WITTGEN
STEIN
HAUS

Über die allmähliche Verfertigung der Gebäude beim Hören is a series of exhibitions by Josef Reiter that explores various architectural concepts and realizes them as sound installations.

The title of the exhibition is also the title of an essay by Heinrich Kleist and exemplifies the artist's working method. Reiter's first project last year was the State Hall of the National Library: there he used trombone sounds to transform the proportions of the Fischer von Erlach Building. In the Wittgensteinhaus, where we are today, this project now finds its continuation.

Ludwig Wittgenstein's architecture is rooted in his own history, which is probably known to all and which I would like to briefly memorize. With his friend Paul Engelmann, a student of Loos, he is building a new house with and for his sister Margarete Stonborough. The design is strongly based on the upper middle-class parental home, the classicist family palace, and is overlaid with Loosian ideas. Wittgenstein intervened relatively late in a largely fixed ground plan. At this point, the final plan still lacks the entire spatial layer in the "Kundmanngasse", the generous staircase with the passenger elevator, as well as that fine-tuning of all proportions, all building elements and all details with which he first gave the building its decisive, unmistakable sharpness and precision.

Wittgenstein, to whom the great new art of his marquee of any discipline remained closed, is one of the essential thinkers and innovators for the understanding of aesthetics and also for the interdisciplinary action of our time . For Wittgenstein, art in general is a form of language play, a language play in a specific form of use, whereby the law of "family resemblance" also applies here.

Wittgenstein rejects any strict definition or genre delimitation, which means for art: it is part of the "form of life" like any other language game, only in comparison, in the "system" of all other life activities art lives.

In spite of symmetry and axes, in spite of strict geometry and number games, what distinguishes and characterizes this building are the proportions (1:2, 2:3, 3:4, 5:6), the "mysterious determinants" of an architectural quality. And these proportions are the basis for Josef Reiter's acoustic treatment. The structure of the spaces are determinant for the pitches, the timbres are created by processing the material on the computer, whereby reduction processes are set in motion by the subjective intervention.

The choice of instrument is closely linked to Ludwig Wittgenstein's musical preferences: Schubert and Schumann were much closer to him than Schoenberg, which led Josef Reiter to select the clarinet, a typical instrument for chamber music. Wittgenstein himself played the clarinet in his elementary school teaching days.

The essence of Wittgenstein's building is what cannot be depicted: The spaces and how they are mutually dependent, how everything complements each other to create an overall harmony. Only moving through the spatial structure reveals the full meaning, -even if each room is a balanced architecture at rest in itself-, -just as each element is a balanced aesthetic object at rest in itself.
And this is precisely where Josef Reiter comes in. 
Every room has its own sounds. Only by moving in the sound-space formations is it possible to experience, to perceive what cannot be depicted.
Reiter explores architectural spaces that have specific constants (historical, philosophical and or social references) and creates a concentrated perception of the spaces through the sound concepts developed for the location. These are not self-referential (self-referential) sound installations, but rather concertante actions of knowledge accumulation: Reiter explores the history of the place, the musical preferences of the people shaping the place, surveys the architecture and uses the ideal dimensions and proportions as source material for his sound patterns. The language of Josef Reiter is sounds and they speak for themselves.