Exhibition program

The current debate on Artificial Intelligence has, among other things, rekindled interest in how cybernetics was received in the realm of art. In her lecture, Sabeth Buchmann discusses Ulla Wiggen’s paintings in the context of the twin poles of aesthetic and mathematical thought systems given that the artist attaches special significance to the topic of diagrams as a dialogical concept of seeing. Buchmann focuses in particular on Wiggen’s representations of electronic components which she painted between 1963 and 1969. These are characterized by an aesthetics that straddles post-painterly abstraction, Minimal Art and Concept Art. While on the one hand Wiggen’s depictions of electronic components correspond with formalist criteria of flatness and opticality, on the other, they bring to mind technical drawings, mathematical formulas, computer programs, and architectural diagrams. Buchmann’s lecture therefore outlines both the Swedish artist’s concept of the medium, and also its cultural and scientific implications and in this way explores questions that address the avant-garde tradition of painting machines and the discourse of transmediality that can be discerned here.

Sabeth Buchmann has been a professor of modern and postmodern art history at the Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien since 2004; she is a member of the advisory board of Texte zur Kunst magazine, of the European Kunsthalle, and was Second Managing Director of the Austrian Ludwig Foundation (2018–2023). Her countless activities in the field of publications include PoLyPen, a book series on art criticism and political theory (co-editor, b_books, Berlin), Kunst als Infrastruktur (author, 2023), Broken Relations: Infrastructure, Aesthetic, and Critique (co-editor, 2022), Die Stimme als Voice und Vote. Festschrift für Diedrich Diederichsen (co-editor, 2019), Putting Rehearsals to the Test. Practices of Rehearsal in Fine Arts, Film. Theater, Theory, and Politics (co-editor, 2016), art works. Ästhetik des Postfordismus (co-editor, 2015), Textile Theorien der Moderne. Alois Riegl in der Kunstkritik (co-editor, 2015), Hélio Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida: Block-Experiments in Cosmococa (co-author, 2013), Film, Avantgarde und Biopolitik (co-editor, 2009), Denken gegen das Denken – Produktion, Technologie, Subjektivität bei Sol LeWitt, Yvonne Rainer und Hélio Oiticica (author, 2007), Art After Conceptual Art (co-editor, 2006), Wenn sonst nichts klappt: Wiederholung wiederholen in Kunst, Popkultur, Film, Musik, Alltag, Theorie und Praxis (co-editor, 2005).

For adults. Admission is free. No registration required.