A View from Outside

Sha’at’nez or The Displacement Annex by Clegg and Guttmann is for the time being the last project in the series A View from Outside.
It is located in the former storefront of the Berggasse 19.

19 March - 19 September 2004
daily 0-24 h, free entrance,
Sigmund Freud Museum, Berggasse 19, 1090 Vienna

“The central idea of the project is to institute in this space a temporary
annex to the Sigmund-Freud-Museum library, Vienna. The annex will consist of a collection of books about the subject of displacement, in the psychoanalytic sense of the term, and about related topics. The annex is designed as a Space of Displacement. It is a concrete symbol, a place designed to produce a heightened awareness and a repository of intellectual
material. As an artwork Sha’at’nez or The Displacement Annex belongs to the category of social sculptures; it is a work of art whose building blocks are institutional arrangements, intellectual constructions and social relations.

Sha’at’nez is a Biblical term (Leviticus 19:19) which denotes combinations without organic unity, the result of putting together things which are foreign to one another. (A piece of clothing made partly of linen and partly of wool, for example, is a sha’at’nez. Such combinations are prohibited by
Jewish law.) The elements of a sha’at’nez are all displaced; they are put in a context that was not meant for them.” ..more
- Clegg & Guttmann, 2004

Michael Clegg & Martin Guttmann, born in 1957 in Dublin and Jerusalem, live and work in New York/Berlin and Vienna.

Curator: Nadja Wiesener
Photos: Alexander Christoph Wulz