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2010
artstripe Nr: 09, inkjet on textile on aluminum
2.5 x 38 m
artstripe is a project in the rooms of Accenture
curated by Liquid Frontiers
Fotos©2010:Christian Wachter
Accenture Office, Börse, Vienna, AT
A stripe of sky with seven white clouds was realized at the invitation of the culture agency Liquid Frontiers, which operates the so-called “artstripe” for the management consulting agency Accenture. The artstripe is a picture board measuring 121 feet in length and 8 feet in height; the support structure is preinstalled in the two-floor open-plan office of Accenture’s Austrian headquarters, and artists ‘stage’ their works on it in regular intervals. Shaped like a U, the picture stripe runs along three of the office’s four walls at the height of the second floor. The corners are rounded, and each of the U’s short side arms is one fifth of the length of the long base, which faces the main entrance to the office.
An artistic intervention that inscribes itself into this situation is of course expected, first and foremost, to contribute to the company’s self-presentation and to animate employees and visitors. By virtue of its monumental billboard-like format alone, the artstripe recalls the features of outdoor advertising. The primary function of art inscribed on this format is inevitably that of inverted advertising addressed to the company’s own staff, to whom it is meant to signal entrepreneurial vision and cosmopolitanism. In addition, the monumental format requires at least some involvement of computer-aided design in the realization of the work: the artists’ projects are produced as inkjet prints on long sheets of fabric and then mounted on the frames already installed in the office. In most of the preceding projects—SIEBEN:WOLKEN was artstripe no. 9—the proposed picture had even been designed onscreen and then printed in the necessary size. The technical requirements of large-format advertising thus retroactively shape the work on the image, informing it with the connotations of advanced technology. At the same time, the virtuality of the digital image fits well with the virtual world of the capital flows that are the management consulting agency’s raw material.
The work brings the meteorological motif of the cloud before a blue sky into play as a pre-modern allegory of this digital virtuality. The pixels and data streams are supplanted by molecular and amorphous steam. Each of the seven clouds was realized separately, at half its final size, in acrylic on thin paper, and then photographed; a specialized printing workshop produced highly precise prints and installed them on the site. The depiction is fairly schematic, with the clouds sharply delimited by curved outlines, but their bodies are furnished with such distinct shadows and indicators of perspectival depth that the question of their size becomes inevitable. With clouds, the relation between the size of a depiction and that of its object is always peculiar. Everyone knows that a cloud, even when it appears small, whether in a picture or in reality, is almost always gigantic; but also that one does not really know its exact size. The installation crosses this inability to estimate a cloud’s size with the exaggerated dimensions of the picture board, in architectonic terms a frieze that has been blown up into a billboard. The infantile and stereotypical motif of the cloud is presented as an exercise to the financial experts, whose profession consists in the estimation and prognostic assessment of opportunities and risks. That there were ultimately seven clouds was primarily a consequence of the proportions of the picture board and the space. One cloud each occupies the short left and right walls, while five form a series on the central wall. Still, it seemed opportune in the context of the installation that seven clouds are also an allusion to the seventh heaven, to cloud number seven, and—this concerns the expansive question of economic forecasting—to the seven fat and seven lean years the dream-interpreter Joseph prophesied to Pharaoh.