LICHTHÖHE

Goethe wrote, “Mountains are silent masters.” As if! There’s plenty happening on the Grossglockner. For example there’s Oskar and Jörgen, bright blue snow vehicles fighting their way through the flakes. When they finally face each other, they blush in red, then pink, green, and orange with excitement, like voluminous neon wallflowers at a snowy afternoon dance. And another species is doing great up there, too: human-looking neon beings with heads, arms, and legs marching through the dark landscape, carrying poles wrapped in neon tape as though they had sprung from the lucid dream of an alpine surveyor. Like neon flowers of evil, or rather of good, colors and creatures blossom on the nocturnal mountain. A fluorescent pea pod shimmers in a crevice, with a naked pea lying inside, but wait, it’s a human male. The neon beings gather for a “ballet de neige”, as hoop skirts turn and glow until somebody pulls out a neon branch and shoots a moving vehicle. The glowing Tusken raider throws up his arms in jubilation.

But all this isn’t about fighting, it’s about nature. Or better said: about “nature, nurture, culture”. A neon-painted face blends into a neon mycelium. Someone casually pees a yellow neon stream into the mountain, which then runs upward to the peak. And at the center of attention is neon, which is actually an inert, colorless element that is incited to glow when placed in gas discharge tubes.

This is the work of Thomas Hörl & Peter Kozek in cooperation with Viktor Jaschke: In their psychedelic alpine stop-motion art film, they oppose geological conditions with artificial patterns, place luminous fashion (“culture”) in a dark mountain range (“nature”) which lives on its own, its fungi, its stones (“nurture”). And what could have been the land art of Andy Goldsworthy suddenly becomes something like Daft Punk´s “Around the World”. (Jenni Zylka)

Translation: John Wojtowicz