Vienna: total quality women

[imomus]

My weekend in Vienna was dominated by the brilliance of women. Not just Tomoko Miyata, who played gorgeous glistening waterbowl music with me at our Into The City event, but also Frances Stark, an LA-based poet and painter whose Torment of Follies show at the Secession (based on phrases from Ferdydurke by Witold Gombrowicz) I really loved.



Then there were the post-punk women who, for me, were the stars of the big Punk exhibition at the Wiener Kunsthalle: Linder Sterling of Ludus and Gudrun Gut of Malaria.

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I found myself photographing the oddly off-kilter images of women I found in neglected window displays all over Vienna, and when, in Cafe Phil on Gumpendorferstrasse, the track "Total Quality Woman" by electronic Viennese singer-songwriter Gustav came over the speakers I not only had to buy her new album Verlass die Stadt, I realised I'd found the perfect soundtrack for my sequence of Viennese shop window women. The video of my photo sequence is above. And here's Gustav live, singing the same song:

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I'm very glad to have discovered Gustav, a sort of Viennese Miharu Koshi or Togawa Jun.

Comments

[kubia.livejournal.com]

Oh, it was absolutely fantastic. She's a wonderful and charming perfomer, has a great Austrian accent and her cover of a song by Rage against the Machine transforms the most unispired political agitprop into an empowering chant encompassing all genders. I'm a fan, I guess.