The sculptor Claudia Märzendorfer’s art is devoted to the process, to the evanescent and impermanent. One iconic example are her frozen records (2005), which she brings out from the freezer during her DJ sets and which, needless to say, can be played only once. Her music typewriter (2012) made of frozen ink slowly stains the stack of music paper on which it rests. These performative sculptures illustrate the artist’s unconventional approach untinged by commercial considerations. Märzendorfer works with a wide range of ingredients and media; her primary material, however, is time.

On Vienna’s Graben, she arranges a still life of bottles, canisters, and sacks—casts taken from plastic containers—on a pedestal resembling a block of ice. The objects’ light, satin-matte surfaces are reminiscent of bone or stone. The ceramic casting medium captures the finest details: the delicate grooves on the bottle caps, the raised lettering on containers indicating fill levels or product information. The drapery of the sacks evokes Baroque-era marble sculptures, while the reflective sheen of the base recalls the imitation marble plasterwork known as stucco lustro.

In the style of seventeenth-century vanitas depictions, Märzendorfer enhances her white landscape made of plastic detritus with additional objects associated with earthly existence—in Baroque painting, these were often money, books, or musical instruments—: frozen black ink in the shape of gold bars, shellac records, nuts, pomegranates, peaches, shells, and octopuses that she places in the still life on opening day. In this instance, the “mortal” world literally melts away before the viewers’ eyes, leaving behind black markings that will fade and vanish over the following few months. What then remains is the ensemble of bottle, canister, and sack sculptures, frozen in an instant to memorialize the inert nature of their plastic archetypes: it takes four and a half centuries for the material to decompose into microplastics, which will still be an environmental burden. Märzendorfer operates on different temporal levels, which she superimposes in performative fashion. The plastic waste landscape is the backdrop against which the black ice objects act as though in fast motion.

Märzendorfer previously grappled with the vast amounts of synthetics in the world’s oceans and the novel plastiglomerate forming out of plastic waste in sculptures and texts in her exhibition A Blazing World (2019). Language is another recurring medium for the artist. Borrowed titles for her works often serve her to unlock another conceptual and narrative dimension. A Chicken Can’t Lay a Duck Egg quotes the 1960s American human rights activist Malcolm X and the title of a 2020 book by Graeme Maxton and Bernice Maxton-Lee. The two writers call for a radical rethinking of how we respond to the climate crisis if we hope to halt catastrophic and irreversible ecological impacts before it is too late. A climate-compliant society, they argue, cannot arise from a system based on short-term profit maximization and constant growth—or in the words of Malcolm X in his fight against racism: “A chicken can’t lay a duck egg.” A systemic transformation is needed. By reusing the phrase for the title of her work, Märzendorfer integrates the metaphor as another layer into her performative still life. (Olga Wukounig)