LEBANON – Last month, a news release from AVA Gallery and Art Center left me arching an eyebrow.
Johannes Grenzfurthner, an Austrian artist and practitioner of “context hacking,” was stopping by the gallery on Aug. 12 as part of a tour across the U.S. and Canada.
“AVA is not the destination; we’re the layover. We’re the lukewarm half-glass and airport pretzel of his itinerary. And we could not be more proud,” the release said.
The plan as described seemed uncertain: “There may be talking. There may be an object.”
Both intrigued and a little put off, I saw no choice but to attend. I was glad that I did.
Grenzfurthner’s remarks on working in Austria – a fairly conservative country, yet one whose public arts funding has enabled him to make a living as an artist – led me to reflect on how art in the Upper Valley engages with its environment and where it falls short.
His visitation turned out to be a presentation on monochrom, the fanzine and art collective Grenzfurthner started as a teenager in the ’90s.
Still operational more than 30 years later, the group, which comprises about nine core members, is interested in the overlap among art, technology, and activism, and in the search for the best medium to explore those themes.
“Context hacking,” it turns out, is a name for that search, which has pushed the group to experiment with performance art, computer games, pranks, and, in the last decade or so, filmmaking.
Listening to Grenzfurthner talk about monochrom beside his PowerPoint of janky memes felt like attending an art history lecture from a mad scientist who’d emerged from the bowels of the internet with a sticker-covered laptop and a story to tell.
In his presentation, delivered to a half dozen or so onlookers, including the artist’s partner and fellow monochrom member, Jasmin Hagendorfer, Grenzfurthner foregrounded the founding of monochrom by discussing formative encounters with pop culture and the internet while growing up in Stockerau, a town outside of Vienna.
Around age 8, he watched “The Day After,” a 1983 film about the residents of a small town in Kansas grappling with the consequences of nuclear war.
The film “gave me the realization that it all might be over,” said Grenzfurthner, meaning you might as well take some big swings in life.
Sci-fi films like “Alien” and “the enormously prescient” “RoboCop” also left a mark, Grenzfurthner, 51, said.
Then there was the day his family got a modem. Suddenly Grenzfurthner could talk to people online, and the internet expanded into its own kind of solar system, a place to connect with those who shared his fascination with cyberpunk and nerd culture.
After discovering the “Industrial Culture Handbook,” a collection of interviews and essays on industrial music and performance art, Grenzfurthner realized he wanted to make his own zine with help from a few people he recruited online.
The first monochrom zine, an amalgam of writing on tech, art and politics, came out in 1993.
Over the next few years, the group began experimenting with film using rudimentary video cameras. They also made computer games and tinkered with other playful ways of engaging with the internet, like when they started a list of “beautiful typos” they found online.
The project was an “incubator for ideas (sometimes bad ones),” read a slide in Grenzfurthner’s presentation.
Part of monochrom’s artistic output also involves reckoning with Austria’s culpability in World War II and the Holocaust, which Austrians are often reluctant to do, Grenzfurthner said.
“It’s almost like a hole in the soul of Austria,” he said.
To prompt confrontation with the country’s Nazi past, monochrom staged “Der Streichelnazi,” or “Nazi Petting Zoo.” A man dressed in a Nazi uniform stood inside a fenced-in enclosure on a city sidewalk while a pitchfork-carrying Grenzfurthner encouraged passersby to feed and pet him.
“The critter is well behaved today!” Grenzfurthner said to the camera in a video about the project.
In 2024, the group released “Solvent,” a horror film about a liquified Nazi whose toxic sludge is infecting the grounds of an Austrian farmhouse with a terrible evil.
There’s a trickster mentality at the heart of monochrom’s work, a sort of thumb biting at the establishment using pranks and zany internet art.
But those kinds of satirical winks are harder to pull off in a world where satire and hegemony are increasingly merged.
“Trump became president in part because of meme culture,” said Grenzfurthner, recalling how the once innocent cartoon character Pepe the Frog became a symbol of the alt-right during Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
“How can you, as an artist, disrupt a disrupted world?” Grenzfurthner said. “In a certain way you have to be way more precise nowadays.”
After the presentation ended, I walked out into the street buzzing, like I’d just knocked back a double espresso.
Grenzfurther’s presentation felt like a breath of fresh air, not just because it was weird and irreverent, but because the group was obsessed with artistic excellence and making an impact.
I don’t always find this when I look at art in the Upper Valley. Much of the work I encounter here is preoccupied with the area’s pastoral beauty, and it often fails to engage with the less pretty parts of life here, such as income inequality and the daily struggles of people who call this place home.
Work here can also feel disconnected from larger art-historical and cultural forces beyond itself – the rise of the internet, for example.
The result is many, many pretty pictures, but not a whole lot to sink one’s teeth into.
Lars Hasselblad Torres, who became AVA’s executive director last year, said the onus is on Upper Valley galleries to change that.
“Those voices aren’t given space on gallery walls, but they’re out there,” he said in a recent interview.
Hasselblad Torres recognizes that many of AVA’s visitors come to the gallery “looking to be reassured” by what they see.
There’s nothing wrong with that, but there’s also room at the gallery for more.
“I do believe AVA can be a space where we both engage with art on the level of beauty and representation…without being in conflict with talking about the way life is experienced within those beautiful landscapes,” Hasselblad Torres said.
Hosting Grenzfurthner was a step in that direction.
Summer Soiree
First Branch Coffee is hosting its second annual Summer Soiree on Friday, Aug. 28 at 228 Chelsea St. in South Royalton. Bethel singer-songwriter musician Nate Mott will perform at 7:30 and Travis Dunning will be giving tattoos to intrepid visitors. There will also be several vintage vendors and food and drink courtesy of the South Royalton Community Garden.
Woodstock reading
The Yankee Bookshop and The Norman Williams Public Library are co-hosting a book launch event for South Pomfret author Elizabeth Wellington Rollins’ new novel “The Three Graces of Pearl Street” in Woodstock’s Town Hall Theatre at 7 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 3. Out on Sept. 1, “Pearl Street” follows three generations of Italian American women, all named after the Three Graces from Roman mythology, as they come to live together after years of being apart. To learn more about the Sept. 3 reading and Rollins’ book, go to yankeebookshop.com.
New play
New London Barn Playhouse is staging “Wakeman,” a new folk-rock musical based on the life of Sarah Rosette Wakeman, who disguised herself as a man to fight in the Civil War, from Sept. 3 through 6. This “developmental production” is part of the Playhouse’s initiative to support new works. For tickets ($50) and more information, go to nlbarn.org.
Stained glass show
About a week remains to catch the retrospective of Vermont artist Phillip Godenschwager at Chandler Center for the Arts in Randolph. “Bringing It All Together” is up through Sept. 6. Visiting hours at the gallery are noon to 5 p.m., Tuesday through Saturday. Learn more about the show at chandler-arts.org.
