Alfredo BARSUGLIA
Alfredo BARSUGLIA
Liechtensteinstrasse 68/25, 1090 Vienna, +43 1 3196582, mail@AlfredoBarsuglia.com, www.AlfredoBarsuglia.com
1980 born in Graz, Austria
1999-2003 studies of paintings and graphics
University of Applied Arts, Vienna (Prof. Wolfgang Herzig)
Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna (Prof. Hubert Schmalix)
Academy of Fine Arts, Cracow (Prof. Andrzej Bednarczyk)
2006 MAK-Schindler Scholarship, Artists and Architects in Residence, Los Angeles, California
solo exhibitions (selection)
2007 MAK NITE ©, Museum of Applied Arts / Contemporary Art, Vienna
2007 Kunsthalle K2, Semriach
2007 Galerie Patrick Ebensperger, Graz (catalogue)
2007 GrazKunst / Werkstadt Graz, Graz
2006 Galerie Patrick Ebensperger gallery, Graz
2006 GrazKunst / Werkstadt Graz, Graz
2004 Galerie Peithner-Lichtenfels, Vienna (catalogue)
2003 Institute for Culture, Andrychów, Poland
2002 Galeria Balance, Mexico City, Mexico (catalogue)
2001 Galerie Peithner-Lichtenfels, Vienna (catalogue)
group exhibitions (selection)
2007 Project Space Schalter, Berlin
2007 Project Space Legion@Sensei, New York
2007 Künstlerhaus, Vienna
2007 Tanzquartier Wien, stage-installation, Vienna (performance: Elegy for the brave, choreography: Oleg Soulimenko)
2006 Neue Galerie at the Landesmuseum Joanneum, Graz
2006 MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles
2006 Project Space Marvimon, Los Angeles
2006 Galerie Lisi Hämmerle, Bregenz
2005 Galerie Patrick Ebensperger, Graz
2005 MUMOK Museum of Modern Art Foundation Ludwig, Vienna
2005 Museum of Fine Arts of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing (catalogue)
2005 MAK Museum of Applied Arts / Contemporary Art, System Wien, Lebbeus Woods, collaboration, Vienna (catalogue)
2004 Galerie Centrum, Steirisc[:her:]bst, Graz
2004 Stadtgalerie Wien, Vienna (catalogue)
2004 Galerie kulturPendel, Waidhofen/Ybbs
2004 Galerie IG Bildende Kunst, Vienna
2003 Galerie Peithner-Lichtenfels, Vienna
2003 Galerie kulturPendel, Waidhofen/Ybbs
2003 Galerie Exner, Vienna
2000 Galerie Peithner-Lichtenfels, Feldkirch
art in public spaces (selection)
2006 Oderfla Dental Office, fictitious dentistry, Los Angeles (book: Esthetic dentistry in Los Angeles, essays by Joseph Goodman, Edward A. McLaren, Nancy Reifel, Leith Kelly Shawaf, Stefan Timmermans)
2006 Transfer of knowledge 1-16, University of Applied Sciences Business Studies, CAMPUS 02, Graz (permanent)
2005 MDAC (Museo d’Arte Contemporanea), fictitious exhibition with Martin Kippenberger and Yves Klein, Mestre-Venice
2005 Subway Graz, a project in a system, fictitious underground walking system, Graz (catalogue)
2004 Loop 2004, a project of the city of Waidhofen/Ybbs
2003 Toothbrush Meadow, Burggarten, Vienna
lectures
2007 Mouthwash, GrazKunst / Werkstadt Graz, Graz
2006 Dentistry and Contemporary Art, UCLA School of Dentistry, Los Angeles
2006 Dentistry and Contemporary Art, CalArts School of Film/Video, Valencia, California
public collections
MAK Museum for Applied Arts / Contemporary Art (Vienna), Leopold Museum (Vienna), Collection of the University of Applied Arts (Vienna), Collection of the city of Vienna (Vienna), Austrian State Collection (Vienna), Collection of the city of Graz (Graz), Neue Galerie at the Landesmuseum Joanneum (Graz)
ORAL HYGIENE
By Rolf Wienkötter
In recent years a vast diversity of artistic strategies has permeated the work of Alfredo Barsuglia: there is hardly a medium, from painting to video; hardly a space, from the art gallery to the pavement; and hardly a scale, from the miniature to the space-filling outdoor installation, that Barsuglia has not known how to make of use for his art. If one wishes to trace Barsuglia’s artistic path, it makes sense to begin with painting. The image of man is at the centre: enraptured figures, recurring faces and poses, of the painter himself and others, in profile or frontally, the view directed out of the picture. The faces are important; yet none is a portrait. What does the ‘image of man’ mean for Barusglia? Dominant is the impression of a cool, sober appraisal. Technical brilliance makes its contribution: only closer inspection reveals a delicate play of colour, light and shadow.
As a painter, Barsuglia has been influenced by the portraits of Hans Holbein the Younger. Only as a painter? The Renaissance master’s stupendous naturalism here plays a role; the perfect simulation of what offers itself to the eye. Equally significant, however, is how this naturalism tips into its opposite, how the congealed immaculateness of what is shown, its excessive presence on the canvas, endows the objects with an aura of the unreal, a phenomenon for which the designation ‘magical realism’ was later to be coined. Objects repeatedly play an important role in Holbein’s pictures, mark the status or describe the profession of the represented person, but they also pose riddles. Barsuglia’s figures, too, are not completely isolated, maintain contact with the viewer, even if an apathetic one, and are displayed in a state of muted but definite entanglement. Scarcely visible at first glance, the Zahnseidenmädchen (Dental Floss Girl, 2007) spans the eponymous attribute between her hands, seemingly without intention, a contemporary muse of a probably quite inartistic precinct.
Dental floss – the contemporary equivalent of the globe, lute and chronometer with which Holbein fitted out his self-confident Renaissance men? Perhaps. Above all, however, Barsuglia presents not individuals but rather placeholders of a social condition. He is interested in everyday rituals, the processes of existence that we all carry out as a habitual matter-of-course and that precisely therefore escape our attention. At the beginning it was eating; thence it was not far to the area of oral hygiene, which has dominated Baruglia’s work since 2003. What about this fascinated the artist? The teeth as human body parts and the apparatus of norms, products and professions that have developed for dental care and repair are a relatively narrow and clearly defined section of human life, yet it is endowed with the greatest generality and is an area that touches upon and materialises fundamental questions of human co-existence: the biological and social existence of man, science and disciplining, the organic and the technical. Because the complex of oral hygiene is far less culturally fraught than is, for example, food, whose preparation has repeatedly fallen under the suspicion of artificiality, many a thing in it shows itself to be more immediate than such subjects and therefore more rewarding as the raw material of art.
The teeth mark an interface between inner and outer, are crude tools and at the same time essential to every smile with which we open ourselves to the world, quite in the literal sense. Health and beauty, the medically prescribed and aesthetically desired, lie nowhere closer to one another than with respect to the teeth; the appearance of the latter is credited with having a great informational value as to a person’s general mood and vitality. Here ideas about beauty have the smallest scope: what counts as beautiful teeth is beyond dispute. Teeth need thorough care; to this purpose products have been developed whose daily use is already learned in childhood. The importance of brushing one’s teeth is little questioned. Yet Barsuglia engages not only with these activities but also with the products themselves, in whose dispositive ‘oral hygiene’, together with its discourses, hypotheses, technical information and premises, whether proclaimed or implied, are embodied and always created anew. We have to do here with a mass commodity which, virtually impregnated with our own corporeality, has become a very personal article of daily use – the personal toothbrush is sovereign territory.
Barsuglia treats what happens in this coincidence of the maximum impersonality of an industrial mass product and the maximum personalness of its use. What particularly marks his strategy is that he does this not only by representing the products or their use, but also by producing them. The specific ‘commodity fetishism’ of oral hygiene products lies in their inviolability. They come to us from another world, from the world of science and the futuristic laboratory. That at any rate is the message their product design and advertisement convey to us with a high degree of success. How can this protective coating of perfect marketing be penetrated? How can the basic questions be posed again, or how can we even marvel at the purportedly self-evident? Barsuglia dares the transgression, experimentally cancels capitalist logic and strategically brings things into disarray. In a sphere that suggests naïve scientificness, and has probably therefore been spared personalised designer lines of luxury goods, Barsuglia creates his personal label: ‘ODERFLA’ – the reversal of his first name has, as it were, programmatic significance. The objects that are thereby developed not only give the impression of being oral hygiene products, they are oral hygiene products. Time-consumingly manufactured by hand, their rhetoric is nevertheless that of industrial production. The preferred method here is the paradox as mode of knowledge; also, with a slight thematic shift, with Barsuglia’s confectionery goods which, designated as ‘sources of risk’, consist precisely of that substance which is supposed to protect against the risk, namely tooth paste.
Barsuglia’s all-embracing approach brings forth an œuvre that is constantly expanding and ramifying. His ‘palette of products’ reaches into bordering areas where the point is to transfer the ingredients of oral hygiene products to other care products. Thus the odour of ODERFLA Parfums AM (ODERFLA Perfume AM) or of ODERFLA Badesalzes (ODERFLA Bath Salts) is redolent of tooth paste. The video work Bürste, Paste, Tube (Brush, Paste, Tube) brings the old but highly adaptable of game ‘Scissors, Paper, Stone’ up to date, that is, to the state of the art in oral hygiene. Conceptually influenced strategies go far beyond the production of traditional art works, as for instance the experimental propagation of a new sexual practice known as ‘Oderflaismus’, which makes corresponding use of oral hygiene articles (Instructions for the sexual use of oral hygiene products, script and video, 2007). The remarkable thoroughness of the confrontation may be seen not least in projects that border on professional science, as for instance the book Esthetic Dentistry in Los Angeles, created in 2006 in Los Angeles, which includes contributions from experts and traces the virulent, Hollywood-influenced change of dentistry into a profit-oriented branch of business.
As a segment from a broad spectrum of artistic procedures, Barsuglia’s here presented Produktkatalog (Product Catalogue) stands for a method that enables the artist to oscillate between opposite positions as a participative observer: service and analysis, affirmation and criticism. Whereas the strategies of the 1960s (Oldenburg’s Store, with its papier-mâché assortment of goods, or Warhol’s Brillo Boxes) broached the issue of the outer appearance of commodities and their distribution, including the question of how the art scene took them up, Barsuglia has blazed what is today perhaps the only path to an artistic yet unspoiled stance towards ubiquitous mass production: through a thorough comprehension of the products that are given us by consumption, but whose inner life is concealed from our understanding, Barsuglia penetrates the surfaces and shakes up the system from inside. We are transformed from consumers into recipients, things become again strange, and the illusion of the world of capitalist commodities becomes manifest.
Translated from the German by Jonathan Uhlaner