The Anthropological Machine
02/18/2005 – 05/30/2005
The first monographic exhibition dedicated to the Austrian painter, graphic artist and jazz musician Karl Anton Fleck, who died at age 55 in 1983 in Vienna, will feature 220 works and thus represents the most extensive overview of the artist’s oeuvre to date. Beyond creating a large number of portraits, nudes, cityscapes and landscapes during his entire artistic career, which stretched from 1950 to 1983, Karl Anton Fleck increasingly made themes involving the strategies and consumerism of the Western world, thoughts on identity, and environmental issues the central elements of his artistic universe from the mid-60s onward.
Fleck drew grotesquely mutated creatures, referring to them with names like brain adapter, industry hound or observational vampire, in which the blurred boundaries between human beings and technical or animal “things” is made manifest. He vividly sketched how fragile the human’s biological and artificial disposition between the animal or object world can be. In the sense of McLuhan, his depictions and landscapes become mass media, urban, economic body-object-machines. His self-portraits usually serve as the point of departure for various sequences of self-alienation (I Dream, Fleck and Flecker, Dogfleck). With these visionary and quasi utopian depictions, the artist was in 1966/67 already anticipating a critique of today’s biopolitics, where biologically artificial mutations lead to the creation of something neither human nor animal, but remain “open”, or according to the views of the contemporary philosopher Giorgio Agamben, create an anthropological machine without purpose.
Catalogue: Karl Anton Fleck: Anthropological Machine. With articles by Manfred Chobot, Andreas Felber, Elisabeth Samsonow, Dieter Schrage and Romana Schuler.
To be published by Bibliothek der Provinz, 2005. Eur 28,90.
To order: office@leopoldmuseum.org
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Karl Anton Fleck, Monkey I.
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