| The Kiesler Foundation Vienna has been a centre of interest for scholars, artists and persons engaged in cultural sectors from the most diverse disciplines. Since its establishment in 1997, the Kiesler Archive has become the focal point of an international debate which, among other things, attends to Kiesler’s utopian architectural designs, his innovative furniture- and exhibition design, his stage-, cinema- and theatre projects, as well as his theory of Correalismus. Kiesler’s universal perception of reality directly corresponds to his artistic concepts, which are primarily concerned with the current needs of the human being and his time. Now it seems to be evident that Kiesler’s heritage, the documentation of his artistic perception in circa 18.000 blue prints, sketches, drawings, photographs and scripts, offers a widely ranged stock for both historical evaluation and contemporary inquiry.
Thus, research projects like the Kiesler Foundation aspire to explore his work in a historical context, to evaluate and to publish Kiesler’s position in the history of the development of the European Avant-garde in the 1920s to the large designs of post-war-modernity, and seek to make his complex oeuvre available to public discourse as a stimulus for current debate.
All his life, Kiesler himself was closely connected to major protagonists of his time, such as Theo van Doesburg, Marcel Duchamp, André Breton, John Cage, Jasper Johns and Willem de Kooning, to name just a few. His historical impact is still visible in the work of subsequent generations, such as in the repertoire of biomorphic architectural designs of the 1960s, as well as in numerous contemporary concepts of art. When Kiesler in 1962 says that “Today it is the architect, who needs to choose from the wide range of historical documentation and the present technical developments the valid facts which can be successfully coordinated with a contribution to a creative way of life”, he formulates a claim that is still valid today. Especially architects of the younger generation, like Greg Lynn, Lars Spuybroeck and the laureates of the Austrian Frederick Kiesler Prize for Architecture and the Arts 2004, Asymptote / Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture confirm Kiesler’s relevance today, whereas the interest in his work is less based on the formal-aesthetic references of a dynamic language of form, rather than on Kiesler’s interdisciplinary working method and his research on human perception.
The Kiesler Foundation particularly oversees those artists and architects, who in the research of their work concern themselves with Kiesler’s ideas.
Today, there exist two models, plans, sketches and the like of Kiesler’s project Endless House. His innovative exhibition arrangements, like the Art of This Century Gallery for Peggy Guggenheim in 1942, the World House Gallery (1956-1957) or the exhibition Bloodflames (1947) in the Hugo Gallery New York were temporary interventions. Stage prospects and designs for the theatre are preserved in the form of collages and photographic documents. Even though some of his mature sculptures and images are privately owned, his multifunctional furniture design, mainly in the form of sketches and patent specification, is preserved. Hence, the Kiesler Foundation Vienna owns the nearly complete documentation of his unfinished or unexecuted works. Not only Kiesler’s dictum of the permanent adaptation of artistic concepts to advanced living conditions, but also his archived manifestations of a work in progress seem to protract Kiesler’s “expiration date”, seem to provoke further editing and extrapolation of his work. |
