released 2008
KAVA & HANS JOACHIM ROEDELIUS
The Gugging Album by Kava & Hans-Joachim Roedelius
has been inspired by the artists of Gugging.
The house of artists is a small building on top of a hill
next to the Wienerwald (Vienna Woods), approximately 12
miles North of Vienna. Since 1981 it has been housing the
Gugging Artists, people who have gained a worldwide
reputation due to the high quality of their drawings,
paintings, writings and objects. They count among the most
important representatives in the artistic field of Art
Brut. Presently the House gives home to 11 residents, 8 of
which are artistically active. The House of Artists. There
is a prior history, to the House of Artists, going back to
the 1950s. The many years of work in and around the House
resulted in the creation of the Art / Brut Centre Gugging.
Today, the House of Artists forms a part of this cultural
centre.
In 1981, psychiatrist Leo Navratil and a small group of
patients moved into an empty wing of the Gugging
psychiatric hospital. Navratil called this place the Centre
for Artistic Psychotherapy. His desired diagnostic and
therapeutic successes paled in comparison to what he had
already culturally unchained. As a result of his 30-year
engagement in artistic therapy, some of his patients had
already attracted international recognition. The patients
at Gugging sketched, painted and wrote, and many of their
works had turned out to be very lucrative. Navratil’s
successor, Johann Feilacher, renamed the wing The House of
Artists in 1986 when he moved away from a romanticised view
of the handicapped and mentally disabled. Numerous
exhibitions and publications have tried to debunk this
glorified way of seeing the artists. The Gugging artists
and their works are considered to be Outsider Art. Cultural
activities or art as a social concept do not interest the
artists of Gugging. Instead, the artists’ approach to their
work is one of rawness and poetry. Their focus is only on
what they are doing, to persist in their own style which
differentiates them from the rest. They live as a group,
but remain solitary in their creativity.
The Gugging artists have received the Oskar Kokoschka Art
Prize, two of the poets have been accepted into the Graz
Writers Association, and there has been a worldwide
interest from galleries, museums and collectors for their
drawings, paintings, objects and writings. Many doors have
been opened through the open respect from artists such as
Rainer, Pongratz, Jandl, Mayröcker, Andre Heller and David
Bowie. The far-reaching influence of the Gugging patients
as artists has provided a path for many other people with
psychological problems and mental handicaps to use art to
improve their quality of life.
Hans-Joachim Roedelius
Roedelius was born in Berlin in 1934 and lives in Baden bei
Wiens since 1990. He was trained as a physiotherapist and
masseur at a German clinic, the Charité Berlin. He worked
in these professions, as well as a hospice attendant from
1961 to 1967 when he decided to become an artist. Since
then, he has devoted himself to the creative arts as a
composer, musician, poet and writer. He has also served as
the director of the More Ohr Less symposium which he
founded at Lunz am See in 2004. Since 2005, he has served
as the honorary president of the Moving Cultures festival
in Tirana, Albania. He is the co-founder and member of
bands such as Kluster, Cluster and Harmonia. 
His name appears on
over 160 LP and CD releases, including cooperative projects
with artists such as Conrad Schnitzler, Dieter Moebius,
Brian Eno, Holger Czukay, Konrad Plank and many others. His
musical career began with the application of
electrically-generated sound material, which is to say the
use of any kind of sound or noise for musical purposes. As
a student of Joseph Beuys and Conrad Schnitzler, he is a
member of the Fluxus movement. He is the creator of more
than 1000 registered works, texts, poems and visual art. He
has also been involved with various dance and theatre
productions, as well as radio plays and film
soundtracks.
Roedelius: I became a sound artist and musician after I
finished my state board exams to qualify as a nurse,
physiotherapist, and masseur for the Berlin Charité
Hospital. It was during my time at the psychological and
neurological clinic there that I came into contact with
people who were described as disturbed and psychologically
fragile. I also worked as a hospice carer for dying
patients at Berlin’s West End Hospital. This probably gave
me a more intense outlook on life here and in the hereafter
than is normal for the average person. At the beginning of
2007, Michael Martinek asked me if I had any desire to
participate in the Gugging Project. I immediately accepted
because I wanted to see if I could create a musical link to
the artists at Gugging, specifically in their position as
outsiders who find themselves in a place of exile which has
been sanctioned by society. It is up to the listener of
this project to determine if I have been successful. In any
case, my Gugging Pieces are a reflection on my personal
experiences during my training at the Berlin Charité
Hospital and my long years of experience with patients from
all social backgrounds, be it in Germany or in France,
where I mainly worked as a private therapist. Specifically,
I wanted to look at the potential before me when I applied
the most attention possible to myself and to the people in
my immediate surroundings. To quote Umberto Eco: Where can
one find the light which has been lost? One looks for it in
the fires, where, after the blaze, the flames continue to
smoulder beneath the dead roots of the charred
foilage...
Roedelius
Homepage
KAVA
Producer and artist Thomas Pötz, alias KAVA, has proven
himself to be an extraordinary talent when it comes to
transparent, glass-clear sounds, refined rhythms, and
high-energy songs with electro-pop appeal. Instead of a
classic rock band career, KAVA, who was born in Vienna in
1981, has won positive praise around the globe for his
debut album The Empty Hall Sessions, which was released in
2004 by fabrique records. It has earned kudos for its cool
clicks and cuts, aesthetic beat formations and carefully
chosen classic cuts. For months, KAVA studied the lives and
the creative processes of the Gugging artists and
transformed his observations into musical
compositions.
KAVA: My first contact with the art from Gugging was when I
saw an exhibition in the Liechtenstein palace in Vienna
with my father in the year 1987 It was then, at the age of
6, that I watched August Walla gobble down a vast number of
meat sandwiches which he kept safeguarded in a shopping
bag. At the same time, my father would not allow me to take
a children’s tour of the palace. He said I should make up
my own mind rather than take a tour which was designed to
talk down to me. I am grateful to my father for that up to
this very day. Indeed, the works left a powerful and
fearful impression on my mind, but it also left a lasting
impression of the power of art on the imagination. The
tracks on the CD are as varied and as exciting as the art
and background stories of the Gugging artists. The
fantastic artistic freedom and variety in Gugging inspires
and motivates. Many tracks emerged from personal
impressions after visits to Gugging. Others relate to
individual works or stories, or as an individual gift to a
specific artist.
Pics taken by Patricia Weisskirchner / snow4white.com
Artwork by Morgen Berlin / morgen-berlin.com
The Gugging Album is powered by Wien Energie &
SKE
THE GUGGING ALBUM -
RELEASE JUNE 2008
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©2024 - KAVA
