Zachary Formwalt But where are the Hundred-Handed Ones?

A group of figures are conspicuously absent from the massive painting on the ceiling in the newly restored Aula of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. This observation is the point of departure for a series of reflections upon the anaesthetic moments of such a space. What else is missing? Might the exclusion of the Hundred-Handed Ones (the Hecatoncheires) from the battle scene in which they did most of the brutal work towards Olympian victory hint at other exclusions from the space of aesthetic education?

Drawing on archival material from the Academy’s Graphic Collection and Glyptothek, passages from Rosa Luxemburg’s unfinished Introduction to Political Economy, Peter Weiss’s The Aesthetics of Resistance , Friedrich Schiller’s letters On the Aesthetic Education of Man , letters from the painter Anselm Feuerbach to his stepmother, and documentation of the recent restoration of the paintings in the Aula, But where are the Hundred-Handed Ones? reconsiders details from the paintings, and the architecture in which they are situated, so that the triumph of culture over nature (Feuerbach) or of thought over the laws of time (Schiller) appears less secure than the painting and its surroundings might suggest at first glance.

Artist Talk: Saturday, October 9, 2021, 1.30 pm

Talk by Johan F. Hartle with Zachary Formwalt on his site specific work of the painting by Anselm Feuerbach on the ceiling of the Aula at Schillerplatz and Jannik Franzen's video-work Originals in the British Museum (2021) in the exhibition Thicket of Ideas – Thicket of Times. Studierende der Akademie im Dialog mit Raqs Media Collective in the Exhibit Gallery