Vienna Contemporary 2024
with R. Sebastian Schachinger
12.09.-15.09.2024
Installation views
Photos: Choreo / Courtesy: the artists and Windhager von Kaenel
Text
For Vienna Contemporary 2024, Windhager von Kaenel is excited to propose a solo presentation by R. Sebastian Schachinger, who invites us to think about the paradoxical structure of time as an abstract entity or a synchronizing tool within the process of art-making.The proposal entails seven new works titled Sunday Sculpture 1-7, on which the artist has worked over the last eight weeks. They consist of residues of machines, such as lawnmowers, engines, or washing machines, combined with hand-produced elements to create complex sculptures. The sculptures avail themselves of formal precision—the same precision with which the works have been hung on the wall in a uniform way, like, perhaps, the numbers on a watch dial, or a sepia photograph of lined-up fabric workers.
Reminiscent of 1950s readymades and Dada assemblages, Schachinger makes use of relics from everyday life. However, he draws less from consumerist culture and more from automation—energy we take for granted—depicting contemporary society as the machines that turn the world around, faster than the control loops of our ecosystem, starting with our own body, can reflect on their effects. For example, Schachinger hand carves industrial components out of oak to reflect on work typically done by machines. When you carve by hand, you enter an exchange of thoughts, body, and material. You hit once, the material reacts, and with the next hit, you adapt. Whereas machines, like the lawnmower, shred through nature at 3,000 rounds per minute, which may seem harmless in your garden but poses a larger problem in countries like Romania, where IKEA cuts down hectares of one of the last primeval forests on the globe. Back in your garden, you only see the ants you’ve cut through after the work has been done—speaking of 2024, by the AI robot that did it.
In Society of the Spectacle (1967), Guy Debord, a member of the Situationist International movement, states: “With automation, which is the most advanced sector of modern industry and at the same time the model in which its practice is perfectly subsumed, the world of commodities must overcome the following contradiction: technical instrumentation, which objectively abolishes labor, must at the same time preserve labor as the only birthplace of commodity.” If machines were supposed to work for us, we now work for the machines. After gathering these machines from his local area, Schachinger works on them like a mix of a crazy engineer and a sculptor, taking them apart, cleaning them, rebuilding parts by hand, and recontextualizing them together with clock parts, transforming them into formal sculptures about time and labor. Schachinger invites us to reflect on who is serving whom—a question not easy to answer, especially when it comes to life.
In Sunday Sculpture 1-7, the paradoxical value of labor in the process of art-making can be read as a call to reflection. Schachinger turns labor-turned-into-artworks back into a discussion about labor—less as a straightforward commodity and more as a process of labor as exchange, where the artwork is fragmented out of the realm it comes from, not looking back but rather eliminating time and language, leaving us with “emit”: left in an endless Now.
Works
Sunday Sculpture No. 7
Lawnmower, soil, green cuttings, oak shavings, synthetic resin binder, brass letters
45 x 52 x 73cm
Enquire
Sunday Sculpture No. 2
Soap, clock parts,
aluminium
12 x 11 x 11cm
Enquire
Sunday Sculpture No. 6
Waterpump, clock parts,
beech wood
40 x 24 x 17cm
Enquire
Sunday Sculpture No. 1
Anglegrinder, steel, clock hand,
hemp string, resin
25 x 9 x 13 m
Enquire
Sunday Sculpture No. 4
Wall clock case, electric motor, drive belts,
belt pullies, acrylic paint
61 x 45 x 22 cm
Enquire
Sunday Sculpture No. 5
Washing machine,
clock dial, oak
75 x 52 x 47cm
Enquire
About the artist
R. Sebastian Schachinger (*1993, Freiburg i. Br., Germany) lives and works between Basel (CH) and Vienna (AT). He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Fine Arts from HGK Basel FHNW. His recent solo and group exhibitions include Salts City, Basel (CH), Kunsthalle Basel, Basel (CH), Kunsthalle Palazzo, Liestal (CH), Kunsthaus Baselland, Münchenstein/Basel (CH) and WAF Galerie, Wien (AT). In 2022 Schachinger was awarded the Kiefer Hablitzel Göhner Prize, Switzerland.