Postcard From
Martyn Reynolds, Vienna, Austria
Martyn Reynolds Untitled, Appendix Project 2015 at Georgi Stranski City Hospital, Pleven, Bulgaria. Photo: Martyn Reynolds
I live in Vienna; what’s it good for? The general humour of the place starts with Schmäh (pronounced schmee), a happily nihilistic response to problems. For a long time, people here have been thinking about meaninglessness and the indifference of reality. An American professor who taught linguistics at the University wrote a paper on the topic. One nice thought related to Marie Antoinette, who the French think of as naïve and decadent—‘let them eat cake’. However, she was raised in Vienna and by most accounts was much more politically aware than her peers in Paris. When the pitchforks came the statement was not a naïve one, but a knowing resignation to the guillotine; perhaps the first historically recorded incidence of Schmäh.
Michael Haneke’s film Funny Games is another good example. Haneke used to live up the street from me and I saw him once, dressed in black, running through the street, clutching a folded umbrella, silver hair flowing.
Not long ago I was invited to give a lecture in Hito Steyerl’s class at the Art Academy in Berlin. I spoke about aggregation, how it’s the process that forms planets including our earth, and Julian Dashper’s stack of Artforums from Wystan Curnow’s house.1 A compression of material necessary when there’s too much world. This phrase struck Hito and she used it as the title of her book published in 2014.2
In the spring I made some videos for Josef Strau. It had been a particularly bleak winter in Manhattan and he had hard-drives full of ice pics and snow vids from his iPhone. We made rhythmical montages set to soundtracks from Native American early contact movies.3 As a European in NY, he said he felt like a colonial explorer. As a New Zealander, I told him, Germanic Europeans still see a Gauguin fantasy that’s not available anymore to the major colonial cultures. He thought that was pretty far out.
Martyn Reynolds in collaboration with Halvor Rønning Les Nouvelles Nouvelles Libertés, Accesorios Especiales 2014. La Salle de Bains, Lyon, France. Photo: La Salle de Bains
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I learnt a while ago that, at any one time, as many as one in five New Zealanders are overseas – that’s one million of us trying to navigate work and life while holding familial and cultural bonds to this island nation. I’ve been living here in Houston, Texas for the last six months; it will be home for the foreseeable future and, almost inadvertently, I’ve joined the ranks of New Zealand artists who, after establishing themselves in their home country, have moved overseas, if only for a time.
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Postcard From...
Malmö is a good place to disappear. I came here in 2010 to attend the Art Academy. I remember watching the Academy’s director on YouTube describe how professors were not allowed to enter a student’s studio unless invited to do so. I would say that this is intimately tied to the ideological legacy Sweden is known for. I bring it up because it is something that still resonates with my life in Malmö, along with why I live here.
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Postcard From...
When I arrived in New York in late 2014 I was told it’d be ten years before I’d qualify as a New Yorker and two years before I’d feel comfortable and start to enjoy the city. That sounds far-fetched but as my two-year anniversary approaches I’m tending to agree. It is a very special city, a lot of fun, but it can be difficult to pace oneself for the long game.