Crime as Ornament

Text by curator María Inés Plaza Lazo

The complexity of human experience becomes even more elusive the more we try to describe it in words. After the two world wars, the simplification of universalist imperatives was enforced. This urge to eliminate parallels, ambiguities, and contradictions affected the collection, the establishment of archives, and the design of buildings like the one hosting this exhibition: all were intended to maintain a chronological sorting of the world, a technocratic, imperial order that simultaneously celebrates and conceals power structures.

However, exhibition spaces also serve silence and the narration of the unsaid. I want to add both to the antitheses of Loos’ ideas in his controversial essay, "Ornament and Crime," which advocated clearer, simpler, and more unified narratives at the beginning of the 20th century. Loos’ call for reduction and clarity is trapped in an old nervous system, in forms of belonging and recognition conceived and enforced only for a certain type of citizen. These forms are currently undergoing violent change, in the chaos of alternative, communal attempts at societal formation. We have had the opportunity to understand and multiply history and the present through non-binary, interspecies, and post-colonial perspectives.

Constantly, images of amputated children appear on the glass surfaces of mobile devices. The structure between dying in a distant place, a technocratic system orchestrating streams of images of this dying, and a moral economy where these images serve as tokens is convoluted, disturbing, and monstrous. There is a crack in the so-called civilization, following an epistemic landslide whose consequences seem neither foreseeable nor navigable. Helplessly, we witness daily how crimes become ornaments on our screens.

Loos’ rejection of ornaments ultimately expresses a Western cultural hegemony that marginalizes other aesthetic traditions and forms of expression. This may have been relativized today. Yet, the recognition of those ‘other’ forms of expression only occurs either in resistance or through exoticization, which still maintains the hegemonic order. Vienna today offers a diverse architectural mix of historical buildings, modern architecture, and contemporary design. This allows us to vividly trace both continuities and breaks in thought and practice in architecture, design, and artistic production.

The text by Noit Banai for Curated By 2024 deserves not only to determine the intellectual framework of this festival but also to stand directly in conversation with artworks. Banai’s plea for a diverse and inclusive approach to design and historiography should be seen in opposition to Loos’ rigid ideas. By focusing on cultural diversity and the subjective perception of beauty and aesthetics, Banai’s arguments directly counter Loos’ theories on ornaments. Subjective aesthetics are not only what interests me personally as a curator; they also do not shape the artworks gathered in the Galerie Crone. Rather, these works show forms of contemplation of subjectivities only insofar as they differentiate between personal preferences, cultural belonging, and historical contextualizations.

In "Belle Epoque dos Tropicos," Noara Quintana seeks lost symbols of European colonization in Brazil. The rubber cultivation and the region’s economic crisis affect not only her entire family but also shape her artistic work. This is based on the materiality of everyday objects, in which ghostly traces of colonial imagination like Art Nouveau fantasies recur, as well as those of individuals, practices, and identities silenced by the neocolonial structures of modernity. Quintana’s ornaments on fluorescent rubber intertwine the exoticized and extinct, the recognized and repressed.

Philip Wiegard’swallpapers serve as a kind of preamble to the exhibition: his abstract designs emerge from an ethic of cooperation, as Wolfgang Ullrich beautifully describes in Wiegard’s catalog for his solo exhibition at Schloss Gandegg. patterns consist of disparate colors, shapes, and textures. They are always collectively painted by children in carefully prepared workshops. Wiegard remains the initiator of the process, paying each child for their participation. Loos saw ornamentation as a cultural "regression" (to where, exactly?) and considered simple, unadorned forms as expressions of moral and intellectual integrity. For Wiegard, the ornament represents a universal openness to the diversity of human experience and the richness of possible perspectives.

Paul Sochacki’spaintings allow mythical creatures and quotes from the art world to meet casually. His paintings move, at first glance, between abstraction and romanticism. Familiar motifs entice poetry and humor into complex interpretations. As we delve into his stories, we begin to recognize connections to real situations and their social contexts. Although Sochacki’s images sometimes appear childish and fairy-tale-like, they often present a sharp reflection on social conditions. This also concerns Sochacki as my co-editor of the street magazine Arts of the Working Class. In this exhibition, he will link the various spaces into a network of speculation about the values of art.

Loos’ term "tasteful forger," which he used to describe artists creating ornaments in his time, brings me to the work of Marcel Odenbach. Since the 1970s, Odenbach has developed a specific visual language using archival material, film and television cuts, and self-produced images and film sequences, experimenting with film, rhythm, sound, and sampling. In his series "Außer Rand und Band," created for the Hamburg association Griffelkunst, he arranges motifs from various sources associatively or thematically. Some cutouts originate from the storming of the Capitol by Trump supporters in Washington in 2021. Others show a grim chapter of German colonial history in Africa. By adopting the form of historical wallpaper patterns, which do not follow notions of beauty or decoration but illustrate and thereby critique, Odenbach contrasts with Loos and aligns with Siegfried Kracauer’s essay "Ornament of the Masses," which analyzed film and photography as expressions of the new aesthetics of mass culture.

There are decorations and ornaments that do not become outdated through enforced modernization but through their use. Shilpa Gupta’s installation "Stars on Flags of the World" arose from the artist’s ongoing interest in the impermanence of geographical markers and imagined communities, nationality, and mobility. "How is it that all countries tell their citizens they are the best?" Shilpa Gupta asks, quoting a line from Benedict Anderson’s book "Imagined Communities." A heap of stars laid out on the floor invites questioning how competing nationalities can even share the same space or enter into dialogue. Everyone can take the stars home. Thus, Gupta offers an inclusive approach to the question of belonging and manipulates power relations.

The ruins of modernization referenced in the footage and music directly reflect the false promises of modern progress that not only define the architecture and image of cities like Vienna but also the ruins of wars and colonies, which continue to carve deeper divides in our globalized society. Kandis Williams turns the relationship between word and image into sculpture, centering themes like racism, social justice, and moral integrity. The significance of empathy in a society marked by prejudice and ignorance is emphasized in her "Readers" and her collages, which showcase the persistent social inequality between white and racialized people in the USA. These images of normalized violence and the criminalization of Black bodies are as old as Harper Lee’s "To Kill a Mockingbird" (1960), where the protagonists, Atticus and Scout, talk about it being a sin to kill a mockingbird because they just sing their song and harm no one. The mockingbird is used as a symbol for the Black farmworker Robinson, who was innocent and harmed no one, yet was shot. The mockingbird also serves as a figure that bridges distances in this exhibition. It appears repeatedly throughout the show.

Whistling, listening, passing on, whistling, listening, repeating, understanding? Who learns from whom how to whistle? How is it used in whose everyday life, how in protests, and when does whistling hold potential for resistance? Havîn Al-Sîndy uses various tools to involve everyone in the question of communication and knowledge transfer. The work "Im Nachklang" deals with whistling as a form of nonverbal, coded exchange between children, robots, fungi, and birds. Through interactive AI sculptures, a cacophony of narrative and expression is created, simultaneously questioning social norms and power structures, similar to Harper Lee’s literary characters who reveal the superficial judgments and moral failings of American society.

Ayham Majid Aghatransforms his own texts in the style of other poets, and this translation becomes an ornament. These are subtly integrated between the spaces, thus bridging the silence between the versions. The silence in historiography, where certain stories are suppressed, finds no place in Loos’ concept of clear, simple, and unified narratives in architecture. In the exhibition, his poems will be presented among the works that visually and thematically address these contrasts.