January 16th, 2023 at Depot in Vienna / w Cornelia Mittendorfer / Initiated by Johannes Franz-Figeac

Working Conditions
For a continuous and reasonable art production, structures are helpful. What is structured with you, what less? Regular job and salary (yes/no), studio space (yes/no; where/how?).
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-Yes, teaching and child care help to partition my time, give me some responsibility and accountability. My studio’s in the basement of our apartment…I like to get up and immediately work, and generally work late…it’s also practical with a kid. I really have no idea how it would work if I had to be out of the house. Also, I’m lazy, and in the past when I had a studio away from home I’d never go. I think to some degree I don’t like to separate art/life…I somehow like to be surrounded by it…maybe it’s a question of object permanence, like if I couldn’t see my work all the time it wouldn’t exist and I’d vanish because my ego is so delicate.
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Material
Architecture as a man-made environment is examined in your multimedia artistic work for the essence of human existence. What is the non-visible material of architecture for you?
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-I’m not sure I think architecture is actually the material…maybe architecture is everything in between the walls? The sounds, smells, safety, social dynamics it proposes…we make something architecture by giving it cultural and political meaning. By using it…however innocently, violently, or impractically. 

Collective processes make up a significant part of your work. In these, there is rarely a single material, which is handcrafted. Nevertheless. Can you formulate in general terms what constitutes material processing in collectives?
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-In the collectives I’ve worked in and continue to work in, the base material seems to be speech. Conversations start the process. Material, and form generally come out of that. With the Palais the form and direction is pretty well established at this point (we have this history of violent occupation and erasure), and we embrace the contradictions and complications of being both physical and digital (post-digital). It’s a kind of experiment into the materiality of remembrance…little by little we’ve become an ‘accidental memorial’, and the material of the project seems to be under constant stress, data and memory are both extremely fickle and equally as fragile.

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Failure
In the maturing process of an artistic practice, failure can be a source of strength. What does it take for failure to succeed? And how have you succeeded in failure?

-Hands (fuck them), my art career (restless, sprawling, unstable, no proper medium or discipline), the Palais (we want to recover something lost but keep losing it in the process)…it all seems like a sequence of separate failures, hopefully when you put them together though they add up to something legible…or at least honest in its messiness. I feel good about my creative practice, good about teaching and how my son is developing but pretty terrible about my career. I think in my life and work I’ve learned to use failure as something productive, career wise not so much. I hate the way I look or actually how invisible I am on the internet, but I’m not really motivated to work on it, I’d rather just panic and complain about it.

Notes: transdisciplinary art therapy, social and spiritual utility

I always have a hard time presenting my practice in a clean way. One friend told me they thought my work was about narrative, the other about relationships, and another about doing weird shit in space…

Art problems, social problems, political problems.

I had a conversation with my brother Brandon recently about the social and spiritual utility of art. I told him that art’s always been a way for me to plug existential leaks. A tool for expressing things that are somehow in between or beyond myself. I think it’s also about the very basic fear of being forgotten when I’m dead and the desire to be remembered while I’m still alive. Somehow it's an echo chamber or discussion with reality. I'm here, playing with the world. Can anyone hear me?

Notes: failed hands, dumb as a painter, money, other people's problems

I started having problems with my hands when I was in my early twenties. Working and sleeping are particularly complicated. Power tools are out of the question. I’ll never be the sexy painter I dreamed of being as a teenager. It was really difficult when I was younger because I would think through making. I connected to the world through my hands, my entire identity was built around them. I had to learn to think before I’d make something. Learn new ways of connecting to the material world. My work became much more conceptual, structured, and planned. Talking and writing took on a much more important role. Making models. Sound. It’s still a difficult limitation, I dream about painting on a regular basis. Occasionally I’ll try to do it again then have to accept my hands failing on me. Johannes asked about how we structure or time, what we do for money. I’ve been teaching now for a decade as a professional adjunct, I find it really inspiring and it plays a central role in my creative process. The input and exchange, the social space. Having a (mostly) paying job where I don’t have to use my hands. A structured time to work on other people’s problems. I would teach for free, but unfortunately the rest of the world doesn’t traffic in good will.

Notes: actual and imagined spatial environments, way to work beyond myself, multiply limitations-whether physical, social, political or material, paper architecture

Space is a doubt that we are constantly attempting to mark. It slips away with time, melting through our fingers just as we find a name for it. We color it, describe it with lines, trade it as data. We borrow it, pollute it, speculate upon its futures. We designate it as territory by planting ourselves in it, inscribing it with intention.

Notes: sound as an extension of touch, expression of space, and way to create impossible places

Working between exhibition contexts, discreet sculptures and the format of albums, Siegel/Weiner draws from a history of site-specific art to create affect-specific situations.

Notes: rarified experiences, giveaways, art that can be touched, taken, ruined and shared

I want art to be free like the internet was in the early 2000s. I miss the sense of a collective archive of creative output…the free for all. Sound is a great medium for this because it’s really uncomplicated to share and whatever space it’s in it’s going to react to…mobile architecture. That being said, I understand the need and desire for more direct material experiences, works that only function where and when they are, that are singular. In terms of visibility and circulation, I’ve stupidly built my practice around an idea that I can only be where I am. I think this has always been a political attitude, and of course a form of laziness, toward art as a commodity and the spectacle of the market.

notes: belonging, shame, collectivity, palais project

A couple of years back when my son Manès was six, I explained the Holocaust to him. It wasn’t a planned event but happened because of an encounter we’d had in the park in the 2nd district of Vienna. A guy who was staggering around and sweating liquor stopped us and began ranting about how foreigners should leave Austria. As he was heating up and pressing closer to us I told my son to run home. Nothing happened, and when I caught up to him he asked why I’d gotten so scared and said he’d never seen me that way. I’d hadn't rehearsed the next moment of parenting, but had spent a great deal of time thinking about it since arriving in Austria nearly ten years ago. Manès, if anyone ever stops you or starts talking bullshit like that, don’t tell them we’re Jewish. Do you understand, this is really important. I know you’re proud, but you have to be careful. The next part of the conversation was difficult for him to comprehend. As we walked home, I used the tripping stones as a way to demonstrate how we live amongst muted graves. Kids don’t understand hate easily though. “Kids auch?" Yes, also kids. “Why do they hate Jews so much?” I don’t know. “When does Österreich get to stop being guilty?” Good question. I’m not sure, but you have to keep asking…I knew that by giving away this information that lives somehow hidden among us it would forever scar how he understands himself as an Austrian. It would change the placid landscape, dirty the facades of the well kept historical buildings, transform the peaks of the alps from majestic into menacing. Our neighborhood, his daily walk to school. Now he knew that if we’d lived here just 80 years ago, we too would mostly likely be names on these brass plaques. When I told my partner what happened she thought I’d overreacted a bit. Which in the current climate is probably true. I then talked to my dad. “Yeah, are you kidding. Of course you have to be careful. Don’t be an idiot.” As a secular Jew of Ashkenazi descent I have the luxury to be able to hide in Europe. I have to announce it, give it away, speak it. People of Color, Gender Non-Conformists can’t hide in this setting though, their yellow Stars of David are stitched into their appearance. Tattooed on their skin. When I first moved to Austria I told my partner that it was a little shocking as to how homogenous it was here. How it was so Aryan. She told me that I was looking rather than listening. The American brand of racism and segregation is optical, in Austria it’s that too, but historically more about listening. Difference may not be so visible here, speaking is what gives you away. Tongues have to work really hard to hide themselves.

Since 2018, Weiner has been the Artistic Director of Palais des Beaux Arts Wien, a nonprofit museum-like entity that serves as a mobile place of remembrance and projection for what was lost during National Socialism. During his time as director, Weiner has focused on commissioning artworks that deal with the history of Atelier Bachwitz, a Jewish-owned publishing house that was once located at the Palais des Beaux Arts building in Vienna before it was Aryanized. Being Jewish, Weiner’s work on the Palais functions as an ongoing act of reclamation and a way to explore what that identity means in contemporary Austria.