1/10 – 31/10 2020
Margot Pilz Amorator
Friedrichstraße/Ecke Operngasse, 1010 Wien
30/7 – 1/8 2020
Margot Pilz Hausfrauendenkmal (Monument to Housewives)
Karlsplatz / Resselpark, 1040 Vienna
Margot Pilz (b. Haarlem (The Netherlands) in 1936, lives and works in Vienna) is a photographer and a conceptual and media artist. Viennese people might remember her Kaorle am Karlsplatz from the early 1980s: a temporary installation taking the form of a public beach with sand, palm trees, and inflatable pool toys, and one of the first artworks to joyfully tackle the transformation of urban centers into commercialized playgrounds – at the same time offering leisure and a seaside atmosphere for free. As a member of the IntAkt (Internationale Aktionsgesellschaft bildender Künstlerinnen – International Action Community of Women Artists), she has used her works and actions to fight for increased women’s representation, right to self-determination, and collective emancipation.
For KISS, Margot Pilz restages – again at Karlsplatz – her Hausfrauendenkmal (Monument to Housewives) from 1979, originally presented as a sculpture-action in Graz. The work makes the domestic public, the personal political, and the invisible obvious. Made of several layers of white linen bedclothes that are overlapped, patched together, and fixed around a wooden pole, which is partly held up by a string tied to a tree, the installation looks like a giant fabric cloak enveloping … a void. The used bedsheets represent the entirety of life, from reproduction and care activities to rituals that all humans perform (birth, love, sleep, death). At the same time, they symbolize the reality faced by housewives, the gendered division of labor, and the misrecognition of domestic work. A note beneath the photographic documentation of Hausfrauendenkmal reads: “Tribute to the disregarded labor of the unknown housewife.” Sadly, its continued relevance today is undeniable.
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