|
In June 2005 all inscriptions, pictograms, company names
and logos were pasted over with yellow plastic film in a
section of the Neubaugasse, a shopping street in Vienna’s
7th district; thus advertising was deprived of its signification.
Instead of the otherwise permanently present writings and
logos the architectural arrangement of the carriers of writings
and the layers of urban communication and mediality became
much more prominent. As the writings and signs of the traffic
guidance systems were not included in this ‘erasure’,
it became especially evident how these elements stand out
against other sign systems within the shared space of signs.
By the use of the monochrome enveloping of the sign carriers
the sculptural aspect came to the fore in an unusual way,
for – through the absence of writings – the volume
of the geometrical bodies could be perceived in its fullness
for the first time. The homogeneous and glossy corporeality
generated the impression of architectural excrescences of
the existing buildings because the carriers of writings,
unburdened from their function, returned to the morphology
of architecture. That the act of enveloping, of crossing
out, attracts its own kind of attention has been shown by
the wide range of reactions from the part of the international
media. In the face of the strong economic interest in the
lettering of the public space such a forceful interference
into the cityscape in the form of a temporary art intervention
has been deemed impossible. |
 |
So one might also suspect that
this installation is the preparation for an even bigger city
marketing campaign, where with a (temporary) erasure of lettering
attention should be drawn to a new lettering. Hence the intermission
in the economic and informational representation of signs
would lead back into the realm of
economically motivated gains with respect to attention. That
the effacement of signs creates in its turn a sign loaded
with increased attention is what the Vienna-based art sociologist
Ernst Strouhal observes too when he keeps an eye on the paradoxical
effects of the iconoclastic strategy of art.
One could also speak of a glypho-clastic strategy here,
as the project makes use of the deletion of (written) characters
against the overabundance of writing in the economic area
of the urban public space. Thus the project Delete poses “the
question for the social instance of control of the urban
signatures in a radical sense” (Siegfried Mattl) even
though it did not strive for ultimate control over the signs
and was realized in consultation with all parties involved.
Seen from this perspective temporary interventions like Delete
create a shared space of cultural experience between the
local business structures and the population which takes
place beyond the “staged urbanity” of the shopping
malls.
bk
transl. ol |
