Elusive and opaque, Josef Strau’s art is guided by an internal logic felt throughout his exhibitions. In his first institutional solo show in his native Austria, Strau presents an expansive and intricately layered installation collectively titled “A Turtle Dreaming (. . . Echoes from an Encapsulated Space Exiled Sounds of Letters Requiring Symphonic Treatment),” and framed by a series of eighty posters featuring the artist’s signature arrangements of text—often interrupted by photographs of a snowy New York. Four pavilions are positioned throughout the space, made of modest materials such as plywood and populated by sculptures of turtles, symbolizing the romantic ideal of an artist as a dreamer, together with flat-screen monitors each showing a fragment of a video depicting the same urban subject matter as the photographs. Each pavilion is named after an American composer or a piece of music that pays homage to American landscapes, such as The Hudson River and the Echo of the Rhapsody in Blue by Gershwin, 2015. The emotional register of the music to which Strau alludes echoes the romantic image of a cityscape in winter.
What is on display here is not primarily the individual objects but the methodology that brought them together. What Strau presents is a way of working and of being as an artist. In this exhibition in particular, his methodology is akin to that of music, with the installation unfolding like a composition containing many elements and cryptic progressions. The four pavilions function like movements of a symphony, and the posters resemble graphic scores. Just as with scores, their meaning depends on the interpretation of the performers, which in this case is the audience.
