Vienna Diary
The Age
Friday April 25, 2003
Freudian depths
Vienna can't help itself. Even as it gears up for its celebratory annual May festival, the city of Sigmund Freud rolls out two retrospectives exploring the darker depths of self-expression.
After a five-year renovation, the Albertina museum of graphic art opens with the resolutely international pairing of American artist Robert Longo and Norwegian expressionist Edvard Munch. Before ascending through the marble colonnades towards the torturous work of Munch and his modernist icon The Scream (until June 22), you can contemplate the enormous inky blackness of Longo's Freud drawings (until June 8). Based on Edmund Engelman's photographs of Freud's Berggasse 19 apartment and consulting rooms, the drawings offer a simpler, but no less dark, glimpse of the abyss. Taken just before he fled to London as Nazism took hold of Vienna, Freud's vacant apartment is documented with a forensic eye. These Gothic images seem as forbidding as they are a door into the unconscious, poised between flight and capture, freedom and fear. The heavy presence of some kind of guiding hand for good or evil lurks out of frame.
Kinski retrospective
Across from the Albertina, the Austrian Theatermuseum pays tribute to the monomania of actor Klaus Kinski (above). Long before he acquired an international reputation in Werner Herzog's films Aguirre, Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo, Kinski's fame was cemented in the demented roles he performed in Germany and Vienna. I, Kinski (until June 1) provides a survey of his theatre work including photographs by Swiss artist Beat Presser and recordings of Kinski's infamous readings of Goethe, Schiller and Brecht. A retrospective of his films is at the Metro cinema.
It's what Marlowe would have done
Vienna wouldn't be Vienna if it didn't wallow in tragedy with the upcoming world premiere of Wolfgang Mitterer's Massacre, based on Christopher Marlowe's 1592 play The Massacre at Paris. It features among the 35 productions from 12 countries at this year's Vienna Festival (May 9-June 16). Also on the program are old opera favourites Aida and Madame Butterfly.
These doleful tales may require a consoling nip of courage at Cafe Central or Landtmann, Freud's favourite watering holes. But if art nouveau is too passe, architecturally speaking, try one of the many new and sensationally designed cocktail bars which are happily in abundant supply. Onyx in Hans Hollein's Haas House has an awesome view over St Stephen's Gothic cathedral. Here you can wrestle with spiritual temptation - ethanol and ethereal - while contemplating the architectural dilemmas of Vienna.
Not quite baroque
The city's contemporary architects have always had to wrestle with the ever-present problem of working in an historical theme-park. Architects such as Pritzger prize-winner Hollein (who has been commissioned to do the Albertina entrance) and conceptual darlings Coop-Himmelblau strip away ornamentation and tip, pinch and generally rattle the modernist box. Architecture students can be seen admiring the merits of Coop's Gasometer building (a profusion of angled glass windows with kinks to rival the hips on Frank Gehry's Fred and Ginger building in Prague). Freud would have been proud and maybe a little envious.
© 2003 The Age