The first collaboration within our research project (Co_Lab #1) was designed as an ongoing workshop, i.e. a series of exchanges, meetings, and reflections among a small group of researching artists whose practices combine critical archive research with different forms of community-building activity. Culminating in September–October 2023, Co_Lab #1 ended with a sequence of four week-long workshops, followed by an exhibition at Vienna’s Exhibit Eschenbachgasse. In each week, we zoomed in on 2–3 artists/researchers participating in Co_Lab #1, dedicating each Wednesday for a public presentation, during which we would facilitate a context for an exchange between these artists/researchers and our Vienna-based friends and colleagues.

The following transcript documents the presentation of Georgia Holz’s research into the history of Vienna’s VBKÖ and the follow-up conversation that took place on September 20, 2023. The transcript has been condensed and edited for concision.

Hello everyone. I was not part of the workshops or the research project, but Gui joined Stephanie Misa and me for our transdisciplinary research project “Anonymity and Absence: Archival Sites of Speculation,” which we run at Angewandte. We proposed this project, as we are both interested in archives. Stephanie’s artistic practice also deals with archival material. We are both affiliated with the VBKÖ [Vereinigung der bildenden Künstler*innen Österreichs]. In our project, we look at artistic practices within archives, with the focus on the VBKÖ and the University of Applied Arts. Both institutions share intertwined histories, in the sense that they promoted women artists early on in different ways. The University of Applied Arts, back then k. k. Kunstgewerbeschule, allowed women artists right from its foundation in 1868, but it was similar to the Bauhaus’s case, where the women were mostly pushed into arts and crafts. At a certain period between 1900 and 1915, they were expelled again because Angewandte was “run over” by female students: there were more than 50% of them at some point. In order to give more space to male students, female students were banned for 15 years. It was exactly during this gap that the VBKÖ was founded (in 1910) for the purpose of promoting women artists, of giving them the opportunity to show, to sell, to be visible. At that time, the VBKÖ also successfully lobbied for female students to be accepted at the Academy. These histories collide or intertwine at some point, which is why we thought it would make sense to look into both archives.

My research has not gone very far yet. I started going through lists of names, checking, for instance, if the VBKÖ members also studied at the Angewandte, but, since it’s hundreds of names, it’s a lot of work. What I brought though is one object from the archive of the VBKÖ. I am stuck with it, and it haunts me. I return to it constantly. The object is the only group photograph of the VBKÖ members from the 1920s–1930s, we haven’t established the exact date. I do not know how to approach it besides resorting to my classical art-historian training, but I still feel that I project a lot onto this image. I figured that, since I have done not enough research around this photo, it would be interesting to look into my own archive, to revisit my practice and interest in the archive, and try to find a red thread between all these contexts.

Here are two examples. On the left, there’s Lora Sana, a performance artist created by Carola Dertnig, who, in this way, hinted at the absence of female artists within the Vienna Actionism group.2 She researched in detail and conducted interviews with women who were the wives or muses of the Vienna Actionists, and, on the basis of this, concocted this artist and the “documentation” of her work. On the right, you see works by Justine Frank, a Jewish surrealist queer-ish painter, created by Roee Rosen, who made up her artworks, wrote her biography, organized her retrospective, and staged fake archival material; she’s not the only fictitious character that he invented.3 That’s Zoe Crosher, who used photo material to create a new archive.4 This is a playful piece by another artist, Warren Neidich, who inserted himself into photographs of famous artists, networks, and groups, such as the Merce Cunningham group on tour, Warhol’s Factory, or the Strike expressionist.5 He would impersonate one character that remained anonymous or unknown and would go through art history from the 1920s to the 1970s, but always the white male position. This comes from the book, The Fae Richards Photo Archive, which is a fake archive created by Zoe Leonard and Cheryl Dunye, around a fictional queer Black actress in Hollywood.6

Working on this exhibition, we were informed by Carrie Lambert Beatty (2009), who coined the term “parafictional”, which fits the situation when an artist creates a fiction and tries to make it as plausible as possible for the audience.7 But, at the same time, the fiction is explicitly fictional, it’s obviously fake. I have recently thought of Carrie Lambert Beatty, when reading Saidiya Hartman’s “Venus in Two Acts.”8 The two texts were published at around the same period. Beatty writes about fiction, about the artists that imitate the real, including Michael Bloom, who creates fake events, documents, and narratives, and tries to make them seem plausible. Hartman takes up the archival aesthetics and documentary forms for the sake of realism, but, at the same time, she argues that approaching archival material, especially that of colonial archives, may require resorting to fiction. I find it interesting that these two perspectives interact.

Let’s step into the VBKÖ’s history. Because women artists were not allowed into the Secession or the Künstlerhaus, they started the association in 1910 with an exhibition organized at the Secession, called “Die Kunst der Frau” (”The Art of Women”). It was an attempt to present an overview of female art history. The VBKÖ was the first women’s art association on the continent, which was also a bourgeois project, because it was mainly upper-class women who had the means to fund their hobby or to obtain private art education. The goal was to promote women artists, to give them more visibility, and to create a possibility for them to sell their art and make a living off of it.

Now I’m moving to the photograph I brought along. We don’t know the date and the occasion when this photo was taken. I’m using a pdf, a huge scan prepared by Julia Wieger and Nina Höchtl of this group. They organized a research call in order to identify more of these women: this is the only staged group portrait of the VBKÖ that we have. We don’t know anything about most of the women. So far, we’ve identified Louise Fränkel-Hahn, who is sitting in the center wearing a black beret, she was the third president of the VBKÖ. There’s Helene Freiin von Krauß, a national socialist and a founding member of the VBKÖ. There’s Marietta von Peyfuss, identified through the research at the MAK. My attempts to identify the other women have been superficial, but I discovered three identities. The first one is Baronin Olga Brand-Krieghammer, a founding person and the first president of the VBKÖ. I also identified Johanna Kampmann-Freund, who was part of the Hagenbund and, if I remember correctly, the first woman artist who received a prize from the state of Austria, which happened also due to the lobbying work of the VBKÖ. The third is Edith Knaffl-Granström, an early member of the VBKÖ who established a network with the Swedish Women Artists Association. The other women on the photograph are Louise Fränkel-Hahn, who is the easiest to recognize because she painted her own self-portrait, where she looks similar. Somewhere in the picture there’s also Johanna Kampmann-Freund.

I’ve looked up which of these women had exhibited at the VBKÖ during that time, and, on this basis, I have assumed that this group photograph was possibly in 1930 on the occasion of VBKÖ’s 20th anniversary. This would be the only reason why Brand-Krieghammer would return to Vienna after she had moved away to Slovakia. My assumption, which I haven’t nailed down yet, is that all these women artists were exhibited at the Hagenbund at Zedlitzgasse 6 in Vienna. I have so much desire related to this image, thinking, for example, about all the possible queer couples that were part of the VBKÖ, but it is all speculation so far. I hoped that this was Stephanie Hollenstein, but it’s most likely not her. Hollenstein was the third or fourth president of the VBKÖ during the Nazi period, she was also a national socialist and a queer person. She’s fascinating and haunting. Also, she was not part of the 1930 exhibition, as there had been several splits within the VBKÖ’s structure. What I am doing now is trying to find a match. I’m also thinking of asking a fashion historian if it’s possible to establish the approximate time period when this photo was taken on the basis of the clothes that they wore, and, with this knowledge, identify other people.

Below you can read the edited transcript of several excerpts from the conversation that followed Georgia Holz’s presentation.

Do you think that you could adapt your presentation to a less informal setting? I am wondering what else you need to do with all this material. Here you are, digging around, looking for stuff that there isn’t much of, so what’s the most accessible about all this is you being direct about the ongoing process. You go through your material in a casual way, but without losing your art-historical background. It’s this other layer of para-fiction or playfulness, which, in terms of how the archives function now in the contemporary space.

I wonder which of these women were deported to concentration camps. I know that several of them were. But this also contributes to the image’s haunting quality. My question is how to respond to that.

You already have all this here. I don’t think that one cancels the other.

Do you think about it as a biographical project, as a collective biography of these women? Or is it more an institutional history of the space?

It’s both. What is special about the archive is that it has been in the same space since it was started in 1912. We are currently trying to find resources for the archive. We would like to get funding for a research room and the archive’s digitization. That’s the big dilemma: the VBKÖ was founded to promote women artists, to give them more visibility, and we are still fighting for the same things.

When analyzing this photo, it’d be interesting to think about the power relations. What are the roles that these people have? Why are some people in the back?

The two presidents are sitting in the front. And they’re all wealthy people.

Why did they have presidents? How did they organize themselves?

In no case, they were feminist frontrunners. They followed a patriarchal structure that they copied from the Secession and the Künstlerhaus. Initially, they believed that the VBKÖ would need to exist only until women were accepted into the Academy and other artist associations. The Academy started taking in female students in 1920, the Secession only after the Second World War, the Künstlerhaus even later. There were also several splits: the Wiener Frauenkunst split in 1926. This group had more progressive, more modernist, and more interesting artists. Meanwhile, if you look at the artworks in the “Kunst der Frau” exhibition, they mostly covered the subjects in the “women’s field”: women artists did not have access to male nudes, so they were stuck with landscape painting, flower painting, children, and private spaces, in a broad sense. Also, they were not aligned with the women’s liberation movement or the women’s right-to-vote movement.

Is there any documentation about the moment that women started being accepted in the Academy and other arts places? Was it meant to be a temporary or permanent gain? Is there any correspondence describing that?

There must be. I don’t know if there’s any document about the Academy allowing female students. But the prize granted by the Kaiser to female artists was the result of their lobby.

Have you found any traces of queer relationships?

Yes, some. For instance, Emma Schlangenhausen and her partner Helene von Taussig were a couple. Schlangenhausen was part of the exhibition in 1930. She was deported to a concentration camp in 1942. What I found in the correspondence between the founding members and the artists invited to become members was that Schlangenhausen did not initially accept the invite. She thought it was not necessary or worthy to create a women-only art association, as there was no such thing like good-quality “Frauenkunst.” Afterwards though, she exhibited there several times. Another person is Stephanie Hollenstein, who had a queer partner, a doctor, for a long time. Her estate is in Voralberg’s gallery, after it was handed over to the city of Lustenau, where she was born. Hollenstein was not part of the bourgeois establishment. She was a farmer’s kid, who was accidentally discovered as an auto-didact artist. After someone saw her drawings, she started studying at Munich’s arts academy, and then she became a well-known expressionist. She’s an interesting figure. She also took part in the First World War as a male soldier. She was also a national socialist, right from the start, when it was still forbidden. Then she took over the VBKÖ, and we know from her letters that she tried to press the other members to produce more portraits of the “Führer.” She also tried to establish abstractionism as not “degenerate” (”entartet”). But she failed. She was not so well known for her art production, though she was the main protagonist within the Reichskulturkammer. She died before the end of the war. Her biography will be published soon.

Did you try to find the place where the photography was taken?

The exhibition was at Hagenbund, close to the Stadtpark. I thought first that maybe it was at the Burggarten at the Glasspalast, they had exhibited there several times but not during that year. I wondered why so many of the founding members would be in one picture at a later point, and it must have been some kind of anniversary. But it’s still speculation.

You don’t have to make up too many things because history itself is fascinating enough.

Also, there is only this one photograph that tells us so much about the history of the institution. Or at least I think it does.

I am listening to you talk about the history of these women and this institution, and I see similarities to us, when we gossip about the art scene in Vienna. When you say, “Ah, I love this person’s art, but they’re a horrible person.” Or vice versa. Or about the struggles in the art scene and art market: who vouches for whom, who gets what prize, what is the importance of getting a prize, having specific funding, or having certain structures? I find it so interesting that we talk in such a contemporary way about something that’s so old.

It’s also interesting how selective this conversation becomes. You look at this image, and there’s three or four people. It’s a whole group of people, but it’s really three people, based on whom we’re focusing on and how you’re talking about it. But also if you had information about every single person, would you go through each of them, give everyone equal space, no matter what their story was? Probably not. You’d still have to create hierarchy within it anyhow, or you would just based on…

…the jury, the president.

You can tell the story according to individual biographies, but then you lose what you may have about the group. It’s interesting what the group’s biography is.

That is the point of what Vlad was asking: about what you can see through this photo, in terms of the collectivity.

The picture is nice because there are these four people, and they are clearly more important. I do this a lot like when I’m looking at images, “let’s open Photoshop and select them out.”

That’s the “magic wand.”

Some select themselves out because they’re not looking at the camera, I find that interesting.

Yeah, maybe they are annoyed because somebody pushed them into sitting in a chair, and they were like, “I don’t want to sit here.” And someone else was like, “Come sit here!”

Maybe they had to wait for a long time before the photo was taken.

Yes, it clearly took a while. By the way, it was made by a professional photograph, studio Marek, but there’s no date on it. But later, they re-produced postcards of it.

I listened to an interview with Naomi Klein about her new book *Doppelganger*, where she writes about how people would frequently confuse her with Naomi Wolf, who has gone nuts with conspiracy theory and other stuff. Klein recalls how she was once in a bathroom stall and heard some people talk about how “Naomi Klein doesn’t understand our movement,” this was during some demonstration. And Klein came out of the stall and said, “I think you have the wrong Naomi.” That’s how the book started, she realized several people mistook her for someone else. In the book, she recalls how Naomi Wolf once visited the campus, where she herself was a student, and how Wolf was a massive icon to her peers. But then this icon changed. I thought about what interesting stories you could possibly stretch out of this moment when this photograph was taken. I mean, there must be someone in that photo who went off the rails, like Wolf!

Georgia, have you thought, format-wise, whether this could become a book, an exhibition, or an extended research project?

Yes, maybe. I asked Nathan C’ha to work with it from a speculative lens, and to consider adapting the methodology of Palais de Beaux Arts.

Do you know how many members were sent off to the concentration camps?

It’s complicated, because, at that time, there had already been a split within the association. Most of the Jewish members had already shifted to the Wiener Frauenkunst. I think we counted, at some point, 33 VBKÖ members who had been sent to concentration camps. But it’s hard to verify, it’s a bit like with this picture. There had been some research on this topic done by Julie Johnson. A lot of the knowledge is missing, which, at the same time, gives you the possibility to fabulate, but it’s ultimately impossible to get somewhere specific with it. You have to live with this tension of possibly never knowing.

There is this register of members, where you see this very violent act of commenting on all members, wether they are “Halbjüdin,” quarter-jewish, “ausgetreten.”

Here I have to think about QWIEN, the queer archive here in Vienna. There is something about having a number or being able to tell the scope of what happened. It’s also important for this specific community. This is how much we lost, and this is what, in this case, the state of Austria has to deal with. There is something about this quantification that I understand in a certain way. But you can never get a proper number, or names, so…

Of course, this is a very violent act, but it also gives us information about people who are lost.