La Gabbia di Ezra Pound / Ezra Pound´s Cage, Curator:Vittorio Urbani, Nuova Icona, Venedig (Venice Biennale 2007)
at Oratorio di S Ludovico, Calle dei Vecchi, 30123 Venezia
Hans Winkler is invited to show his installation "Ezra Pound´s Cage" at Nuova Icona in June 2007. He is working as an artist mostly on public intervention and side spefic projects all over the world for many years. Hans Winkler is developing art pieces which are connected to the city and space. His art is dealing with issues of the society and intervene in daily life, like the aestetic poem of the project "un incedente in gondola" at Nuova Icona. On the Brennerpass he changed 1997 (with his p.t.t.red partner) a mountaincabin, used by shepards into a mountain/hermitage-library, filled with books suggested only by international writers and philosophers.
For the "Ezra Pound´s cage" installation he is reconstructing the cage, which was especially built by the American Army 1945, to detain Ezra Pound. For the project Hans Winkler did research in the USA and is using material and drawings from the handbook of the American Army. This kind of small and open outdoor cages are still in Guantanamo, Cuba. The installation is telling the story of Ezra Pound´s life, who lived and died in Venice, and it shows also a part of the history of the avantgarde movement of the 20th century. Where Ezra Pound had an enourmous influence. He was often called "poet´s poet", and generally considered as the poet and most responsible for defining and promoting a modernist aesthetic in poetry. In the early teens of the twentieth century, he opened a seminal exchange of work and ideas between British and American writers, and was famous for the generosity with which he advanced the work of such major contemporaries as W. B. Yeats, Robert Frost, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway and especially T.S. Eliot. Pound helped to get Eliot's poems into print. In Paris 1920 he moved among a circle of artists, musicians and writers who were revolutionising the whole world of modern art. He was friends with notable figures such as Marcel Duchamp, Tristan Tzara, Fernand Leger, and others of the Dada and Surrealist movements. Pound published over 70 books and translated Japanes plays and Chinese poetry. The Cantos, a series of poems which he wrote from 1920 throughout his life (also during his time in the cage), are considered as masterpiece of world literature, which won the Bollingen Prize 1948. In his poems he increasingly reflected his preoccupations with politics and economics. He lived almost his whole life in Italy (since 1924). He became involved in Fascist politics, and did not return to the United States until 1945. At the age of 60, he was arrested and on charges of treason for broadcasting Fascist propaganda by radio to the United States during the Second World War and kept like an animal in an outdoor cage, exposed to all weathers for some months. In a trial he was labelled as paranoid by the examining psychiatrists. Pound spent 12 years in Washington, D.C., in a hospital for the criminally insane. In 1958, he returned to Italy and settled in Venice, where he died 1972. He is interred in San Michele Cemetery.
Landesausstellung Tirol, Franzensfeste, 2010
www.nuovaicona.org info@nuovaicona.org
VENEDIG: EZRA POUNDS KÄFIG HS WINKLER, Ezra Pounds Käfig, Venedig 2007 2002 inszenierte der Berliner Künstler HS Winkler in Venedig die "Ästhetik des Untergangs" als Bootsunfall. Eine Gondel, die als das Symbol Venedigs schlechthin gilt, wurde samt Gondoliere in den Fluten versenkt. Damit hatte Winkler gestisch das künftige Schicksal Venedigs vorweggenommen. In diesem Sommer kommen die Bewohner und Besucher der Lagunenstadt wieder in den Genuss einer Winkler-Aktion. Diesmal erzählt der Künstler mit einer Installation im Oratorio di S.Ludovico/Fondamenta S.Sebastiano die Lebensgeschichte des Poeten Ezra Pound, der einige Jahrzehnte in Venedig gelebt hat. Die Installation "La Gabbia di Ezra Pound" besteht aus der Rekonstruktion des Käfigs, in dem der 60jährige Pound von der US-Armee 1945 mehrere Monate lang gefangen gehalten wurde - im Freien, ohne Rücksicht auf die Witterung. Bei seinen Recherchen über den Käfig und seine Größe stieß Winkler auf eine bizarre Parallele: Es stellte sich nämlich heraus, "dass der Käfig von Ezra Pound nahezu die gleichen Ausmaße hatte wie die Zellen in Guantanamo". Winklers Installation verweist außerdem auf Pounds Einfluss, den er auf die literarische Avantgarde des 20. Jh. hatte. Pound war mit Hemingway befreundet, pflegte enge Kontakte zu den Dadaisten und Surrealisten, und er half James Joyce und T.S. Eliot bei ihrer Karriere. Als US-Bürger lebte er seit 1924 in Italien, sympathisierte allerdings mit Mussolini. Das war der Grund für seine Verhaftung bei Kriegsende. Man steckte ihn schließlich in Washington für zehn Jahre in eine psychiatrische Anstalt. Nach seiner Entlassung kehrte er 1958 nach Venedig zurück, wo er 1972 starb. Jürgen Raap, in Kunstforum Sept.2007
