Sweet Idleness Oasis, 2014Installation, mixed mediaInstallation views: Kunstraum Niederoesterreich, Dissent : Repetition
(c) Photo: Eva Würdinger
For her installation Magdalena Fischer has built objects and furniture, and collected texts that deal with labour and notions of work, idleness and laziness. Investigating the idea of ideal working conditions, Magdalena also draws on questions about what is considered “work”, and what distinguishes it.Sweet Idleness Oasis uses references to office environments and set pieces from wellness culture, weaving them together spatially in her installation. Shelves are upholstered in towel fabric and pens from first class Viennese hotels lie ready for note taking. A fountain made of letter trays gurgles away. The sofa is upholstered in blue work-wear fabric and terrycloth. A room divider featuring a print of a party-drunk crocodile provides some kind of private zone. The sparse blue-, turquoise-, white-toned room doesn’t give me a sense of relaxation.
Yet I want to stay and read the texts on positive re-evaluation of laziness in a production-oriented working world, hoping for food for thought. To sit and read, acquiring knowledge: for some these are the activities that also pay the rent and expenses. For many others, they can only be pursued outside of waged employment, if at all.You don’t have to go to work to experience the bodily exertion and the behavioural conduct required of an average workday, let alone the impossibility of designing your week the way you want it: Sweet Idleness Oasis offers a wavering counterbalance. The uncomfortable couch, the abstraction of wellbeing elements and the puritanical blankness of the room designed for the work of relaxation do little to loosen the reins of everyday life and leave one’s cares behind.
Nel Fragner
