About the Misunderstood or: YOU DON’T SEE THINGS THE WAY THEY ARE, YOU SEE THEM THE WAY YOU ARE
Markus Waitschacher

Bernhard Wolf’s works in public space stand somewhere between graffiti, advertising copy and the total denial of all of this. His symbols, icons, quasi-icons—as Judith Laister once called them, in reference to Bruno Latour—are unconsciously very familiar to us and at the same time they testify to the most aloof unfamiliarity. “Ich komme von der Erde und habe gute Absichten” (“I come from Earth and have good intentions”) is one of his most well-known statements he has released into the world. Released because they are placed in the public realm. This then deals very differently with them. His icons are fleeting from time to time, appearing and disappearing again. Quite often, but consistently permanently, they set very big question marks into the space. Sometimes they open a utopian horizon in their combination of the very local and the extremely foreign.

It is a constant zooming in and out, metaphorically and metaphysically. The Pale Blue Dot is the name of a photo of the Earth taken by the Voyager1 space probe from a distance of about six billion kilometers—the greatest distance from which a photo of the Earth has been made to this day. The work that carries this title is a self-contained, yet open, three-part ellipsoid shape on the facade of a castle, the plaster of which is slowly crumbling on account of its time and history. This is also the case with Bernhard Wolf’s mural. Clergymen, whose dimensions stretched far into the universe, once lived there—at the same time they hardly dared to conjecture that one day there would be a photo from the universe bearing down upon them.

In a kind of dissection course in acupuncture, the wall painting for (for (for (you))), a joint project with Matthias Jäger, also explores a crumbling building ensemble. Reininghaus is a controversial, large-scale construction project in Graz, where a wide variety of interests and stakeholders come together. The remnants of a secret Nazi armaments factory were recently discovered right under the malt house floor. With its computer-generated wall pattern, the facade now looks like it has been shot at. Did the two artists subconsciously sense that their marked house is far more charged than can be surmised purely from the outside? In any case, Bernhard Wolf’s play with the misunderstood is extremely fearless. At the same time, there are interventions in the public, Chinese urban space, as well as at the university. Works like DIQIU/EARTH (LED projections in Suzhou, China) and SYNTAX (typefaces in the auditorium and the corridors of the Alpen-Adria University of Klagenfurt), both move in a semi-understood space.

For those who speak Mandarin, there is seldom anything “Chinese,” as the university teachers have long forgotten what PER ASPERA AD ASTRA could mean.
Why do Bernhard Wolf’s interventions irritate us at all? The public space is full of messages, signs and symbols. Even if we don’t understand most of them, we know how to read them carefully. Who knows what the traffic sign § 53/4: “Breakdown assistance” is supposed to represent? Every driver knows what it means. In this way, all church visitors will understand his work UPLOAD/DOWNLOAD when they wait for their personal heaven. It is exactly the same with most of the commandments and prohibitions in public space, but also with the other flood of images and symbols—advertising. His intervention in the public space of Klagenfurt, FETE BLANCHE, for example, is seen by many people as an advertisement for this Lake Wörthersee event. In a vacant lot, towards the city center, the use of this brand name is already perceived as branding and read as advertising. That speaks volumes. Can we (still) understand messages in public space as non-advertising? Where a political message has long since come across as more primitive than any laundry detergent advertisement? stellvertretend für alles was sein kann (on behalf of everything that can be) is another work that makes the artist’s gesture seemingly visible: We can practically follow his brushstroke. Here, too, he doesn’t make it so easy for us, since the drawing comes from the stage design of Marta Navaridas’ performance ONÍRICA, which was presented in 2020 at the Kunsthaus Graz. The artist took a small excerpt from it and enlarged it onto the outer facade of the Forum Stadtpark. Again it is a zoom out and again we can decide whether we want to zoom along with it at all. If many of his works refuse to use the acclaimed artist’s handwriting, then it becomes palpable as a representative of everything. In fact, representatives are that Bernhard Wolf puts into our arms. We can annihilate ourselves with them, love them and misunderstand them: They stand for something much bigger and at the same time for ourselves.

Markus Waitschacher
Freelance curator and program designer for Visual Arts at Forum Stadtpark, Graz, Austria