(*1948 in Ebensee, †2018 in Linz). Walter Pilar is one of Austria’s contemporary writers yet to be discovered. He was interested in the contradictory, that which does not belong together and yet forms a unity. His main work of art, the “Karbach High Altar”, is a window frame with three-part mullioned windows (inner/outer sashes); a suspended tin tub (capacity 330 litres); on a table frame with stuffed wood-like, turned legs. It is Pilar’s main artistic work. In the “Karbach High Altar”, he transforms this strange place on the east bank into a multi-layered, contradictory object that brings together all aspects and – in the medieval visual tradition of the triptych – simultaneously depicts and visualises them.
At the same time, the toppling altar also demonstrates Pilar’s basic literary principle, which does not consist in the convention of a constant flow of narration, but in jumping, fragmentation and condensation. Pilar’s art is an “epic waterfall”, as Arno Schmidt, another great scurrealist, aptly put it for his own understanding of literature: “For the sake of ‘truth’ – i.e. For the sake of ‘truth’ – i.e. to come closer to a conformist representation of our world through words – I replaced the unjustified fiction of the ‘epic river’ with the better approximation of the ‘epic waterfall’: which foams from stage to stage, decay as a prerequisite for superior acting, but which, lo and behold, arrives at the bottom just as surely as Ol’Man River. “1
How Scurrealism Comes into the World
Where the real and the bizarre meet, “scurrealism” enters the world. This neologism comes from the Ebensee writer Walter Pilar, the instigator of the Villa Karbach art project. He and many other artists show works of unconventional power and intensity.
