I would like to express my gratitude to the fellow guards at the Neidhartfestsaal, whose generosity and support, despite the challenges of their roles, afforded me the space to reflect and develop this project. I also thank the mentoring program Kunst at the Academy of Fine Arts for the financial support and feedback that supported this artwork.
Special thanks to my mentors Andreas Spiegl and Jens Kastner for their interests, discussions, questions, and feedback on the topic and this art work as well as to Veronika Dirnhofer and Steffie Alte for their supports and encouraging my artistic practices and during class meetings, particularly in this work during the exhibition at Rundgang 2023 in the drawing class at Schillerplatz.
I extend my gratitude to the Media Lab K7 in Schillerplatz at the Architecture Institute and the Computer Studio in Lehrgasse 6 at the Fine Arts Institute for their resources and assistance.
Lastly, I would like to thank Jakob Grabher for his continuous support in documenting my artwork throughout the exhibition.
Introduction: Working in the Neidhartfestsaal
While working as a guard in the Neidhartfestsaal in the summer of 2022, during a period when the museum had fewer visitors than average—a lingering effect of the years of quarantine—my fellow guards were kind to allow me to take time to read and take photographs when the museum was empty, in this house and in several other locations. This gave me the opportunity to reflect on the museum's wall paintings and their role in depicting the social scenes of the 14th century ain reltion to contemporary views.
The museum has carried out extensive research in this room, with restoration crews and historians working with musicians and scholars to present a rich context for the house on the one hand and the Minnesang on the other. The research and curatorial concept of the Neidhart fest saal mentions the representation of class and power in society in the 14th century based in many part on Johan Huizinga’s concept of play, particularly as articulated in Homo Ludens (1938). However, the gender roles and privileges in relation to that are, in my view, stay marginalised in th current apporaches. In this art work, I encourage the viewer to consider the various perspectives of and within the society depicted in these early works. At the time of my work there, I was unable to identify this gaze, such perspectives in the museum exhibition. Here I exmines a critical apporach to the play as part of the social and cultral fields.
The Neidhartfestsaal features a series of wall paintings in Tuchlaubengasse 19 in Vienna that depict social scenes from the 14th century, adapted from the Minnesang poetry associated with Neidhart. The artist behind these five fragments of scenes in the wall painting—formerly classified as frescoes—remains anonymous, with all recognition in the current display at Tuchlaubengasse attributed to the poet Neidhart. The lack of information and background on the artist is notable given the museum's narrative, which tends to prioritize the literary significance of Neidhart's work while overlooking the artistic labor, positions involved in creating the wall paintings, and the artist's relation to the poet's position of that time. The wall painting is one of the first in a non-secular house; unlike the common wall paintings of the 14th century, this raises questions about the positions and the relationship between artist, poet, historian, and private secular spaces, which are of great interest to my work that I present here.
Endless possibilities: Play as a Social Act
The photographs and drawings here offer endless possibilities for rearrangement and reinterpretation. Each fragment introduces a new one, whether by reimagining them as homemade NFTs, pixellating them to maximum size, or viewing them as giant mosaics of fragments. This playful engagement reflects the broader tension between the present and historical references. Is this work merely a playful digital manipulation, or does it serve as a contemporary critique of how we engage with history ans social, cultral life in an era dominated by digital media? Is this work a play, an aesthetical play, what kind of play? It is Play as a Social Act. The act of reconfiguring these fragments—akin to the agency of photography and drawing as artistic and social media—challenges the boundaries of a singular narrative.
Play as a Social Act:
While Huizinga’s notion of play has contributed to the understanding on the cultural significance of historical artworks, I argue that the museum's application of Huizinga’s Homo Ludens within the Neidhartfestsaal neglects the social-historical critique embedded within the Neidhartfestsaal’s wall paintings. The scenes depicted are not merely playful or celebratory; they are deeply tied to class dynamics, social and gender hierarchy, and the tensions of medieval life. By following an art methedology here in my work on these images through photography and drawing, I aim to highlight the social critiques that have been not included in the museum's current contemporary presentation.
Engaging with Bourdieu’s theory of social Kampf, I assert that the playful act of rearranging and reinterpreting these fragments is itself a form of resistance—a way of positioning the artist, both past and present, as a critical voice in the ongoing struggle over social and symbolic capital.
Through the lens of Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus and social fields, I suggest that play can be understood as a form of social Kampf, where cultural practices are inseparable from the power dynamics at work within a society. This perspective allows us to see the wall paiting and my work not simply as artifacts but as contested spaces in which the meanings and roles of art were negotiated. In this way, play becomes an active, critical engagement with the socio-political conditions of both the medieval period and today.
The museum's current narrative, which leans on Huizinga’s idea of play as escapism, encourages a more passive engagement with the frescoes, one that risks isolating the playful elements from their socio-historical context. However, I argue that play should be seen as a dynamic process of negotiation—one that involves identity, power, and social capital. By contrasting Huizinga’s framework with contemporary understandings of cultural production, in the following methofdological apporaches in this artwork I aim to demonstrate the richness of play as a critical tool for engaging with history and society.
Referances
Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Harvard University Press, 1984.
Bourdieu, Pierre. The Logic of Practice. Stanford University Press, 1990.
Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. Beacon Press, 1955.
Kastner, Jens. Die ästhetische Disposition: Zum Zusammenhang von Kunst, Politik und Gesellschaft. Transcript Verlag, 2009.
Spiegl, Andreas. "Alles bewegt sich, nichts vergeht." Streulicht 3, Amelie Zadeh (ed.), 2018.
Acknowledgments
I would like to express my gratitude to the fellow guards at the Neidhartfestsaal, whose generosity and support, despite the challenges of their roles and mine at that time, afforded me the space to reflect and develop this project. I also thank the mentoring program Kunst at the Academy of Fine Arts for the financial support and feedback that supported this artwork.
Special thanks to my mentors Andreas Spiegl and Jens Kastner for their interests, discussions, questions, and feedback on the topic of this art work as well as to Veronika Dirnhofer and Steffie Alte for their supports and encouraging my artistic practices and during class meetings, particularly in this work during the exhibition at Rundgang 2023, in the drawing class at Schillerplatz.
I extend my gratitude to the Media Lab K7 in Schillerplatz at the Architecture Institute and the Computer Studio in Lehrgasse 6 at the Fine Arts Institute for their resources and assistance.
I would like to thank Jakob Grabher for his continuous support in documenting my artwork throughout the exhibition.
A Methodological Approach: Photography, Drawing, and Cultural in Neidhartfestsaal
Photography and drawing have both been associated as artistic practices related to the social realm. The photographs and drawings are based on and taken from the wall paintings in the Neidhartfestsaal, captured with my smartphone and printed in black-and-white or color. By drawing on these images repeatedly, I explore the tension between photography and painting, drawing, and images.
Andreas Spiegl in Alles bewegt sich, nichts vergeht." , introduces a lens through which we can understand this tension. He argues that photography operates as a formal mechanism that disrupts and reframes viewers understanding of temporality. Spiegl contends that photography’s reproducibility fundamentally alters the relationship between captured moments and their historical contexts, erasing the "here and now" and transforming the image into a "mere shadow of space and time" (Spiegl, 2018).
I apply this framework to challenge the museum's narrative, which emphasizes the poet Neidhart but overlooks the anonymous artist responsible for the wall painting.
Furthermore, Jens Kastner in Die ästhetische Disposition argues that photography has long struggled for legitimacy as an art form due to its pervasive wide use in social spaces and its association with capturing everyday moments, often viewed as lacking the "high art" status traditionally accorded to painting. Kastner, in Die ästhetische Disposition, critiques how the medium is often seen as an instrument of documentation rather than artistic expression, reflecting class-based tastes that determine what is deemed worthy of being captured or exhibited (Kastner, 2009, p. 30). This mirrors Pierre Bourdieu’s observations on how artistic taste is shaped by social position, where photography—and, I argue here, drawing mediums —are often relegated to the domain of non-dominant cultural capital.
However, I challenge this hierarchy from my position by placing photography and drawing side by side and overlapping in my work, each medium acting not merely as a tool of representation but as a site of tension and performing possibilities. Kastner’s assertion that "Bilder nicht nur erzählen, sondern auch handeln, wie bestimmte Worte es nach der Sprechakttheorie tun" (Kastner, 2009, p. 30) positions images, especially photographs, as performative acts within the social space, much like speech acts in linguistic theory. Thus, the act of photographing and drawing in the Neidhartfestsaal is not mere documentation but a critical engagement with the space and its narratives.
In this methodological approach, I navigate the interplay between photography and drawing as forms of critical practics. Both mediums, mixed and existing in between photography, drawing, and painting, allow me to intervene in the museum’s current narrative, utilizing the performative and disruptive capacities of photography to put many possibilites of interpretations, performing in the socio-historical context of the Neidhartfestsaal. Spiegl’s argument reinforces my position that photography—far from merely documenting the frescoes—offers a space for many and several reinterpreting the cultural narratives embedded in the Neidhartfestsaal. Just as Spiegl notes that the reproducibility of time mediates history in mediums such as photogrphy and in film into a form that moves without changing, I argue that my work mediates between mediums that find their action in the social realm and in the fine arts, emphasizing how both mediums interact with cultural memory, cultural productions, and social fields.