AA BRONSON & KEITH BOADWEE. PLAID

KEITH BOADWEE & AA BRONSON PLAID Exhibition: 26.02. – 09.04.2016
Opening : 25.2., 7 – 9pm

"The artist does not stand in front of the picture, but he is in the picture."
Otto Mühl

The exhibition "PLAID" was first of all an invitation : AA Bronson invited Keith Boadwee to revisit some works he had long abandoned, only this time as a collaborative project. The collaboration seems almost intuitively natural: Bronson’s work as a healer famously concentrated on the anus; both Bronson and Boadwee have histories of working collaboratively by generously inviting younger artists to play a role in their work. This is exactly what happened here. Bronson the elder invited Boadwee the younger into his court at the prestigious Salzburger Kunstverein to restage certain of Boadwee’s seminal works.

Austria is of course rich in an art historical narrative which acknowledges corporeal matters. The Viennese Actionists represent a key art historical moment for the country. Their early and prescient performances took the theoretical matrixes developed by Freud and Jung and flung them bodily into the public sphere. Boadwee and Bronson chose to directly engage the performative legacy of the Actionists' well-known relationship to painting. The material of the body is spewed onto the canvas. Sanguine red, bilious green, shit brown: a dripping stream of interleaved humors crisscrossing the canvas. Two assholes creating a dense weave that is from the body, but transcends the body; a fireworks display of anal abandon. Two assholes are better than one.

Georg Petrmichl, a Viennese photographer, documented the funny, strange, awkward and tender process of enematic collaboration in the publication that accompanies the paintings. These photographs of Boadwee and Bronson's bearded gay Janus, presented in a book and as an invitation, is the revelatory supplement to the paintings; present and absent, the figurative secret which which unfolds the meaning of the abstract patterned surface.

Justin Lieberman