16.11.2022 - 05.01.2023
Opening 15.11.22 7 pm

WAF
Schadekgasse 8
1060 Wien

In medieval times, the golden age of mosaics, whatever the mosaic, its value rested on the fact that it was first and foremost a religious and hence a political statement, not an artistic one. Mosaic artists remained anonymous. The artist was merely a paid servant of the patron, a craftsman. The making of mosaics, while fine, delicate work, was considered a form of manual labor less valuable than fine arts or services to God. In De diversis artibus, Theophilus even goes so far as to claim that craftsmanship alone does not produce art, but that it requires the gift of the Holy Spirit. God, who had created man in his image, was considered the ultimate artist.

Line Lyhne’s appropriation of the ‘applied’ genre of mosaic – which she reclaims as a contemporary artistic form carrying the principles of collage, montage, objet trouvé, and readymade – is at odds with the historical devaluation of craft that continues to prevail in contemporary art. Including different materials and methodologies, from hand-crafted marble and steel to the employment of readymades and sculptures made in collaboration with her glassblower friends Rick Gerner and Johanne Jahncke, Line Lyhne transgresses the boundaries between fine and applied arts, thereby questioning the value of craft, the agency of the material, and the role of the artist as producer. Her exercises in material, technique, and style, both individual and collaborative, reference the histories of abstract expressionism, modernist sculpture, and conceptual art, and thus subvert potential perceptions of mosaic and marble as concessions to conservative notions of craft.

The tiles of Line Lyhne’s mosaics are industrially produced. They come in readymade slabs, are then taken apart and reassembled. In this process, their industrial aesthetic and their clean, shiny surfaces become handmade and worn. Unlike medieval mosaics, whose tesserae assemble into a sublime whole, thereby disguising the collective handcrafted labor that went into their production, in Line Lyhne’s mosaics, labor is artificially produced as a retrospective layer of alienation. The mosaics thus perform a “craft morphology” and claim “more love hours than can ever be repaid”[1] than are actually contained inside them.

If Line Lyhne’s marble sculptures were workers, and they could speak, what would they say? Perhaps, one would speak in my tongue and say: I’m exhausted. Tired from its form and function, its art history, it would take a brief respite from being an object of contemplation and critique, just a quick nap on a chair, not even a real plinth, something for the common people. Sitting on top of a simple chair, the marble sculptures come to embody characters, performing tired workers more than mere value. 

While Line Lyhne’s works recall certain historical discourses of form, their presentation in space complicates these through conceptual contradictions and material confrontations. The industrial mosaics perform craftiness while hanging on walls to prove themselves as paintings, or as ‘sculptures of images’, as the artist calls them. The steel sculptures that hold precious glass works, which in turn could hold other pieces, were made for the simple chairs, not vice versa, and are at the same time supported by them like pedestals. Who is holding whom here? Who inscribes their flesh on whose surface? These questions are fundamentally questions of presentation and display, of support structures and categorization, of taste, perhaps.

By the early 18th century, mosaics had joined the canon of artwork and antiquities collected by the aristocracy and displayed as examples of good taste; they had become signifiers of learned identity and social distinction which broadcast economic and cultural wealth. Good taste is both an aesthetic faculty of perception and evaluation and a social category that structures fine cultural and economic distinctions. In complicating the dichotomy of fine arts and handiwork, Line Lyhne obscures distinctions between good and bad taste to open up new aesthetic categories that play, in an almost campy fashion, with the ambivalence of taste and artistic value.

(Exhibition text written by Sophia Roxane Rohwetter)

[1] Mike Kelley, sculpture. More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid and The Wages of Sin 1987