ROMANA SCHEFFKNECHT 1982 2013 - romana scheffknecht videos

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UnTITLeD. InTeRVIeW WITH RoMAnA ScHeFFknecHT
Patricia Grzonka
We met for a number of conversations. First we were
at Romana’s ground floor apartment, which is more of
a studio than a home. Then we met at my only recently
acquired ground floor home, which is also a writer’s
den. Between these two meetings we went for walks,
always staying firmly grounded. A conversation about
Vienna, Sils Maria and New Media Art.
Romana Scheffknecht: It began when I thought I needed
a break from my life. I had to park myself somewhere,
and I parked myself with Oswald Oberhuber at
the University of Applied Arts in Vienna.
Patricia Grzonka: What did you do before that?
RS: I was involved with the theatre before that, in a
group called the Komödianten im Künstlerhaus, with
Conny Hannes Meyer. It was a troupe of freelance
actors in Vienna, and Conny was one of the first people
to put on Brecht after the ban on his productions had
been lifted in Austria.
PG: And what did you do there?
RS: I was in charge of props, in a kind of decor collective.
I was totally powered-out at the time so hatched
a plan not to do anything. And then I had two years of
living marvellously as an Oberhuber student. I could
really relax there, really recover.
PG: What kind of a class was it?
RS: It was called ‘Graphic Art’, but it was really
freestyle art. Oswald Oberhuber was a draw for all the
difficult people, people who didn’t want to fit in. He
was early to understand that an education can be a
laboratory situation. We didn’t produce things straight
off, we experimented. In particular, he was the first
person to run a media space where you could also work
on video.
PG: Avant-garde with New Media.
RS: Yes, there wasn’t a class for New Media before that.
Other artists, like Peter Weibel or Valie Export, hadn’t
started teaching back then. As far as I know there
wasn’t an art class where New Media played a role.
Oberhuber began doing that in 1979, and the entire first
generation of New Media artists in Austria was almost
exclusively trained there.
PG: And did it matter what direction people took with
their work?
RS: Every Wednesday at 11am there was a regular
gathering where Oberhuber talked about art. And many
of the students didn’t understand what he was on
about because he had developed such heavily Tyrolean
‘evasive tactics’.
PG: What do you mean by that?
RS: When he wanted to bring across a subject he
always talked around it, he never went straight to the
point. He wanted to pick people up along the way
and take them somewhere else. His way of teaching
was to take pleasure in artistic positions in such a way
that everybody thought: Wow, that’s really good! But
it was too complicated for a lot of people. There were
120 of us in the class, and about 30 came to the
Wednesday meetings.
PG: What kind of art was discussed?
RS: Mainly the work of other artists, whatever was
the hot topic at the time: Daniel Buren, Fluxus and, of
course, Joseph Beuys regularly came up, he was the
great point of reference at the time — not least because
he had taught at the University of Applied Arts, himself.
PG: What did you take with you from your studies?
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