An exhibition by Collection and Archive at the University of Applied Arts Vienna

The exhibition Fernheilung [Distant Healing] reflects on events connected to the artistic production in Vienna during the decade that saw the creation of the Angewandte collection. Drawing on works created by figures in the milieu of the former Hochschule, as well as documents and selected loans, the exhibition takes us on a journey through which key events, exhibitions, artistic currents, and discursive formations are illuminated in their broader context. This allows us to view the practices of teachers and students within the context of Vienna's exhibition scene and international trends at the time, and to trace the related—often generational—gaps and moments of dissent.

If every collection necessarily entails acts of inclusion and exclusion along largely opaque lines that only occasionally become visible, this special collection has sought to understand its place in history since its conception in the 1980s under the direction of Oswald Oberhuber and Erika Patka. Although collecting is largely driven by whim, it is nonetheless shaped by a deliberate programmatic intent that exhibitions seek to make publicly visible. First and foremost, the program aims to reorganize and reassess the canon of the twentieth century, examining the role the Kunstgewerbeschule [School of Arts and Crafts] played in its creation. It also addresses Austria’s belated coming to terms with the collectively suppressed legacy of National Socialism, ultimately seeking to reflect current developments in both the contemporary art scene and the school itself from an (art) history perspective.

The exhibition Fernheilung builds on this programmatic approach by engaging with the logic of the collection—the way the collection’s holdings are described, certain aspects are highlighted, and corrections and new contextualizations made. By constantly evolving, the Angewandte collection remains true to itself. This allows the exhibition to present an image of the collection that is both historical and contemporary. By drawing on different—and often contradictory—forms of contemporaneity, this image inevitably becomes a distorted mirror, reflecting individual perspectives, value systems, and ways of seeing.

Accordingly, the concept of distant healing should be understood here not only in terms of space but also in terms of time. It embodies less a teleological motif, invoking a phantasm of salvation, than the expression of the impossibly difficult task of illuminating the ‘therapeutic’ problems and assumptions that go hand in hand with every attempt at historical reappraisal. Contrary to what the title might suggest, the exhibition cannot provide an exhaustive summary of an entire decade. Nor can it claim completeness or anything resembling healing. (If such terminology were to be used, disease awareness would be more accurate.)

Paradigmatic exhibitions and events such as Design ist unsichtbar [Design Is Invisible] (Forum Design, Linz, 1980), Zeichen, Fluten, Signale [Signs, Floods, Signals] (Galerie Nächst St. Stephan, Vienna, 1984), Traum und Wirklichkeit. Wien 1870–1930 [Dream and Reality. Vienna 1870–1930] (Künstlerhaus, Vienna, 1985), Wittgenstein. Das Spiel des Unsagbaren [Wittgenstein. The Play of the Unsayable] (Secession, Vienna, 1989) and the symposium Das ästhetische Feld [The Aesthetic Field] (Angewandte, Vienna, 1992) serve as touchstones for exploring developments such as the canonization of early Viennese Modernism and the belated confrontation with the legacy of National Socialism. The exhibition highlights the failed institutionalization of practices from the 1960s and 1970s at the Hochschule, new media art and the Neo-Geo movement, as well as their shift toward institutional critique. It also traces both intergenerational battle zones and the long road to internationalization of the art field in the context of applied arts.

Fernheilung is not a cultural-historical retrospective of an entire decade; rather, the exhibition attempts to capture the connection between increasingly condensed artistic production and its rapidly changing spatial and temporal conditions. In doing so, it seeks to assign the collection its own independent cultural profile, one that transcends its specific boundaries and frameworks—even at the risk of once again distorting an already distorted image.