Inside Out
In 1980 Maria Lassnig became the first female professor of painting in the German-speaking world. For almost 70 years she has been making difficult, complex pictures that attempt to visualize the invisible aspects of her bodily sensations. Jörg Heiser recently spoke to her in Vienna about subjects including art, life, embarrassment, dumplings and crutches

Jörg Heiser: Your works of the past two or three years are all painted on a uniformly primed canvas on which bodies are portrayed without a background. Maria Lassnig: That is a return to something similar to my ‘Static Meditations’ from the 1950s: simple brushstrokes on a naked, primed canvas. Background creates mood and atmosphere, and I don’t need that. JH: Du oder Ich (You or Me, 2005) – which shows you naked, pointing a gun at your head and another gun at the viewer – is a really drastic, brutally direct picture with a certain theatricality. ML: I call...
 
 
Classified Information
Over the past decade Peter Piller has compiled hundreds of groups of images – from unspectacular newspaper photographs to old postcards and abandoned archives by Dominic Eichler

After laying out on a coffee table half a dozen downloaded pictures of vintage artillery shells, bombs and bullets photographed by private vendors in suburbia, Peter Piller quipped: ‘Now that is damned explosive Gemütlichkeit!’ All kinds of people seem to have cleaned-up munitions in their homes. Unwittingly absurd and macabre, some of the photographs are cropped like family portraits, the gleaming metal subject resting in an armchair or standing in a corridor. Some have a packet of cigarettes or a mobile phone next to them for scale. And then, around the edges, are...
 
 
The World’s a Stage
In which Dan Fox interviews a dead novelist about truth, fiction and representation in the films and photographs of Irish artist Gerard Byrne

A country road, a tree. Evening. Dan Fox (1976– ), sitting on a low mound, is trying to take his boot off. He pulls at it with both hands, panting. He gives up, exhausted, rests, tries again. As before. Enter B.S. Johnson, novelist (1933–1973). Dan Fox: I could talk about Walter Benjamin. I notice some critics have brought up Bertolt Brecht, or the history of photojournalism but why step in other writers’ footprints? Something tells me it would be easier for me to articulate my thoughts about Gerard Byrne’s work with the help of a literary conceit, some clever...
 
 
Katya Sander
Privet hedges, capitalist rashes, toilets and feminist graffiti by Lars Bang Larsen

The story of the suburb seems to be based on the idea that nothing should happen within its supposedly sheltered confines. In contrast to urban space, which is busy, noisy and constantly shifting, the suburb’s physical and psychological environments articulate a grammar of harmonious co-existence, a kind of exalted stability. In Denmark the idea of suburban security is epitomized by the privet hedge commonly employed to demarcate the family home (hence ‘privet fascism’, the slang term for middle-class narrow-mindedness). An almost imperceptible presence, the hedge...
 
 
Reference Material
Helen Mirra’s works in sound, fabric, film, photography, text and sculpture are rich with allusions and overlaps across a range of subjects by Peter Eleey

Ascension is a tiny island in the South Atlantic, seemingly bereft of inhabitants. Like Diego Garcia, a small piece of the Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean, it sits at a gigantic crossroads of electronic communications. Although neither the British nor the American government has confirmed these atolls’ respective espionage functions, the utterly remote isles are assumed to be surveillance nodes, perfectly poised to capture a range of signal intelligence passing invisibly over them. Although perhaps a strange comparison, there is a similarly secretive...
 
 
Mick Peter
Phrygian bonnets and dunces’ caps; dice, cards and concrete by Tom Morton

The poster designed by Mick Peter to advertise his recent solo exhibition at Transmission, Glasgow, depicts two wooden butcher’s blocks, scarred by heavy cleaver blows. The block on the left takes the form of a pig giving a piggyback to a man in a Phrygian bonnet, while the block on the right reverses this tableau. In the first image both human and animal frown, while in the second they break into broad grins. We might read the poster as a pedagogical device, or even as a carnivore’s revision of the Yin-Yang symbol’s symbiotic orbs. At any rate it seems to be a...
 
 
Ghost World
Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s compelling films have often delved into the realms of popular folklore and the supernatural. His latest project, Syndromes and a Century, is no exception by Bert Rebhandl

One of the key factors still differentiating cultures is how people conceive of their ancestors. Are the dead gone for ever, surviving only in our memories? Are they still present in some other dimension, watching over us and influencing our lives? Or have they taken on a new identity and been reincarnated? Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s most recent film, Syndromes and a Century (2006), addresses just such issues. In one scene we see two men talking somewhere in rural Thailand. A singer and a monk, they don’t have much in common except for a vague physical...
 


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