Your Take on Vienna Fringe Living: THE INSIDER TIPS: Report #1

Within hours of launching the newest in our Living On The Edge series, our inboxes were already steadily pinging to announce the arrival one great tip after another. We asked you how you live off the tourist radar, and you, White Line Hotels’ fans, have given us your edit for the cooly classic city that is Vienna.

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Living On The Edge #4: VIENNA

If you’re a long time White Line Hotels follower — and if you’re not, where were you? But seriously, welcome! — you’ve seen our Living On The Edge series travel from New York, to London, and then on to Paris. We’ve got a new edition for you, and without much further ado, let us introduce Living On The Edge: Vienna.

A polished hub. The quietly cool classic. Vienna doesn’t need to shout to get attention; with its quiet confidence it knows people are already watching. Dig beneath the surface of the city, and you’ll discover a youthful, creative and innovative vibe as captured at the Hollmann Beletage.

What’s your style of Vienna “Fringe Living”? Do you know the perfect little cafe, filled with more locals than tourists? Drop us a line with your secret hangouts &/or things you like to do in Vienna to stand a chance of winning a fab weekend for 2 in the ever so cool Austrian hub and a brand new laptop folio from our partners at Hard Graft.

Getting to know Christina Berger

Christina Berger is an emerging Austrian fashion designer based in Vienna. She started her label in 2006 during her studies, and since then has been exploring different fashion markets in order to establish her label on an international level. Today, through an exclusive interview, she is giving us an insight into what it takes to make it in the fashion business.

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Erased James Franco

Making a nod or gesture in the direction of a hero/idol/influence/whatever you prefer to call it is so common in the arts, it’s almost a right of passage, a means of elevating one’s profile a little nearer to that of who you were nodding at. If you stand near enough to a star, a little bit of stardust will land on you, right? Were the mechanics of celebrity and fame so transparent, though, we wouldn’t be interested. There just isn’t much fascination to be found in things we already understand. The ephemerality, the fragility, the altogether arbitrariness; it all mixed together in the forming of the cult of the celebrity, and its alt-culture “kill yr idols” counterpart.

Before anyone ever said “kill yr idols”, Robert Rauschenberg tried to erase them. Rauschenberg’s 1963 Erased de Kooning Drawing – in which he had literally erased a de Kooning drawing – ironically or intentionally enough, helped make him a star in his own right. Fast-forward half a century, and artist Carter has made his nod at Rauschenberg’s “nod” to de Kooning, but Erased James Franco is hard to position in terms of its namesake. Erased James Franco shows the actor himself reenacting several scenes from his past film roles with the intention of fracturing narrative and identity in order to then reconstitute it. Denied the interplay with other actors and also featuring some interesting choices in reenacted film roles not originally played by Franco (Julianne Moore’s role in Todd Haynes’s Safe and Rock Hudson’s in John Frankenheimer’s Seconds), Erased James Franco succeeds in drawing question to the concept of filmic identity, but the main issue raised is a far more difficult one.

When Rauschenberg erased that de Kooning, he obliterated the celebrity and made a work of his own, although of course what that piece of paper had been remained central to understanding the piece. In Carter’s film, even taken out of its original context, James Franco’s face remains James Franco’s face. Here the context is what has been obliterated, but is the celebrity/identity of Franco so dependent on that context as to be considered erased in its absence?

Go take a look and decide for yourself at Georg Kargl Box where it’s on until August 13^th. Wind up the debate somewhere too good to even think about erasing: Vienna’s Hollmann Beletage, as chosen by White Line Hotels.

Photos courtesy www.georgkargl.com

curated by_vienna 2011: EAST by SOUTH WEST

VIENNAFAIR, Vienna’s international art fair, will open its doors on May 12^th. With 120 prestigious galleries exhibiting this year, it’s sure to be an exhilarating – if admittedly somewhat exhausting – event, but one that any avid lover or collector of contemporary art should be sure not to miss. If you’ll be arriving a little too late to Vienna to catch the fair, or the weather’s simply too nice to be cooped up indoors, check out the 21 thematically linked exhibitions in the program of curated by_vienna’s 2011 edition EAST by SOUTH WEST. As if you needed another excuse to explore the beautiful streets of Vienna on a late spring day!

21 galleries, you say? Don’t worry, curated by_Vienna is not just another gallery week/weekend, and don’t feel like you have to see everything. What makes curated by_Vienna so special is that 21 internationally renowned curators have been brought in to develop these “special edition” exhibitions at 21 of Vienna’s leading galleries. While each exhibition stands alone within EAST by SOUTH WEST’s encompassing preoccupation with Vienna’s status as a geographical doorway to Eastern Europe, you’ll surely want to see more than one to find out how that many separate exhibitions could possibly form a cohesive whole. With individual titles as intriguing as Yet In The Future Everyone Will Be Anonymous For Fifteen Minutes, … forsakes its existence and gives its shape over to recollection., and What about this., I bet you won’t even need good weather to be tempted out of doors.

If you’ll be in Vienna in time, VIENNAFAIR runs from the 12^th until the 15^th of May. You can catch the curated by_Vienna exhibitions until June 18^th. All the gallery addresses can be found on their website. For the perfect place to chill and recoup in between all the action, White Line Hotels edit the Hollmann Beletage has all your needs covered. Don’t miss their Viennese breakfast!

Image courtesy www.curatedby.at