TUNING SCULPTURE

Car tuning is the process of modification of the performance or appearance of a vehicle.
It has become a way to personalize the characteristics of a vehicle to the owner‘s esthetical preferences. Cars may be altered to provide better fuel economy, produce more power, or to provide better handling. Exterior modifications include changing the aerodynamic characteristics of the vehicle via side skirts, front and rear bumpers, spoilers, splitters, air vents and light weight wheels.
The essence of modification of a tuner car is an attempt to extract the greatest possible performance—or the appearance of high performance—from the base motor vehicle through the addition, alteration or outright replacement of parts. Although this largely involves modifying the engine and management systems of the vehicle to increase the power output, additional changes are often required to allow the vehicle to handle this power. Although largely invisible from outside the vehicle, certain modifications such as low profile tires, altered suspension, and the addition of spoilers can change the overall appearance of the car.
In Japan the tuning practice is called bōsōzoku, (literally „violent running tribes“) it was first seen in the 1950s as the Japanese automobile industry expanded rapidly. The precursors of that practice enhance by groups of young people known as kaminari zoku („Thunder Tribe“). The particularity of shapes they would give to the cars made the visual appearance the main focus of the transformation. The most typical car designs involve large exhausts pointing high in the sky, aero kits that seem to expand the vehicles to twice the size and very colorful paint jobs. Not to mention disco lights and seriously enhanced suspension systems that must make drivers fall out of their seats.
The peculiar sculptural aspect of bōsōzoku’s cars is the starting point of tuning sculpture project. By using distinctive car parts and remodeling them into sculptural object, the work deals as a driving force to investigate ideas about performative sculpture and involvement of the viewer. As tuning cars enhances the notion of giving to the car the appearance of performance, tuning sculptures is a playful way of questioning the nature of a sculptural performative work, set within the social context of pop culture and suburban experiences.
The first two tuning sculptures, RED PRO and OCEAN created in Vienna in collaboration with a car tuning company, were built and conceived as experiments around some specific car component like a car door, a car light or a side mirror. The car elements were chosen for their ability to be activated by the viewer, for example with RED PRO, when the door opener is used, the light turns on. On the other hand, OCEAN is composed with a car side mirror, a remote control mechanism and a poster found hanging in the garage of the car tuning company. The remote control can be used by the viewer to activate the mechanism of the car mirror to impulse movement to the poster.
The fact that these two sculptures can be activated to release their performative power has a twist in the fact that their power is useless and act like a joke towards the concept of « tuning ». As we explained before, car tuning involves a modification of the basic structure of the object (the car), with the tuned sculptures it’s the more or less identified car parts that acts like modifiers to the shape given to the sculpture.
The sculptures are so called ”tuned” on at least two level, first of all it refer to the fact of using recognizable objects (car parts) that immediately gives an image or a context to the sculptural object. The second level is the fact that the sculpture can be activated. We could find a third level of the ‘tuned concept” in noticing that the way the components were put together and arranged so they work on a visual and a mechanical level implies the same ideas as tuning an instrument, balancing the material, creating a certain harmony.
We can also notice that in urban slang the expression « tuning » is the act of flirting, the action of seducing the other. We could say that the tuning sculptures operates in that way to, they are seductive, they are made to be touched, their color (like the kaminari Zoku car) are eye catching, in fact the title of the work refers to the name of the car painting applied to the sculptures.

Text: Arianne Foks

HANS IM GLÜCK

Anyone visiting the Kunstraum Niederoesterreich on 11 September 2014 will find it empty. The exhibition is open but the works are not there. Stacks of posters start off a murmur: they talk about 13 fairytale expeditions that are starting the next day. Our artists commence at various points in Lower Austria, penetrate a natural and urban thicket that they have chosen themselves, and a week later reach the Kunstraum in the heart of Vienna. They bring encounters, rumors and artistic prey from their ramble with them. They imitate Grimm’s Hans and entrust themselves to the path for seven days. Hans is the hero of our exhibition, because in the best sense of the word he is simple-hearted. He is a slave neither to the past or the future, so that he belongs completely to the present. He respects his impulses and changes what he carries with him. He does this without any strategy, he goes step by step, without the foresight of the last result of his metamorphoses. People of the arts are familiar with this process, because it precedes numerous works. And nevertheless Hans must remain a stranger, because few so easily overcome the distance between wealth and well-being as Grimm’s returnee does. The actual provocation that maintains the fairytales‘ tension, however, is hidden in the end of the text: the Brothers Grimm let Hans go. Everything we tend to accuse him of – naivety, credulity, wastefulness – never affect him. Hans can remain in his good fortune to the end, while we set out every day to recover ours. Our artists, too, are on the point of departure: they are going on a journey and allow their metamorphosis to take place. The exhibition “Hans im Glück” is intended to retain the chance of an open outcome for these metamorphoses. Thus we, the curators, can also be excited about the findings and the rumors that will reach the Kunstraum Niederoesterreich.

curated by: Katharina Blaas, Ursula Hübner, Christiane Krejs, Esther Strauß

For the diploma exhibition in 2008 a view people of our class decided to make a group project in addition to our individual diploma works. We wanted to create an environment that would be so flexible as to allow the individual projects to integrate themselves within the common project. There for the group decided on building an architectural structure, that would be able to grow and adapt to the diploma works while they were developed. We used material found within the academy, some was sponsored by const- ruction companies, some additionally had to be bought. By dividing the space into several parts the structure enabled the individual positions to create their own environment. Yet every individual piece fed on the structure and refered to it, working on the structures character and nurturing it by incorporating itself in the coll- ective body. At this point an interdependency became visible, a moment where the border between the individual position and the context is blurred.
The method I used to react on the structure could in a wider sense be described as metabolism. All the material that could not be used for the construction, residual material (in a metaphorical sense the excrements of the metabolism from our context) I used, to create formally perfect shapes, which resembled the form of diamonds. The size and shapes were determined by the residual material. On a purely aesthetical basis the object are of high value, due to the technical refinement and the fact that they are symbolising the valuable par excellence. Within the context of the structure they are not supposed to exist, a waste product that is not considered of value to the construction. The finality and perfection of the objects opposed the procedural character of the structure, as no more development or mutation is intended. In the eyes of photographer Kate Steinitz simply the context of the Merzbau transforms a bottle of urine, which had been used in the composition, into gold. In much the same way is the meaning of the diamonds dependent on the context of the structure. The structure and the diamonds are like a coordinate system with marked points for the space in which they are exhibited in. In everyone of them the information chaos of the structure is depicted in the facettecut of the diamonds. Referring to Vilèm Flusser the objects are aesthetically visualised waste. In this case they do not run the risk of pretending to be nature, in order to disappear under the cover of vegetation; the smell of waste sticks to the diamonds despite the aesthetical value.