lecture the interrelations of myth-production and the social, cultural and political constitution of a society. The central question is what function artists have in a society at certain moment.

Hildegund Amanshauser will continue her talk on Wednesday August 4 at 2 p.m. in the Alte Saline Hallein, lunch talk room. The lecture will have the following chapters: painting in Germany from Basilitz to Richter with an excursus to Maria Lassnig, Video in the 1990s, another chapter on the globalization of the art world in the 1990s ...
You are cordially invited to come.
For those, who come from Salzburg: you can take the 170 bus from the Kuenstlerhaus at 13.26 and you get off at Hallein Kornsteinplatz 27 minutes later, go in the direction the bus came from, take the first street to your right, continue until a house is in front of you and then go to your right and immediately after this, cross the bridge to your left, there you are...
The talk will be in English, if there is somebody attending, who doesn't speak German.

After talking about various projects tying together language and how it can be visualised, Tanja Dückers, our author in residence, gets to the core topic of the day,  her very own writing system she calls Autumnish.

Invented 15 years ago as a means to write undisturbed while using public transportation, she studied various writing systems and codes to make up her very own. The name comes from autumn, as this was the season she invented it in, and a word she is quite fond of. She gives "I was bored of writing in roman letters, and I wanted a language of my own. " as another reason to create Autumnish. There are some signs that cover a group of letters, others just single ones. Sometimes she also ends up changing them because she doesn't like the way one of them looks any more. Or, as she puts it, "we don't get along with each other." She also inserts little smilies mirroring how she feels on that particular day to make it even more confusing to the probing eye.

This is as much as she will divulge of her secret, even though some members of the audience plead to be given more information. Instead, she explains how she likes to "use the letters to visualise all my ideas for a novel out of my head, just to see them in front of me." She also writes poems in Autumnish on top of photos, fusing words and image.

Even though people now tend to stare more than ever at those strange and beautiful signs flowing out of her pen, which made her stop using it for everything like she did at some point because she was tired of creating  a spectacle every time she went out shopping, she still likes to use it as a tool for work. It's sometimes quite upsetting that there are people who badly want to crack her code, but then, she doesn't think it will be possible as it simply changed too much during all the time she spent using it.