The Grass Is Always Greener On The Other Side

The Grass Is Always Greener On The Other Side – New Vindobona is the title given by the artist Pierre Bismuth to the site-specific sculpture that he has developed in collaboration with the architect Nicolas Firket for Kunsthalle Wien Karlsplatz. This 5 x 10 m sculpture, reminiscent of a construction site sign, continues the calculated collision between fiction and reality that is often applied in Bismuth’s work. Taking real artefacts in the media, politics and entertainment as his point of departure, he develops surreal sequences of images, film works and installations that can be read as a direct commentary on modern society and that define the question of the political in art as an issue of appropriate representation.

Bismuth’s main approach is often that of a collage or a superimposition of logics of meaning, the fault lines and incompatibility of which usually first strike one at a second viewing. Here, the motif of the calculated misunderstanding or the deceptive first impression not only highlights the way that interpretative processes generate their own creative input, but also maps out the pattern of existing possibilities of thought.
 
The public-space sculpture is accompanied by a series of discursive events on the theme of urban development and urban branding.