The Martin - IFFI Award Trophy

TEXT by FLORIAN WALDVOGEL

The Martin is the prize given to films at IFFI, the International Film Festival Innsbruck. It is named after the Austrian artist Martin Schlögl (born in 1988), who designed the trophy for the award. For the first time, in 2023, The Martin will be presented in five different categories.

What might come across as coarse clearly corresponds to Schlögl's spirit, which also penetrates his earlier works such as Bugles (2021), ohne Titel (Kastanie) (2019) or es gibt Kohle (2018): the mundane, the simple, the things that surround us every day. Schlögl bows to what we might call our daily bread when we go to the cinema (to use a Christian analogy in the Holy Land of Tyrol), but it is precisely what is not available at Leokino. He places popcorn in a black box at the centre of his artistic considerations, thus giving the corn his sacraments!

If there is a social agreement on the theoretical and practical value created by artworks, it is that objects gain meaning by adding to existing meanings, thereby modifying them. Arthur C. Danto calls this effect the ‘Aboutness’ of art.

Popcorn in the cinema seems to have a fairly clear meaning. Schlögl's popcorn, however, is about how we create our own world ourselves only through the way we face it, look at it, define and describe it; determining the meaning of things and relationships in the process. Art is just one particularly versatile means of meaningful world creation, because the world we think in is not the world we live in.

Popcorn embodies the longing for change and the memory of youth, for a visual language that captures the complexity of existence in intelligible form. The bronze object in a box recalls the moments of happiness experienced at the cinema, but also points to the transience of earthly existence and fame. Picasso and Warhol already found out that being unique is not a desirable attribute, as it leads to oblivion and thus to non-reality.

Everyone has lost their popcorn at the cinema before, or searched for it in the depths of the cinema seat. The Martin is a vanitas still life, a private devotional object for the prize winners to recognise an extraordinary achievement; and for us, the audience, a reminder of artistic freedom.

Schlögl's design for the IFFI prize also shows in a very simple way that ordinary life is wonderful, and that everyday things are far more meaningful than objects of art might ever become.