monochrom web content update // Georg Paul Thomann: The São Paolo Biennial is well-known as one of the most important and biggest art exhibitions in the southern hemisphere. It forms a counterpart to the geographical concentration of art in the Western world. The worldwide hegemony of Western art has been maintained throughout art history, in aesthetic theory as well as on the practical side in terms of presentation and discourse. Nevertheless, we, the group monochrom, were pleased, albeit only as the national representatives of a racist mini-state, to participate in such an event.
Since February 2000 Austria has been governed by a very right-wing government. Thus the independent art curator’s selection of monochrom as Austria’s national representatives at the São Paolo Biennial 2002 was quite an interesting political statement. We decided to do a tactical-ironical project. Instead of doing an exhibition as monochrom, we decided to send Georg Paul Thomann to Brazil. Who is Georg Paul Thomann? He is a fictitious 57-year-old Austrian avant-garde artist. We wrote his complete biography (around one hundred pages) and asked fellow artists, writers and pop theorists to write articles about his life and work, which were published as the catalogue of the exhibition. It took the media quite a long time to actually figure out the whole art-avatar maneuver.
The Thomann biography grew to be an amusing overview of pop, art and intellectual history during the past four decades with fictitious guest appearances from people like William Gibson, Peter Handke or Alan Jenkins. Anyway, you might like our approach - and by the way: Georg Paul Thomann saved the country of Taiwan ... Link
monochrom is an art-technology-philosophy group having its seat in Vienna and Zeta Draconis. monochrom is an unpeculiar mixture of proto-aesthetic fringe work, pop attitude, subcultural science, context hacking and political activism. Our mission is conducted everywhere, but first and foremost in culture-archeological digs into the seats (and pockets) of ideology and entertainment. monochrom has existed in this (and almost every other) form since 1993. [more]
