Gerhard Roth: In Hidden Vienna

Stadtmuseum, Vienna

MúzeumCafé 17.

Gerhard Roth was born in Graz in 1942 and has been living in Vienna for decades. Roth is a significant author writing in German whose works have not yet been translated into Hungarian. Roth’s debut in Hungarian begins with this issue of MúzeumCafé in connection with his exhibition In Hidden Vienna at the Austrian capital’s Stadtmuseum in the winter and spring of 2010. Roth writes about and takes photographs of the invisible Vienna and is exhibiting hundreds of those pictures in the city museum. In doing so he records traces of memory which, for a variety of reasons, have so far proved to be hidden. Visitors and readers alike can take a peep into the storerooms of Vienna’s Natural History Museum, the Kunsthistorisches Museum, the Museum of Ethnology and the City Museum. The stuffed animals, skulls, objects and works of art, and death masks lined up next to each other in museum storerooms, and the photographs of plaster portraits produced in large quantities are quite appropriate not merely for unmasking the artificial nature of classification, namely taxonomy, but also for forming a critical concept in connection with museums. By means of exhibitions – those assembled spectacles created for public consumption – museums offer visitors the appearance of a fully determined and self-confident order, presenting precisely and objectively, so to say, what exists and what does not. The photographic criticism of classification created by Roth also acts as a vehicle for interpreting the aesthetics of visibility and invisibility. The intervening layers of cultural, photographic are presented, as is the reason why museums have become the unavoidable means of image politics. The rearrangement of exhibitions and the redefinition of museums in the urban space create the museological context for Gerhard Roth’s exhibition.