Operation Street Credibility

Iv Toshain and Anna Ceeh were putting their street credibility to the test in public spaces across Vienna: ПРЕЙЪР, an urban intervention, was a sequel in a series of acts staged under the typographically rather complex label “FEMINismTC”: The superscript “TC” stands for Toshain and Ceeh; “FEMIN” is always in capital letters; “ism” is crossed out and visibly rejected (see Dada: the negation of “ism” as critique of ideologies); and the “IN” in “FEMIN” is written in italics, with a special slant, that is. Just as the duo’s artistic measures and course of action quite often diverge from the norm.

The project ΠΡΕЙЪΡ—the word functions as a semiotic sign and is a transcription of the English “prayer” in Cyrillic script—appropriated a conventional field of propaganda, that of the poster. The subtitle 4000 Slogans referred to the subjects used—exclusively text, i.e., language—and the print run, but also, in a general sense, to the genre of advertising.

Leading the way, sisters in arms VALIE EXPORT and Marina Abramović stayed true to their principles: “think what you can do—not do what you can think . . .” and “I believe in no gender in art.” And there was a canonical feel to “all that matters is whether you make good art or bad art.” From Eastern Europe, Anetta Mona Chișa and Lucia Tkáčová sent their “do it” instructions, in the infinitive form gleaned from Marcel Duchamp. New York-based Soviet poet and gay activist Slava Mogutin contributed an optimistic “towards the gender fluid future.” With a crude “baby,” the master of relational aesthetics, Olaf Nicolai, catcalled young women in Berlin, playing on stereotypes, their ironical treatment, and the theme of reproduction. In Bratislava, Boris Ondreička reminded us of the ectoplasms made from papier mâché by Scottish medium Victoria Helen McCrae Duncan who was convicted of fraudulent witchcraft in 1944. Estonian “Jack Torrance” KIWA, who reaches for an axe to enter the door, put the words “I can’t stop wearing mascara and lipstick” into Immanuel Kant’s mouth. With their sense for pop aesthetics, Siggi Hofer and Linda Bilda outed themselves as “both active and passive” and recommend that we “love sex, hate sexism!” With semantic shifts (Toshain’s “I cum on FEMINismTC”) and a syncretist corporeality (Anna Ceeh’s “die heilige Milch abspritzend” / “squirting holy milk”) both mildly appreciated the heroics of transgressions in the more recent (Viennese) art history and pointed to the concepts that run through all of their art: pop, cult, glamour, the unorthodox and subversive, protest, activism, performance—all nonchalantly joined together in concert.

The statements were printed onto four thousand A1-sized posters and put up around the entire city over a period of one month. Vienna’s twenty-three districts were thus transformed into a large exhibition space, Gewista advertising billboards were turned into artistic discursive interfaces between the public and contemporary art, everyday urban life and activist discourse. In contrast to spontaneous guerilla acts by poster top dogs during art gallery openings, the free style of the independent scene enabled “FEMINismTC” to expand their sphere of action into the city’s public toilet stalls and urinals.

Iv Toshain and Anna Ceeh coated the posters with Molotow spray paint. As the fluorescent pigments store light and release it slowly as a glow, the texts were thus also visible by night: the darker a corner, the brighter they shone. With a painterly gesture, Toshain and Ceeh transformed an industry standard into the artistically aesthetic aggregate of the original and repositioned it in a border area between materiality and the immaterial, between appearance and disappearance, visibility and invisibility.

“FEMINismTC”, Toshain and Ceeh say, “looks to the border regions of perception, a potential space for emotional and intellectual reflection. We create spaces where content is always present, but not always perceptible. This is about content that reaches beyond representation/abstraction/performance/installation.”

Text extracts: Brigitte Huck. The text is available at www.fxxxx.me.