Armin Medosch on Wed, 9 Sep 2015 04:03:29 +0200 (CEST) |
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<nettime> Robert Adrian, 1935 - 2015 |
dear nettimers, it is my unfortunate duty to report that the Canadian Austrian artist Robert Adrian passed away yesterday. It all happened quickly. We celebrated his 80th birthday in February. Bob was diagnosed with cancer in June, it then went more quickly than those close to him had anticipated ... I am reluctant to call Bob a pioneer of net art or art and telecommunications. On one hand he really was someone who did things in this area at a really early stage, doing a first project with Bill Bartlet in 1979, and then starting the project Artex on the I.P.Sharp network in 1980. Yet on the other hand he never was one who tried to gain much symbolic capital out of this. Born in 1935 in Toronto, Robert Adrian primarily saw himself as a visual artist. Yet at the same time he had a very personal take on the digital revolution. Readers of nettime, a list he always held in high esteem, hopefully remember him for his seminal text, posted on this very place, and then republished in various locations, the Infobahn Blues, 1995. http://alien.mur.at/rax/TEXTS/infobahn-e.html I am not in the mood for writing a full obituary - I hope I will be able to do this at a later stage. But I want to point out a few things. One thing is something that I have already hinted at, the tension between Robert Adrian's early involvement with art and telecommunications and his lifelong identification as a visual artist. He theorised this split in a very specific way, which made him, in my view, a member of the Toronto school of media theory, in his way, not as a media theorist but as an artist-as-media-theorist. Robert Adrian moved from London to Vienna in 1972, after having met his wife, Heidi Grundmann, an Austrian radio journalist, who also had a decisive influence on media art in Austria, as founder of Kunstradio. Robert Adrian in his new place of domicile carried out work as a visual artist. One well remembered piece is Picasso's eye, a pixellated eye on the outside of a building which is still visible form afar today. At the same time he had a strong influence on the local art scene, including me as a youngster in the 1980s. His works, such as The World in 24 Hours, Ars Electronica 1982, or the telephone concerts linking Vienna with Budapest, Warsaw and Berlin when the iron curtain still existed, have an enduring importance, and have already entered the history books (but maybe not in a way entirely doing them justice). However, what is for me more important is the way in which Robert Adrian was an important presence in the art scene in Vienna and Austria. It was maybe because exactly he was an outsider, not from Austria, that he could have an integrative and catalyzing role. Apart from his work as such, it was his presence, always at the forefront, always with the young forces, between critical conceptual and contemporary art and media art and net art, that will be an enduring memory for me, from the early days of Station Rose, to the Zero projects with mailboxes in the early 1990s till his participation in the Fields exhibition in Riga last year. Bob, we will always remember you well Armin    Â
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