museum in progress – a museum without walls

A colorful wall covers the opera stage. Bright and intense colors shine next to delicate and pastel tones. A sea of shapes, lines, ornaments and figures pours out. Straight and curved lines, circles, regular and irregular squares, ellipses, flowers, leaves.

The abstract landscape is vertically divided into three areas: In the calm center, geometric shapes alternate with straight and wavy lines. On the left and right it looks more chaotic, but also livelier. Alongside the lines and waves, flowers and leaves are formed, growing up on branches or being arranged into trees.

This »wall« is a large painting (176 m2) by the Brazilian artist Beatriz MilhazesBeatriz Milhazes. She created the work »Pink Sunshine« for the 24th edition of the exhibition series »Eiserner Vorhang« designed by the mip. Milhazes intended it to create [an] »atmosphere of spiritual beauty«. It can be seen at the Vienna Opera until the end of June 2022.

Since 1998, the »Eiserner Vorhang« project has temporarily transformed the firewall of the Vienna Opera between the stage and the auditorium into an exhibition space for contemporary art. The large image is fixed to the actual iron curtain with magnets. Milhaze's work is the first from Latin America to decorate the firewall. Previously, artists such as David Hockney (15th edition), Cy Twombly (14th edition) and Jeff Koons (10th edition) were selected.

The »Eiserner Vorhang« is one of the many projects that the association has already implemented in program. The first ones were realized already in the 1980s by the artists Kathrin Messner and Josef Ortner.

Messner and Ortner met in 1978 and fell in love. They walked their life's path together until Ortner's death in 2009. In 1990, the couple founded the private and non-profit art association mip in Vienna. Since then, the mip has collaborated with more than 600 artists (as of 2021), supervised more than 60 projects, and created countless individual works as well as novel exhibition spaces – ephemeral as well as imperishable. In the process, the association cooperated with a wide variety of media, curators, institutions and commercial enterprises.

The goal of the association was to free art from the static place of museums and to bring it to all people by realizing innovative and modern forms of presentation. In practice, this meant and still means that art appears in a wide variety of media, context-dependent and mostly temporary. These media were and are newspapers, magazines, brochures or other such as the opera house mentioned above.

The basic concept of mip was already evident in one of the first projects of the association. The »Botschaft als Medium« gave artists the opportunity to produce their art in print media. Every month, from September 1990 to September 1991, an artist could freely design four pages of the business magazine CASH FLOW. At the same time, the Viennese daily newspaper DER STANDARD provided a panorama page each month. The project was made possible by Austrian Airlines.

With its approach, the association created new »museum spaces«. The association opposed the so-called »museum ideals«, i.e. collecting, researching and preserving. It was concerned with current creation – it rejected walls, guards, admission tickets and permanent collections. This is particularly evident in their project »Urmeter in USA«:

In 1992, artist Michael Schuster traveled the United States for six months, turning it into a temporary exhibition space. Schuster took photos of a Kodak color wedge, faithfully reproduced in every detail, as a primal meter at popular tourist spots in North America, for example in Arizona in front of the Grand Canyon or in Kentucky at the Bluegrass Horse Park. However, the actual exhibition of the large-scale pictures at the Kodak company building in Vienna, in whose cooperation they were created, was canceled.

The art of the mip caused alienation because it appeared in public places where no one expected it. The project »museum in progress an Bord« deserves special mention. Over a period of two years, Austrian Airlines, in cooperation with the company Asea Brown Boveri (ABB), provided two pages of each copy of the in-flight magazine »Sky lines«. The artist Alighiero Boetti then created his work »Cieli ad alta qouta« in six different versions. These were not only displayed on the double pages of the in-flight magazine but could also be requested from the flight attendants as puzzles. These puzzles fit exactly on the folding tables of the aircraft.

The goal and approach of the mip were not new. Back in the 1920s, the art historian Alexander Dorner invited visitors to a lively exhibition. He defined the museum as a powerhouse and called it a »museum in motion«, because he believed »only as a pioneer the museum has [a] meaning«. For him, a museum should be permanently dynamic and active. Not only the exhibitions should be flexible, but also the building itself: It should be changeable and adaptable to the respective exhibition.

About 40 years later, some conceptual artists tried to make their art more active and even went so far as to bring their art into the media, such as newspapers or television. However, these ventures mostly failed, so they started magazines themselves and created art for media, but not with them. In the early 1970s, the museum debate led to an academization of contemporary art and the classical museum experienced its renaissance. Countless museums of modern and contemporary art opened. In the 1980s, corporations began sponsoring art. It was at this point that the mip was born. It opposed this form of academization and took advantage of the newly developed corporate interest in art.

With the innovative ways of communicating and publishing art and the cooperation with companies, the way of financing art changed. From 1999 to 2008, for example, the mip collaborated with the Wein & Co Bar on »Naschmarkt« in Vienna under the project name »Vienna Stripe«. Eighteen times the artists of the association transformed the window area of the bar in different ways into an exhibition space: In the first six months the artist Heimo Zobernig presented his work »PHILOSOPHIE/GEOGRAPHIE« in the format of two large paintings. Here, the terms philosophy and geography were depicted as gray capital letters on white canvases. And in 2004 the Austrian artist group G.R.A.M. showed their »Wiener Mischung« – stills of their video work » Musikalische Komödie fürs Fernsehen (Farbfernsehen)«. The artists can be seen eating, drinking and making music.

Media, institutions, organizations and business enterprises financed the art of the mip in the form of money, exhibition space or the like, but they did not determine it. By means of contracts, the association set certain limits for the cooperation partners. Although the company logo could appear in the works, the art of the mip was to go far beyond the pure advertising effect for the respective companies or media. Thus, there was a certain risk for the partners, since they did not know the works and their influence on the company's image. The artworks and content concepts were left purely to the imagination of the artists. Thus, the artistic world collided with the economic world, which was also the effect of the mip.

Today, art is everywhere, whether in classic museums, on the street or in the media. Digital media are also playing an increasingly important role and are being tapped bit by bit by artists. The mip has contributed a lot to art arriving in the middle of society and therefore reaching a larger audience. Even if they were not the first, they have used past trials and failures to their advantage and turned the world into a museum.