Oswald Oberhuber | Permanente Veränderung

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There is much that is changing—and some things that have ceased to change. When Oswald Oberhuber, who presumably prized openness above all else, died little over a year ago, his life and his work came to an end. But our meditation on his oeuvre continues. Oswald Oberhuber’s work is based on something that is considered to be of the utmost relevance today; over the decades, however, it has been clad in such widely varied concepts and metaphors that some of what has long been known and said, or done, is unrecognizable in the contemporary discourse’s trending concerns.

What would that be? Oberhuber’s maxim—and the guiding idea of his practice—was the embrace of a simple principle: the principle of “permanent change.” Today’s younger generations may no longer see it as a major breakthrough when an artist seizes the freedom to follow no plan, to submit to no stylistic regime, to keep trying something else; perhaps even not to insinuate that she or he, or it, has a dependable grasp, at a given moment, on what she or he or it is doing, or is. But we should be honest: the reality is different. “Quality is measured by the quantity of the uniform output being piled up,” Oberhuber wrote in 1982. In 2021, that is arguably still the general rule in the art world, although fortunately enough there are exceptions.

Still, these are superficialities. Having been bullied by the Nazis in his native Tyrol as a teenager, what Oberhuber wanted at heart was this: never again to obey a rule that exerted force and was enforced by violence, that made no sense, that could not be part of his own personal decision. “Permanent change” meant the right to the kind of anarchy that sees no reason and no occasion to follow people and ideas and institutions that were not after his own mind and heart. There is no need to call it resistance. Self-will will do.

True, over the decades, Oswald Oberhuber himself became an institution, an artist who was one of a kind and a powerful player in the Austrian culture and education sector who was hardly without his detractors. As rector of the University of Applied Arts, he inspired numerous students; his contrarian sallies onto the political scene raised eyebrows. Historians, meanwhile, hailed him as one of the originators of cultural postwar modernism in Vienna and far beyond, and he won plaudits commensurate with his achievements; in 1973, he represented Austria at the Venice Biennale.

But to come back to where we began: what can Oswald Oberhuber, who would have celebrated his ninetieth birthday this year, teach us today? What can we do with his principle of “permanent change”? “Everything can change when we set our hand to it!” he wrote, and he meant business. Who, if not we? When, if not now? How, if not this way? Without a canon or anyone bossing anyone around; but with the humility of the feasible in the given circumstances. For although his ambition to give himself a voice that would be heard was unmistakable, it was also manifest that the means to that end would have to be basic, requiring no major resources and no reliance on economies or institutions.

“Permanent change,” that means, in a word, praxis. A doing in time. And times change. Conditions, media, politics, the artist himself: nothing remains what it was, and why should it. That might just be what makes Oberhuber’s work relevant today: that he did something at each juncture, and always in a way that seemed right to him at that juncture. And tomorrow might call for different solutions, to be devised by different means. Why indeed commit to anything? Why effectively gum up the future with decisions that look compelling only right now? No, if we would keep the future open, we have no choice but to adopt permanent change as the principle of what we do, too—and translate that principle into practice.

One final note: like everything that becomes history, Oswald Oberhuber’s oeuvre is the child of its times—in this case, of the span from the 1950s to the late 2010s. And beneath the enormous mobility and flexibility of his practice, it obviously evinces the complexion of an era; there are trademark features, a methodology to his work, even, arguably, a style, despite (or because of) the anarchistic versatility of his forms. And so Oberhuber’s oeuvre stands as an exemplary and quite personal model of an attitude and a praxis that really do espouse freedom as the highest good, no matter how and where.