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Lovely Ferdinand by Sergius Kodera A brand new, golden Porsche – the Ferdinand – oh yes: the strongest model, the fastest, most beautiful, wettest dream of the young men of yesterday. But the Audi 80 at the intersection leaves it in the dust, with screeching tires, with a roaring motor, in despair, so to speak. Over on the sidewalk, a pensioner gestures in excited irritation that the vehicle has no license plate. And at a closer look, there are a number of things that are not quite right. The golden Ferdinand is right in the middle of the road and doesn’t make a sound. When the light turns green, the vehicle moves forward, but slowly, very slowly, as the driver does not step elegantly on the gas, but instead on bicycle pedals. Something like this is what Hannes Langeder’s account of the first excursion of his most recent art object sounds like. The story says much about our habits of perception, about how we are usually satisfied with quickly identifying a thing – here the curved engine hood, the gold color, the low car body, rear spoiler (veeeeery important, yes!) – and straight away, we think we know what’s going on. We associate “gentlemen” sports drivers chronically in search of the company of young ladies (if not recently deceased Austrian politicians) or something like that. Hannes Langeder, who is also deeply concerned with demonstrating the destructive dimension of the automobile, has cleverly taken a detour, however. He operates more as an imitator than an agitator. The bicycle Porsche is an emblem for the way that repetition is never the reproduction of the same. Initially, his work is mimetic in the derogatory sense, in which Plato described art in general: mere imitation of the forms of things without fulfilling their function, useless stuff, in other words. Yet the bicycle Porsche immediately raises the question, what was actually the function of the original, the real, ostentatiously powerful, roaring motor vehicle? For me as a passionate cyclist, this results in the associations outlined in the beginning: even the 400 HP powerhouse has no other function than to represent wealth, power or potency. Considered from this perspective, Langeder guides the intended recoding by the audience here, the subversion noted by Cultural Studies in general for the consumption of trivial mass culture products; this re-semantization of the familiar has always been the main business of artistic work. To this extent, his work recalls Erwin Wurm’s “Fat Car” (2000/01, mak, Vienna): Here a car body (this time with a number plate) was surrounded by air-filled pink plastic, its round forms vaguely recalling a Porsche and enabling associations with human flesh, sex toys and similar things. The bicycle Porsche functions as signifier for the fascination with the figure of an automobile that has lasted since the 1950s; yet Hannes Langeder’s art object is lacking specifically the “self-moving” feature of a motor, an essential characteristic of the car. Nevertheless, the vehicle remains recognizable as a Porsche: “it does move”, but not under its own power, but rather through the muscle power of the person inside it. This opens up a space for reflection, for an opposition that has already been discussed by Roland Barthes. In the industrial commodities world the mass-produced consumer object becomes a sign for something else, due to its recognizability. The serially produced, seemingly identical objects thus create a sphere, in which communication takes place with them. In this sense, the bicycle Porsche is a clever intervention, because it does not involve a serially produced object. It is a one-of-a-kind, at best a prototype: through his mimicry, his only seemingly careful artistic intervention, Hannes Langeder manipulates “the Ferdinand”; he saves the aesthetic form of the vehicle, the phantasm of which has become a general cultural good (which Janis Joplin already sang about, although not without irony), and allows it to live on in a completely new reference context. What we are dealing with here is (to use a term from J. W. T. Mitchell’s contemporary image theory) an intervention in an image – in the mental image of a thing –, but less with pictures, i.e. a concrete representation. Dr. Sergius Kodera,
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