Mechtild Widrich

Mechtild Widrich is an Austrian art historian, curator, and professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. 
Born in Salzburg and educated at the University of Linz and the University of Vienna (M.Phil Art History), she founded the art publisher Verlag Mechtild Widrich, served as commissioner for works on paper for the International Graphic Biennial Intergraf in Udine, Italy, and co-curated Nancy Spero's permanent installation Remembrance/Renewal at the Jewish Museum Vienna with Werner Hanak.M. Widrich and W.Hanak, "Remembrance/Renewal", Jewish Museum Vienna, exh. cat. (1996), 44-49. As a Fulbright Program, she pursued a PhD in History, Theory, and Criticism program in the MIT School of Architecture and Planning#Academic and research program|MIT School of Architecture, under the supervision of Caroline A. Jones, Mark Jarzombek and Martha Burskirk. While at MIT, she edited issue 30, "Microcosms", of the HTC journal Thresholds, co-curated the exhibition Sounding the Subject, on sound and subjectivity in new media art, at the List Visual Arts Center with Daniel Birnbaum, and edited with Jarzombek a book presenting Krzysztof Wodiczko's alternative 9-11 memorial proposal, City of Refuge. On graduating, she was a postdoc in the Modern and Contemporary department of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, where she co-curated There is Nothing to See Here in the gallery's experimental space, the Modern Lab.
After teaching art history at the University of Vienna, the University of Zürich, and conducting postdoctoral research at eikones Center for the Theory and History of the Image at the University of Basel. Since 2014 she has been full-time faculty in the Art History, Theory, and Criticism department of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
==Career and Research==
Widrich's long-standing interest in how art and public space interact issued first of all in an edited book, with photographs by about Vienna's 2nd District, Leopoldstadt, historically the center of Jewish life in the city and Austro-Hungarian Empire. The result of graduate work on performance art, its photographic mediation and often urban settings resulted in her first monograph, Performative Monuments Widrich coins the title phrase, 'performative monument', to explain why live body artists who once insisted on the oppositional ephemerality of their actions went on to design some of the most influential interactive memorials of the 1980s and since. Building on the definition of anti-authoritarian countermonuments proposed by German artist Jochen Gerz, and the speech-act theory of British philosopher J. L. Austin, Widrich showed that the procedures of photographic and video documentation taught artists like Gerz, Valie Export, and Marina Abramović how to draw audiences into social protocols of commemoration of traumatic historical events like the Holocaust. The concept of performative monuments has proved fruitful in recent literature on commemoration and public art, and has been taken up by artists concerned with the same issues, notably Doris Salcedo.
Besides contemporary art, Widrich is fascinated by the long discourse around ugliness in art and life. This has resulted in an edited volume and the edition and translation of the first book-length philosophical treatment of the topic, Karl Rosenkranz's 1853 Aesthetics of Ugliness. She has also co-edited books on Presence (2016, based on a conference at the Cabaret Voltaire (Zurich)|Cabaret Voltaire and Participation in Art and Architecture" 
Category:Austrian art historians
Category:Austrian curators
Category:Austrian academics