Xenia Lesniewski & René Wagner  

Installation view, Zeller van Almsick, Vienna 2023

BLOWIN’ MONEY FAST: ON REEL 2 REAL

“The best of the intellectual and creative speculation carried on in the west over the past hundred and fifty years seems incontestably the most energetic, dense, subtle, sheerly interesting, and true in the entire lifetime of man. And yet, the equally incontestable result of all of this genius is our sense of standing in the ruin of thought and on the verge of the ruins of history and of man himself. (Cogito ergo boom). More and more, the shrewdest thinkers and artists are precocious archaeologists of these ruins-in-the-making, indignant or stoical diagnosticians of movements useful for individual survival in an era of permanent apocalypse.” Susan Sontag, “Thinking against oneself: Reflections on Cioran”, 1966

Santiago Serra, the Spanish conceptual artist responsible for dreaming a line of tattoos across the backs of seated women, designs for the Spring/Summer 2023 Balenciaga runway show an infernal environment composed of piles of peat and mud. This premieres in October of 2022. Models walk through this wasteland, focused, and increasingly corrupted, damaging hundred of thousands of euros worth of haute couture. This is the height of excess. These are the riders on the storm, these bodies and this laissez faire arrogance which comes only with the ironies of the theatrics of late neoliberal capitalism. In 2015, the Demna Gvasalia assumes control of the fashion house which has come to define the aesthetics of urban boredom and the posturing of “nothing for everything”. Near this year, Rene Wagner and Xenia Lesniewski both begin (in parallel) certain artistic practices which they emulate and annunciate to this day, and within this exhibition. Gvasalia advocates the protagonism which renders any wearer of his designs both important and equivalently forgettable. This contradiction in terms is what makes Balenciaga sellable. The label is the wearer and the wearer makes the label.

Perhaps, this is true of any mode of appropriating value; it is also the death a meritocracy which saw its decline in the post-war indecencies of mass production and the subsequent rise of corporate identities which implement ever convincing regimes of image, status, and function. Rene Wagner takes his position in the midst of the complexities of the “brand as fetish”. In using his own name as a privatised yet publicly accessible tuning label, the artist totemizes and advertises himself while hiding his artistic agenda. Using this strategy while wielding a high level of craftsmanship, Wagner also manages to reveal the epic descent of the cult of the artist, which sees its fragmentation in the bipolarity between the rhetorical state of authorship in 2023 and an imagined A.I. future. Spending time with Wagner’s colourful, iridescent, even flashy vessels and objects is to stand under the burning sun in an unwritten and holographic cross-edit between Mad Max, Koyaanisqatsi, and an assemblage of Young Thug music videos. Some score which combines broken remnants of Erik Satie and A$AP Rocky and is playing from speakers in the sky, and we are unsure where all the humans have gone. What is left behind, in the sand, is the warped label, “Rene Wagner”. These are artifacts of the last attempt of humanity to make sense of itself in Technicolor.

Meanwhile, a woman enters the scene searching for a way of documenting the unseen stars, the common celebrities that prove Kim Kardashian’s empire is a fake. Xenia Lesniewski, uses the word “ultra” and the phrase “ultra contemporary” to describe her role in this sea of displaced acts of self-promotion. Lesniewski uses her femininity as a weapon and shield, while robbing the public sphere of its titles of ownership. Finding Audis, Mercedes, BMWs or Land Rovers and using them as pedestals, sofas, chairs, backdrops, we see both a satire of a slavic Americanity and a direct confrontation of the logic “my life my rules, my Benz my power”. One could ask the question, “and if it’s not yours, can you still use it, and furthermore, can you make it into art?”. Lesniewski’s answer is perplexingly current, and her work coerces a radical affirmation of anything and everything being the material and the substance of an artwork; such that the elite aesthetics of “blowin’ money fast” are equivalently available (even if by proxy performance), to anyone, anywhere, anytime. It’s a photograph, and it can be stolen, just as the artist refuses to fully objectify herself while being the central subject of the work.

Wagner and Lesniewski incarnate critical intervention, both with their artistic practices and with the ideologies which guide their production. The public is affected, just as the artists let themselves become the material upon which interrogation can be enacted. Sometimes what can be taken apart can only be put back together differently and reconfiguring elements can be a radical form of generosity. Both artists offer tools for dissecting and composing selfhood in the tidal wave of commodity that includes consciousness as product. As Susan Sontag so aptly wrote in 1966, the artist is not only responsible for reflecting on uncertainty as a principle, but also uniquely qualified to devise strategies for managing social, economic, cultural, and spiritual decay. Attention itself is not a sufficient antidote to the seismic confusion of our times, and the return of the hero and heroine may be necessary. “Reel 2 Real”, is not a myth of an exhibition, nor is it a proposal for seeing differently, it is a luminescent answer to the problem of being contemporary.

Josseline Black / January 2023

Installation shots Simon Veres.