Free Association

Five Years at Area 53

Mark Hulson

Five Years is a London based artists' association and gallery space. Its 13 members alternate personal projects with guest curated exhibitions and events, contributing freely and autonomously to the gallery programme: it develops according to a sort of structured anarchy, beyond the control of any unified directorship, and free from censure through commitee.

The exhibition at Area 53 includes contributions by 23 artists and writers. The participants were invited to respond to a text by Marc Hulson titled Free Association.

The term refers both to creative or psychoanalytic processes and to ideas of non-hierarchically structured organisation or community. Vienna could claim to be the birthplace of the first while Five Years aspires to exemplify the second.

A further, related, theme is 'the couch' as an iconic object or archetypical idea. There is an odd but compelling relationship between the Factory couch and the Psychoanalytic couch. Both are sites where the enunciation of the self is played out in relation to an impassive observer / interlocutor: with Warhol through self-image in relation to the camera; in Psychoanalysis through speech in relation to the analyst. The couch signifies as a space for reverie and drifting self-reflection. It also presents itself, along with its occupants, as a sort of artistic readymade. It represents a space in which stories are told or enacted and connections made or, equally, as a site of passive immersion - in images and information – and hence self-obliteration.

The exhibition at Area 53 includes contributions by 23 artists and writers. The participants were invited to respond to a text by Marc Hulson titled Free Association.

Free Association

1. In conversation with a friend about the recent Warhol exhibition at the Hayward, she reminded me that when I’d visited the Freud Museum in Vienna with her, Warhol’s 1964 film Couch had been on show there. As my friend pointed out, there is an unexpected but neat connection between the iconic Factory couch and the iconic Psychoanalytic couch. Both are sites where the enunciation of the self is played out in relation to an impassive observer / interlocutor: with Warhol through self-image in relation to the camera; in Psychoanalysis through speech in relation to the analyst.

2. The curator of a gallery space in Hastings recently informed me over a lunchtime drink that in 1923 John Logie Baird demonstrated the first working Television set there.

3. In 1922 the first translation in English of Beyond the Pleasure Principle by Sigmund Freud was published, in which he introduces the concept of the Death Drive.

4. The owner of a bar and exhibition space in Vienna told me he’d been reading a book about cocaine. In it the author claims that David Bowie intended the name Ziggy Stardust as code for Sigmund Freud: Ziggy is an established diminutive for both Sigmund or Siegfried, while Stardust is a reference to Freud’s use of cocaine. I haven’t been able to verify my friend’s claim anywhere else but it is definitely the case that Jean Genie is a reference to Jean Genet. So why not.

5. David Bowie played Andy Warhol in Julian Schnabel’s film Basquiat.

6. The London based artists’ association Five Years was named with reference to both the Stalinist Five Year Plan and the song Five Years by David Bowie, from the album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Five Years is a free association – each member acts with creative autonomy in relation to the group.

7. Area 53 is the artist-run gallery in Vienna where Five Years will be exhibiting in May 2009. I’d always assumed it was called Area 53 simply because it’s at Gumpendorferstrasse 53. However, over a few beers at their place, two artist friends in Vienna told me they thought Area 53 might also be the name of a mysterious US Military designated no-fly zone out in the Arizona desert. I googled it and, while its existence can’t be verified, there are several sketchy message boards and websites speculating around rumours that aliens land there. The director of Area 53 in Vienna is of part Sioux Indian, part Tyrolean descent. He’s never mentioned the other Area 53.

8. In 1938 the Marxist Psychoanalyst Willhelm Reich fled Austria for the US. Reich had begun working as a Psychoanalyst in Vienna with Freud’s blessing and was a respected analyst for much of his career. However in later life he was virtually disinherited by the analytic community due to his eccentric ideas about sexuality. He believed he had discovered a primordial cosmic energy called ‘orgone energy’, which was responsible for the biological expression of emotion and sexuality. He believed he could harness this energy as a therapeutic tool. He also believed he could harness it to control the weather and to do battle with UFOs over the Arizona desert. Reich was arrested and imprisoned by the US authorities in

9. He died shortly afterwards.

10. I recently cured a friend of an irrational dislike of David Bowie through a sort of aversion therapy. As she lay on the couch in my front room, horizontal between the speakers of my stereo, I played her the entire Singles Collection. By the end of it she’d concluded that her critique had been misplaced and that Bowie was great.

11. Over coffee, a Viennese curator was talking to me about the emigration of writers and musicians from the city to Los Angeles prior to WW2. Many of them chose LA over New York because they hoped to find work scoring or scriptwriting in Hollywood. Among them was Arnold Schoenberg, who was unsuccessful in composing for the screen. Four avant-garde musicians who’d trained under Schoenberg in Vienna however formed the Hollywood String Quartet and made a living in LA playing commercial music. Among other projects they recorded an album with Frank Sinatra in 1954 called Close to You, in which Sinatra eschews the customary big band setting for his vocals.

12. Another Viennese emigre to the U.S. was the architect and designer Frederick Kiesler, who moved to New York City in 1926. One of the designers of the Shrine of the Book, which houses the Dead Sea Scrolls in Jerusalem, Kiesler was derided by his colleagues: "If Kiesler wants to hold two pieces of wood together, he pretends he's never heard of nails or screws. He tests the tensile strengths of various metal alloys, experiments with different methods and shapes, and after six months comes up with a very expensive device that holds two pieces of wood together almost as well as a screw". Among other multifunctional items of furniture, Keisler designed very beautiful fold out couches, which are still manufactured by the Austrian firm Whittmann.

13. In 1908 the Viennese artist Richard Gerstl, who had been instructing Arnold Schoenberg in painting, had an affair with his wife, Mathilde. When Schoenberg stopped the affair Gerstl committed suicide in his studio. He burnt most of his work, destroyed his diaries and correspondance, then hung himself in front of the studio mirror. He also stabbed himself for good measure. He was 25 years old. 66 works remain. He was unknown in his lifetime. His work now hangs in the Belvedere. Each year Schoenberg marked the day of Gerstl’s death with a G in his diary.

14. Rock’n’Roll Suicide is a song on the album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.

15. In 1910, when Willhelm Reich was 12 years old, his personal tutor had an affair with his mother. When the affair was discovered, Reich’s mother committed suicide by drinking a bottle of household cleaner, dying in agony over the course of three days. Reich’s father was devastated and in 1914, on the pretence of going fishing, he stood for hours up to his knees in a freezing cold lake, as a result of which he died from pneumonia and tuburculosis. Reich’s sense of guilt was profound: he said “ the joy of life [was] shattered, torn apart from my inmost being for the rest of my life!”

16. Willhelm Reich was an important influence on Viennese Aktionists such as Otto Muehl. In 1970 Muehl founded a commune, ‘Friedrichshof’, inspired by Reich’s theories. The mission was to equivocate ‘Psychoanalysis’ through ‘Aktion-Analyse’. In its heyday Friedrichshof numbered around six hundred converts. The enemy of the commune was ‘monogamy’ – its central tenet was to mobilise revolutionary potential through the release of sexuality from the fetters of bourgois convention. Promiscuity was a requisite of membership, regulated by an imperative to find a new partner every four hours. Inevitably, with such a rate of new couplings, even in a commune of 600, repetition set into the chain quite rapidly. In 1987 Muehl bestowed upon himself the right of ‘first night’ with the commune’s grown up children. Muehl was arrested in 1991 and sentenced to seven years in jail.

17. Although Freud’s theories investigated the potentially harmful impact on the psyche of social imperatives, with respect to the repression of sexual desire, his own love life was conventional, in the sense that it was devoted to one woman. During their engagement, he was separated from his future wife Martha Bernays from 1882 to 1886, while she was away from Vienna, living with her mother in their home town of Wandsbek in Germany. Throughout those four years Freud wrote to her constantly, amassing some 900 love letters. He also sent her packets of cocaine.

18. Lady Stardust is a song on the album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.

When the kids had killed the man I had to break up the band.

As should be evident, the preceding anecdotes, thoughts and stories were gathered via a series of separate conversations, each one centring around the discussion of thoughts for the Five Years exhibition at Area 53 in Vienna. The couch represents a space in which stories are told or enacted and connections made or, in the case of the Factory couch, upon which a chain of couplings also occurs. My initial idea for the show was that participants might respond to the Freud / Warhol / Couch connection proposed at the beginning: both the couch as a space for reverie and drifting self-reflection and the couch and it’s occupants as a sort of artistic readymade. However the premise rapidly triggered other oddly linked stories, forming a sort of chain of association. Hence the title Free Association.

Participants are invited to use the entire chain as a starting point, decide which point they want to branch off from, or simply respond to the initial premise.

References:

http://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=55748

http://qualteam.tripod.com/area53confidentialfiles/

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080418134729AAEOD8P

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Reich

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Gerstl

http://www.freewebs.com/vienna-actionists/ottomuehl.htm

http://www.answers.com/topic/freud-bernays-martha

http://www.buzzle.com/editorials/2-15-2003-35624.asp

http://www.architonic.com/1019362

Marc Hulson