Gertrude Moser-Wagner
lecture (as guest lecturer at BÖS – Course for Writing Pedagogy)
lehrgang-schreibpaedagogik

Language is material at its finest, even for a sculptor.
Words, sentences, urban language finds, indicators and objects of all kinds are lasting companions. They are protagonists in my toolbox, so to speak – even beyond the workshop.
I would like to tell you a few excerpts of how I developed some of them further and used them methodically in the open-air studio.

Perhaps we can agree on something first:
Art and literature want to explore and shift our view of reality. This is not at all easy in our so detached society, which has utilised its taboos and created others. People expect the unusual, often just the entertaining, from literature and art. It is tempting to go to extremes, to get carried away. Isn’t it more about deepening, condensing, re-poetising? Perhaps, however, a holistic approach that allows us to scan spaces from a cautious stance without being didactic is successful.

I said ´Evokationskunst ́/ ́evocation art´ in connection with the close-up view of a stretch of road in the upper Praterstrasse. That was in the context of the TASTE projects (2003-05). TASTE is contained in the word Praterstrasse, at that time I had house PR10 available there and was able to invite people to work with me. It was like putting in an acupuncture needle, which can have revitalising effects on an organism. taste.at

One thing at a time: Words are things that have come into being and have to do with time and space. Only in mathematics are propositions formulated that do not exist in reality because there is no contradiction (axioms). Everything else is not fixed, is in the process of becoming – is dialectical, subject to the processes that generate interactions, is at the mercy of ideologies and beliefs, myths. The desired balance remains, like the proverbial paradise, wishful thinking. To explain my work, perhaps I will begin with the concept of balance.

I introduce you to my ´language as art´, through correction signs DELEATUR (deletion mark) and VACAT. Something is, and it may either be cancelled (because there is too much of it / deleatur) or something is missing (vacat). From this real, perpetual imbalance come the narratives, actions (PLOT). So this formula was clear to me at the beginning: PLOTVACATDELEATUR (the plot comes from the fact that something is missing and there is too much of something else – in other words, that there is an imbalance that creates a plot). I have assigned parts of my works, texts and projects to date to these terms.

(´project art´ : moser-wagner.com)

At the beginning of the 1990s, I worked with minus formats in sculpture, from which came the realisation that negation was just as important, if not more important, than affirmation, at least more interesting for me at the time. The counter-pendulum to something (existing), filtered out of everything, which was ultimately to be referred to artistically: that there! NOTHING was also conceptually asserted twice:
NOTHING is carved in stone (2014) and currently, the video bridge NOTHING. (2020, with Ulrich Kaufmann)