Haus Wittgenstein Ergin Çavuşoğlu: The View from Above Jon Bird: Wittgenstein's Ladder

About

The starting point is Haus Wittgenstein, the Viennese townhouse designed by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein for his sister, Margarethe Stonborough-Wittgenstein, between 1926-29. Margarethe originally commissioned the architect Paul Engleman, a pupil of Adolf Loos, but Wittgenstein gradually appropriated the project whilst retaining Engleman’s overall structural framework. It was the interior layout, dimensions and fittings – windows, doors, door handles, radiators – that became his focus for a rigorously planned and executed set of internal spaces that dispensed with all unnecessary and decorative elements. The building was completed ten years after Wittgenstein had apparently abandoned philosophy believing that his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus had resolved the logical structure of language, of what could and could not be said. However, he had already begun to make notes towards what would become his major rethink of linguistic philosophy, the posthumously published Philosophical Investigations.(1953)

The Stonborough-Wittgenstein House thus occupies a transitional and pivotal role in his thinking, a period that initiated the shift from a theory of language as representing the world through the lens of logic (the ‘picture theory of meaning’) to language as constructing a world of everyday practice (‘language games’). Architecture, as a problem-solving material practice of space, place and subject, can be seen as analogous to the reframing of subjectivity through language segueing from an external or meta-critical position to one framed from within. Wittgenstein made frequent reference to visual and spatial metaphors in his writings: boundaries, limits, inside/outside, public/private, hidden/manifest and these constructs are operative in the viewpoints and sightlines of the interior spaces of Haus Wittgenstein. The exterior assemblage of white cubes interrupted by regularly positioned, vertical windows is contrasted by an interior that emphasises edges, planes, surfaces, inside and outside, division and repetition, transparency and opacity. The central hall, which allows access to the ground floor rooms, is illuminated by light passing through and reflected off, eight paired translucent glass and steel doors. This space of movement from exterior to interior is characterised by images of reflection and refraction, of looking through and looking into, shifting viewpoints that refer directly to Wittgenstein’s reassessment of language in the Philosophical Investigations as ‘a labyrinth of paths’. Ergin Çavuşoğlu and Jon Bird responded to the internal dynamics of Haus Wittgenstein and the philosopher’s notions of boundary, viewpoint, framing and other spatial epistemologies and the site of encounter with the work of art. Ergin Çavuşoğlu’s investigations in informal architecture and sculpture manifested in his large-scale anamorphic drawings constitute ongoing research that conveys the construct and the critique of ideas on spatial art practices. Jon Bird’s drawings and collages are visual explorations of the ‘unsayable’ that haunts the Tractatus.

The exhibition will culminate in site-specific installations and an exhibition at Haus Wittgenstein in Vienna from 7 April to 5 May 2025.