CHRISTOPH SCHLINGENSIEF GERMAN PAVILION, 2011 54TH INTERNATIONAL ART EXHIBITION LA BIENNALE DI VENEZIA EDITED BY SUSANNE GAENSHEIMER WITH THE ASSISTANCE OF EVA HUTTENLAUCH
WITH CONTRIBUTIONS BY
HELKE BAYRLE KLAUS BIESENBACH JOHN BOCK FRANK CASTORF THOMAS DEMAND CHRIS DERCON DIEDRICH DIEDERICHSEN BORIS GROYS CARL HEGEMANN IRM HERMANN JOHANNES HOFF ANDY HOPE 1930 ELFRIEDE JELINEK SCHORSCH KAMERUN ALEXANDER KLUGE DIETRICH KUHLBRODT AINO LABERENZ TORSTEN LEMMER MATTHIAS LILIENTHAL JONATHAN MEESE MICHAELA MELIÁN / THOMAS MEINECKE KLAUS MERTES EVA MEYER-HERMANN WERNER NEKES HANS ULRICH OBRIST PETER RAUE CHARLOTTE ROCHE STEPHANIE ROSENTHAL KARLHEINZ SCHMID ELISABETH SCHWEEGER GEORG SEESSLEN FRANK-WALTER STEINMEIER SANDRA UMATHUM ANTJE VOLLMER
Via Intolleranza II, Arsenal, Vienna, June 12, 2010
TABLE OF CONTENTS
15
FOREWORD ELKE AUS DEM MOORE
19
INTRODUCTION SUSANNE GAENSHEIMER
27
IMAGES AUTHORS’ CONTRIBUTIONS
135
HELKE BAYRLE Settebello
139
KLAUS BIESENBACH I Wanted to Capture Everything in Pictures: Christoph Schlingensief in Conversation with Klaus Biesenbach
155
JOHN BOCK
165
FRANK CASTORF He Asked the Question of Guilt
169
THOMAS DEMAND
173
CHRIS DERCON Comrades
183
DIEDRICH DIEDERICHSEN Combating Discursive Scarcity, Futile Intention, and the Negative Gesamtkunstwerk: Christoph Schlingensief and His Music BORIS GROYS When Words Fail
191
TABLE OF CONTENTS
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CARL HEGEMANN GERMANIA: Art and Non-art in the Work of Christoph Schlingensief
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209
IRM HERMANN From Berliner Republik to Mea Culpa
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JOHANNES HOFF Life in Abundance: Schlingensief’s Deconstruction of (Post)Modernism
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297 223
ANDY HOPE 1930 Mathematically Carnival Labyrinth
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ELFRIEDE JELINEK The Squanderer
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SCHORSCH KAMERUN That’s Probably What They Call Freedom
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ALEXANDER KLUGE The Complete Version of a Baroque Invention by Christoph Schlingensief
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DIETRICH KUHLBRODT A Chance Acquaintance
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AINO LABERENZ
327
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TORSTEN LEMMER Christoph Works!
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MATTHIAS LILIENTHAL Eighty Percent Internal Dynamics: Matthias Lilienthal in Conversation with Franz Wille
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JONATHAN MEESE Jonathan Meese is Mother Parsival MICHAELA MELIÁN / THOMAS MEINECKE Read Texts by Christoph Schlingensief from Mode & Verzweiflung and Sing a Song by Vier Kaiserlein
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FRANK-WALTER STEINMEIER The Artist of Democracy
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SANDRA UMATHUM Theater of Self-Questioning: Rocky Dutschke, ’68, or the Children of the Revolution ANTJE VOLLMER Christoph Schlingensief: Myth and Overpainting, Nepal and Parsifal
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
KLAUS MERTES Requiem for Christoph Schlingensief Oberhausen, August 30, 2010 EVA MEYER-HERMANN A Barbed Seed WERNER NEKES Splinters of Memory HANS ULRICH OBRIST Multiplications: Christoph Schlingensief in Conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist PETER RAUE Memories of Christoph Schlingensief CHARLOTTE ROCHE The Soil of Burkina Faso STEPHANIE ROSENTHAL 18 Images per Second: Christoph Schlingensief—the Image-maker KARLHEINZ SCHMID Dear Christoph ELISABETH SCHWEEGER A Personal Perspective on Christoph Schlingensief GEORG SEESSLEN Art in Films? No. Art as Film
APPENDIX
FOREWORD ELKE AUS DEM MOORE INTRODUCTION SUSANNE GAENSHEIMER
FOREWORD ELKE AUS DEM MOORE
The Venice Biennale is the world’s oldest and most distinguished biennial. It is distinct from other biennials by the principle of national representation through country-specific pavilions. Processes of globalization and digital networking are changing our world, creating new challenges, and compelling us to conceive national identities in new ways. In Susanne Gaensheimer, the Foreign Office has found a curator for the German Pavilion whose work is dedicated to these current challenges. She has chosen to present the work of Christoph Schlingensief, a preeminent contemporary artist, to an international audience. Schlingensief attacks the cornerstones of society with instruments that transcend barriers on the levels of content as well as form, creating combinations that are surprising, even shocking, and powerfully evocative. With relentless intensity he probes deep-seated German sentiments, frankly addressing the way things stand in a Western world in which consumerism and social isolation prevail. “The relationships between people ought to become the highest form of art in our world,” he said. He was interested in what moves people and what people, when they come together, can set in motion. He saw Europe as being in crisis, and proposed an artistic strategy framed not just as a gesture of art but as a political demand. Schlingensief developed a form of art that foregrounds exchange and community and facilitates a union of bodies of knowledge from different cultures. It is in this light that we can understand the project he started in Burkina Faso, the opera village Remdoogo, which is being built in response to the needs of the local population and enables them to produce their own images. Schlingensief’s intention with this project was not to bring German culture to Africa but to initiate social energies that see mutual learning as fundamental. He was not only one of the most renowned contemporary German artists, but also an energetic protagonist in international cultural exchange. Since 1971, the Institute of Foreign Cultural Relations (ifa), as the partner of the Foreign Office, has managed the presentation of the German Pavilion in Venice in collaboration with the appointed curator. As the oldest organization promoting German cultural and educational policies abroad, the ifa presents German art around the globe and produces exhibitions held at the ifa galleries in Stuttgart and Berlin that examine the art of countries undergoing transformation. The ifa sponsors international exhibitions and maintains the Biennale archive. The Foreign Office is the principal sponsor of the German Pavilion at athe 54th Venice Biennale. We would like to thank all our partners, including AXA Art Insurance Company, Deutsche Welle, the Goethe-Institut, and especially all the private benefactors. It is my very special pleasure to work with Susanne Gaensheimer. After Christa Kühne and Gudrun Inboden, she is the third female curator to direct the German Pavilion. With her curatorial choice she has made a firm decision that requires courage, determination, and persistence. I would like to express my profound gratitude to her. I would also like to thank the members of the team around Christoph Schlingensief for their great dedication and sensitive precision with which they have worked after to present his work to the world. I am deeply grateful in particular to Aino Laberenz, his longtime companion.
FOREWORD
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Draft of Key Visual for the Wellness Center Africa Double Standards, 2010
INTRODUCTION SUSANNE GAENSHEIMER
“I have worked in many fields: as a film, stage, and opera director, a producer, a solo entertainer, a human being, and as a sick human being and a Christian, too, and as a politician and a performer, and I’ve also always been interested in artists who practiced their art almost compulsively, and didn’t necessarily see it as different from the compulsion of having or wanting to live. Some form of schizophrenia has always been typical of my work and my life. If I were to focus on one thing only, I’d get bored; my head would never hit its stride. Between music and the image, between people and language, between the healthy and the sick, between the funny and the sad, I always need to have the chance to assert the opposite as well. An unambiguous world is not something I believe in. The assignment to use the German Pavilion, a suspicious representational building, for purposes not of representation but of art strikes me as exactly right: a heavy burden, but art makes light what is otherwise heavy. Yet perhaps that’s exactly what’s good about it. I, in any case, love rifts and antagonisms, and over the next few months I will find out which antagonisms are the most productive for Venice, for the German Pavilion, and for Burkina Faso.” Christoph Schlingensief Wellness Center “Africa” Sometime in the spring of last year, Christoph Schlingensief began to think about an idea for the German Pavilion that he would work on until his death on August 21, 2010. This idea gradually took definite shape as he played through the possibilities it opened and the associations it called up in his mind; but of course he had not fleshed it out in all formal detail by last summer. The way he worked, Christoph Schlingensief would probably have kept reconsidering and condensing this original idea right until June 1, 2011, the day the German Pavilion was to open, responding with his outstanding capacity of observation and celerity to what would happen in his immediate as well as extended social and political environment. What would ultimately actually have taken place at the German Pavilion? There is no way for us to know, and so all we can do today is describe the shape this idea had taken when, after his long struggle with cancer, Christoph Schlingensief unexpectedly died while working on it. It is surely a great loss to the art world that it will not experience Christoph Schlingensief’s contribution in the German Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale. For what he wanted to do would have challenged the perceptual habits of the pavilion’s visitors and confronted them with the need to rethink this highly ideologically charged site, a site that has been discussed ad nauseam and is fraught with significance even today. Schlingensief’s dissecting and yet generous style, his uncompromisingly critical and yet humorous attitude, his tendency to overburden objects and overwhelm spectators, his straightforwardness, and most importantly, his profound dedication to the social would have been able to undermine the monumentality of this building and to allow us to experience it in a new way. It became clear in one of our first conversations that Christoph Schlingensief was not interested in addressing the pavilion as such, nor did he see it as a stage on which to produce
INTRODUCTION
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himself as an artist. He saw it more than anything as the site of a process in which the visitor was to participate. He then developed his idea for the German Pavilion by elaborating fundamental themes that had run through his projects of the past several years, with carefully placed emphases on several points. In addition to motifs that had already been central to his trilogy on illness—Der Zwischenstand der Dinge [The Intermediate State of Affairs], Eine Kirche der Angst vor dem Fremden in mir [A Church of Fear vs. the Alien Within], and Mea Culpa—the plans for the pavilion also incorporated his longstanding engagement with nationalism, racism, and Eurocentrism, as well as the very personal experiences and insights he had gained from his great project for the future, the opera village he conceived for the African nation of Burkina Faso. Christoph Schlingensief wanted to transform the German Pavilion into a grand wellness center, to be called “African Wellness Center” or “Wellness Center Africa” or, later on, the “German Center for Wellness and Prevention.” The pavilion was to be equipped with functional bath and sanatorium facilities, with a swimming pool, a sauna, and a hamam; services to be offered included cryotherapy and massages and, as in Mea Culpa, Ayurveda—though an “African Ayurveda.” A Burkinabè company was to erect an architectonic structure made of mud brick, and plants and trees would grow everywhere. Visitors would also have the possibility to get preventive computer tomograph scans taken; an obscure Swiss company called Ingenia would have set up an information booth, offering a saliva test to determine the visitors’ genetic ancestry. A central element of the pavilion’s design, balancing between reality and a theatrical production, would have been a large projection of a panorama, a sort of zoetrope or diorama, featuring footage of the natural scenery surrounding the construction site of the opera village. To be recorded over the course of a year, the images were to render the way the landscape changes with the seasons and the time of day in the manner of a real-time projection. This panorama would have enclosed the wellness center so that the visitors would have found themselves amid a permanently changing African landscape—a landscape that, to Schlingensief himself, always exuded calm and healing. Schlingensief’s plan was that with every twenty-fourth frame in the film the image would be replaced with a different one: images of a starving African child, a child soldier, or another situation that illustrates the poverty and catastrophic situation in the country, but also images showing everyday life in Africa as a well-functioning routine, something our media usually fail to represent. These intercalations would have been brief irruptions of the real, almost passing beneath conscious perception, into an ostensibly authentic but in fact highly romanticized situation. He also wanted to integrate a great variety of other visual media into the wellness center: pictures Burkinabè children were to take using disposable cameras, video material to be shot by African students, and other films produced in the opera village. He was going to mix them with images of torture and violence from his own films such as 100 Jahre Adolf Hitler—Die letzte Stunde im Führerbunker [100 Years of Adolf Hitler—The Last Hour in the Fuhrerbunker], Terror 2000, and Die 120 Tage von Bottrop [The 120 Days of Bottrop] in order to condense the material into a “medical-sociological torture chamber.” Dependent on technological feasibility, there was also going to be a sort of closed-circuit installation in which visitors would have seen themselves with black skin. The swimming pool, too, would contain tinted water so that visitors would have turned black in it, “purging” themselves of their whiteness.
INTRODUCTION
These plans clearly illustrate how the idea of wellness and relaxation as well as the ostentatiously idealizing image of “Africa” would have immediately turned into their pointed exaggeration and caricature. Displaying the hedonism of Western societies implicit in their exoticizing notions of Africa, the “black continent,” would have made for trenchant commentary, particularly when set in the context of the Venice Biennale, a destination for wealthy tourism. The emphasis on “wellness,” a phenomenon of modern civilization, and its exaggeration in the principle of “preventative medicine” would likewise have taken up a theme that had strongly occupied Schlingensief ever since he became ill. The endeavor to use preventive measures and all forms of insurance to preclude anything unforeseen and to mobilize our technological and financial means to protect ourselves against any discomfort—an endeavor that is fundamental in Western societies and inevitably doomed to fail—always struck Schlingensief as a reflection of repressed insecurity and helplessness. “Why are we constantly trying to help the African continent even though we cannot help ourselves?” was a question he had repeatedly asked in other contexts, and it became a leitmotif of sorts in his concept for the German Pavilion, whose initial levity, not unlike that of his last play Via Intolleranza II, would have turned rapidly into a caustic, unrestrained, and merciless critique of society and mankind. The Biennale’s exhibition format, with its national pavilions, had immediately brought the association of the idea of the world’s fair to Schlingensief’s mind, which he wanted to address in the pavilion’s surroundings. In an allusion to Hagenbeck’s ethnological zoos and the colonial exhibitions of the nineteenth century, as well as the Brussels World’s Fair, which, as late as 1958, had featured an ethnological exposition (called village indigène) literally exhibiting Congolese and Ruanda-Urundi people in commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Belgian state’s takeover of power in the Congo, Schlingensief wanted to erect cage-like structures outside the German Pavilion in which he would have presented Africans as artists, actors, computer technicians, and all sorts of other “curiosities.” One of these cages would have housed an African painter creating pictures of “Negros” in the manner of Gerhard Richter—a reference to the sale at Sotheby’s in early summer 2010 of a painting by Richter entitled Neger, which Schlingensief had spontaneously brought up during one of his last performances in Via Intolleranza II. The German Pavilion’s façade was to be transformed into a funfair-style “Totally Wacky Tavern,” with a gigantic Negro mask with a moving oversized bottom lip laughing at the crowd from the gable. “The space is testing you, rather than you testing the space”—Schlingensief’s permanent quest for a shift of perspective was also behind the plan to build a ramp that would let visitors look into the pavilion from above. The panorama shot of an African landscape that was to enclose the wellness center would likewise have generated such a shift: Africa would observe the observer. But Schlingensief conceived the entire space of the pavilion as a sort of projection screen, a camera. So it is not at all improbable that he would have designed the pavilion’s interior, like all of his theatrical productions in recent years, as a rotating stage, an Animatograph whose rotating movement and constantly shifting superimposition of spaces and projections would have undone not only the one-dimensional position of the spectator but also a linear conception of space and time.
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“Plan B” Even before Christoph Schlingensief’s death became foreseeable, the media and the public began to raise the question concerning a “Plan B.” An English locution that has become popular in Germany, designating the attempt to prepare for all eventualities; using it in direct reference to the death of a person is not entirely in good taste, and it is hardly surprising that Schlingensief would respond with the plan to call the website representing the German Pavilion “Plan B.” He thus used his own slow death once more to satirize a fundamental attitude that is so typical of German society today, one Schlingensief had repeatedly taken aim at: the attempt to compensate for human insufficiency by asserting absolute control and repressing the possibility of failure. I had no “Plan B” for the event of his death, since my resolution to invite Christoph Schlingensief to design the German Pavilion was based on my conviction of his significance as an artist and my view that he was the right artist for this site at this moment in time. The more I learned about his work, the more my convictions grew. My decision developed from the idea that for the German Pavilion I should approach an artist of my own generation who looked back on a solid career—in Christoph Schlingensief’s case, almost thirty years—whose art had not merely responded to the artistic, social, and political issues in a reunified Germany but had even influenced public discourse. Christoph Schlingensief was one of the Germany’s most significant artists, filmmakers, theater directors, and performers, one who always articulated and asserted his position, uncompromising towards the public and himself, and with all the clearness and straightforwardness necessary to comment effectively on the situation. Schlingensief’s oeuvre is complex, and it is in the nature of his work that it itself was subject to permanent self-interrogation and transformation. My decision was ultimately determined also by his opera village project in Burkina Faso, which demonstrated that Schlingensief, rather than relating the questions he raised only to Germany, placed them in a global context. In this visionary social as well as artistic undertaking—the project to build a festival hall complete with a school, housing facilities, and a hospital in Africa in close collaboration with local partners—and in also reflecting the failure of his humanitarian efforts in Via Intolleranza II, he transposed his analysis of “Germanness” into a transnational dimension. Now, after his death, it seems all the more important to me to make Christoph Schlingensief’s oeuvre, which is well known in Germany, accessible to an international audience. Yet realizing a project conceived by Christoph Schlingensief without him is impossible. Though it would have been appealing to implement his plans, it was also clear that too many questions had been left unanswered, and no one was competent to make the necessary subsequent artistic decisions. Christoph Schlingensief’s death changed the situation fundamentally. What had originally been planned as an artistic project by Schlingensief could now only become an exhibition about him. In constructive collaboration with Aino Laberenz, Christoph Schlingensief’s wife and longtime collaborator, as well as a circle of close collaborators and confidants such as Carl Hegemann, Thomas Goerge, Voxi Bärenklau, Heta Multanen, and Frieder Schlaich, and drawing on extensive conversations with Chris Dercon, Alexander Kluge, Matthias Lilienthal, and Francis Kéré, we have developed a concept for the German Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale that focuses entirely on existing works—theatrical productions and films by Schlingensief—and offers insights into central aspects of his multifac-
INTRODUCTION
eted oeuvre. Three themes are central to the concept: Christoph Schlingensief’s engagement with his own illness and biography, the wide field of cinema and film, and his initiative to found an opera village in Africa. In the main hall of the German Pavilion we have installed the stage of the Fluxus oratorio A Church of Fear vs. the Alien Within, which Schlingensief conceived for the 2008 Ruhrtriennale as the second part of his illness trilogy, after Zwischenstand der Dinge and before Mea Culpa. Written immediately after Schlingensief had undergone surgery to remove one lung and several months of chemotherapy, the play was first performed in Duisburg, then at the Berliner Theatertreffen and in Amsterdam. A Church of Fear vs. the Alien Within is perhaps Christoph Schlingensief’s most personal work; he portrays his illness openly and unsparingly, using his own painful experience to examine the existential circle of life, suffering, and death. The stage is a reconstruction of the Oberhausen church of his childhood and teenage years, where he served as an altar boy for years and where the funeral service after his death was also held. The theme of religious faith, of belief and doubt, which had always been central to Schlingensief’s thinking, is scrutinized in a highly subjective perspective and with a keen eye for its ambivalences. Yet the play addresses not only themes of childhood, illness, and faith, but also Schlingensief’s views regarding music and the visual arts. His engagement with Richard Wagner’s music as well as the art of Joseph Beuys and the Fluxus movement—both positions in art history profoundly shaped his own practice, but he repeatedly questioned and parodied them as well—find expression in A Church of Fear vs. the Alien Within. The play’s stage, unlike that of other works by Schlingensief, not only serves as the venue of a theatrical production; with its many film projections, including no less than twelve 16mm projections, and a multitude of spatial and pictorial elements, it is an encompassing spatial installation as well—a role it always also played for Schlingensief. It shows central features that defined Christoph Schlingensief’s art over the last several years, while generating atmospheric effects so powerful that it can stand by itself, without a theatrical production in the strict sense taking place. It is the only stage design Schlingensief considered and conceived not only as a stage on which to direct, but which he also organized tours of when the show itself was not playing. In one of the pavilion’s two side wings, we have set up a movie theater where a program of six selected films from different moments in Schlingensief’s career play on a large screen: Menu Total (1985–6), Egomania (1986), the Germany trilogy of 100 Jahre Adolf Hitler (1988), Das deutsche Kettensägenmassaker [The German Chainsaw Massacre, 1990], and Terror 2000 (1991–2), as well as his penultimate film, United Trash (1995–6). Presented on a structured schedule, these films exemplify central features of Schlingensief’s filmic oeuvre. The theater is accessible at all times during the Biennale’s opening hours and accomplishes two tasks at once, offering an international audience the opportunity to see a significant selection from Schlingensief’s films—some of the films have been subtitled for the first time—while introducing the artist’s filmic visual language into the canon of visual culture. As far back as the early 1980s, Schlingensief developed a highly individual style of an incredible visual power whose ostentatious B-movie aesthetic had parallels in the work of visual artists such as Paul McCarthy and, later, Andreas Hofer, Jonathan Meese, and John Bock. Although Schlingensief’s performative actions such as Church of Fear and film installations such as Area 7 have been recognized in the art context, his filmic oeuvre has long remained on
23
the periphery of the art world. Yet both in their radical social critique and in their excessive visuality, Schlingensief’s films prove an unconsciously prophetic element of our cultural memory. Learning from Africa The pavilion’s second side wing is dedicated to what ultimately became Schlingensief’s most important project: his vision of an opera village in Africa. Schlingensief conceived the plan for this social project the night before his surgery, and committed himself to it with all his strength and devotion until his death. Starting in 2010, the African opera village Remdoogo has begun to emerge near Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso; the structure will include a school, film and music classrooms, studios and storage facilities, housing facilities and accommodations for visitors, a canteen, offices, a café, residential areas, a soccer field, agricultural areas, a restaurant, a hospital, and a theater stage with a festival hall and rehearsal rooms. Schlingensief designed the project with friends and partners in Ouagadougou and in collaboration with the African architect Francis Kéré; part of the plans have already been realized. The opera village is to be a place where children, teenagers, and adults living in the immediate neighborhood and abroad learn to develop their musical and artistic talents and showcase them in joint productions; where young Burkinabè can live and explore their love of experimentation and curiosity and unleash their creative powers. In keeping with Beuys’s idea of the social sculpture and the expanded concept of art, the project seeks to merge art and life, to serve as a research laboratory for the reunion of art and non-art. In addition to visual and documentary material already produced in Africa and photographs taken by children and teenagers at the project site, the exhibition in this part of the pavilion will feature selections from the panorama footage showing the opera village’s surroundings Schlingensief had already commissioned an African filmmaker to make before he died. We will also present a compilation of scenes from Via Intolleranza II, the play in which Schlingensief distinctly articulates his concern for Africa, but at the same time demonstrates his ability to self-reflection and self-critique. Almost painfully, the play addresses the complex and complicated relation between vision and failure, between being a person and an artist, and the perhaps irresolvable contradiction between Western intolerance and the sincere attempt to achieve a real and equal encounter.
Sternberg Press for their great confidence in us. My gratitude goes to the Ruhrtriennale and Francesca von Habsburg for the loans, and to all the authors and artists for their profound contributions to this book. I am grateful to Felix Semmelroth, head of the department of culture of the City of Frankfurt, who was highly supportive of my commitment in Venice and put the infrastructure of the MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt at my disposal to make the organization of the project possible. I would like to thank my husband and my children for their love and patience. And last but not least, I want to thank Christoph Schlingensief for his art as well as the precious insight that every single moment of life is a gift.
Acknowledgments I would like to express my profound gratitude to everyone who continued to believe in the project after Christoph Schlingensief’s death and supported it in decisive ways. The realization of the pavilion would have been impossible without the enormous generosity of friends and patrons such as Iwan Wirth, Brigitte and Arend Oetker, and Harald Falckenberg, as well as the dedicated efforts of Cornelia Pieper, Klaus-Dieter Lehmann, Hans-Georg Knopp, Monika Grütters, Rosa Schmitt-Neubauer, and other cultural politicians. Another important partner was Hartwig Fischer, who was an integral supporter of the project. Nor could I have developed the exhibition for the pavilion without the tremendous dedication and wide-ranging knowledge the abovementioned confidants and associates of Christoph Schlingensief’s brought to the project. Christine Kaiser, Eva Huttenlauch, and all other members of the staffs in Venice and Frankfurt were equally indispensable to the project’s success. I am especially grateful to Helge Malchow of Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch and to Caroline Schneider of
INTRODUCTION
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CHRISTOPH SCHLINGENSIEF GERMAN PAVILION, 2011 54TH INTERNATIONAL ART EXHIBITION LA BIENNALE DI VENEZIA IMAGES
A CHURCH OF FEAR VS. THE ALIEN WITHIN
STAGE INSTALLATION FROM CHRISTOPH SCHLINGENSIEF’S FLUXUS ORATORIO AT THE GERMAN PAVILION, 2011
A CHURCH OF FEAR VS. THE ALIEN WITHIN
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A CHURCH OF FEAR VS. THE ALIEN WITHIN
Model
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A CHURCH OF FEAR VS. THE ALIEN WITHIN
Stage Installation from Christoph Schlingensief’s Fluxus Oratorio at the German Pavilion, 2011
A CHURCH OF FEAR VS. THE ALIEN WITHIN
Stage Installation from Christoph Schlingensief’s Fluxus Oratorio at the German Pavilion, 2011
A CHURCH OF FEAR VS. THE ALIEN WITHIN
Stage Installation from Christoph Schlingensief’s Fluxus Oratorio at the German Pavilion, 2011
A CHURCH OF FEAR VS. THE ALIEN WITHIN
Stage Installation from Christoph Schlingensief’s Fluxus Oratorio at the German Pavilion, 2011
A CHURCH OF FEAR VS. THE ALIEN WITHIN
Stage Installation from Christoph Schlingensief’s Fluxus Oratorio at the German Pavilion, 2011
A CHURCH OF FEAR VS. THE ALIEN WITHIN
Stage Installation from Christoph Schlingensief’s Fluxus Oratorio at the German Pavilion, 2011
A CHURCH OF FEAR VS. THE ALIEN WITHIN
Stage Installation from Christoph Schlingensief’s Fluxus Oratorio at the German Pavilion, 2011
A CHURCH OF FEAR VS. THE ALIEN WITHIN
Stage Installation from Christoph Schlingensief’s Fluxus Oratorio at the German Pavilion, 2011
A CHURCH OF FEAR VS. THE ALIEN WITHIN
Stage Installation from Christoph Schlingensief’s Fluxus Oratorio at the German Pavilion, 2011
A CHURCH OF FEAR VS. THE ALIEN WITHIN
Stage Installation from Christoph Schlingensief’s Fluxus Oratorio at the German Pavilion, 2011
A CHURCH OF FEAR VS. THE ALIEN WITHIN
Stage Installation from Christoph Schlingensief’s Fluxus Oratorio at the German Pavilion, 2011
16mm Projections
A CHURCH OF FEAR VS. THE ALIEN WITHIN
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16mm Projections
A CHURCH OF FEAR VS. THE ALIEN WITHIN
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16mm Projections
A CHURCH OF FEAR VS. THE ALIEN WITHIN
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A CHURCH OF FEAR VS. THE ALIEN WITHIN
Performance at Ruhrtriennale, September 2008
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A CHURCH OF FEAR VS. THE ALIEN WITHIN
Performance at Ruhrtriennale, September 2008
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CHRISTOPH SCHLINGENSIEF FILM PROGRAM AT THE GERMAN PAVILION, 2011 MENU TOTAL Germany, 1985–6 16mm, 81 min., black and white EGOMANIA—ISLAND WITHOUT HOPE Germany, 1986 16mm, 84 min., color 100 YEARS ADOLF HITLER—THE LAST HOUR IN THE FUHRERBUNKER Germany, 1988–9 16mm, 60 min., black and white THE GERMAN CHAINSAW MASSACRE— THE FIRST HOUR OF GERMAN REUNIFICATION Germany, 1990 16mm, 63 min., color TERROR 2000—INTENSIVE STATION GERMANY Germany, 1991–2 16mm, 75 min., color UNITED TRASH Zimbabwe, 1995–6 35mm, 79 min., color
FILM PROGRAM
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FILM PROGRAM
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FILM PROGRAM
Menu Total
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FILM PROGRAM
Menu Total
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FILM PROGRAM
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FILM PROGRAM
Egomania—Island without Hope
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FILM PROGRAM
Egomania—Island without Hope
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FILM PROGRAM
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FILM PROGRAM
100 Jahre Adolf Hitler / 100 Years of Adolf Hitler
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FILM PROGRAM
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They came as friends and turned into sausage
FILM PROGRAM
Das deutsche Kettensägenmassaker / The German Chainsaw Massacre
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FILM PROGRAM
Das deutsche Kettensägenmassaker / The German Chainsaw Massacre
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FILM PROGRAM
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FILM PROGRAM
Terror 2000
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FILM PROGRAM
Terror 2000
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FILM PROGRAM
United Trash
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FILM PROGRAM
United Trash
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REMDOOGO
PLANNING AND BUILDING OF THE OPERA VILLAGE NEAR OUAGADOUGOU, BURKINA FASO Documentation 2008–11
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Christoph Schlingensief’s address at the groundbreaking ceremony for the opera village on February 8, 2010 Dear ladies and gentlemen: When I came to Burkina Faso a year ago, I had already gone on several trips to various countries in Africa. The Goethe-Institut—with its very smart and dedicated regional director for Africa, Peter Anders in Johannesburg—had made these trips possible for us. Unfortunately, Mr. Anders cannot join us here today because he is in Berlin to present a film created by African directors and produced by the Goethe-Institut, but he called me this morning to send his most cordial greetings, also on behalf of the president of the Goethe-Institut, Mr. Klaus-Dieter Lehmann, and his associates, Messrs. Hans-Georg Knopp and Bruno Fischli. These trips deeply impressed the diversity of Africa, of the very different countries with their very different cultures, on our minds. I first set foot on the African continent rather gingerly back in 1993, in Zimbabwe, where I shot films, feature films, looking for Richard Wagner’s grail; later, I built a very art installation in Lüderitz. Wherever I went I discovered treasures that I myself had long used up and lost in Europe. The different countries of Africa had something that I could no longer find, or had perhaps even lost, in Germany or on other trips around the world. But what exactly was that? Was it merely a touristic sentiment, or was it a force that I found there and that struck me as familiar even though I somehow no longer possessed it? Something must have happened in my frenzied and stressful life in Germany that had made me oblivious to exactly who I was. Too often had I asserted so many things in my works that I no longer quite knew whether it was reality or merely reality’s imitation. There is a film by the famous German director Detlef Sierck whose title, Imitation of Life, describes precisely the sensation I always felt when I was in Africa. In the countries of this continent, everything was much more concrete. It was more direct, harder, sometimes so hard that I was glad to leave as well. But the concrete life and often also the very hard struggle for survival in some African countries made me feel that I had lost myself. I had become pretty glutted and self-satisfied. And I—like all of us in Europe—lived at the expense of people who had no chance to survive or to take their lives in their own hands. Today, too, many questions come up; as I’ve noticed, tomatoes from France, which is to say, from Europe, are cheaper here than ones produced in Burkina Faso. Or cotton, too—the same problem, it seems to me. And why is it that solar plants are not built in Burkina Faso or in other African countries but in China and Europe, when it is here, on the African continent, that the sun pours out its power so without measure? Why doesn’t the European Union arrange for solar plants to be built here? That, too, is an idea my architect and comrade Francis Kéré and I have discussed. Questions the opera village raises as well. Last year I was in very bad shape, and Francis Kéré’s father, chief of the village of Gando—it is my great pleasure to welcome him and his company, and I am deeply honored that the chief of Gando would make his way to the opera village—noted just yesterday that, to his delight, I seem to have grown a bit of a tummy again.
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In any case, the trip to Burkina Faso almost a full year ago was the beginning of a quite incredible story. As early as December 2008, Peter Anders expressed the wish that Francis and I meet sometime, but as these things go, we were unsure and busy with other things. But Mr. Anders wouldn’t let up, and so Francis and I finally spoke on the phone. Within ten minutes it was clear that we absolutely had to meet. We were both surprised at how much we had to say to each other. And then there was an encounter with His Excellency Xavier Niodogo, the Burkinabè ambassador to Germany, at a stage play I had directed. We met after the show, and from then on we knew we wanted to—I would even say, had to—do something together! Xavier Niodogo passed our wish on, and when—after trips through Cameroon and Mozambique, countries I also found interesting, especially since my friend Henning Mankell has been leading his Teatro Avenida in Mozambique for more than twenty-five years —I finally arrived in Burkina Faso, something happened that I cannot describe in words. I visited Francis Kéré’s school in Gando, and what I saw there was a miracle! Working with the locals, Francis Kéré had built a school that possessed so much beauty, such infinite power, an amount I had never seen anywhere in the world. The teachers at the school, the children who studied writing, math, and so on, the family surrounding Francis were of such incredible beauty and purity, of such infinite love and softness that I, in a very shaky state at the time, and my wife Aino felt very safe and sheltered among them. In no other country on the African continent that I have traveled have I experienced this pure sense of safety and comfort more strongly than in Burkina Faso. Spirituality—which I believe is the ability to feel things that do not always manifest themselves in outright physical form—has a very special significance in this country! The wealth of Burkina Faso, I think, consists in the spiritual purity of its residents. The world really still seems to work differently here. To be sure, Burkina has its problems as well; here, as in any other country, the question of equitable distribution of course comes up again and again, but in that regard, too, I trust that we will have the opportunity in the next few years to think about how art might be able to solve these issues in new ways. Art has more to offer than l’art pour l’art. Art, when it is at its best, is an organism that grows out of life and allies itself with life, allowing entirely new forces to emerge. Politics, too, must be artful, and the ways people relate to each other ought to become our world’s greatest form of art! That’s the cause I am championing, the cause around which I have until now been able to bring so many people together who are interested in it! Remdoogo shall become a Gesamtkunstwerk where people live and are encouraged to study the highest form of art, the art of living together. Learning from Burkina Faso: that shall be the motto that sounds forth from this place and day. I want the world to finally understand what wealth the African continent possesses in its people! And that we in Europe and elsewhere as well will survive only if we go back to school and finally learn who it was we used to be. I know that many people in Germany, Switzerland, France—but also many creative artists from Burkina Faso—think that yet another theater will now open its doors where all sorts of things will soon be performed on the stage, not unlike in the city. I would like to ask everyone for their patience. Francis and I wouldn’t have discovered this place if Stanislas Méda hadn’t had the idea, and I would like to thank him and his staff very much. And when I heard that twenty-five years ago Siriki Ky discovered a place not far from here that is now home to the stone sculpture park, a place that, as he told me, possesses a unique power, I knew at once what he meant. I, too,
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have felt a power here that I want to call the dramaturgy of nature. God knows I am not given to esotericism, but I am a spiritual and religious human being. And so Francis and I immediately chose this place because it is sheltered from the noise and pressure of the city, and also because I don’t want to step on the toes, as they say, of any artists who have done magnificent and important work there for years and decades, perhaps for their entire lives. I call upon the local cultural institutes representing Germany and other countries to invest a lot more energy so that this cultural wealth will also be perceived in other countries of the world. Art needs no laws to be understood elsewhere as well. As Henning Mankell writes in his introduction, art is a universal language! I think the opera village, with its many different sections, will lead to a new idea of art, and what will emerge will at some point also raise interest in tourism in Burkina Faso. The school will be our center, educating five- to eighteen year olds for whom it will open up wholly new possibilities. And who will let us share in their works! It will be a festival for everyone all over this world when we will see how children from Burkina Faso develop their own images, learn the music of their country, build musical instruments, start bands, record music, shoot films. Starting tonight, a website will go online in three languages that, through twelve rounds of gradual expansion, will show visitors how the village is growing, how people live and work here, how their children discover their future. And when the first visitors join us, they will perhaps already be able to spend the night at the opera village and eat here; perhaps they will be looking for an opera singer who sings most wonderfully, but perhaps they will then hear the primal scream of a new-born baby that has just come into the world at our little clinic here in the opera village. What wonderful song! The first scream of a child. By far better than opera, and truer by far than anything we can otherwise present on our stages. This little clinic in particular, which will also be another major element of the opera village, is an important indicator of art’s powers of healing. Art can heal! Art is balm for the soul. And at some point there will surely also be a Remdoogo festival of film, music, and art. Not an attempt to compete with other creative artists in the city, but a festival that carries the radiant power of Burkina Faso out into the world. Yet it is a long way until we get there, a path to which our school will be central; we hope to open parts of it as early as this October. At least that is the goal toward which we should all strive together! But before I end my speech, I would like to thank first and foremost the Federal President of Germany, Horst Köhler, who has time and again supported and encouraged me in my pursuit of this idea. Learning from Africa! He liked it from the very beginning, and he sends his warm greetings and the best wishes to everyone here. I would also like express my particular gratitude to my friend Filipe Savadogo, minister of culture of Burkina Faso, who, with his entire staff, has accompanied the project all the way through, and without whom this groundbreaking ceremony would never have happened! I also want to use this opportunity to thank the German Federal Cultural Foundation, with its Artistic Director Hortensia Völckers and my longtime companion Torsten Mass; the Foreign Office, and especially the former Minister of Foreign Affairs Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who
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generously supported this project from the very beginning; and the German ambassador, Dr. Ulrich Hochschild, who asked skeptical questions to draw our attention to important issues. I am grateful, once again, to the Goethe-Institut. I owe particular gratitude to the generous sponsors and friends: the great writer and friend of Africa, Henning Mankell; the German-American movie director Roland Emmerich; and the German superstar Herbert Grönemeyer. They, as well as thousands of generous donors, have made the launch of the opera village possible! We are deeply grateful to them! In addition, I would like to thank the Ruhrtriennale, represented by Michael Helmbold, Willy Decker, Jürgen Flimm, Ulli Stepan, and the wonderful stage designer Barbara Ehnes, who created the Erwin Piscator-style total theater building that is waiting back there in those containers. I am grateful to the brilliant and great conductor Daniel Barenboim, who will take on the sponsorship of the opera village with the Staatsoper Berlin and bring in additional support through concerts and other special events. My thanks also go to Rupert Neudeck, who will send us some of his Green Helmets for the construction of the opera village. And I owe especial gratitude to Francis Kéré and his staff, who have worked for months to develop the plans and designs detailing the impressive model. I have met his team and must say that his associates are no less wonderful than Francis himself. I also want to thank my own wonderful people: Thomas Goerge, Celina Nicolay, Sibylle Dahrendorf and her team, Claudia Kaloff, Meike Fischer, and Matthias Lilienthal. And finally I would like to express my very special gratitude to my dear wife Aino, who has stuck with me through thick and thin! Without her, I would surely have departed this wonderful planet on several occasions. My darling, I thank you! Spirituality, and directness too, unrestraint, the unmixed joy of life, and a link between heaven and earth. That’s what Remdoogo shall be! The necessary connection of art and non-art. Helping and beauty belong together. How does Faust put it? I want to see the throngs come to hear our opera’s songs. … Absorbed in that august presentiment I now enjoy the happiest moment! And my last and greatest gratitude is to God! He is more than what we have made him into! And more than anything he is boundless! Long live the opera village! To look into the face of a human being who has been helped is to look into a fair country, friend friend friend.
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FIRST COLLAGES, SKETCHES, AND PLANS
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LOOKING FOR A SITE IN BURKINA FASO – NOVEMBER 1, 2009
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THE SITE IS FOUND – NOVEMBER 4, 2009
SIGNING OF THE CONTRACT WITH THE GOVERNMENT – NOVEMBER 5, 2009
MODELS BY FRANCIS KÉRÉ – JANUARY 2010
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TRANSPORT OF CONTAINERS – FEBRUARY 5, 2010
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LAYING OF THE FOUNDATIONAL STONE – FEBRUARY 8, 2010
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AN UNDERGROUND WATER LINE WAS FOUND! – FEBRUARY 24, 2010
APRIL 2010
JUNE 2010
COLLAGE BY THOMAS GOERGE & FRANCIS KÉRÉ
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JUNE 2010
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MARCH 2011
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CARDBOARD MODEL 1 – OCTOBER 2009
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CARDBOARD MODEL 2 – FEBRUARY 2010
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Photo: Kabyagda Yhsuima
Photo: Amone Rokiatou
Photo: Amone Rokiatou
Photo: Ba Fatao
Photo: Amone Rokiatou
Photo: Samandoulgou Fassala
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Photographs by Burkinabè children between five and eleven years old taken with disposable cameras
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Photo: Tamagda Inouasa
Photo: Sargho Ftinata
Photo: Samandougou Abdoul
Photo: Samandougou Abdoul Agig
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Photo: Samandougou Abdoul
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Photo: Dialo Rainatou
Photo: Tamagda Celina
Photo: Tamagda Celina
Photo: Yacomba Kéré
Photo: Tamagda Celina
Photo: Samandoulgou Fassala
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Photo: Tamagda Inouasa
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VIA INTOLLERANZA II
PERFORMANCES AT KUNSTENFESTIVALDESARTS BRUSSELS, MAY 15, 2010, AND AT VIENNA FESTWOCHEN, JUNE 12, 2010
Photo: Zerne Osmane Tenke Bogo
Photo: Dialo Rainatou
Photo: Zongo Abdoul Rasume
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VIA INTOLLERANZA II
Performances in Brussels and Vienna, 2010
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VIA INTOLLERANZA II
Performances in Brussels and Vienna, 2010
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Chapter 5: Introduction of the European Cultural Code: 1) Love without limits 2) Art is giving form to doom 3) Life is what doesn’t work out
VIA INTOLLERANZA II
Performances in Brussels and Vienna, 2010
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HELKE BAYRLE SETTEBELLO
HELKE BAYRLE
Settebello, 2011 Christoph Schlingensief at the Venice Biennale June 2003, Video Stills
Settebello, 2011 Christoph Schlingensief in Frankfurt am Main September 2003, Video Stills
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KLAUS BIESENBACH I WANTED TO CAPTURE EVERYTHING IN PICTURES CHRISTOPH SCHLINGENSIEF IN CONVERSATION WITH KLAUS BIESENBACH
Klaus Biesenbach: When did you know that you were an artist? Christoph Schlingensief: Well, I don’t know that even today—four or five years ago I tried saying, I’ve done films, I’ve done theater and opera, and now? We’ll see, now I’m going to go into art, I’ve had dealings with people from the art world on many occasions. I know a couple people, and there are artists who I think are great. And then at some point a curator working for Hauser & Wirth was sitting in the audience, and after the show she asked, “Well, so what now about the table and the slaughtered chicken on top of it, and where is the drawing?” I said, “They’ve been taken away and rinsed off, they’ve already been put away for next time.” But she took an interest in where all that stuff goes, so I started throwing some ideas around, and I thought to myself, well, I might produce something that could remain. But this process, to my mind, is already concluded by now, as I realized it also led me to make mistakes. With the Animatograph, for example, a large rotating stage I built in a slum near Lüderitz, the project was called Area 7. And this Animatograph was built over the course of six weeks, in collaboration with the people there in Namibia, they were paid for it, too; a ship was dragged through the desert for the objects to be bolted on top of it, down to pieces of corrugated sheet iron we had collected—I don’t know what all was bolted to this Animatograph in the end. The children painted it, and films were shot during those six weeks. When everything was finished, we wanted to project films onto the rotating stages one night. We made a big show out of it, of course, and we also filmed this show. But I had already lost touch with it, had lost it a long time before. It didn’t really grab me all that much anymore, and added to that was the grand absurdity that we had wanted to bring food as well but we didn’t have any plates or spoons for it. So we just set out the food, and then they came with paper tableware to put the food on and then they gobbled it up. Then people got into a brawl over the food, it was just a disaster.
Biesenbach: To come back to the question of the artist. The artist can also be someone, after all, who writes a text, who makes a film or music or does theater. I think our society often distinguishes between the visual artist and the creative artist, but the point of my question is really: I know this from myself, there was a phase when I drew like crazy. But every child does that. Do you remember anything that went beyond just this creative-child thing? Where people around you first said, there’s something going on that’s more than the normal creativity of a five year old? Schlingensief: With drawing, not at all, in fact I had a shocking experience: we were supposed to draw our primary school. When my picture was finished, the director, who also taught art, took out a wide marker pen, took my drawing and then redrew all the edges of the building with thick marker lines, as well as the windows and the door. To me that was such an injury to this picture, I thought it was horrible! That I remember—I was six or seven at the time, that must have been early in primary school. In any case, I never thought about being an artist, I always wanted to be a movie director. I always wanted to be someone who has the chance to record something with a camera, which is to say, to play, to stage. Biesenbach: How old were you? Schlingensief: I was eight at the time. Biesenbach: When you were eight you already knew what film was? Schlingensief: Yes, my father always shot films, Double 8 films, and so after seven and a half meters he had to switch them around to expose the other side. Then it was sent in, developed, cut along the middle, spliced together, and finally you had fifteen meters. At eighteen frames per second, fifteen meters made for roughly four minutes of film. Biesenbach: And then you would watch it at home?
I then had the Animatograph dismantled and taken along, the idea being that it is art, after all, and I want to keep showing it, there were plans for an installation at the Burgtheater in Vienna, for instance. Later on it was in fact shown there. Looking back now I didn’t like the film that was made in Namibia either, because at the time I didn’t even really know what I was doing. I did something imitative every day, I probably also imitated the figure of the artist. I noticed, and this is probably something that didn’t happen until two years or even a year ago: the mistake was to take the Animatograph away instead of leaving it standing in Namibia, saying, I have my photographs, I have my films, I’ve experienced things, had ideas, or disappointments as well, what do I know? I’m taking all that with me. But no, I did have to take the object with me as well, and that was the mistake.
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Schlingensief: We would watch it two weeks later in our living room. One time my father had switched the film around twice. So suddenly there were people walking across my mother’s tummy and my own tummy on the beach at Norderney. I asked my father how that was possible, and he explained to me that he’d switched the film around twice. Children then weren’t as trained as they are now; there were only three television stations. One had a noisy picture and sound, the second had a good picture but no sound, and the third channel had both picture and sound, but the signal was gone all the time. Once I was allowed to watch a boxing match on television, I was supposedly four at the time. My mother was in the kitchen, I was in the living room watching the men go at each other. When one of them was knocked out, I apparently turned the television off and told my mother, “Man dead—television off,” and so then I didn’t watch any television for weeks because the man was knocked out, gone, off air, as it were.
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Then my father let me have the camera. That was in 1968. But even before that, I had always rehearsed theatrical plays of sorts with people we met at the bed and breakfasts on Chiemsee where we went on vacations. That is to say, organized scenes of some sort, and of course I liked to be in the main scene. The first film was just a chase, three people coming after a go-kart, and farmer Meiwes, he waved a flag. That was also the film’s title, Fahnenschwenkerfilm [Flag-waver Film]. And later, when I had enough money for a soundtrack, I put the wedding march to it. Biesenbach: When did you stage these scenes at that bed and breakfast on Chiemsee? Schlingensief: In 1967, I think. That must all have been around that time. I had bought a book of theatrical sketches you would practice and then perform. And so we put on an afternoon program in the barn for the parents. Biesenbach: You were the director? Schlingensief: Yes. Biesenbach: And who were the actors? Schlingensief: The children who were staying at the same bed and breakfast with me. The problem with the films, even with the first, the Fahnenschwenkerfilm, was that the camera always needed to be wound up. And whenever you would wind it up of course there would be a jolt, and then it would take a while. So everyone had to stop when the camera was off, I shouted, “Stop now!” and then I’d quickly wind it up, turn it back on, and say, “Now run!” That’s why you always saw pursuers that started running—and suddenly the picture would jump and they would stand frozen-like. And then they would start running again. It had something of the show about the boy with the boomerang, I distinctly remember that, it was a broadcast where a boy could bring the world to a standstill with his boomerang. Whenever the boomerang shot up into the air, everything froze and he would run around and arrest the perps. I Dream of Jeannie, too, was a very important television show, because by blinking her eyes she was able to fulfill wishes. Or Get Smart, with the tricks in his shoe, and so on, so this was all about tricks and cheating time, or making two times overlap, that was what fascinated me most. Biesenbach: So at the age of eight, you didn’t document some actual chase, for example, but instead staged it? Schlingensief: That was staged, yes. And I very deliberately put the farmer on his spot, selected the flag—I remember it was very important to me that it would be this way and no other way. And the first film after that, there was even a script for it, which must still exist somewhere. Biesenbach: That one is called Die Schulklasse [The Class].
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Schlingensief: Yes, and in it I play the teacher who accompanies his class on a trip to a country hostel, where he then holds his lessons in the open. After a falling-out with the children he wants to bolt—he is leaving the house and suddenly a bra falls out of his suitcase, and he is disgraced. I don’t even remember how the film ends. Biesenbach: How long is that film? Schlingensief: Probably ten or fifteen minutes. My uncle Paul shot it on the Super 8 camera. It was really a play, which he then helped me adapt for the screen, scene by scene. So, coming through the door, suitcase opens, and so on. That’s when I started taking a shot twice when it didn’t work out the first time. Or three times, because I didn’t think it was good. Biesenbach: Was there a screenplay for it, or any outline? Schlingensief: Yes, there must be screenplay somewhere. I wrote something of the sort, I remember that. There are screenplays I wrote, even typed up, that I composed when I was eleven or twelve. Around that time I also bought books at Messerschmidt’s Photo Shop, I think that was the name. These were books about how to make films, real manuals. In the back of one book, in the list of sources, I discovered that there was also a book about special effects. And so I got that book, and then I also got one about real, major special effects, like the Schüfftan process, where you place a mirror at an angle in front of the lens and scratch some of it off so that you can look through it while also inserting a scale model backdrop via the mirror. You then see the actors walking through the door of a tiny model house that looks like it’s a regular-sized building. I copied all of these tricks, translating them chapter by chapter into my own language, because I wanted to publish my own book about special effects. I really didn’t do anything other than what people are now doing for their doctoral theses using Google, selecting pieces from other works, and pasting them together. So I also copied what it said in those books. Biesenbach: What was it you were interested in, was it form? Did you want to be in control of it? Or were you more interested in embarrassing the teacher by having the bra fall out of the suitcase? Schlingensief: No, I wanted to shoot real movies. They were supposed to be films of the sort I knew. I had seen Tatort, for example, or Der Kommissar, that sort of thing, and these shows were major events for me. I always thought, that’s what I would like to do, and when a film featured a helicopter, that was the greatest thing ever! I noticed, of course, that by being in the position of the director you’re also a central figure of sorts, and that’s certainly something I needed. I then founded the film club called Amateurfilm Company 2000 when I was ten. And we put together a trailer for our films, too, that looked like the one 20th Century Fox uses: a high-rise building with two rockets on the left and right, which were pieces of table fireworks that sprayed these fountains, and then there was a countdown from ten to zero. Of course there was a lot of jolting and flashing, since it was all handmade.
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And I managed time and again to turn my parents’ or other people’s conversations to my hobby, filmmaking. I remember that I posed as a director when I was only twelve or thirteen, and then when I was sixteen I picked up the tic with the silk scarf and the cowboy boots, I had probably seen somewhere that that’s how directors dress. … In any case, I played the director wherever I went. I was the director.
the issue that so many people keep on deluding themselves and saying, “Now I’ve got it, now redemption has come!” is already in there. And you can also recognize my point of view, that I see redemption as a form of delusion. Why that is I don’t know, but it’s something I’ve always felt very strongly about. Biesenbach: Let’s go back for just a moment. The Erdkundefilm [Geography Film] was next?
Biesenbach: When did you first perceive Hitchcock or whomever else as the director of a film? When I was eight or nine or ten years old—at that age we would already know a band, we already knew that Erik Ode was Der Kommissar … Schlingensief: Exactly. The first films I consciously saw were Laurel and Hardy, Charlie Chaplin, Tom and Jerry, Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny with sound, where he shaves to the music from The Barber of Seville, a sensational film! I remember screening that for my cousins. And when the moment came where the fat one falls down the chimney, I ran the projector forward and backward again and again in order to repeat the scene. Only much later did I realize that they had already reeled the film drum forward and backward in Jean Renoir’s films from the 1920s and 1930s, also to make the film longer—they didn’t have long filmstrips yet. So I did the same sort of thing as a child without knowing that that was how it was done. But it was an obvious thing to do, since the effect of his falling down was also funny when the chimney rose up again all by itself. So that’s why I was of course familiar very early on with the names of people such as the comedians Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, or Charlie Chaplin—Western Cyclone, and then Ole and Aksel … !
Schlingensief: Yes, that was the attempt to get better grades in school by working with a special medium, since technical presentations and the like were never my thing. In makebelieve writing I always received As, whereas my interpretations got C minuses or even Ds because I permanently put myself in the shoes of the perpetrator. But this was the ’60s and ’70s, and where I went to school you were supposed to take the position of the victim into account, the Holocaust and such. … I once had a total falling-out with my history teacher because I said that I thought it was tendentious to forever study only the history of the victims, I thought it was incredibly important to study the perpetrators, since I personally couldn’t rule out that I might have made films in the Third Reich as well. Biesenbach: How old were you at the time? Schlingensief: Fifteen or sixteen. Biesenbach: And when the Erdkundefilm was made, you were even much younger than that, you were only twelve or something like that?
Biesenbach: And who was the first director whose name meant something to you? Schlingensief: Charlie Chaplin. Biesenbach: But he was ultimately also the actor … Schlingensief: … who took center stage, yes. Charlie Chaplin was the one who acted as well as directed. And I would have liked very much to act—I was very funny. I was very gangly and I could make people laugh just by the way I moved. And for a long time I would harbor the ambition to act as well, and later, in the theater, I often did. But I am so awed by the camera that I always tense up when I am cast for a role in a feature film. Biesenbach: In which of your films do you act? Schlingensief: I only played small roles. In Tunguska—Die Kisten sind da [Tunguska—The Boxes Have Arrived] I am Major Pater Hilf, which is actually a nice cameo. But of course what I play there is a Jerry Lewis role, I am a priest who goes nuts and somewhere deep in the forest falls in love with a retard who lives there, and then tries to convert him to the faith, to doing good. What is interesting is that in that role I already say sentences like, “I am igniting a fire here for all people in this world who constantly hope for redemption, who constantly hope for redemption. A symbol for all people who constantly hope for redemption!” Which is to say,
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Schlingensief: Yes, I don’t remember anymore what was in it; there was also a film set in a retirement home—that was actually quite nice. It was about relations between the generations, I was on a sort of social-issues trip. In any case, these were films where I attempted to use my abilities in the area of film to make a contribution in school. The aim was of course to score points in a field others didn’t work, mostly so I wouldn’t have to do the bullshit others were saddled with, writing essays, throwing around percentages, and so on. That wasn’t my thing. I wanted to capture everything in pictures. Then I was able to sit at my work for hours, for days without food, I sat there at night and edited until I got sick to my stomach, until I just couldn’t keep at it, to the point of exhaustion. That I was able to do. But I could never have read books to the point of exhaustion, that was out of the question. Technical literature I would always eat up, I would race through it, it went straight into my head, and it always also made me raise a thousand questions. But once things veered into the orbit of this particular ’70s-style dopiness, “society as such,” “the social system,” and reflection here and reflection there—Arno Plack, Living Without Lies and that sort of thing—I was dead set against it. That didn’t do anything for me, I thought it was disgusting, and that was where the girls usually did best, we had those gasbags in pedagogy class, I didn’t like any of that. Biesenbach: Next in your filmography is Wer tötet, kommt ins Kittchen [If You Kill, You Go to the Slammer], what was that?
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Schlingensief: That was the first film after the Class one. It was a Super 8 film, which meant a leap forward, since the footage now came in cassettes. We had already set up the film club, Amateurfilm Company 2000, which initially consisted of Karl-Heinz Henning, Klaus Müller, and myself. Wait, now I remember! I played theater as early as kindergarten: I was the seventh dwarf and had a major role, but I came down with a middle ear infection and couldn’t play. So Klaus Müller subbed for me, and everyone had to wear cotton-wool beards and carry candles. And he couldn’t hold his steady because the handle got too hot for him, but the kindergarten teacher always said, “Keep carrying it, keep carrying it!” until his false beard caught on fire and he ran off with his face on fire. Klaus suffered severe burns. His butt was then surgically transferred to his face, and of course he was always teased for that.
how gotten hold of, and a dimmer switch I used to slowly turn the light down. Later on, I also set up a sound studio with a mixing console, the whole shebang.
Biesenbach: You mentioned the film club, what was that?
Schlingensief: Everyone laughed, that was not a problem. Well, I do remember that at some point there was a crisis because the girls were coming. We were a pure all-boys high school, there were lots of people, and all boys. And then ten girls joined our school—and they were studious like you wouldn’t believe! So I immediately told everyone they mustn’t bring girls along, as they were destroying the structure we had here …
Schlingensief: The Amateurfilm Company 2000, that was Klaus Müller and Karl-Heinz Henning, the son of the innkeeper. In primary school, his aunt, called the Sheep—her mouth was crooked, she had some sort of neurological issue—always came during recess and brought him a cocoa drink and sweet rolls with raisins, which she handed to him through the fence. And we all stood around him—we would get the leftovers when he was done eating. And since I was his best friend I was the first to get something. And that was great, of course; I always stood there, craving this roll and hoping that he wouldn’t eat too much. In the first film produced by the Amateurfilm Company he plays a detective. The murderer, that was Klaus Müller.
Biesenbach: When did you first get in trouble with authorities? When did you first set a theatrical production, or a role, or a film in motion that led to conflict? Schlingensief: I don’t know. I mean, I do know that there were instances, of course, where someone would not like a particular film, that did happen, but … Biesenbach: So when the bra fell out of the suitcase, everyone laughed, because it was like Laurel and Hardy.
Biesenbach: You were the captain? Schlingensief: I was the captain. Biesenbach: No girls?
Biesenbach: And you were the director?
Schlingensief: No girls! They’ll mess everything up, I said.
Schlingensief: I was the director. Wer tötet, kommt ins Kittchen was shot in Karl-Heinz Henning’s father’s inn, and the funny thing is that Klaus Müller played not only the murderer, but also the victim, a journalist. So it was a member of the press who got killed.
And then at the age of fourteen I had a crush after all. Her name was Claudia, she was the sister of a fellow student, and she was really very pretty. Strangely enough, she developed a crush on me, and we dated for two weeks. Claudia was the first girl I made out with at a party. Friends explained to me how it was done, they were all experts already. “When the music is playing, you have to hold her tight, move on up close, keep turning her around, and then you put your tongue in her mouth,” and so on. I still remember that whenever I was about to get my act together I would see my friends sitting on the bench, sticking their tongues out to tell me to make my move. It was completely terrifying. So finally I worked up the courage: and presto! I had my tongue in there, and then that lasted for ten seconds or what have you, and then, presto!—tongue comes back out, we sit down, and then I put my arm around her—and there we sat, all tied up in knots.
Biesenbach: Who founded that film club? Schlingensief: I did. And in high school I was then also given rooms in the basement that became our film club lounge, they were actually bomb shelter shafts. That’s where we had our conference room, and we also put together our magazine and the program booklets down there. And there was a movie theater in my parents’ basement, which was really my movie theater. I had put insane efforts into setting it up, but it was my childhood dream: to own a movie theater. I built a real viewing room: a mattress with a plank of wood on it, and then chairs for twelve viewers on top. Of course the whole thing was pretty shaky when you sat on it. A hole was drilled into the wall for the projector, and there was a curtain in front of the screen that opened and closed automatically. I had built it out of two remote-controlled Carrera slot cars attached to the curtain by nylon threads: when you activated the slot car on the right it pulled the curtain open, and the slot car on the left would close it again. There was also the famous gong from Essen’s Lichtburg Movie Theater, which I had some-
KLAUS BIESENBACH
Biesenbach: That’s an interesting answer to the question of when you first got into trouble … Schlingensief: Well, yes, I can’t think of anything else right now. The authority was always the system itself. And I also have this attitude of subservience to authority in me, which I now also find, time and again, in my religion: “Oh, but you mustn’t do that!” It is only now that I’m learning to be generous enough to say that if someone has different ideas about a subject, then I will by no means try to take them away from him. I don’t want to force him,
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I don’t want to attack him, not at all, let him be happy with it. What he needs, let him have it. But I was still brought up to be subservient to authority.
Biesenbach: After all, the seventies were also conflict-laden years: Munich ’72, the German Autumn.
Biesenbach: But you didn’t come into conflict with any authorities, such as Mr. Möllemann, Mr. Kohl, the priest, until you were twenty?
Schlingensief: Yes, there was a lot going on, I know. I also saw all the films that were very controversial at the time. I saw Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom, for example. I got a ticket after flipping my collar up, because I probably looked younger than eighteen. And then I suddenly thought I saw my religious studies teacher and my Greek teacher and I got scared. And so I left after fifteen minutes. I got up and left the movie theater swearing loudly, along the lines of, “What shameless dreck, what filth!”
Schlingensief: No. But I did come to blows with my father! That was a major explosion. That was with my first great love, Inge, whom I dated for six years—we were making out down in the basement under some table, both of us naked. And then my father came down to the basement. Came down the stairs whistling like Peter Lorre in Fritz Lang’s M. He walked through the room as though he wanted to take a look at what was going on down there, and I knew he knew exactly that I was there—he’d always had the seventh sense, after all, whenever I came home, my father would show up at the window, as though he had some sort of GPS device, though of course they didn’t exist back then. In any case, at some point he also came into the room we were in, and suddenly he bends down, his hand comes swooping under this table we had covered with blankets: “Now what is this here? Now what is this here?” I just grabbed my things and ran upstairs, and he came after me, “You’re staying here!” “No,” I said, “I’m not staying here,” and then we ran out to Altmarkt Square. So I screamed at him and kept yelling, “Leave us alone, you perverted pig!” Which was of course insanely embarrassing, on Altmarkt Square—the pharmacy, the church, there were lots of people everywhere around us. That was an instance of real conflict; I remember that distinctly, that was a major explosion. Another conflict arose in school with a teacher, when my patience snapped and I told her that I really thought her way of treating things made me want to throw up. I wasn’t a Social Democrat or a leftist at the time, my ideas were probably leftist after all, but because of my parents I leaned more toward the Christian Democrats. Though at one point I also wound up with the KPD/ML [a Communist organization] and sold eggs for them on the market square for six pfennigs apiece. Until I found out some day that the chickens didn’t even benefit from the proceeds, they were just being exploited, and that’s why it was so cheap. But the KPD/ML people wanted to demonstrate that things can be produced more cheaply, and that was all. So I immediately bolted because I thought that was pretty dubious. I was a member of the city’s youth film group for a while. We staged these raids on at the Lichtburg Movie Theater in Essen, putting the lady at the cash register on the spot with a U-Matic video camera, asking why they weren’t showing anything but this imperialist shit from America, why the Lichtburg wasn’t running any German movies. I thought it was disgusting, they should stop threatening the poor lady—it bothered me, there wasn’t anything she could do about it. But then came the answer: she is indeed the saleswoman for this shit, she is a part of the system and has to take a stand against her employer. But, I said, she can’t do that, she’ll get it in the neck—I defended her. So from then on I was in a very controversial position, I distinctly remember one of them really fucking hated me. His name was Balou, and unfortunately he was also the leader of the local Boy Scouts. To him I was not a leftist but just some bourgeois sonny. That was one conflict, now the conflicts are coming back to me.
KLAUS BIESENBACH
I had an incredibly bad conscience. A couple days later I then was back at the theater and watched the entire film, which I thought was great. Afterwards I felt very guilty and was disgusted with myself; to my mind it was of course way out there. Just as I sat in the lobby as The Exorcist was playing, as I wasn’t allowed to see it and no stunt got me in. Instead I must have heard the film three times, sitting in the lobby—I sat in the lobby and just listened to the soundtrack. I thought it was just crazy, pictures were playing in my head to go with the soundtrack. At some point later on I actually saw the movie. I still thought it was great, but by far not as great as the one in my head. Sound, in any case, was becoming ever more important to me. I had already missed it in the films from my childhood. When I was ten or eleven, I sometimes projected them on our television set. I turned the television picture off, but kept the sound on. So my film now had a soundtrack, and sometimes the asynchronicity even produced a new synchronicity. I got all excited, called my mother, and wanted to show it to her: you should have seen that, this door was in synch, that car was in synch, the music made it exciting, and then suddenly the dialogue made it funny. I think that was a very important experience for me, to see how foreign materials bring in a new level and add a new exposure to your own material. But there was no way to repeat it, it was a random generator. Whenever my mother came in it wouldn’t work, the news would be on, and of course that didn’t fit at all. But even when the sound didn’t fit the images, it expanded them. I then used this way of adding another level in art class, for example. For quite a while I got nothing but As in art. I would take catalogues and put entire dialogues into the mouths of the characters in them, drawing speech balloons and writing stories for them. As a child I read all the comic strips I could get my hands on, although I am not a comic strip expert at all. The language of comic strips was crucial to me. My mother thought that that was why I never read novels. Biesenbach: Let me come back to Salò and The Exorcist. Were there other films beside those two that had a comparable impact on you? Schlingensief: Yes, I saw a science fiction movie, for instance, called Der Untergang der U3000 [The Sinking of U3000]. I saw all episodes of Godzilla that there were, always on Sundays at eleven—these were also very important films because the special effects in them were of course mind-blowing.
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Biesenbach: But the fact that William Friedkin or Pier Paolo Pasolini were really artists, that film would allow a director to achieve not just some sort of pure creativity but perhaps even something that finds a new form, as in Pasolini, was that something you realized during the first twenty years of your life?
Schlingensief: That was in 1976, at the Saalbau municipal event space in Essen. My father was a member of the Lions Club, and they held these events at regular intervals with people of note. On one of these evenings they had invited Joseph Beuys to give a lecture. And my father took me along.
Schlingensief: Yes, but in a way that I didn’t reflect on, that I simply perceived, since the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen was always there, and I went too.
Biesenbach: Were you fascinated by Beuys?
Biesenbach: When did you start going there? Schlingensief: My father took me one time when I was twelve, though I didn’t go as regularly as some others. At some point Oberhausen’s municipal film theater started having the Youth Film Festival, but they had this extreme political touch, with documentaries of one kind or another, important responses, and then endless discussions about the Third World or that sort of thing. And I thought that was boring, but these events time and again allowed me to see films that were different. Biesenbach: Nagisa Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses? Schlingensief: I saw that one as well when it came out, I was about to keep going back to see it again and again. Biesenbach: When did you consciously see your first Fassbinder?
Schlingensief: Yes, I definitely was, while my father and the other men all fell asleep during the lecture. Or rather they became a little sedate, but then in the end Beuys said, “And I’m telling you, this social system will be utterly destroyed in seven years’ time.” So all the men collectively woke up and started barking, woof, nonsense, woof, so they all definitely heard that one sentence. And they thought to themselves, “Well, Mr. Beuys, how about you take your hat off for starters”—that attitude was palpable. Five years ago, when my father was still alive, I asked him, “Do you remember that thing with Beuys?” And he said, “Yes, I remember that, I even put it in my appointment book”— he always had these very slim appointment books—“seven years to go, six years, five years, and in the final year it didn’t come to pass, he was wrong, Beuys was.” And so I said, “But he kept you preoccupied with it for seven years, he actually just articulated the uncertainty within you, the fact that you’re also expecting that things might change.” And my father said, “Yes, that’s true.”
Schlingensief: Umm, that’s a good question.
These mechanisms that Beuys had in him, this prophetic aspect, the fear that someone is saying something I actually do fear, and the fear that it might actually come to pass that way, that fascinated me.
Biesenbach: Germany in Autumn was made at the time; Berlin Alexanderplatz was in 1980.
Biesenbach: Did you listen to the lecture at the time?
Schlingensief: I saw Germany in Autumn when it came out, I know that.
Schlingensief: Yes, I did. But I don’t remember what he talked about.
Biesenbach: Early 1978, you were seventeen.
Biesenbach: But that one sentence about the destruction of the social system you do remember?
Schlingensief: I saw that, I remember, I also saw The Marriage of Maria Braun; that was later. Biesenbach: Did you realize that there was someone at work here who was a great artist? Schlingensief: Yes, well, I would say, in Fassbinder’s case I saw that, I also saw films by Bernhard Sinkel, and Volker Schlöndorff’s The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum. They all ran at the municipal theater, the theater for ambitious films. Biesenbach: If someone had asked you, who is Heinrich Böll, who is Fassbinder, would you have known at seventeen?
Schlingensief: I remember that, yes, yes, most definitely. Why that is I don’t know either, but I remember that sentence. That impressed me very much at the time: that someone would stand there in front of the room and roil an entire room of dozers, that a prognosis, an idea was able to force people to respond. Biesenbach: The years of your childhood and puberty are also the years when the Federal Republic tried out civil disobedience. If you think about it, ’67, ’68, ’69, these were years during which everything was revolutionized and evolutionized and changed in one way or another, then in the early 1970s there were sit-ins, the oil crisis, the Munich disaster, a terror attack in the Olympic village.
Schlingensief: Fassbinder, yes, Heinrich Böll, too, I think. Biesenbach: When did you first hear about Joseph Beuys?
KLAUS BIESENBACH
Schlingensief: And the Anti-Radical Decree. That was a huge issue, and I think my first
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Schlingensief: Yes.
Schlingensief: Das Totenhaus der Lady Florence was the attempt to picturize a trashy “John Sinclair” novel, and it took half a year’s work, because we never had money for footage. So we always had to shoot on weekends whenever more money had come in. And that’s where I first came to understand what continuity is—what happens when you have money for footage only every second week, or you can only shoot on weekends because you have no time during the week. Because what happens is that the detective walks into the interrogation room wearing long hair and a yellow T-shirt—and comes back out wearing short hair and a green T-shirt because in the meantime he’s been to the barber’s and bought new clothes. And the murderer comes down the stairs in a red T-shirt and walks out into the street in a blue T-shirt … Which is to say, you always saw how time had run in parallel because I’d never paid any attention to continuity. And in the end, because of the typical flashbacks in a “John Sinclair” novel, I had completely lost track of the action and no longer had any clue where I was in time at any moment.
Biesenbach: Where did you get it from?
Biesenbach: And your mother or your father lent a hand with these films, didn’t they?
Schlingensief: It came from a company that monitored pipelines of some sort from the air, and I somehow got wind of that. I always got wind of everything. I made phone calls like I was insane. My father once had a phone bill for, I think, 600 marks because when I was sixteen or seventeen I even called a Hollywood studio to ask what kind of lamps they used and where to order them.
Schlingensief: My mother only very reluctantly, when I asked her to help, but my father always stood up for me when I ran out of money.
Super 8 film, Das Geheimnis des Grafen von Kaunitz [Count Kaunitz’s Secret], that’s a film in which the suspect escapes in a helicopter in the end, rather than getting caught. Biesenbach: Which is to say, the suspect wins? Schlingensief: My former art teacher, Dieter Hermann, plays a man who locks up five boys and girls in order to use them as hostages after a successful bank heist. The police stage a major operation featuring Fritz Kahle, the greatest actor at Oberhausen’s municipal theater at the time, and Dieter Hermann runs over to the helicopter, gets in, and flies off. Biesenbach: And you organized a helicopter at sixteen?
Biesenbach: But he also acted, as a double?
Biesenbach: What did your father do about the phone bill?
Schlingensief: Yes, yes, of course, he drove the car as well, lying invisibly in the car he had to drive around on Mülheim’s Steinstraße.
Schlingensief: He was livid. Especially since there was only one phone line, and when I was upstairs making calls to organize my films, my father downstairs in the pharmacy was cut off from ordering medications. And when he found out, boy would he come upstairs.
But then a turning point came when I presented Mensch Mami, wir dreh’n ‘nen Film [Come On, Mom, We’re Shooting a Film] at the Westdeutscher Rundfunk broadcasting station, which had already broadcast something I’d done, as part of a children’s show.
Biesenbach: You saw Salò, you experienced Beuys; you must have picked up one way or another on what was going on during the German Autumn.
Biesenbach: What was it that was broadcast?
Schlingensief: Yes, very much, but not really by reading the paper; it was more the permanent discussions at this Oberhausen Film Short Film Festival, or at the municipal film theater, with films about the Anti-Radical Decree. Biesenbach: And there were sit-ins, and there was Mutlangen, and Heinrich Böll, and civil disobedience. Schlingensief: I didn’t go there at all, to the nuclear thing, I never took part in any of that— Brokdorf, that was never what I was interested in. Biesenbach: Before Der Graf von Kaunitz, there were other films: Rex, der unbekannte Mörder von London [Rex, the Unknown Murderer of London], Das Totenhaus der Lady Florence [The House of the Dead of Lady Florence], Columbo. Were these sort of attempts on your part to organize things for yourself?
KLAUS BIESENBACH
Schlingensief: Six minutes out of Graf von Kaunitz. And then I showed them Mensch Mami, wir dreh’n ‘nen Film and when the film was over and the lights went on, one producer got up—this is really seared into my mind, which is why I’m so cautious with children when I talk to them—and said to me: “This film shows that you will never love a human being.” That’s what he says to me—and I was sixteen. Biesenbach: What is Mensch Mami, wir dreh’n ‘nen Film, what kind of film is that? Schlingensief: A real piece of slapstick comedy about a family man who absolutely wants to shoot a film with his family in Much, the village where my mother was born: the grandma, who is in a wheelchair, ends up in the chicken coop, there are chases, the police arrest the wrong guy, there is making out in front of the camera—in the end the film blows up, then the entire house, and the director’s mother says, resignation in her voice, “Herbert, oh Herbert, must you really overdo absolutely everything.” That I remember, that’s the final line, and then “Y.M.C.A.” starts playing.
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Biesenbach: Did you have a team at the time, or were you by yourself? Schlingensief: We were a team, but I organized it. I had my plans, they were so precise. They specified, this shot takes three seconds, that one five second, I timed it all in advance. But the friends who joined the club of course also contributed in major ways. One was better at operating the camera, the other was good with the sound, but I know I was so egomaniacal that I messed with everything, and then that’s how it had to work out. And when it didn’t work out I would be in a major funk. Once, as we were shooting for Punkt, I was coming back from the bathroom and heard them talking about me: how the film was total shit, and that I probably had a screw loose somewhere, and how my antics were really outrageous. That hurt badly. At that moment I felt very, very lonely, but I didn’t say anything to anyone. But it hurt so much.
KLAUS BIESENBACH
JOHN BOCK
JOHN BOCK
Christoph Schlingensief, Zoo Bayreuth “Klütterkammer,” ICA, London, 2004, Installation View
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The camera is running unevenly. Risk of fracture. Break-even point licks! The little wheel is sludging out secretions. The screen clicks forward, trickles into the buttonhole, and gets caught up lewdly logically in the light-cackle. So I hold one Myself, my body countenance, into the cutting lens. When the camera’s running, then go, go for it, to the WORK. Lay down in that Zest-For-Action-Drama on the paddock. Creeping up to the B / W Existo. So I’ll eat my way into the picture. Jaws are working in synchrony with the picture crackling, no holds barred. Knitting the camera in so the picture can be built snuglywarm. When camera suppurates, spotlight on it. Bit Shit CUT when CUT CUT is pouting in the corner and everything is getting out of hand, LETTING things slide anyway.
Christoph Schlingensief, Zoo Bayreuth “Klütterkammer,” ICA, London, 2004, Installation View Christoph Schlingensief, Remdoogo II “Fischgrätenmelkstand,” Temporäre Kunsthalle, Berlin, 2010, Installation View
JOHN BOCK
Christoph Schlingensief, Remdoogo II “Fischgrätenmelkstand,” Temporäre Kunsthalle, Berlin, 2010, Installation View
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JOHN BOCK
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Come on, get it! Closer! Do it! No, harder, until the lens fogs over. Light flocculates out of your back. Turn around, a shadow puddle behind the ear. Got it? Again, until shadow puddle stiffly slaps against the back of the head. Full bread. It’s shaking. No matter. Are you on it? Turn your way into the camera. Eat the lens. Sound. Next door. No, get it. Just scream something! But what?! “Am hungry for sour bread + everything that’s on the agenda after that.” Is he getting a green light? Left would be good. Stop! Now! “Am hungry for …” Stop! More fiercely! What has to come out has to come out. The lens is pulp. Scratch it out of your skull. “Basal skull fracture on the corner pillar” Fierce stormgathering is to suck up the cameramachine. Which then twists it deliriously into your cerebral gyri. Ritual bubble. Are you in it? Not yet. Go in! Some ritual is slapping itself sore against your shoulder pad. Apply Sidomastik over stitches. Crusty, but it’s holding up. Lens is shaking. No, not now. Pause!
JOHN BOCK
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FRANK CASTORF HE ASKED THE QUESTION OF GUILT
I
n 1993, Matthias Lilienthal asked me about Schlingensief. I had seen Das deutsche Kettensägenmassaker [The German Chainsaw Massacre] and thought that its extreme aesthetic position, its fusion of trash, horror, and polit-kitsch, was not uninteresting. We got to talking, and I said to Schlingensief: “Do something!” Up until 1999, he created eight productions at the Volksbühne. It was important to him to have an institution for his peculiarity, his eccentricity. We maintained a friendly hostility or a hostile friendship based on an attitude of fundamental friendliness. When I met him in Vienna in June of last year, he looked very tired and very depressed. He wasn’t happy during the work on the last project he created there, not happy in the way he used people or, for that matter, himself. He didn’t want to be broken, but the break within the man that was Christoph Schlingensief was impossible to overlook. … On August 21—I was coming back from Cuba, had landed in Tegel, and was passing VirchowKlinikum, the hospital where he died, on my way home—Matthias Lilienthal called me and said: “Christoph is dead!” I would never have thought that someone like him could die. Someone who always lived and worked to excess, always in a state of emergency, who could not conceive of himself in any other way. I had hoped that his will would be strong enough to override the laws of nature. Exceptional characters like him—like Heiner Müller or Einar Schleef, too—have become rare in our ever more marginal segment of the culture business. … Schlingensief was an exceptional character, a breaker of barriers who relentlessly called the rules of the game we impose on ourselves in question. That was his happiness, his technique of happiness. He always had a piece of cultural revolution in his head, and a cultural revolution is what he permanently performed to the end of his life: not in the consensus that has us zealously adopting every trend emerging across the Atlantic, not in the mainstream, not in the pull of what is politically or morally correct, but rather far away from them and against them. Suspending political correctness: that was important to him, and that’s how I experienced him. … I also think that Burkina Faso is more a metaphor; that Schlingensief wanted to do something more with it than using this necessary useless activity that is art to think about people and turning it into something like art, something that makes you wonder more than once: who really needs this? And perhaps Burkina Faso is a metaphor for doing something with the means of art that approaches a notion of usefulness. And that might be, for instance, the building of an opera house in a poor country in Western Africa, from groundbreaking to the day the artists take possession of it. That, too, required a quite literal act of border-crossing, and not just one. … Using art as a way of crossing borders at some point became synonymous with Christoph Schlingensief. He was very hesitant about it initially, and in fact did it at his most brilliant in the beginning. Nobody knew how to react: Is this art now, should we now leave the event? Will there be a final applause at all, does that even make sense? How do I respond to this shockwave of provocations, of challenges, of art terror? The first work at the Volksbühne was 100 Jahre CDU [100 Years of CDU], then Kühnen ’94—Bring mir den Kopf von Adolf Hitler! [Kühnen ’94—Bring Me the Head of Adolf Hitler!].
FRANK CASTORF
He used Katzilein, a film by Otmar Bauer, the Viennese Actionist, for that. I told him that that thing wouldn’t be on my stage, I would forbid it. He scrambled the scenes I deemed unacceptable, and during the second, third, fourth performances he exposed me on the stage as a censor and Stasi man. He may have been right—in any case, at the time I didn’t want to see that film in my theater. That was one instance of profound discomfort. Or Tötet Helmut Kohl [Kill Helmut Kohl], which caused a giant uproar in West Berlin’s ultimately very provincial Christian Democratic Union. I think Kohl himself adopted a much more self-possessed or tolerant or perhaps also slightly ironic attitude. Actions of this kind were something in which you really noticed that there’s a defensive response within yourself, and you find yourself saying: there’s a line here, and that is perverse. I think that experience was important to him: that you have to take the theater that far, that you don’t impose an internal censorship. These limits we set for ourselves—I’m from East Germany, after all, from a country under dictatorship—need to be breached time and again. Schlingensief is one of the very few people I know from the West German context who breached the limits with this degree of relentlessness. … The only truly great and stirring art experience, to my mind, was Kunst und Gemüse [Art and Vegetables], featuring a woman who was suffering from this incurable neurodegenerative disease, ALS—nothing moves anymore, there’s nothing left but her head and eyes. She sat in her bed or coffin, like Snow White. I talked to her, she communicated with me using a language computer, and there was this radiant desire for life—unreal and beautiful, as with Snow White in her coffin. That was incredibly moving, the collision of possibly fairy-talelike kitsch with the brutality and relentlessness of a lethal disease, accompanied by Schönberg’s music. And facing that you also face the question: How do I deal with this, how do I respond? You’re utterly alone with this question, utterly on your own. He really set something in motion with that synthesis, which the theater virtually never accomplishes; accomplished it by generating what we call, a stupid term, “concernment.” The path from the political provocateur of Tötet Helmut Kohl to someone who says there is so much dirt in this world when that world ought to be equal, free, and just; who says more must be done to achieve it than just going onstage and creating images of reality— that was Schlingensief’s path from life to dying. That theater must be more than entertainment, no, more must be possible! And that is a challenge. … A small number of people, and Christoph Schlingensief first and foremost, are responsible for others who say: no, not this way! Count me out. We’ll do our classics, our Ibsen and our Chekhov, and lean back. You go do it, comrade, I’ve got a family! You go first! That’s our depoliticized age. And touching the sore spot with such insistence; that is Schlingensief’s lasting accomplishment. He asked the question of guilt. In this regard, the theater is no more than a mirror image, a gloomy stocktaking. It takes someone who will repeatedly and insistently put our own bad conscience—which we needn’t have—to the test. In contradistinction to the medium of television and the pressure to increase ratings, in contradistinction to the need for newspapers and books to aim for large print runs, we in the theater are free to do, and even politically free to do, what we want, to say what we think. It’s just that we take this liberty and become ever more timid. That’s one tendency. Luc Bondy says: this German idealism, it always needs heroes against
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which to work off its own petit-bourgeois instincts. That is true, and it is sad. Schlingensief was an artist of the momentary. He was such a genius, after all, because he reacted with such precision to the moment in which he lived, always responding instantaneously. And so this African project was something he used in order to think about a form of sustainability, perhaps even to think strategically about what can be done with the theater, what will remain? … What remains of Christoph Schlingensief is, more than anything else, he himself, between the horrible fate that befell him so early and the will to fight, to take up the fight against this theater of nothing-but-art, this performance, whatever we may call it. That doing so lets you be someone who becomes very important to others, who really uses art to convey a project for humankind, these are ideas he persuasively championed. This yearning for a cultural revolution, after all, was also something that united us. I sometimes think it’s very simple and better to just make babies. They, too, are something that remains. But he chose a different path, always focused on the fighter in his mind. His performances, his players, were his family, and they still are. … But the fighter that Schlingensief was could also reveal a side of himself where he was a total asshole; in the way he dealt with the apparatus of the theater, but also with people. He would also behave as someone who was incredibly obtrusive, incredible friendly and charming in order to push through what he thought was important, egotistical to the point of terrorizing others; unjust in his fight for a just world. I would not exempt certain people, Schleef or even myself, from the same charge, so in that regard, too, we resemble each other. And perhaps it is important that one has to be this way. But at the same time, when we met, these encounters were very friendly. He also knew what he had in this institution, the Volksbühne, which is, after all, not just Castorf, it is a gigantic apparatus he fought, and an apparatus that needs to be fought. … Somehow this hatred also turned into a love affair. He did around fourteen productions with us starting in 1993, the most recent one was five years ago. And so then it was good, too, that he left, that he took an interest in other things. In his recollection, this house was certainly also a milestone to him, including the fights we had here. He knew no bounds in his “Give me!” But he relied on those who gave not just to augment his own surplus value, he transformed it into an essential artistic substance that had something to do with our time. And the more strongly someone asserts himself, even to the point of egocentricity, the more conspicuous he will be to our time of superficiality and rapid fluctuation; the more memorable he will be. And memorable he will remain, for quite a while!
FRANK CASTORF
THOMAS DEMAND
“I
feel as I presume the great majority of you do. We are all modern people who move mistrustfully and awkwardly in public. Caught up in our modern prejudices, we think that only the ‘objective work,’ separate from the person, belongs to the public; that the person behind it and his life are private matters, and that the feelings related to these ‘subjective’ things stop being genuine and become sentimental as soon as they are exposed to the public eye. […] In order to speak to the point here we must learn to distinguish not between subjectivity and objectivity, but between the individual and the person. It is true that it is an individual subject who offers some objective work to the public, abandons it to the public. The subjective element, let us say the creative process that went into the work, does not concern the public at all. But if this work is not only academic, if it is also the result of ‘having proved oneself in life,’ a living act and voice accompanies the work; the person himself appears together with it. What then emerges is unknown to the one who reveals it; he cannot control it as he can control the work he has prepared for publication. (Anyone who consciously tries to intrude his personality into his work is play-acting, and in so doing he throws away the real opportunity that publication means for himself and others.) The personal element is beyond the control of the subject and is therefore the precise opposite of mere subjectivity. But it is that very subjectivity that is ‘objectively’ much easier to grasp and much more readily at the disposal of the subject. (By self-control, for example, we mean simply that we are able to lay hold of this purely subjective element in ourselves in order to use it as we like.) Personality is an entirely different matter. It is very hard to grasp and perhaps most closely resembles the Greek daimon, the guardian spirit which accompanies every man throughout his life, but is always only looking over his shoulder, with the result that it is more easily recognized by everyone a man meets than by himself. This daimon—which has nothing demonic about it—this personal element in a man, can only appear where a public space exists; that is the deeper significance of the public realm, which extends far beyond what we ordinarily mean by political life. To the extent that this public space is also a spiritual realm, there is manifest in it what the Romans called humanitas. By that they meant something that was the very height of humanness because it was valid without being objective. […] Humanitas is never acquired in solitude and never by giving one’s work to the public. It can be achieved only by one who has thrown his life and his person into the ‘venture into the public realm’—in the course of which he risks revealing something which is not ‘subjective’ and which for that very reason he can neither recognize nor control.”
THOMAS DEMAND
From Hannah Arendt, “Karl Jaspers: A Laudatio,” in Men in Dark Times (Middlesex: Harmondsworth 1973), 75–76.
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CHRIS DERCON COMRADES
August 2010
Werner Nekes and What Really Happened Between the Images
“August is a dangerous month,” the famous German filmmaker, writer, and television producer Alexander Kluge wrote in the August 5, 2010 edition of the German weekly Die Zeit. On August 21st of that same dangerous month, Christoph Schlingensief, whom Kluge, his senior by many years, called his “young comrade,” died. Why died? “Christoph Schlingensief is not dead,”1 Kluge wrote in an obituary that was not supposed to be one. “Christoph often played hide and seek, but this time he has hidden especially well,” Schlingensief’s wife, Aino Laberenz, said during the memorial service in Oberhausen on August 29th.
The trilogy is the immediate outcome of the training he received from one of Germany’s leading experimental filmmakers, the collector of optical apparatuses, and connoisseur of early cinematography, Werner Nekes, whose most important insight is probably that film ought not to be conceived as a rigid unit. Schlingensief first met Nekes in 1982, in Mülheim an der Ruhr, the next town over from his birthplace, Oberhausen. Just twenty-two years old, he became Nekes’s assistant in various functions. He maintained Werner Nekes’s amateur film archive, whose holdings included many documents of the Viennese Actionists. The title of the first film in whose production Schlingensief assisted Nekes is emblematic of the older filmmaker’s significance in Schlingensief’s own work: Was geschah wirklich zwischen den Bildern? [Film Before Film: What Really Happened Between the Images?, 1982]. “I knew Christoph from when we were both with Werner Nekes at the University of Art and Design Offenbach. I was a student there, and he was an assistant. […] Nekes inspired in all of us this curiosity and the interest in the magic of filmmaking. The curious exploration of the principles of the camera obscura (recording) and the laterna magica (projection), that was the childlike drive propelling the realization of his work. Be it in the realm of art, in that of film, or on the stage. Nekes was the quiet and modest teacher and the self-effacing paragon. […] The Nekesian curiosity about phenomena of perception and their technical realization, recording, or projection is something that stayed with Schlingensief throughout his life. Christoph’s Animatographs attest to that, a sort of oversized zoetrope or praxinoscope. Without Werner Nekes’s influence, Christoph would never have taken an interest in this form of presentation and integration between his films and his theatrical projects,”3 writes the lighting designer and cameraman Voxi Bärenklau, who was a close collaborator of Schlingensief’s from the film Mutters Maske [Mother’s Mask, 1987] until Schlingensief’s death. With Bärenklau, Schlingensief developed complex silhouette and film projections on the stage, as well as the rotating stage as a central cinematographic element, which gave rise, in 2005, to the Animatograph, a sort of “Actionist photographic plate.”
“August is a plane, a surface; we might also say it is a stagnant pond, the month when the bustle of activity quiets down, when a sort of universal recess is held. […] In its very name, August is a month of longing. […] In 1989, August played an important role, it was when the mass exodus from the GDR began. […] That is a typical August event, everyone is on vacation; it is a phase when nothing is ready for a counterstrike. […] The agreement that everyone takes a break at the same time, everyone decides to lower the stress level together, that is what makes August dangerous,”2 Alexander Kluge wrote, as though he already sensed that Schlingensief would use that same month to break free of his illness in order to come back, though in a very different guise, to the most animated life. Alexander Kluge and Saying Farewell to Yesterday Schlingensief had known Kluge since the fall of 1993, when they first met at the funeral of their mutual friend Alfred Edel, where both delivered eulogies. Edel had been Kluge’s companion and an important mentor to Schlingensief. In Kluge’s milestone achievement of New German Cinema, Abschied von gestern [Yesterday Girl, 1966] , Edel had played an ambitious scientist, which was in fact what he was in real life. With Abschied von gestern, Kluge drew his conclusions from the manifesto “Papas Kino ist tot” [Papa’s Cinema is Dead], to which he was a signatory. Penned on occasion of the 8th West German Short Film Festival held in Oberhausen in 1962, the manifesto called for a renewal of West German film culture with respect to content as well as form. Schlingensief, not even two years old at the time, grew up in the same city of Oberhausen. In Abschied von gestern, Kluge, adopting an almost documentary style, tells the story of Anita G.’s attempts to gain a foothold in West German life after escaping from the GDR. For Edel, Abschied von gestern meant the beginning of his career in film; to Kluge it brought an award at the Venice Film Festival. Almost twenty years later, Edel played an “avant-garde researcher” in Schlingensief’s Tunguska—Die Kisten sind da [Tunguska—The Boxes Have Arrived, 1984], his first feature-length film and the most important contribution to his “Trilogy on Film Criticism” (1983–4). The two other—shorter—parts are entitled Phantasus muss anders werden / Phantasus Go Home and What Happened to Magdalena Jung. As the titles suggest, Schlingensief’s “Trilogy on Film Criticism” is a comment about the situation—which is to say, effectively, the end—of New German Cinema. Schlingensief sharply rejects filmic realism and provokes new visual experiences. The boxes the so-called “German avant-garde researchers,” dragged into view in Tunguska, represent each individual filmic image. They can be filled with new content only if the visual language and the projection surface of the filmic image are expanded.
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Werner Nekes probably thought that Menu Total (1986), which Schlingensief himself called his “best film,” was rather fascistic. Like Nekes’s own parodic film comedy Johnny Flash (1987), Menu Total was a “Ruhr flick.” Helge Schneider—another assistant and disciple of Nekes’s—plays the leading roles in both films: sons screaming at the world in helpless rage; in Nekes’s film he is the frustrated pop singer Jürgen Potzkothen, in Schlingensief’s, a frustrated Hitler youth. Although Schlingensief was still Nekes’s assistant when Johnny Flash was made, the two gradually grew apart after the younger director’s own films began to garner some success. Come On, Mom, We’re Shooting a Film Still, there are echoes of Nekes’s ideas and his fascination with film technology throughout Schlingensief’s own remarks about film: “According to Godard, a film consists of twentyfour pictures per second. He says, ‘twenty-four truths per second.’ But Godard is wrong, that is at least six pictures too many, because humans begin to see fluid movement at eighteen pictures and even almost at only twelve pictures per second. So please remember: twelve
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pictures and up, almost fluid; sixteen pictures and up, quite fluid; eighteen pictures and up, fluid. But with twenty-five, that’s already superfluous, no dark phase intervenes at all anymore, and the dark phase is decisive. Eighteen pictures per second is right.”4 The most important text Schlingensief wrote about film is an essay about “The Criminal Pleasure of Making a Film,” 5 written in 1987 for the journal Filmwärts. “It reads,” Schlingensief’s longtime editor and “ghostwriter” Jörg van der Horst says, “like a sort of big bang. Schlingensief most importantly casts doubt on the rigorous logic of narrative cinema, which he feels is notorious, calling, as it were, for a (childlike) liberation of the medium of film.”6 Other important essays bear titles such as “Manifesto of German Underground Film”7 and “How Films Are Made!”8 In his writings about the “liberation” of German film, Schlingensief often pointed to the Oberhausen manifesto of 1962, which he believed had failed. Schlingensief wanted a liberated cinema in the sense of Antonin Artaud’s “nonrepresentational theater,” transgressive, drawing freely on reality and fiction, on the conscious and the unconscious, open to popular culture, impure, dirty. Time and again Schlingensief also used religious motifs, offering to “sacrifice” himself to save German film. In 1988, writing under his full name, Christoph Maria Schlingensief, he published an essay on “How to Restore One’s Balance. A Religious Contribution,”9 in which he remarked about the keyword “genius”: “Retaining my puberty might be my hope, were I not indeed compelled to walk the path of genius.” It was a sort of childlikeness, namely “the innocent eye of the child that interested him most. He thought that we should approach things the way a child would,” Schlingensief’s widow, Aino Laberenz, noted.10 Schlingensief himself repeatedly spoke of “pubescent” ideas, confronting both his team and his viewers with the curious and inquisitive eye of a teenager. In his exhibition “18 Images per Second” on display at Haus der Kunst in 2007, for example, he presented cabins—the so-called “Sauna Boxes”—containing utensils and film reels from the filmic oeuvre of his teenage years. In 1972, he founded the Oberhausen youth film team; until 1978, the team, working under his leadership and a variety of names (Club of Seven, Altmarkclub, Amateurfilm Company 2000), produced seven Super 8 feature films. His film Mensch Mami, wir dreh’n ’nen Film [Come On, Mom, We’re Shooting a Film, 1977], whose title alludes to the Oberhausen manifesto’s “Papas Kino ist tot,” is a satire about an ambitious hobby filmmaker; it was broadcast on Westdeutscher Rundfunk [West German Broadcasting, WDR]. Alexander Kluge and True Claims After Werner Nekes, Alfred Edel and Alexander Kluge were Schlingensief’s most important mentors. Alfred Edel vomits his way through the entirety of Schlingensief’s film Menu Total; in Das deutsche Kettensägenmassaker [The German Chainsaw Massacre, 1990], he plays a butcher, “the principal heir to the German tragedy.”11 Schlingensief depicts the first hour of German reunification as a blood-soaked act of cannibalism in which the West ingests the East. After Edel’s death in 1993, Kluge and Schlingensief were accomplices, regularly meeting or speaking on the phone. If there was anyone who had a sustained influence on him, Schlingensief admitted in conversation with Max Dax, it was Kluge.12 The chroniclers or archaeologists of the new German era, Schlingensief and Kluge, have no problem reusing
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extremely cooled or burnt-out “intellectual fuel rods” in their productions, appearances, or essays, setting them forth as “true claims”; the filmic image often contradicts the filmic text or off-screen commentary, serving time and again to try out a new theory, a term that must here be understood as a theater of thinking. “Exchanges with him always enabled his interlocutor to forget about the pure functionalism of German cultural pessimism,” Schlingensief praised Kluge in 2002 on occasion of the older filmmaker’s seventieth birthday. And he ended his encomium with these words: “Would be nice if the day were to come when Kluge and us younger filmmakers could jointly make a film for the entirely new New German Film. The title: Germany in Spring. For Alfred Edel.”13 Schlingensief is alluding to the omnibus film Deutschland im Herbst [Germany in Autumn, 1978]. A few years later, at the 2006 Hof Film Festival, Schlingensief will describe Kluge’s contribution, the episode “Verlorene Geschichte” [Lost History], as a “portrait of im-morals, painted by the New German Film under Kluge’s leadership, of a Zombie-Germany that, caught between the terrors of the Nazi era and the Red Army Faction, tries in vain to bury its unloved history in hasty state funerals.”14 Jörg van der Horst says about the relationship between Kluge and Schlingensief: “What interested and sometimes fascinated Christoph in Kluge was not the rigorous consistency of a defined theory Kluge championed vigorously, a theory one might deduce and elaborate in logical fashion. A purely theoretical superstructure would not have been all that interesting to Christoph, because to his mind it would have entailed the risk of losing all connection to practice, to life. It seemed more interesting to him to concoct his own theories on the basis of (mundane) fragments of knowledge and flashes of insight, or to put it differently: to adapt theory to his practical purposes. In this sense, the abovementioned Alfred Edel once attributed to Schlingensief ‘brilliant superficial knowledge.’”15 The first concrete collaboration between Kluge and Schlingensief took place in 1999 as part of the “2nd Social Evening: Toolbox of History” at Berlin’s Volksbühne, where Schlingensief had been a guest director since 1993 at the invitation of the theater’s dramaturge, Matthias Lilienthal. Schlingensief put a live “German evening” on stage that featured some highly contentious characters in recent German political history; Kluge had his own camera team on the stage, commissioned by his television production company dctp, to create a documentary record of the event. A New Germany? In an essay written for the Hamburg Institute for Social Research and published in 2009 under the title “A New Germany? The Federal Republic, Twenty Years After the Fall of the Wall,”16 the British historian Perry Anderson claimed that Germany was no longer a country of ideas and instead a country of images in painting, photography, and film: “no other contemporary European society can boast a comparable palette.” At the same time, however, “the economic sphere has shifted to the right. The political sphere has not yet moved very far from the center. The social sphere has performed a subliminal movement to the left, the intellectual sphere, in the opposite direction.” Anderson concludes: “art had its premonitions, even if they are not always correct.” He professes to have felt the beginnings of change as early as the mid-1980s, after Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action (1981) and Sloterdijk’s Critique of Cynical Reason (1983). One of the two thinkers, Habermas, adopts a defensive posture; the other goes on the offensive,
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if primarily in the register of literary style. These are the years when Schlingensief makes his “nasty” films. Schlingensief, however, scratches the surface of the German present, unearthing it with the help of various media. He is neither interested in the territorial claims of different genres of art, nor in dissolving the lines of demarcation between them. How often did he not maintain: “I am not a filmmaker anymore.” On another occasion, he feels much more at home in a museum than in the theater: “I come from movie. But art is easy to make. There’s just so incredibly much you can do.”17 Toward the end, he wanted to return to film after all: “I am totally ill, don’t have a lot of time anymore, give me money now, I have to shoot a film.”18 Is he contradicting himself? No, he just will not be told what to do. He acts and transacts. Good Boy Bad Boy In the visual arts, too, Schlingensief “acted.” He liked to be on the scene. And in this field, too, he had several venturesome “accomplices.” Admittedly, there were not many, but still: Klaus Biesenbach, Catherine David, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Stefanie Rosenthal, Ulrich Wilmes, and a handful of other curators. Most “art professionals” regarded Schlingensief as no more than “pleasant”; in the world of professional curators and collectors, that is actually an invective. Schlingensief was nonetheless very proud of his appearances at documenta 10 (1997) and the 50th Venice Biennale (2003); at Museum Ludwig, Cologne, in 2005; and at Haus der Kunst, Munich, in 2007. But at bottom he didn’t know his way around the art world. And why should he? Of course there was a lot for him to discover that was useful and desirable, mostly in the works of artists who had bid farewell to “the cleanness of art”: Otto Mühl and the other Viennese Actionists’ vomiting, Joseph Beuys’s dead rabbit and his “expanded concept of art,”19 Dieter Roth’s emotion machines and the fluid ideas of Fluxus, the concept of the action as translated through Kaprow, Paul Thek’s processions, Paul McCarthy’s ketchup massacre, Martin Kippenberger’s fortitude. More generally, the only artists Schlingensief found worth engaging were those whose works presented themselves to the world strung together like chains of images. Exhibitions of isolated pictures with lots of white wall between them didn’t strike him as productive. It is strange that Schlingensief would so often challenge the artists he admired by approaching them through appropriation, imitation, and parody bordering on the infantile. In 2005, for example, his work I destroy Parliament. You destroy Parliament. He destroys Parliament. She destroys Parliament. It destroys Parliament appropriated the litany from Bruce Nauman’s video work Good Boy Bad Boy (1985). He claimed during a 2005 satirical talk show at Munich’s Haus der Kunst: “I want to prove that anyone can be a talkshow host in Germany.” Addressing Paul McCarthy, whose independence he greatly appreciated, he said: “I am delighted that Paul McCarthy is also here to talk about art. And I am now imitating your work or you imitate me. I am with the same gallery as you.20 Now the problem is, as some people say: There is a young man who wants to be like Paul McCarthy.” 21 What he admired very much in Paul McCarthy and other visual artists he himself famously celebrated, and also how he treated his longtime team: “Independence is something you have to be able to afford. Like Paul McCarthy or Matthew Barney. They have their stores
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of materials, their workshops and assistants, they are self-reliant entrepreneurs.”22 He wished that his “Schlingensief Office” and his team had had the same financial means, the same networks and possibilities at their disposal.23 One might say that “we should speak not so much of a Schlingensief factory but really rather of the permanent experiment of a Schlingensief family, a community in process; and the term is not meant to romanticize at all but rather intended in the sociological sense: as a social system in artistic production. ‘Family’ was an important concept to Christoph, both in the private sphere and in his work.”24 The Metaboleus What might have driven Schlingensief to imitation and even caricature in the form of parodies? Schlingensief’s protest is directed not against Paul McCarthy or against the social components his works convey. Schlingensief challenges the artist personally and in his personality as an artist. The etymological origins of the concept of parody lie in the Greek word “parodia,” a compound of “para” or “next to” and “ode” or “song” we can translate into English as “side-song” or, more pertinently, “counter-song.” It is a paradoxical expression, designating something that is similar and alien at once. Parodying something or someone, we generate a comedic effect. So it is initially difficult to avoid the impression that parody mocks its original. Yet by eliciting laughter, it not only criticizes the original, it also identifies with it.25 This perspective also allows us to understand Schlingensief’s marked penchant for “remakes”—a method he repeatedly and publicly owned up to—in his films, theater plays, and visual art projects. To Schlingensief the Catholic, are such parodies or side-songs not also an expression of brotherly love? Especially since he time and again identifies with the “other”—in his collaboration with mentally disabled people, whom he shows not as “freaks” but as absolute “equals,” admiring them for possessing a certain very particular form of “child-likeness.” It should come as no big surprise that Schlingensief would write about the Munich-born comedian, balladeer, author, and film producer Karl Valentin (1882–1948): “Karl Valentin is, to me, one of the greatest!, is, to me, something like the German Buñuel and of course a perfectly logical mirror-image of Adolf Hitler. Waging war on the greatest scale by means of disruption on the smallest one. […] Might it be that Hitler permitted these films because he recognized himself in them, I asked my father. And he responded, there were two things Hitler wanted to be: Wagner and Valentin. So I studied him when I was as young as fifteen, but not until I was twenty-two did I find him again in Helge Schneider.”26 Alexander Kluge, too, makes use of Helge Schneider’s satyr plays. In the television productions in which he talks to the comedian, his interlocutor adopts various roles, including that of Hitler, as a relief from the gravitas and pathos of the documentary register. “Sometimes you have to have an eye on the ratings,”27 Alexander Kluge, who was often described as ratings poison, remarked on one occasion. Under Kluge’s direction, Helge Schneider repeatedly played a sort of haggler or metaboleus. Schlingensief, too, employed the metaboleus, a character with roots as far back as antiquity who never adapts to his environment, always acting without any respect for the feelings of others. He is the haggler, after
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all, a master of rhetoric, and no pretext is alien to him. Like the heretic, the metaboleus is a spoilsport, disturbing our peace of mind. A good example is Martin Kippenberger’s crucified frog, entitled Was ist der Unterschied zwischen Casanova und Jesus? Der Gesichtsausdruck beim Nageln [What is the difference between Casanova and Jesus? The facial expression when being nailed, 1990]. The work, carved in wood in the style of traditional religious sculpture, demonstrates the metaboleus’s insane transformational artistry. The ultimate demon must be in play here, or at least a sort of extra-natural being with animal features, a Pan. One of his most conspicuous marks is Pan’s mad laughter: he thinks that he is Casanova and Jesus. But the ancient immortal gods do not take Pan seriously, and finally they turn against him with cruel violence. On the one hand, then, we see endless haggling and laughter, on the other, a fatal demise.28 Kippenberger: Yes, Yes, Art Is Always Part of It So we should not be astonished that Schlingensief has a major appearance in Jörg Kobel’s Kippenberger—Der Film: Dieses Leben kann nicht die Ausrede für das nächste sein [Kippenberger—The Film: This Life Cannot Be the Excuse for the Next One, 2005], which shows how important observing Kippenberger’s works was for Schlingensief’s own art. The film begins interestingly enough with a general and yet highly revealing remark about Martin Kippenberger that might be applied to Schlingensief as well. Kippenberger’s widow, Elfie Semotan, says about her husband, who died in 1997: “He really put himself as a person in front of his work, as it were. And people couldn’t see his art. Because he stood in front of it, and it wasn’t him they wanted to see. Because he was too much for them.”29 Semotan also wonders why Schlingensief has so much of interest to say about Kippenberger; she in fact believes she recognizes a certain similarity between the two. When Schlingensief showed the First International Pole-Sitting Competition of the Church of Fear (his first collaboration with the gallery Hauser & Wirth, Zurich) at the entrance to the Biennale grounds in Venice in 2003, he tried to explain why Kippenberger was so fascinating to him: “But I am not as courageous as Kippenberger.”30 Those are the final words spoken in the film about Martin Kippenberger: they seem full of admiration—or is it jealousy? “Yes, yes, art is always part of it.”
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Alexander Kluge, “Die Toten sind nicht tot. Kein Nachruf,” dctp.tv, Düsseldorf, August 26, 2010. Alexander Kluge in conversation with Ursula März, “Der August ist ein gefährlicher Monat,” Die Zeit, August 5, 2010. Voxi Bärenklau, letter to the author, February 9, 2011. Christoph Schlingensief, Kaprow City, Volksbühne Berlin, September 13, 2006. Christoph Schlingensief, “Die verbrecherische Lust, einen Film zu machen,” Filmwärts 7 (May 1987): 4–7. Jörg van der Horst, e-mail to the author, February 14, 2011. Christoph Schlingensief, “Manifest des deutschen Underground Films,” Filmfaust 54 (September–October 1986): 35. Christoph Schlingensief, “Wie man Filme macht!” in Filmförderung in Selbstverwaltung. Die kulturelle Filmförderung des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen (Mülheim: Filmbüro NW, 1988), 86–91. Christoph Schlingensief, “Wie man wieder ins Gleichgewicht kommt. Ein religiöser Beitrag,” in Kino-Fronten. 20 Jahre ’68 und das Kino, eds. Werner Petermann and Ralph Thomas (Munich: Trickster, 1988), 150–68. Aino Laberenz, in conversation with the author, February 11, 2011. Christoph Schlingensief, in conversation with the author. Christoph Schlingensief in conversation with Max Dax, “Überwindung des Theaters,” Spex 328 (September–October 2010). Christoph Schlingensief, “Kluge wird 70. Der Denker,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, February 13, 2002. Christoph Schlingensief “Der Zeitmaschinist Alexander Kluge” (laudation on occasion of the award of the Film Prize of the City of Hof to Alexander Kluge). Jörg van der Horst, e-mail to the author, February 16, 2011. Perry Anderson, “Ein neues Deutschland? Die Bundesrepublik 20 Jahre nach dem Mauerfall,” Mittelweg 36 18 (2009): 4 Christoph Schlingensief, unpublished recording of an event featuring Christoph Schlingensief in conjunction with the exhibition of Paul McCarthy’s work at Haus der Kunst, Munich, July 9, 2005. Matthias Lilienthal in conversation with Franz Wille, “80 Prozent Eigendynamik,” Theater heute (October 2010): 18. Christoph Schlingensief, unpublished recording, Haus der Kunst, July 9, 2005. Christoph Schlingensief and Paul McCarthy are both represented by Hauser & Wirth, Zurich. Christoph Schlingensief, unpublished recording, Haus der Kunst, July 9, 2005. Christoph Schlingensief in conversation with Eva Behrendt, “Kunst, Bühne und Videotapes. Ich liebe es, abends den Grill aufzubauen,” Theater heute (August–September 2007): 17. Jörg van der Horst, e-mail to the author, February 14, 2011. Jörg van der Horst, e-mail to the author, February 20, 2011. Eva Wattolik, Die Parodie im Frühwerk Roy Lichtensteins (Weimar: VDG, 2005). Christoph Schlingensief, “Maximal ziellos zur Attacke,” Die Zeit, literary supplement, November 2002, 67. Conversation about the radio play and film, Alexander Kluge at Haus der Kunst, September 16, 2009. Paul De Vylder, “Een monsterlijk Perspectief,” De Witte Raaf 113 (January–February 2005). Elfie Semotan, in Kippenberger—Der Film by Jörg Kobel, 2005, absolut Medien GmbH. Christoph Schlingensief, in Kippenberger—Der Film. Alexander Kluge and Christoph Schlingensief in conversation, “Eule und Ratte,” Vogue (May 2004).
Postscript Kluge: Where does the soul reside? Schlingensief: I felt it here (points at his chest) just now when you asked that question … Kluge: In the breath, yes? Schlingensief: Yes, it resides here, I think, where the pylorus is. Kluge: Which is to say, a little above the diaphragm. Schlingensief: And that doesn’t obey anyone. Kluge: In the vicinity of the diaphragm and moved by the breath, yes? That is why the soul is so closely associated with laughter. And with freedom. And with love. Schlingensief: And with happiness.31
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DIEDRICH DIEDERICHSEN COMBATING DISCURSIVE SCARCITY, FUTILE INTENTION, AND THE NEGATIVE GESAMTKUNSTWERK: CHRISTOPH SCHLINGENSIEF AND HIS MUSIC
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he “readymade opera” Mea Culpa featured an actor, Joachim Meyerhoff, who represented Christoph Schlingensief. In the Vienna version, which I saw during its first complete run, this actor appears in a function similar to the one Schlingensief himself fulfills in many other plays (and an off-screen voice, sometimes Schlingensief’s, fulfills in some films). He seems to guide the spectators through the action, offering explanations and ostensibly meaningful and instructive arguments that tie fantastic and absurd moments back to what is happening in the real world, be it the big political picture we all share, or be it the artist’s own biography. In this play, Schlingensief’s illness and illness in general plays a large role; the biographical as an interpretive template has been cranked up pretty far, even if it is repeatedly disrupted and subverted. After the intermission, the character Schlingensief then explains the Burkina Faso project in a long, detailed, and plausible monologue, but other events push into the foreground strongly enough to signal to the audience that this pursuit and explication of a project known to be close to the director’s heart is an automatism running its course, something that belongs to a sort or stratum of reality we may ignore in favor of more important processes. A little later, the real Christoph Schlingensief takes the stage and delivers a very different speech. Although my memory of the impressive gray hair, standing on end as though charged with electricity, and the bearing of an artificial human being with which Schlingensief appeared, is more vivid than my recollection of what he said, one thing was perfectly plain: the aim, on the one hand, is to make clear that no certainty is to be had regarding the ontological status of someone who appears on stage. The character Schlingensief is more prone to speak germanely of the plans and intentions harbored by the artist Christoph Schlingensief than the latter’s full and physically present voice now filling the cavernous depths of the Burgtheater. True, there is no doubt that the speaker down there is Christoph Schlingensief, whereas the guy in the back is a “mere” actor. Yet in addition to its consequences for the theory of performance and the philosophy of the subject—what or who offers the best physical representation of a human being who harbors plans and acts according to intentions?—the issue now acquires an existential component. Schlingensief is confronted with his own mortality, and he relates that mortality not only to his physical existence but also to the innumerable interconnections and effects in the complex productive apparatus that is the theater; an apparatus that knows no obligatory formats of recording and only very indirect traditions of preservation. While on the other hand, participants incessantly lay claim to genealogies, legacies, and kinships, so that the very absence of an authoritative culture of recording, the questions of recollection, preservation, and future vitality, and—a closely associated issue—the relation between intended and contingent aspects (of life as much as art) time and again become the focus of artistic decision-making. That artists speak about themselves is not a matter of course, though that is how it must seem in an era in which the social type of the young narcissist is so pervasive that people cannot imagine the meaning of any art other than as tied to the extraction of personality, of distinctive individuality and self-identification, a resource that is becoming ever more indispensable in the economic context. By contrast, classical arts such as the theater, painting, sculpture, epic and lyric poetry, or music often employed highly structured divisions of labor and generic rules to keep the selves of their authors far away from the line of fire of the presumption of immediacy. Biographical meaning, and indeed meaning more generally,
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is proffered forever only to the extent that pieces of information and decoding interpretation are withdrawn elsewhere. Where a commentary offered possibilities of biographical and personal attribution, the rug would be pulled out from under the same attribution in another place; also in order to attain general and perhaps even universal validity. In any case, personal information about performing artists or those who devise works was not as widely available in the pre-bourgeois phases of the development of the arts as it is now, in the post-bourgeois period. In appearing onstage, writing, or sketching, an artist was equally at liberty to simulate improbable attributions and to dissimulate probable ones. Yet even the conditions of contemporary self-display are not simply boundless. The evergrowing supply of, and demand for, anecdotal-biographical readings of works of art—the strenuous search for, and identification of, individual trademarks and the reconstruction of personal signatures—has always occupied only one dimension of the old artistic divisions of labor: has occupied, say, the figure but not the ground, or then again the ground but not the figure. In so doing, however, it condemned the other dimension or dimensions of artistic representation—for there are always at least two—to conventionality, to supportive self-effacement. One price that must usually be paid for the hegemony of expressive individualism is the simplicity and banality of the supportive artistic constructions, the narratives, visual languages, theatrical production, etc. The transgressions in the name of egos that have grown beyond all bounds are then recognizable no longer in the form and construction plan of the works of art, but have developed precisely out of the liberation from overly rigorous form and elaborate guidelines in pop music, performance art, or certain forms of directors’ theater against a backdrop of simple and fairly undefined structure. It is at this point that Christoph Schlingensief’s specific idea of art as a war on discursive scarcity attacks. One of his role models, Fassbinder, extracted greater personal commitment, more drastic acting, and a higher density of authenticity by inventing the fairly stable stylistic backdrop called Fassbinder-film, effectively employing a bipartite logic of constant and variable; another role model, Beuys, achieved the same effect by promoting the artistic persona, the explicit center of his art, to the status of the grand constant. Schlingensief, by contrast, casts both components as variables from the very outset. Even his earliest films take on a seriousness in terms of cinematography—the lighting goes haywire, the camera refuses to occupy a vantage point that would offer a panoramic view—as well as on the plot: the love of extremisms, grand themes, and personal obsessions. The elements of avant-garde and experimental filmmaking that have informed his approach on the one hand, the traditions of New German narrative Cinema after Oberhausen on the other hand: he lets them have at each other, as it were, putting them to the service of a mutual critique. Schlingensief draws on two—mutually contradictory—admired traditions while also waging war on both: the “whiny” New German narrative Cinema that has grown old, the self-centered esotericism and ineffectiveness of experimental film. The Fassbinder actors he loves, from Volker Spengler to Irm Hermann, as well as types like Alfred Edel, who represent the anarchic past of German film, and Udo Kier, who embodies a certain less highbrow international fame attained by the same tradition, are confronted with bizarre plots and, most importantly, with the constant violation of stabilizing unities of filmic language and technique.
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In the economy of the arts, the withdrawal of material does not always or even, as is generally assumed, predominantly serve to avoid disambiguation, heighten suspense, and impel the audience’s imaginative faculty to fill blanks according to its own fancy. Much more frequently, artificial discursive scarcity is an instrument serving the construction of unambiguousness—a false unambiguousness. There is much we could say at this point, the censorship authority seated at the center of artistic decision-making thinks, but if we did, what we offer the audience would become too confused and contradictory, people would not follow with the same enthusiasm they bring to simple statements and constellations, which are, for the time being, on the ascendant. We decide to relate only the dialogue in the foreground and to summarize what is going on in the trees and shrubbery behind the speaking characters in a single sentence that informs the audience about the season and the weather. Shooting a film, we position the microphones such that the birds remain background, just for the general feel, and set the focal length such that the leaves of the birch trees become a blurry green surface, the better to bring out the bodies of our darkly-clad protagonists. According to Deleuze, film since 1945 has also known the opposite strategy: the reinforcement of contingent backdrop elements, the strengthening of atmosphere—yet few filmmakers rival Christoph Schlingensief’s explicit commitment to the permanent interpenetration of foreground and background, of event and commentary, of the reinforcement and the destabilization of the impression that has just emerged. Since his productions at the Volksbühne in the early 1990s, his work in the theater has achieved this effect by means of a principle of superimposition of action and commentary; the commentary, the intervening or interpreting of speeches delivered by stage characters, often by Schlingensief himself, far from helping to clarify or lend pointed emphasis to the scene, as they had done in Epic Theater, make the stage action more difficult to read and translate. When a funny wig had just been recognizable as parody, as associated with traditions of clowning, the next interpretive appearance would be bitterly serious and address specific issues of contemporary politics. The aim of such interventions, however, was not yet recognized to prevent any sort of meaning fixing the action; it was motivated, rather, by a trust in forms of polyphony that were ultimately good when they remained anarchic and chaotic. Earlier on, in his work in film, there had been obscuring comments as well, stylistic devices such as close-ups or musical crescendos that were employed against their normative function in narrative film; but their use was organized not so much by superimposition but rather by succession. Schlingensief was importantly not a magician of the deep focus serving to mobilize backgrounds, not a portraitist of strange summer days. Instead, his films switched registers successively and at varying tempos. The camerawork, the director’s work with the actors, and the lighting heightened the confusing complexity, forever generating obscure corners in an architecture that would never become transparent. The films presupposed a single abyss—Terror! Hitler! Germany!—but within this abyss the tones, the acting styles, the identifiability of logical consistencies switched between the grotesque and the serious, between the ridiculous and the Goth-pious: not as a show of virtuosity or as flowing from the artist’s overfull heart, but in order to suppress, from the very outset, any unambiguousness of mood, of points of reference, of registers. The means to this end were quasi-theatrical even then. Fast, intense, and tight shooting
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schedules provided for intensity and exhaustion, a childishly and somberly unfettered camera sustained the balancing act between grand crazed pretension and brute irony; excessively well-known themes and stories culled from the nasty bottom of popular culture pulled the rug out from under self-involved experimental strategies of pleasure. But it was only in the theater and in public interventionist actions such as the Chance 2000 appearances at Berlin’s Prater that the principle of simultaneous and mutually superimposed actions was developed into a deliberate and refined device. There were still discontinuities and sudden changes of register, now usually achieved by destabilizing the ontology of the stage situation: thus when real neo-Nazis (who had received instructions) stormed the stage of the Zurich Hamlet, or when Kunst und Gemüse, A. Hipler—Theater ALS Krankheit [Art and Vegetables, A. Hipler—Theater A(L)S Illness] featured an actual patient suffering from severe ALS who rested on a stretcher in the auditorium and gradually became involved in the stage action. But in addition to such ambiguities, a perfectly normal Schlingensief evening saw the accumulation of so many references, hints at action, and events taking place in front of each other that the organization tying them together at some point inevitably became musical in character. We will return to this point in a moment. Yet the two kinds of disruptions and multiplications installed to counteract one another —lofty pretension and black irony, the garish pathos of art and an acute diagnosis of contemporary states of affairs—not only make it impossible to fix what is going on, to pin it down to a semantic continuum narrated in the logic of constant and variable; they are exposed, moreover, to another form of pressure, an external goal of Christoph Schlingensief’s work that he himself repeatedly emphasized and demanded: an effect on the society outside the theater. Such efficacy is not to be had in simple and mechanistic fashion, and is often not even legible as the objective motivating artistic decisions; but that does not change the fact that we must, from the standpoint of society, render the sort of judgment on art that calls its lack of efficacy failure. Such failure—which Schlingensief, in a muchquoted slogan, famously apostrophized as chance—marks the relation to social reality of all artistic endeavors that exert themselves in the pursuit of intentions. Their helplessness in the face of any social mission, however, becomes apparent not so much in their direct relation to their audience, which hardly knows any different anyway, but instead in the actions and behavior with which the agents on the stage, within the white cube, beyond the fourth wall, and in other symbolically protected art spaces &encounter one another. Intention carrying on in the void—a stage action set in motion by nothing more than stage directions, the practicing of routines, memorization, drill—looks so desperate, so helpless because it achieves nothing. And that ultimately goes against everything intention stands for; it is not something it can live with. If Christoph Schlingensief sees a chance in this fundamental failure of artistic action, the failure must first be staged as such, it must be exaggerated and revealed: yet exaggerated and revealed not in a stylized representation of its symptoms but as the clearly recognizable sound of a profound dissonance. Art really might make a difference. Let’s not kid ourselves: it’s not going to make a difference. And let’s also not kid ourselves: let’s not try, again and again and forever afresh, to do something that really ought not to come to grief in this attempt at intervention; let’s try instead to find out what is attractive at the core of
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this failure, attractive to its producers as well as its spectators. Why is this dissonance beautiful—beautiful not as an exception from the world, as a destination for escapist expeditions, but as a way to get by in the world, in the political world? So what would this dissonance be? It is, in Schlingensief, never just an aesthetic impression informing us about the relationship between art and the world it represents, but time and again the result, actively generated in the stage action, of forces that, for very specific reasons of social fact and tradition, could not act in concert to advance the purposes of a particular artistic discipline. That is, getting the world of the arts to unite harmoniously around one table in the theater is just as impossible as getting the real world to come together in the political sphere. In the films, this basic idea appears as a counterweight to the two (or more) channels of production that goad each other on without ever being reducible to the economy of figure and ground: the content with its drastic theme, the grotesquely violent narrative plot, and the insane world-reference, against which Schlingensief offers, on the formal level, the combo of brute lowbrow, historical catastrophe, and twilight of gods. In the theater, by contrast, it is more and more the antagonism of the arts. I am referring not only to the conventional genres that defy attempts to integrate them into the Gesamtkunstwerk, but importantly also to the competing and mutually contradictory conceptions of art Schlingensief himself champions; for they have only one thing in common: the vanishing point of (the failure to have any) effect. Among the most conspicuous contradictions is that between a bearing that constantly seeks to seize the audience, to grab it and influence it, and the hermeticism of a highly allusive, densely superimposed, and often private way of conducting the action and mise en scène. This contradiction continues in the gradual conquest of the depth of the scenic space we observed in recent years, at the latest since the Bayreuth Parsifal and its “art-theoretical” successor projects (ATTA ATTA—Die Kunst ist los [ATTA ATTA—Art Has Broken Out], A. Hipler …, the Animatograph, etc.), while Schlingensief simultaneously violates or rescinds the fourth wall protecting these expeditions: by having actors make excursions into the real space, having other actors, who were filmed beforehand, intrude into the space of the stage, and of course in numerous actions that are set outside the theater in the first place (Graz, Vienna, Wolfgangsee, Berlin’s subways, etc.). The same contradiction then reappears in the offers to contemplate complex structures, to quietly reconstruct them in the mind (a form of aesthetic understanding for which the animation or significance of these structures plays no role), offers that are at odds with the insistence with which Schlingensief time and again asserts the external reference of his art. The insistence on necessarily polyphonic complexity, finally, stands in similar contradiction to the urge to understand in a way that would have immediate consequences. This antagonism between the arts and the conceptions of art on his stages, but also his insistence on the relevance of the raucously lowbrow in his filmic experiments, are adequate translations of the fundamental diagnosis of Schlingensief’s aesthetic politics, which is in turn based on an (immensely productive) internal contradiction. On the one hand, Schlingensief’s aesthetic ideas took shape in the 1980s, and at that time he saw artistic practice, saw the impulse driving artistic production as a war on the emerging uniformity
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of linguistic and artistic standards. The excessive conventionalization the 1980s exemplarily perpetrated in his (and not only his) beloved New German narrative Cinema was a phenomenon of the era, after all, against which every single countermovement labored: journalism, the political debate, the majority youth cultures that still predominated in the early years of the decade, the peace movement and other vestiges of the movements of the 1970s, and the intellectual standards of one’s adversaries in the Kohl government, which did not necessarily work to raise one’s own standards—all these factors contributed to generate the widely shared sense of an incredibly confined and standardized cultural environment into which every oppositional discursive impulse from punk, feminism, newly arriving French theory, and the visual arts was translated and thus curtailed and reduced. That not less but more would be more, that diversity and complexity would arise as context-independent values, has to do with this initial situation in which Christoph Schlingensief, too, began to wage his war on discursive scarcity. On the other hand, even in that same situation there was the fear that any insistence on difference and difficulty would involuntarily help sustain the problem the dead cultural landscape of West Germany then posed to all those who had begun to articulate themselves: the insufficient reach and ineffectiveness of political and cultural action. The preceding generation had apparently enjoyed greater opportunities to exercise influence, but instead of using them had come to an agreement with its fathers in the mode of a democratic balance of interests. This public, which seemed paralyzed by its youthful semi-external audience, appeared to have struck a relativistic deal with plurality: everything and everyone had the right to self-expression as long as the public framework ensured from the outset that the position articulated in such fashion did not lay claim to any validity beyond its subjective—or artistic —truth. This diagnosis of a miserable state of affairs gave rise to the idea that artistic production in particular now needed to insist on dimensions of truth that went beyond the contingency of the subjective. The flirtation with the totalitarian aimed against the relativism of mere subjectivity and the longing for the universal, the two thus converging in a grand paradox with the other great longing felt by artists who set out in the early 1980s: to have justice done to the irreducible, the diverse, the different in a single grand destandardization attack against consensus and comprehensibility. Reading the obituaries and recollections that have appeared over the past few months, you will find several that use the formula of the paradox to summarize the person and persona of Schlingensief. It is not my aim here to take a different position: there is a paradoxical cast to the construction of probably any productivity—the problem to be solved that must not be solved with a solution. There are, moreover, always the individual colors in which a living individual gives concrete form to this paradox. I merely want to add something to these paradoxes: how a given construction relates to artistic constructions. I have already argued that there is a fundamental dissonance in his work, embodied in superimposition in the theater, in a certain selection of materials (trash, bad lowbrow culture), in the cinema and the theater, and in certain convictions regarding the aesthetic of production on the part of the author (failure, chance): but this dissonance now enters into a certain history. The same obituaries and recollections also spoke a great deal about the Gesamtkunstwerk, without remembering the good reasons that led to the decision to shelve the reconciliation of the arts, and between the arts and non-art, as a bourgeois illusion. Still, these good reasons do not
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relieve us of the obligation to address the perfectly justified questions to which the Gesamtkunstwerk was the wrong answer. We might say that Schlingensief raised these questions incessantly, and accordingly also had to play to the public audience that was of such significance to a contemporary version of the problem. Yet as early as the late 1990s, in a conversation about his conclusions from the Chance 2000 project, he surprised me by using musical metaphors to describe the grand dissonance, the culture of superimposition at the core of his theatrical productions as well as the core of the relation of his art to reality. As became clear during this interview (at the latest) and then ever more evident in the productions he directed during the last ten years of his life, he needed to keep this dissonance, this disharmony, this failure present and to elaborate it. “Music” was that elaboration. He mentioned the work of the Sun Ra Arkestra—the ensemble of a few dozen musicians and dancers led by the mythomaniac, free jazz pioneer, and director Sun Ra, who died in 1993—as exemplifying the sort of radical and disharmonious forms he was interested in, forms that nonetheless permanently addressed social tension and kept it alive. Staged in the home of the Gesamtkunstwerk, the production of Parsifal he directed in Bayreuth, which was surrounded by scandal early on and soon drew the vehement antagonism of the Wagner clan, was in this sense the first appearance of a Schlingensiefian negative Gesamtkunstwerk: a mise en scène of dissonance, of the non-reconciliation of the arts and between the arts and their environment, but within a framework that defined this non-reconciliation as its field of operation. That music as it developed in the free and improvised formats of the past fifty years might be particularly apt to provide models in which one might display, elaborate, and refine the necessarily inconclusive and confrontational relation of artistic production to the production in its vicinity was the guiding idea in Schlingensief’s later productions, up to and including the Luigi Nono paraphrase, Via Intolleranza II, his last work, which would be followed by preliminary work for an opera. In the shadow of the other Gesamtkunstwerk, the Wagnerian one, this process indeed began with the initial subjection of the non-musical elements of the production—the movable stage design on a rotating stage, projections, the movements of actors—to the musical tempo of the orchestra under Pierre Boulez; but then this very synchronization was blown to pieces by the incorporation of all other registers, the registers of content first and foremost among them. The second act already alighted in Africa, which Schlingensief then worshipped in what was still largely a mythical fashion. The consequence, however, was the project of a festival hall, an opera village in Africa, which subsequently took quite concrete shape in Burkina Faso. For Schlingensief always threw the conditions of production and their history, a politically unreconciled art, and its counterpart into the mix, particularly when working in constellations such as Bayreuth that seemed to have achieved a purely aesthetic solution —never generating a synthesis but always only fresh explosions. That the failure of art would today, after the death of its initiator, continue to play his music as a project in the real world is a failure of failure: strangely beautiful and perverse.
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BORIS GROYS WHEN WORDS FAIL
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he realization of any artistic project, as much as any scientific or technological project, requires that its author command and control the means of that realization as comprehensively as possible. The true artist, is seems, is one who has achieved perfect mastery of his material and trade. Failing that, the artist will remain just a powerless and impotent dreamer. A writer is supposed to have command over language; a visual artist, over colors and shapes; a musician, over his instruments. Now a director may be supposed to command many more of the so-called means of expression than any other artist, for he must take control also of the actors, the other theater staff, the bureaucracy, the financial backers, and much else. A director such as Christoph Schlingensief, who not only directs in the theater but also makes films, organizes performances, intervenes in the public space, and builds installations, must be particularly capable of exercising power effectively. The aim of the exercise of power on the part of the artist, it is generally believed, is to make things, such as colors, sounds, or spaces, speak. The artist, then, is one who transmutes things into means of expression and compels the material reality to convey his message. Yet it is indisputable that the transmutation of the world into one’s own message can never be complete. How does the artist then deal with this insight into his own powerlessness? The modernist tradition in the arts is at bottom a series of attempts to answer this question. Schlingensief’s oeuvre is firmly rooted in that tradition. At the same time, Schlingensief’s responses to the insight into the powerlessness of the artist are distinguished by what is, even in the context of modernism, an extraordinary radicality. The most widely accepted interpretation of the powerlessness of the artist is that it is due to structural conditions. When the artist performs the act of transmuting the world into language, this interpretation suggests, it is always already too late. Language is always already there. And the languages of music and the visual arts, too, are always already there. Language is always already up and running—and the artist can do no more than run along. The medium, as McLuhan has put it, turns out to be the message—deconstructing any authorial intention, to describe it in Derridean terms. This figure of the subversion of authorial intention by language is by now widely familiar and accepted. It presupposes, however, that language keeps on working, keeps on running—constantly displacing or “differing” the meanings intended by the artist. But what happens when language simply fails and comes to a stop? Neither the usual media theories nor the theory of deconstruction envision this case, which we will accordingly need to subject to a brief theoretical analysis. For the failure of language is not in fact a rare phenomenon. Let us assume that someone is giving a speech as he receives the news that he suffers from a fatal illness and will soon die. At that moment language fails. In this instance the failure of language does not mean that it breaks off, that it is interrupted and passes into silence. It may well continue to be heard, but it ceases to be a machine serving the production of meaning. Language instead freezes, becomes a mere thing, a readymade. Not by accident did Schlingensief describe what is, for the time being, his last play, Mea Culpa, which is about his illness, as a “readymade” opera. His point is obviously not just that the opera’s text consists of a montage of quotations from various authors. More pertinently, these texts are used as pure graphic and sonic things that have lost their expressive force. It is as such mute things that they are integrated into an action that for its part does not add up to any meaning—making the spectator freeze in incomprehension. What takes place in this opera, then, is an inversion
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of the intention of art. This is no longer about the transmutation of the mute world into language, but rather about a transmutation of language into a thing. The artist has lost control of the flow of language—and so he stops this flow. And he stops this flow because he has learned that it can be stopped, that there are situations in which language fails for its own reasons—without the artist deliberately, purposely, and artificially stopping it. In its normal “living” state, language serves us as a means to find out the truth about the world. But in so doing, language does not reveal itself to us in its truth. When language fails and petrifies, by contrast, it appears before our eyes as it really is—without meaning. Illness and death engender a state of exception that makes language fail and thus reveals it for what it is. Therein lies the peculiar cognitive chance illness and death offer us. We usually perceive both as nothing but disruptions—and as disruptions that concern no one but ourselves. When illness strikes us, we are only too ready to submit to the prevailing conception of the world and of language, to believe that the petrifaction of language is a petrifaction only of “our language”—that the loss of all meaning is the mere correlate of our psychological state. It takes a certain courage to understand and to assert that what is at stake in this state of linguistic exception is not just our own language but rather language as such. Hamlet demonstrated such courage when he maintained that it was not he personally who was “out of joint” but in fact time itself. And Schlingensief, too, possesses this courage to make the state of exception caused by his own illness the subject of his art— that is to say, to make it the image of the general state of exception language enters again and again. Yet it is an illusion to believe that illness and death have their positive sides. They have no positive sides, they are purely negative. Still, they offer us an opportunity to identify with this negativity, to profess this negativity in a radical fashion—a negativity that, beyond all possibilities of our own experience, perhaps turns into a positivity. But we cannot profit from this possibility. The transcendent, even when it uses our language, does so in a way that is incomprehensible to us—and thus eludes our hermeneutic control. The language of transcendence is, to us, a failing language, a language without meaning. It has long been noted that deeply religious people remain deaf and resistant to any reasonable criticism of their so-called “belief.” That makes these people appear odd and extraordinary, if not even obdurate and stupid. Yet this assessment fails to recognize the essence of religious language. Such language is not the expression of a subjective opinion immunized against all scientific objections. The word “belief” is misleading in this context. It deludes us into thinking that the believer believes in something where the knower knows something. The difference between religion and science is thus interpreted as that between two modes of individual engagement with a well-functioning, living language which keeps on running. In reality, however, the language of religion is a failing, frozen, petrified language. The believer uses the same language the scientist uses, but this language is in one state in the case of science and in another in that of religion. Somewhere in his notes, Wittgenstein remarked that it is pointless to assess a functioning, working language as it is practiced during the week based on analyses conducted on Sundays, at a time, that is to say, when this language is not working. It is just as pointless to attempt to understand the Sunday language based on experiences one has had of it during the week, for on Sundays language does not work and live but instead freezes—it is as though dead. The Sunday language of transcendence is without meaning to us, and so we can
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only repeat this language word for word instead of subjecting it to the hermeneutic generation of warped meanings. No critique avails against such transcendental failure, for no critique can confute what does not mean to say anything. Religion, it is true, can be conceived as a defined set of opinions, insofar as it is the role of religion in the secular space that is at issue. There religions are associated with opinions regarding whether contraception ought to be permitted or whether women ought to wear headscarves. Yet for all religions there exists another space: the space of the transcendent. And with regard to this space, the religions maintain a different attitude: the attitude of opinionlessness. For the will of the gods or God’s will remains ultimately impervious to mortal opinion. And that means that whereas man appears in our culture mainly as a bearer of opinions, religion is by contrast a place where a reflection on this bearing, on man’s role as a medium takes place—and it takes place here precisely because religion marks and describes the state of opinionlessness, the zero level of the freedom of opinion. Just as Malevich’s Black Square made the medium of painting its subject by letting all figuration disappear into it, the medium-character of man can be addressed in the sacred places of the religions precisely because they are spaces in which man loses all opinions and finds himself in a state of opinionlessness. Being opinionless, he practices pure repetition, a repetition, that is to say, that is no longer the repetition of a certain opinion but instead a ritual evacuated of opinion. Now the experience of opinionlessness, which is a genuinely religious experience, is not necessarily tied to specific places. We find ourselves in such situations of opinionlessness much more frequently, they are much more commonplace, than is generally thought. They emerge, for instance, whenever someone is confronted with circumstances in which all available opinions fail. But the same can also happen when someone does not want to harbor any more opinions, when he has grown decidedly weary of opinions as such, of the market of opinions, the procurement and dissemination of opinions. When he suddenly notices that all available opinions cancel each other out. In such circumstances, man finds himself at the zero level of the freedom of opinion—and he grows aware of his being a medium. The freedom of opinion then becomes the desertion of opinion: man is equally free of all opinions, equally deserted by all opinions. The cultivation of opinionlessness—individual as much as collective—requires a dedicated place, a heterotopia, as Foucault called it. This is a place located outside the space of opinion, the market of opinions. In this place the distinction between true and false as well as that between good and evil is neutralized. Yet this very neutralization renders the line separating the everyday market of opinions from sacred opinionlessness so poignant. By championing defined opinions, we can easily position ourselves in the public space. But if we wish to persevere in opinionlessness, we need a different space, a sacred space, and a different time, the repetitive time of ritual. Nor can we then avoid returning to certain places and rituals that have been defined in the past as other or sacred places, as heterotopias. Stepping into such places, participating in such rituals, we leave our opinions standing and hanging at the door. The space of the temporary suspension of all opinions requires an exterior boundary in order to guarantee its freedom of opinion, which is here the freedom from any opinion.
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In the past, temples and churches were where the suspension of all opinion took place— where language stopped expressing opinions and intentions and where people instead allowed language to fail and freeze. In modernity, it is art that creates such heterotopias of language in a state of exception. Schlingensief’s artistic practice is unmistakably rooted in the grand tradition of Dada and Fluxus, both currents in art that set themselves the goal of creating situations in which language, as well as all other so-called means of artistic expression, including music, painting, and later television, would fail. In Cabaret Voltaire, Hugo Ball composed a performance that would become exemplary for posterity: he had several poets, himself among them, recite their poems at the same time so that the meaning of the individual sentences was effectively drowned in the general noise. We cannot even call this an absurd spectacle, for the effect of the absurd is engendered by a theatrical production of a paradox. Ball, by contrast, did not allow for the emergence of any meaning, not even a paradoxical one. He transmuted language into a pure sonic mass— beyond any meaning. The artists of Fluxus took the same route, not just subjecting all meaning to systematic deconstruction but simply and utterly eliminating it. And anyone who has observed the performances held by Schlingensief can say the same about them— they strike us as highly efficient machines designed to obliterate signification, to evacuate meaning. Schlingensief’s interest in religion, which grew recognizably in recent years, would seem at first glance to be the immediate consequence of his illness. Yet there is no doubt that the logic of the art Schlingensief had practiced before he became ill would have led him to the same outcome. Not by accident did the most determined representatives of Dada and Fluxus sooner or later turn to religion. Marcel Duchamp described his famous urinal as a “Buddha of the Bathroom,” and maintained that exhibiting it made him feel like he had stepped outside time and space. Hugo Ball spent his last days writing stories about Byzantine saints; Robert Filiou entered a monastery; Joseph Beuys was raised in a religious tradition. At some point these artists came to the realization that the exceptional situations they staged in order to make language fail and freeze derived from a tradition of grand petrifactions of language engendered by the fear of God or the gods—which were later repeated in ritualized form. We might say, then, that Schlingensief does the same thing his predecessors did—but he also evinces much greater distrust of traditional religions. This distrust aims first and foremost at a widely held view according to which religion is a “doctrine,” a social institution, an organizing force whose mission is to hold society together and give it lasting shape. The language of a religion conceived along these lines is an authoritarian and indoctrinating language that is even less adequate to the genuinely religious experience of the failure and petrifaction of language than our everyday secular language. That is why Schlingensief organizes performances and installations—the Church of Fear is perhaps the best example in this context—that reenact the primal scene of the failure of language. These performances and installations mix symbols from all possible religions with quotations from art history and everyday life, which are here held together by nothing but irredeemable disarray. Torn from their cultural and religious contexts, all these symbols fall silent. They become mere movable pieces—frozen and vacuous readymades. And the spectator observing the whole thing knows only this: there is nothing he can say about it—it simply leaves him speechless. In this way, Schlingensief
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stages the primal scene of the failure of language, which is at once also the primal scene of all religion. In a certain sense, all performances and theatrical productions Schlingensief has organized look like repetitions of an unchanging ritual. And this ritual is repeated precisely because it seems unrepeatable, spontaneous, uncalculated, ravaged within itself by ruination and chaos, alogical, a pure event. The spontaneous, which does not permit anything to be said about it but that it is spontaneous, recurs precisely by virtue of this failure of any significance to materialize—by virtue of the pure fact that this spontaneity makes language fail forever afresh and in forever the same way. Yet why does a failing and frozen language nonetheless seem to offer us glimpses of insight into the higher truth, whereas a healthy, well-functioning, living language cannot but elicit our distrust? Why are we willing to believe, in language, in a state of failure—and not, in a powerful language, in the state of success? It is because the concept of truth presupposes that anything subjective, anything merely all-too-human, anything merely accomplished and fabricated by the will be removed so that we can behold, immediately and without disguise, things as they really are— beyond all subjective intention and manipulation. The failure of language thus emerges as the only path leading to truth. And indeed: it has long been recognized that science is merely a matter of convention, of construction, and social consensus. It has nothing to do with the truth of things in themselves. By turning language into things instead of turning things into language, modern art thus holds out the sole promise of attaining a truth that does not put its name to shame. But there is a problem that would seem to doom this modern project to failure from the very outset: even modern art remains just that—art. If the artistic project consists in letting language fail, it is ultimately yet another project the artist is free to realize or not. So we feel, if not grateful, then at least obliged to an event that engenders an unintended, unplanned, unmanipulated situation of linguistic exception. Illness and death, more than anything else, are such rituals that ensue unintended, and seem to justify artistic rituals of the evacuation of meaning. In his later work, however, Schlingensief responds with profound ambivalence to the opportunity to appropriate such justification, evincing a high degree of reflection and artistic maturity. He picks up on this justification, but at once relativizes it by using it in his work as yet another readymade and thus silencing it. In one remark (included in Mea Culpa), Schlingensief even traces the sources of his illness back to his work on Wagner’s Parsifal: he suspects that his body was infected by Wagner’s music—by the yearning for death that sustains and shapes this music from within. Schlingensief’s illness thus loses its organic, worldly sources and becomes the consequence of the impact of art on his body. Art here serves not just to manifest the state of exception, it actually calls it into being—and expresses it in the medium that is life. Art, then, is the very hidden and “true” matter that manifests itself in life, instead of being, as is often thought, a medium in which life manifests itself. As the Christians of a distant past believed that not only their happiness but also their suffering could come solely from God, Schlingensief regards art alone as the source of happiness as well as suffering. In his work, art conclusively becomes a religion—and does so precisely because it no longer needs a religion beside itself.
BORIS GROYS
CARL HEGEMANN GERMANIA EG O ART AND NON-ART IN THE WORK OF CHRISTOPH SCHLINGENSIEF
0. “Everything Screams”
Mein Filz, mein Fett, mein Hase, documenta 10, Kassel, 1997
Passion Impossible—7 Tage Notruf für Deutschland, Hamburg, 1997
We can read Parsifal as a sublimated ritual, as a sublime or uplifting engagement with a serious subject, or then again as a very earthly engagement with the real pain of mortal humans. “Everything screams,” Wagner says, as Cosima notes; the work trails off into death—“everywhere the scream, the lament.” The suffering creature that cannot die, the shocking image of the torments of Tantalus, of sufferings nothing can alleviate and only death can put an end to. If we decide in favor of the first variant, we have displaced the pain into a higher sphere; if we choose the second or, as I might say, the materialistic variant, we are immediately confronted with the experience of pain and our own individual death, not as an abstract idea but as a concrete event no living being can escape. Wagner’s “work of farewell to the world”—his own words—as a ritual of screaming rather than sublime pain: that would be the attempt not to glorify pain and death, not to turn them into vague and vanishing abstractions, but to render them concrete instead, to make them personal and relate them to each individual spectator and actor. For no one is above these questions however consistently we may pretend we are. Almost the only thing citizens of today’s world still have in common is the fact that every hour they live brings injury, and the last one kills. You can read it on many church clocks in Italy: “Vulnerant omnes, ultima necat.” (“Everything Screams.” Notes on Schlingensief’s production of Parsifal in Bayreuth, July 2004) 1. “Remembering Means Forgetting”
Parsifal (act 3), Proto-animatograph, Bayreuther Festspiele, 2005
Christoph Schlingensief taught me what it means that although in art one can do anything, not everything goes in art. For art must meet a paradoxical condition: it must look like art and non-art at the same time. “When art looks like art, it is considered to be not art but kitsch. When art looks like non-art, it is simply non-art.” (Boris Groys)
Kaprow City, 2006
Film Production for Via Intolleranza II, Opera Village, April 2010
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Mea Culpa (end of act 1), Burgtheater Vienna, 2009
In 1993, Schlingensief, working at the Volksbühne in (East) Berlin, directed theater for the first time. He was thirty-three years old when I met him, the famous director of infamous splatter films. At the time, radical right-wing as well as left-wing groups were violently trying to prevent the screening of Terror 2000—Intensivstation Deutschland [Terror 2000— Intensive Station Germany]. After the death of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, no director in Germany was more controversial. His films already defied assessment according to criteria such as art vs. non-art; distinctions such as those between serious and not serious or between the glorification of violence and its critique were equally unhelpful. There were always both at once, in unresolved contradiction: neither either-or nor both-and. It was always “everything together.” His works for the theater, which were almost never based on literary sources and from the outset incorporated film and video materials, likewise moved within this constitutive paradox of art. There was something “iridescent” to his work; Schlingensief effortlessly divided his audiences in ways sociology was unable to explain, and often even split his fellow actors. He prompted contradictory feelings in anyone he encountered. For his own part, he lived with the endeavor to overcome these splits, but that usually only served to reinforce them. And
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nonetheless—or perhaps precisely therefore—he became one of the most successful stage directors. He was invited to participate in the showcase event of the German-language theater world, the Theatertreffen in Berlin, three times; by the time he died, he had directed on virtually every important stage in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, causing considerable agitation not only in the auditoriums but throughout the cities as well. He managed to do what many artists and theater people dream of: being noticed outside the playground of the feuilleton. Schlingensief popped up everywhere: in politics, in sports coverage, in the tabloids, and even in the Christian Saturday-evening television sermons. He made his debut as an opera director at the Bayreuth Festival in 2004 with Richard Wagner’s late grand work, the “festival play for the consecration of the stage,” Parsifal, horrifying most old-style Wagnerians as well as the majority of the composer’s progressive critics by inaugurating a new era in how we read Wagner; three years later, walking in the footsteps of Fitzcarraldo, he would pursue this vision further in his production of The Flying Dutchman in the Brazilian jungle city of Manaus. Long before his illness, both productions engaged with death and dying, and not in any symbolic or allegorical or aesthetic fashion: they engaged, quite directly, with Schlingensief’s own death and his own dying. In Manaus, he fused German operatic theater with carnival and the syncretism of nature religions and Christianity he encountered there, a universe in which the Dutchman’s yearning was right at home: “When will the blow of annihilation resound which shall crack the world asunder?” 2. “Failure as Chance” Even in Bayreuth, he had drawn suspicion: was he trying to infiltrate the festival with a “religious-terrorist sect”? Was he an adherent of the voodoo cult, as a famous critic believed he could prove? After September 11, 2001, Schlingensief had indeed founded Church of Fear, a group that sought to define an esoteric as well as materialistic perspective in which the rampant collective fears after the collapse of Manhattan’s Twin Towers might be transformed into art. Needless to say it was not a sect but, like almost all of his interventions, a paradoxical art action. The political party Chance 2000 he had founded in 1998, which brandished election-campaign slogans such as “Failure as Chance” or “Save Free Enterprise, Throw Away Your Money,” was an art action that ran for nine months, though citizens participating in he German Bundestag elections held that same fall could also actually vote for it, and 56,000 of them did. In this particular instance, even Schlingensief’s actors and the members of his team were often no longer able to tell theater from reality. Inadequate as an attempt to translate art into politics, the project instead spawned Schlingensief’s endeavor (which first drew Elfriede Jelinek’s support) to proclaim himself a nation of one; not bound to any particular territory, the new state would restore the autonomy of the artist, whom the democratic state had compelled to go into politics and bureaucracy. Sadly enough, this state was quick to disappear, not unlike the party before it, which split up several times, dissolved, but then reunited. When the candles illuminating the new nation’s second manifestation in Basel’s Badischer Bahnhof caused a fire that almost set the entire ballroom ablaze, Schlingensief apparently took the accident to be a sign and abandoned the endeavor. Much earlier on, fire had already been the decisive element when he presented his first featurelength film, Tunguska—Die Kisten sind da [Tunguska—The Boxes Have Arrived], at the Hof
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International Film Festival. The film caught fire during the screening—at the very moment the film within the film also caught fire. Which is to say, images of burning film were projected onto the screen from a film that then really started to burn. To Schlingensief, the fateful coincidence of art and non-art, of aesthetic alarm and a truly alarming event, was a key experience. 3. “I Am Not the One I Wanted To Be” Whatever he did, his works tested the limits of the freedom of art, but also spared no risk as they chafed against and allied themselves with realities that no artist designed, that were given to him. The radicalization and reinterpretation of television formats such as talk, quiz, and casting shows (Talk 2000, U3000, FREAKSTARS 3000, Quiz 3000), broadcast primarily on the music channel MTV; a program to help neo-Nazis looking to leave the scene that actually worked, part of his Zurich production of Hamlet, which proclaimed all of Switzerland a “rotten” state; the action Bitte liebt Österreich [Please Love Austria], held in front of Vienna’s Staatsoper, which staged the deportation of aliens, more precisely asylum applicants, based on the format of Big Brother and led half of Austria to disgrace itself; a public porn film shoot (Seven X) in the lobby of Berlin’s Volksbühne that was so hardcore that even Schlingensief couldn’t stand and watch; his art action Mein Filz, mein Fett, mein Hase [My Felt, My Fat, My Hare] at documenta 10, Kassel, on the day Lady Di died in Paris, a performance where he was arrested straight off the stage by a large police detachment who wanted to charge him with “slandering the memory of a dead person” and other misdemeanors: art and non-art collided in his spectacular actions and theatrical productions as well as during his semi-private research trips to Africa, South America, and Asia. The dynamism these forever incomplete and highly consequential activities developed is almost unbelievable even in retrospect. The acclaimed world premiere of Bertolt Brecht’s “Rosa Luxemburg Fragments” at the Berliner Ensemble in 1997; the “post-charitable” railway mission Passion Impossible, during which Schlingensief first celebrated his own style of High Mass in the station concourse and theater people as well as members of the audience fraternized with the station’s homeless and junkie population; the Lady Di performance at a London gallery featuring the “original car wreck” from Paris; the Wagner Rally in Namibia and the Ruhr area, during which sound trucks brought the great composer’s music to the desert and every last corner, respectively: these were all meticulously prepared and yet risky actions, unpredictable and improbable to come about in the first place. According to Niklas Luhmann, the “low probability of its emergence” is the only feature that defines art in contradistinction to all other social institutions; though their emergence is improbable as well, they, unlike art, are always defined according to their purposes. Schlingensief’s art consistently defined itself by both features: by its utter purposelessness and simultaneously by its clearly delineated political, cultural, and moral or amoral intentions—intentions, however, that collapsed the moment they first found expression. These plays were almost always realized by ad-hoc groups of professional artists—among them the best actors, video artists, and stage and costume designers of the German theater world—as well as so-called ordinary citizens and “special people” of deviant physical or mental capacity. Schlingensief’s ability to hold heterogeneous groups together, to motivate them and lovingly plunge them into such improbable activities, was the precondition for
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the realization of all these actions. Remarkably, he formed perfectly unconstrained and deep friendships especially with the disabled participants that would last for many years. 4. “Cemetery of the Works of Art” The way he launched his career in the visual arts, which seemed to have come to an early and sudden end with his 1997 arrest at documenta in Kassel, obeyed the same logic of nondefinitiveness that governed his other work. And it took only a short time before he regarded the art business with no less ambivalence than the theater world and the film business. His works defied integration into the museum or the gallery, where the improbable is precisely what is probable. That’s why he thought of art in the museum as no more than “art.” His own exhibitions, by contrast, often looked as though they had a built-in random generator somewhere. They, too, drew their improbability not from aesthetic sensations but rather from their relation to their extra-aesthetic environment, with unpredictable consequences. The Animatograph, the rotating disk or sometimes, as in Kaprow City, a set of two counterrotating disks, equipped with movable screens and gyrating projectors that generated unforeseeable images, was perhaps the pragmatic invention for this production of contingency: which images we see, and how they correspond, is left to chance. The film, as Schlingensief put it, edits itself. That was the astonishing thing—in everything he undertook he was literally autonomous, like God. He would not accept anything but his own, often utterly unfounded, intuitions and was at once completely open to anything his associates and actors brought to him. Only when something struck him as routine and specious did he become restless and cranky, or when it began to look like nothing but art or nothing but non-art. 5. “Conquer Your Grave” Given these paradoxical simultaneities of the incompatible, working with Schlingensief was always uncertain and a bit scary, but most of the time it was also incredibly funny. The process never obeyed any “user’s manuals,” even if people consulted such manuals at work. It was a challenge to everyone who participated that seemed impossible to meet because Christoph made a point of demanding more of himself and his comrades than anyone thought feasible. He could be an extreme perfectionist, but then would also mess things up as soon as something seemed to have worked out well. That did not really change, neither in formal terms nor with regard to content, even when he fell ill and realized how limited his time was. Creaturely suffering, life in extreme situations, vulnerability, mortal fear, and the yearning for death: these, after all, had always been his themes. His second major feature film, Egomania, already culminated in a funeral procession. The forty-five op-ed pieces he wrote for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in 2002 bore the title “Intensivstation” [Intensive Care Unit]. The motto of ATTA ATTA—Die Kunst ist ausgebrochen [ATTA ATTA—Art Has Broken Out], his 2002 action about September 11th, was a variation on Aeschylus: “Conquer your grave!” And his Bayreuth Parsifal, which he directed long before he fell ill, was not an edifying opera of redemption but “an engagement with the real creaturely pain of mortal humans,” as we then said, invoking Wagner’s own authority, “a ritual of screaming rather than sublime
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pain.” The “festival play for the consecration of the stage” was to be nothing less than Schlingensief’s own pre-constructed “near-death experience,” as it were. Afterwards, he worked through his Bayreuth experience in an action entitled Kunst und Gemüse [Art and Vegetables] that featured the fake Namibian “Bach Festival” and incorporated Schönberg’s opera Von heute auf morgen [From Today Till Tomorrow]; under the subtitle Theater ALS Krankheit [Theater A(L)S Illness], it examined the neurodegenerative disease ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis). For years before he was diagnosed with cancer, Christoph had been almost constantly sick, or at least persuaded himself and others that he was. He exhibited his boils on television and kept friends and the public on edge with the detailed description of his progressive loss of eyesight. At least his fear of going blind left him from one day to the next when the cancer came, vanishing just like that. 6. “Without Darkness We Are Blind” In retrospect it seems to me as though everything he did during the years before his cancer diagnosis only served to prepare him for the final public engagement with his illness and slow death. “Philosophy is learning to die.” But unlike Plato and Aristotle, whom the tradition credits with this definition, Christoph was not a philosopher. By-the-book philosophical thinkers struck him as aloof showoffs; they scared him. On the other hand, he cultivated friendly exchanges of ideas with philosophers such as Boris Groys and Peter Sloterdijk that went on for years, and used ideas from Nietzsche, Luhmann, Deleuze, Žižek, and Nancy in his productions where they seemed useful to him. If, as Wagner can teach us, art is something like the continuation of philosophy by other means, if the theater allows us to philosophize our way out of what Adorno has called the “icy desert of abstraction,” then everything he produced was philosophical at its core. Thinking was important to him and became ever more important, and precisely as what it ought to be according to Plato: as the practice of learning to die, not as a detached intellectual sport where there are points to be scored, not as anemic speculation, but as a public and exemplary engagement with one’s own frail existence—in accordance with Salomon Maimon’s motto, “My thinking originates in the activities of my daily life,” as well as Joseph Beuys’s categorical imperative: “Show your wound.” 7. “Prove That You Exist” Artistic action defies simple explanatory patterns; the reference to external or internal circumstances such as a “traumatizing environment” or “pathological states” does not explain anything (and for all I know, Schlingensief’s childhood was a happy and “sheltered” one). Yet the ambiguity of his work patently began to develop very early on. And perhaps it had something to do with his mother’s raising him to “almost compulsively tell the truth.” Telling the truth, however, is difficult for someone who has the constant sense “that there are two sides to every coin.” As Schlingensief remembered, “When my mother asked me whether I liked the food, I could never say, ‘I do.’ I always said, ‘Maybe I do, but then maybe I don’t.’” The truth, to him, was ambivalent, contradictory, and uncertain. Schlingensief was one of the most normal people I have ever met, and at bottom he did not want anything but normalcy: “The normal is the highest gift we have been given, or taught by our parents. Use that! I still don’t know how to.” Yet his way of working through disappoint-
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ments and lies and getting his will, of maintaining normalcy, constantly required him to perform actions that were far beyond the bounds of any normalcy, beyond all traditional norms. That is why he, probably like all artists, needed the place called art, what Schiller described as the “cheerful third realm where we are released from everything that is called compulsion, be it in the physical, be it in the moral domain.” 8. “Living in Self-contradiction” In an essay published elsewhere (Theater heute, October 2010), I tried to explain Schlingensief’s aggressive engagement with his own contradictions as rooted in his inability to lie, with the strange fact—perhaps a product of his socialization—that he was literally allergic to lies, getting a red rash all over his body when he did no more than employ harmless dissimulation or white lies on the stage, where such behavior is generally considered “normal.” The only thing that helped at such moments was an injection of cortisone from the theater’s doctor. This allergy to lies perhaps forced him to profess the contradictions in the realities of his life and his convictions. He was physically incapable, as it were, of feigning a straightforward and coherent identity. Rather than hiding this impairment, he made it public, just as he liked to present the allergic reactions of his skin to the audience. He was a permanent provocation, not only to others but most importantly to himself. His own inner contradictions, which he could neither eliminate nor ignore, which became bearable only when he was able to communicate them to others, may have been the force that propelled his work. But of course that too is not enough to explain what was so special about him, what made him unique to so many people, myself among them. Everyone senses contradictions, after all, and we all tend to have illogical and incompatible habits, but Schlingensief unselfconsciously exhibited his own paradoxes for the public to see, whereas most people are inclined to camouflage and conceal them. To their environment, they are then either the “ideal son-in-law,” for instance, or a “dangerous seducer.” For many years, Schlingensief managed to be both at the same time in the eyes of large parts of the public. The ability to maintain a performative self-contradiction, which logic wishes to prohibit and which logical thinking nonetheless in fact engenders time and again, allowed Schlingensief to fuse autonomous art (“I decide, I do what I want …”) and heteronomous non-art (“… but under conditions that determine me”). This ongoing amalgamation of art and non-art generated forever-new improbabilities, things and occurrences we would have considered to be impossible. 9. “Hunt Two Tigers!” “If you calculate, you’re a coward. Calculation deals with gains and losses. To live is to gain, to die, to lose. If you don’t calculate, you die. If you calculate, you resolve not to die, but you die nonetheless. The hunter who hunts two hares misses both. If you are bound to fail, fail splendidly: hunt two tigers!” These sentences from the booklet accompanying Laibach’s album Kapital (1993) cut right to the chase: we live according to our own will only when we do not let ourselves be guided by calculation, which is to say, by purposive-rational strategies
CARL HEGEMANN
of survival—but renouncing them is dangerous. If we do not want to die we must be cautious, act rationally, secure our advantage, our survival, yet when that becomes our only motivation, it can destroy our lives. So we must do both: calculate and not-calculate. The two are mutually exclusive, and neither works without the other. Either way, we are bound to fail. But there are differences between the ways we fail. Schlingensief wanted to fail splendidly. “Hunt two tigers!” On several occasions in the 1990s and again later, in the Zurich Hamlet and the Bayreuth Parsifal, he used these sentences penned by the Slovenian band Laibach as a programmatic statement. Put succinctly, they meant: “Failure as Chance.” 10. “The Images Disappear Automatically” Shortly before his cancer surgery in 2008, Christoph Schlingensief bought a dictaphone. The observations he recorded on it before and after his operation and over the weeks and months that followed form the basis for his open and public engagement with the illness, with the fear of death and the repression of the thought of his own mortality and the terrifying insight that “we cannot learn to die,” that we are utterly helpless, that the production of meaning fails, that death is contingent, that we can no longer even see ourselves as guilty, that we lose all autonomy. “And you don’t understand, ’cause it’s bigger than you.” From the same material he also compiled his book So schön wie hier kanns im Himmel gar nicht sein—Tagebuch einer Krebserkrankung [It Couldn’t Possibly Be as Lovely in Heaven as It Is Here—A Cancer Diary], which came out in 2009 and stayed on best-seller lists for many months. It examined the way the author was dealing with his own impending death, which, at least in the Catholic view, was supposed to be “quiet, silent, and speechless.” Schlingensief’s public engagement with the process of dying was extraordinary, at least in our latitudes. Even from the sickbed he began to direct again; his theatrical medical report Der Zwischenstand der Dinge [The Intermediate State of Affairs] opened at the Maxim Gorki Theater, Berlin, that same summer of 2008, with him making a personal appearance on stage. The modest production, which mercilessly laid out the shock of the diagnosis and the desperate experience of cancer therapy before the public, was something like the nucleus of the “grand goodbye” he then celebrated in a personal farewell tour, presenting himself as a most effective comedian in around ten major German-speaking theaters in order to raise money for his opera village in Burkina Faso and directing four large theatrical productions: Mea Culpa (see photograph), the Parsifal overpainting as a readymade opera, which opened at Burgtheater, Vienna, in March 2009, and was a “glimpse of the beyond” and a “glimpse from the beyond” and ultimately a directorial refusal to die. The Zurich project Sterben lernen—Herr Andersen stirbt in 60 Minuten [Learning to Die—Mr. Andersen Dies in 60 Minutes] took place on Zurich’s two leading stages as well as at the Kunsthalle and in the streets; a most animated Schlingensief showed up to storm the simultaneous premiere of his friend René Pollesch’s work at the city’s Schauspielhaus, taking the actors along so they could keep Mr. Andersen company as he was dying at the Neumarkt Theater: “There are more important things than theater.” And in May 2009, his last production scrutinized his ambivalent relation to Africa: Via Intolleranza II, featuring many artists from Burkina Faso as well as Schlingensief himself, which ran at the Bayerische Staatsoper, Munich, until early July.
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11. “Immortality Can Kill” A Church of Fear vs. the Alien Within, devoted to that over which we no longer have any power, forms the center of the German Schlingensief pavilion during the 2011 Venice Biennale. The films and the pews and the entire interior of the church are still extant; the actions that took place inside the church are unrepeatable. Schlingensief liked to take friends to visit his Fluxus church—not to be confused with the small single-member church Schlingensief displayed on the Biennale grounds eight years ago—on evenings when there was no show; there would be nothing but the film projections playing and the artificial light falling through the church windows. He liked it especially well in a state of quiet, as a site of contemplation. The church in the German Pavilion invites the visitor to pray or meditate, documenting the indivisible union in Christoph Schlingensief of self-aggrandizement and self-humiliation and memorializing an artistic movement from the past century: Fluxus. Even without the actions that took place in it, the church is a site of the engagement with our own deaths. “Learning to die.” It welcomes everyone, including those who do not believe in anything, in keeping with the “extended conception of we” from Schlingensief’s Bayreuth Parsifal, which encompasses not just Germans or Europeans but all people, and not just humans but also hares, for instance. That is Schlingensief’s “everyone together,” as we might loosely translate the word “Catholic.”
So the pavilion now consists of these three separately accessible rooms. At the center stands the church, with all the films, cultic objects, and images, as true to the original as possible, although spatial limitations forced us to shorten the nave. The entrance on the right provides access to the movie theater, where Schlingensief’s films are shown every day at regularly scheduled times, just like in a normal cinema operation. And the door on the left opens onto Africa, the opera village Remdoogo; instead of a live panorama, the image projected on the wall is a fixed-camera shot documenting an ordinary day at the center of the construction site. If we imagine that the biennial is the environment in which this room is set, and that the festival itself is something like an aesthetic wellness center for friends of the arts and major events, then this Remdoogo room might even almost match Christoph’s original idea for the pavilion. 14. “Germany Must Become Harder Again” Egomania was one of Christoph Schlingensief’s earliest feature films. It is shown in the movie theater at the German Pavilion. The title’s ambivalence bespeaks Schlingensief’s artistic program. It is one side of the coin. The other side, then, would be the “extended conception of we” from the production of Parsifal. Egomania would be the sublation of “Germania” in art.
12. “This Is the Story of a Family That Has Lost Its Father” Sadly, realizing Schlingensief’s original idea for the pavilion was impossible. Using a satellite link, he wanted to transplant Africa—a live panorama of the construction site of his opera village in Burkina Faso—straight into the German Pavilion and to Europe. This video-link operavillage panorama, he thought, would form the setting for a large “wellness and rehabilitation center” open to the Biennale’s visitors, which was to take up the entire pavilion, observable from outside and above through the pavilion’s upper row of windows. A pavilion furnished in this manner might have documented the “healing” power Schlingensief had once hoped “Africa’s green hills,” which are not in fact very green, would prove to possess. At the very least it would have articulated his longing to muster a major effort to build something new in Africa while also lying idly in a bathtub, as he had imagined in his last theatrical production, Via Intolleranza II. But who should have realized this story for which nothing existed but an idea without taking Schlingensief’s place and presuming to produce art at his postmortem behest? Because there was no way to answer that question, we preferred to furnish the pavilion with things that Schlingensief himself had designed, without turning it into a show of relics. 13. “Over the Next Hundred Years There Will Be Six Billion Dead. At Least.” What we have set up are simply central sites of his life: the movie theater, where all the actors, however alive they may be on the screen, are dead because in the finished film they can no longer change, and what does not change does not live; the church where he celebrated his own requiem mass and will never celebrate it again; and the opera village, which is under construction in the vicinity of Ouagadougou and where the school will open in the fall of 2011 with classes in film and music—Remdoogo, which marks the future that will take place without him and, in the slightly longer run, without us as well.
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IRM HERMANN FROM BERLINER REPUBLIK TO MEA CULPA
CARL HEGEMANN
Special Edition of the Nordbayerischer Kurier, July 24–25, 2004
I
first met Christoph Schlingensief in 1987, when he cast me for his film Schafe in Wales [Sheep in Wales]. He was still fairly unknown at the time, and at first glance he struck me as a good-looking young middle-class man who had manners; every mother-in-law’s perfect dream. Yet behind the bourgeois façade lurked a great seducer, who would use his overwhelming charm to drive me into the craziest acts of self-abandonment, something I had not experienced since my time with Rainer Werner Fassbinder. After Fassbinder, with whom I spent a formative chapter of my life, from 1966 until his death in June 1981, and to whom I owe my very personal “Éducation sentimentale” in matters artistic as well as personal, working with Christoph now cast a similarly fascinating spell over me that mixed pleasure, fear, and curiosity. Taking part in one of his projects—he always needed to exert all his charm to persuade me to do it—invariably meant embarking on a trip into the unknown, meant leaping into chaos and hoping that one would eventually emerge unscathed. There were no scripts but inspiring texts aplenty that were tried out and discarded, snippets of film and conversations that developed into scenes and video projections and gradually condensed into a multimedia collage.
Berliner Republik, at Berlin’s Volksbühne, was his first play in which I appeared. He always participated in the acting, was the motor and connector in a loose scenic aggregate. As long as he was the animator, this sort of evening could never really go awry. Repetition bored him, and so he came up with the idea of playing Berliner Republik backward. Five minutes before the curtain would rise he jumbled up the entire sequence of the scenes, and each actor had to see for himself how he would manage the transitions creatively. There were holes that were painfully embarrassing—the audience suffered with us—but also wonderful moments of realistic tension, something one cannot experience on any other stage. Working with him was always most challenging, and we never stood on the firm ground of a finished production. During the performances he would constantly come up with new things that demanded a response, and woe to him who laughed about that, something he did not like at all. He was a berserker and a magician at once. His surprise appearance in ATTA ATTA, for instance, was magnificent: I am soliloquizing with a flower in my hand, and suddenly he approaches me, covered in white powder and wearing a gigantic set of antlers on his head, moving spastically, throws me into a bathtub on the stage, and “rapes” me. When our mutual “feeling” on the stage was right, it was wonderful. Much of it, after all, played out on the level of the unconscious—it was inexpressible. This mixture of the Catholic pharmacist’s son and the “abysses” inside him often shocked me. Sometimes I was afraid. When he worked with you, he would sense any weakness, any lack of conscious awareness in you, and use it. “Show your wound,” that was the credo he had adopted from Beuys, and after he was diagnosed with cancer, he worked maniacally, more alive than ever, calling himself into question as well and addressing his innermost feelings head-on in Church of Fear and Mea Culpa. During the long time that I worked with him, my view was often obscured by the hardships that being part of his productions entailed, and he did not seem all that great to me, but now that he is no longer I see the void he has left and realize that he was a giant. That is the one thing I would still like to tell him.
IRM HERMANN
Mea Culpa, Hamburg, October 2010
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JOHANNES HOFF LIFE IN ABUNDANCE: SCHLINGENSIEF’S DECONSTRUCTION OF (POST) MODERNISM
Camille. What do you say, Lucile? Lucile. Nothing, I love to watch you speak. Camille. Do you hear me too? Lucile. Certainly! Camille. Am I right? Have you any idea what I was saying? Lucile. No, none at all. There are moments of when we do not pay attention to what people are talking about; when we do not hear but “see” them speaking. However, it takes a person of considerable unworldliness for this attitude to become a permanent state of affairs; people like Lucile, for instance, the wife of Camille Desmoulins, a Jacobin whose own comrades-in-arms sentenced to death in Büchner’s drama Danton’s Death. Even beneath the barred window of her husband’s death-row cell, Lucile speaks the seemingly naïve language of unworldliness: Listen, people are pulling long faces and saying you must die. I can’t help laughing Lucile speaks as though the people with their long faces had nothing to do with her. But that does not stop her from being more in touch with the world of her comrades than they themselves are. As early as the second act, when it seems as though no one’s head but Danton’s was at stake, Lucile glimpses something barreling toward Camille, which he, swept along by the enthusiasm of revolutionary fraternization, refuses to see: Lucile. When I think that they may take your head and … Camille, it’s nonsense, isn’t it? I’m crazy? Camille. Be calm. Danton and I aren’t the same person. Lucile sees clearly, from the very beginning. But at the end she refuses to translate what she sees into a message that would be adequate for the gravity of the situation. As Camille declaims solemn phrases celebrating his own heroic death (“Gentlemen, I shall serve myself first”), she hears the strokes of the clock. She wants to scream: Lucile. And yet there is something serious in it. I must think. I’m beginning to grasp it. … To die. Die. Everything has the right to live, everything—the little fly there, that bird. Why not he? […] Everything moves. Clocks tick, bells peal, people walk, water trickles, everything—except in that one place. No! It can’t be allowed to happen. I shall sit on the ground and scream until everything stops in fright and nothing moves any more. Yet a blind scream is powerless to halt the ceaseless, clamorous creation of meaning. And so all that remains to her in the end is what Paul Celan, in his speech on the occasion of receiving the Büchner Prize in 1960, called a “word against the grain” or “counter-word”: Citizen. Qui va là? Lucile. [Reflects a moment, then suddenly decides] Long live the King! Citizen. In the name of the republic! [The guards surround her and take her away] Lucile’s “Long live the King!” not only disrupts the logic of the intentional creation of meaning—the desire to communicate of those who churn out pathos-laden messages even in the face of the scaffold. Her “counter-word” halts even the flow of the non-intentional production of meaning; that is the key point of this scene. The Deconstruction of “Puppet” and “String” According to Martin Heidegger and Marshall McLuhan, the transformative potential of modern art is comparable to that of the modern light bulb. It opens up its own contexts of association and action; it function as a self-referential medium around which we can congregate.
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Hence McLuhan’s theory-of-everything offered to the global village in the media age: “The medium is the message.”1 Lucile’s counter-word is neither an intentional nor a self-referential medium. The medium of her final words neither has a message, nor is it its message. It amounts to no more than a brief moment during which the machine of ceaseless meaning production of meaning is halted. It is easy to create something meaningful: But when there is talk of art, there is often somebody who does not really listen. More precisely: somebody who hears, listens, looks … and then does not know what it was about. But who hears the speaker, “sees him speaking.” […] Here where it all comes to its end, where all around Camille pathos and sententiousness confirm the triumph of “puppet” and “string,” here Lucile who is blind against art, Lucile for whom language is tangible and like a person, Lucile is suddenly there with her “Long live the King!” […] It is a word against the grain, the word which cuts the “string,” which does not bow to the “bystanders and old warhorses of history.” It is an act of freedom. It is a step.2 Celan’s analysis of the dramatic scene is persuasive. But it speaks the language of an era that regarded the dawn of McLuhan’s global village with skepticism, even aversion. It makes it difficult to translate its “potential for negation” into the language of a village whose residents do not fear death if it provides an opportunity to congregate, in the manner of a herd, around an “event,” or to become its central protagonist if only for fifteen minutes. Andy Warhol was paraphrasing McLuhan when he prophesied in 1968 that, “in the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” In the age of Lady Diana, I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here!, and al-Qaeda, even the most unworldly actions and words are transmuted into poetic light bulbs that supply the placeless inhabitants of the World Wide Web with fleeting community experiences. It is impossible to produce a counter-word in a postmodern global village. That is why one would look in vain for such a gesture in Schlingensief’s art-blind oeuvre. The faith in the word is replaced, or so it would seem, by a “faith in embarrassment.” A paradigmatic example of this faith is the theatrical happening titled Kaprow City (2006), whose prehistory goes back to Schlingensief’s action 48 Stunden Überleben für Deutschland [48 Hours Survival for Germany] during documenta 10 in 1997. During the documenta action, Schlingensief uncannily announced the death of Lady Diana before the princess had died. A few hours later, Kassel police arrested him for “slandering the memory of a dead person.” In Kaprow City, this event recurred now overpainted in a way that turned the dead media princess into a thing, trivial and boring and embarrassing at once. Schlingensief’s arrest in 1997 could still have been interpreted as an event of the “my fifteen minutes” type, but in 2006 the machine of event production simply broke down. The Kaprow City installation, a monstrous and labyrinthine complex the spectator had to enter alone, was not designed to prevent the audience with any experience of community. The beholder had to find her own way through this moving structure; rather than discovering the collective time of a virtual event, each step revealed nothing but a lonesome present time. Up to a certain point, this scenario was consistent with the postmodern trend: Beuys’s “Every human being is an artist” turned into Kippenberger’s “Every artist is a human being.”3
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Schlingensief’s art, however, was more radical. The dominant gesture, to the very end, was that of an unworldliness blind to art. Instead of bowing, in an act of postmodern irony, to the law of McLuhan and Lacan that the message even of a purloined letter always “arrives,”4 his art made the spectator freeze in incomprehension. But more than that, it captivated the beholder even as the message never “arrived,” because there was something to see in Schlingensief’s art. Montaging the flotsam of a history of art, cinema, literature, and music that had lost all orientation and mixing in religious symbolism to create a Gesamtkunstwerk decidedly bereft of all meaning, his art allowed the spectator to see through the artifice of “puppet” and “wire” to what Celan’s art-blind person sees: the person-like, the perceptible, the everyday. The late Schlingensief’s Fluxus and readymade projects, dedicated to his own illness, are exemplary in this regard. For the readymade is precisely that: an object alienated from the context of its use that presents itself to the beholder as a speechless and expressionless thing. Boris Groys has offered an excellent analysis of this strand in Schlingensief’s art: This is no longer about the transmutation of the mute world into language, but rather about a transmutation of language into a thing. The artist has lost control of the flow of language—and so he stops this flow […] because he has learned […] that there are situations in which language fails for its own reasons.5 Achim, or Life in Abundance Is that a sufficient interpretation? In Groys’s analysis, what allows “the thing” to become person-like in Schlingensief’s work recedes behind the experiences of negativity in illness and death or the petrified language of religious symbolism and its indifference to meaning. But Schlingensief’s readymades were about more than the gesture of iconoclastic negation —they were about the eighty-year-old opera-chorus singer Elfriede Rezabek, for instance, singing the song of Isolde’s “Love-Death” from Wagner’s Tristan in her frail voice (“How softly and gently he smiles, how sweetly his eyes open—can you see, my friends, do you not see it?”),6 or about Achim von Paczensky. Achim was a patient at the state hospital at Teupitz in 1993 when Schlingensief cast him for his film Terror 2000. As the postmodern Botox and art market was auctioning puppies and teddy bears in the style of Jeff Koons’s balloon animals, Achim became the favorite candidate of Schlingensief’s futuristic political party of the marginalized, Chance 2000. Achim then co-directed the TV project FREAKSTARS 3000 (2003), which displayed the mechanisms of postmodern talent shows by staging such a show at the Tiele-WincklerHaus, a residential home for disabled people. Finally, in the Fluxus oratorio A Church of Fear vs. the Alien Within, Achim and Kerstin Grassmann shouted “Avant-garde—Marmalade! Avant-garde—Marmalade!” (see also the photographs of Achim in the Church of Fear under Prozession zur Auferstehung as well as Geschichte der Kirche). When Achim died of a heart attack on December 26, 2009, an editor at nachtkritik.de wrote: What the show celebrated: a human being! And a human being with a disability to boot! At bottom, Schlingensief was making fairly cynical use of strategies of mass-media staging to benefit himself and his cause; it was presumably all the product of cool calculation. And yet it made tears well up in my eyes. For Achim von Paczensky’s sake.7
JOHANNES HOFF
Schlingensief’s art played on the anti-humanist keyboard of a media economy that offers no visibility for those who shed tears without the commercial extraction of ratings gains. There is no key on this keyboard for sincere humanist messages. But that did not stop the former altar boy from Oberhausen from using the means of art to let something emerge into view. The decidedly unprofessional program of Schlingensief’s theatrical productions is comparable to a “seriasure” that “serially” “drives” the spectator “into a corner” (the corner Jacques Derrida described as a “stricture”8) in order to afford him the opportunity to see something the scenario of “puppet” and “wire” does not provide for—Achim, for instance, or Helga, Kerstin, Frank, and Elfriede. Something seems to have driven Schlingensief time and again “to do art”; but to him this urge was part and parcel of an articulation of life that, though it included the aspiration to art, included also something else—healthy and sick people, merry and sad ones, boring and embarrassing ones. How serious, how blind to art this interest was became undeniable when Schlingensief’s performances began to organize themselves around “the alien thing” within himself, the cancer in his lung. According to Friedhelm Mennekes, his role at that point approached that of John Paul II as he lay dying.9 Despite the billions of people all over the world who watched the old man’s slow death, there was one thing the event was not: a theatrical production controlled by directors who play god without taking an interest in man. It was not even drama, but instead the plain and simple celebration of what all Catholics celebrate on Sundays and holidays: the Liturgy. On Easter 2005, for instance: The empty window is taken up by the figure of a little old […] man struggling with the last bit of strength he retains. He puts his hand in front of his mouth, bursts into tears, can barely lift his arm to give the blessing, forcing the few words the ritual requires him to speak through a tube surgically inserted into his windpipe, producing no more than an unintelligible rattling sound. The head of the Catholic Church […] It is not a drama he is not involved in. Not a theatrical production. Rather […] it is suffering: suffering before himself and the one in whom he believes, whose suffering, dying, and overcoming of death are just now being consummated down there, in the celebration of the Eucharist.10 As the first pages of the program notes from Mea Culpa document, Schlingensief felt that this event strengthened his resolve to catapult himself into the position of the “thing” (despite the defeatist attacks from the Catholic milieu against his experiment).11 And these projects, too, were not about staging a drama of suffering. The merry-go-round of his productions revolved more recognizably than ever around a Biblical motif: “life in abundance” (John 1:15, 10:10; Psalms 16:11).12 In A Church of Fear vs. the Alien Within, this motif reappears during the Reading from the Fifth Gospel According to Joseph Beuys: “By virtue of his suffering, the sufferer who can do nothing at all fills the world with Christian substance.”13 Leaving aside the metaphysics of suffering elaborated by the Reformation and by German Idealism, this “substance” has no more to do with a masochistic mysticism of suffering than the crucified Christ of the Fourth Gospel (John 19:34) does with Wagner’s Parsifal. The point here is not to celebrate suffering and compassion as ends in themselves, but rather to celebrate life even in suffering.
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Schlingensief’s trenchant Tagebuch einer Krebserkrankung [Cancer Diary] gets to the heart of this affirmative strand of the Christian heritage. Long passages in the book speak the language of Old Testament invective: “Mine eye mourneth by reason of affliction. […] Shall thy loving kindness be declared in the grave? Or thy faithfulness in destruction?” as the Psalmist already proclaimed (Psalms 88:9–11). Schlingensief’s Diary pursues this line, speaking the language of the Daily Prayer at the Church of Fear: “And yet Jesus isn’t there. And God isn’t there either. And Mother Mary isn’t there either. It’s all completely dead. […] The whole petit-bourgeois shit is no longer there. […] Amen.” And yet even in Schlingensief such invective has its context, as the title of Schlingensief’s Diary makes perfectly clear: It Couldn’t Possibly Be as Lovely in Heaven as It Is Here! We may revile God and the world; but when we are done reviling, one certainty at least remains: the “here and now” is still better than the “fairylands” that artists, philosophers, or theologians contrive. No “possible world” can compete with this real one. The “Unmoved Mover” and Boris Groys’s Reading of Schlingensief To dismiss the importance of this Catholic aspect of Schlingensief’s world in the interpretation of his work would mean to miss the nerve of his art. To be sure, his aim was not to “make art”—“making” was alien to him, but neither was it his aim to take up the position of an aloof observer vis-à-vis the spectacle of artistic activities. That is why Boris Groys’s reading of Schlingensief strikes me as unsatisfactory, most im-portantly because it falls for a distorted theology. According to Groys, God was a director who created the world only to adopt the passive attitude of the “unmoved mover” watching his self-moving creation. When this mythical “first mover” died, he left a void, and that is precisely the point, which, according to Groys, allowed artists to come into play: artists like Schlingensief, for example, a director and action artist who sets gigantic Gesamtkunstwerke in motion in order to subsequently become an “observer of his own frantic activities.”14 Groys’s reading is original in that spikes this deistic framework with a shot of Buddhism: “We have to work on not possessing any power, on not doing anything, not producing anything, not fighting against anything, and instead approving of everything.”15 That could sound as though Schlingensief stood back from life. But the true object of Groys’s reading is of course something else: the radical unworldliness of Schlingensief’s art, which he shares with Büchner’s Lucile. The likening of the attitude of unworldliness to the perspective of an “unmoved mover” is utterly appropriate. What is problematic, however, is the way Groys uses the technical term established in Western theology by Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas’s concept of movement relied on the act / potency schema of Aristotelian physics. A seed is a flower in the state of “potency”; and such a flower “moves” to the extent that it strives toward the “act” of blossoming. By no means, however, does this imply that the flower freezes into a motionless crystal at the moment of blossoming. Blossoming, thinking, or loving: according to Aquinas, these were “unmoved” activities; only the path to the blossom was considered an instance of motion. However, this does not mean that the act of blossoming was regarded as passive—much less so God’s “pure act of being,” which coincided
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with “life in abundance.” Abstracting from the Aristotelian terminology, this “act” could even be called motion in the highest degree.16 Basing our discussion on this model, we can certainly compare Schlingensief to the “unmoved mover.” But Schlingensief’s motionlessness never contrasted with his “frantic activities.” He fell silent when life was effervescent; he became frantic when the creative flux of life abated. And at all times he remained what he was—not a god, but indeed what Saint Thomas called imago dei. Schlingensief’s anticipatory self-obituary for himself in the welcoming address to the Church of Fear aptly puts this fundamental principle of the Catholic love of wisdom as follows: “He was who he was, no more, but even so: who can really say that of himself?” According to thinkers as diverse as Saint Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Meister Eckhart, Nicholas of Cusa, and Kierkegaard, a consequence of the Fall of Man is that the human being is irresistibly inclined not to be who he is. We tend to make ourselves at home in a narcissistic world of the imagination or in “possible worlds.” That should give us pause. Schlingensief not only gave thought to the matter; the reflection on the hysterical narcissism of our time was the engine that powered his art. And so his art consisted, more than anything, in being Christoph Schlingensief of his own accord—“anyone who has ever tried and seen how difficult it is to drink a glass of milk or write a symphony of one’s accord also knows: it is not an easy thing to do.”17 Beyond Activity And Passivity The desire to learn how to drink a glass of milk of one’s own accord explains the appeal Meister Eckhart held for the late Schlingensief. In act four of his Zurich experimental arrangement Sterben Lernen [Learning to Die, 2009], for instance, he engaged with Eckhart’s sermons, which became part of the production.18 But it was not just the Dominican’s paradoxical rhetoric that fascinated him in these texts, which did not shrink from verbal provocation in order to call his overenthusiastic late-medieval brothers and sisters back down to reality. What fascinated him even more was that Meister Eckhart’s articulation of the idea of “motionlessness” was far more rigorous than those of postmodernist art theorists; for according to Meister Eckhart, even he who does nothing still does far too much. Following the Meister Eckhart scholar Reiner Manstetten, we can illustrate the point of this paradox using the economic theorem of non-saturation.19 Loosely put, this theory assumes that our consumer behavior always follows the maxim that “more is better.” But what does “more” mean? More is always what we do not have. Human behavior is determined by preference decisions. The constant desire to have more is a logical consequence of this principle. For any preference decision implies a negation: when I decide to do this (to marry, to live, to buy an iPhone), I cannot have that (not marrying, hanging myself, buying a different smartphone, etc.). And so we always decide in favor of something (this) only to realize soon enough that we do not have something else (that). As early as the fourteenth century, Meister Eckhart concluded that he who wants something wants nothing, for at the very moment he decides to want something there is something else he does not want. There is accordingly only one way for us to break free
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of the unhappy consciousness of postmodern consumerist life: we must cease to want this or that and instead want nothing. So beware of conceiving of yourself as being this or that man in any particular way. […] Divorce yourselves of all “not,” for the “not” makes distinction. How so? That you are not that man, this “not” makes for distinction between you and that man.20 We must decide, as it were, to become “Men Without Qualities.”21 Meister Eckhart calls the required characteristic attitude toward life “Gelazenheit” (equanimity or, more literally, the ability to “let” oneself and the world be) and the corresponding relation to the world, “Abgeschiedenheit” (“detachment”). But such detachment by no means implies utter inaction. Someone who does nothing still does “something,” for he does this (being passive) as distinct from that (being active). Detachment, then, is not the opposite of “frantic activities.” “Gelazenheit” can mean all sorts of things; we must merely be able to “let them be.” In Groys’s analysis, by contrast, the motion and bustle of life appears as an ongoing affair that competes with the detachment of the “unmoved mover.” Thus he believes that the decision to “want nothing” coincides with a movement of transcendence that negates active life: “I see this will to transcend life in Schlingensief. […] He observes life; he, as it were, does not live, he attempts to take up a position that lets something take place and then he looks to see what happens.”22 Of course, there is a more complex background to this lopsided image of the “unmoved mover” in Groys. For his intention is to read Schlingensief as a preeminent representative of the (post)modern religion of art. “Here, art conclusively becomes religion.” Symptomatic of this development, Groys believes, is a diary excerpt included in the program notes for Mea Culpa in which Schlingensief interprets his cancer as a consequence of his work on Wagner’s Parsifal. With this interpretation, Groys argues, Schlingensief transformed his own dying into a prop of a theatrical prop: “Schlingensief’s illness thus loses its organic, worldly sources and becomes the consequence of the impact of art on his body.”23 But this reading neglects Schlingensief’s ambivalent stance vis-à-vis the modernist program of art-as-religion. Schlingensief’s view of Wagner is paradigmatic of this stance, as the relevant passages from his diary show: I have come to believe that it really is death-music, a dangerous music that celebrates not life but death. It is venomous stuff that squirted out of Wagner. […] Open the shrine, unveil the Grail! That’s quite enough. That really is plenty. I’m almost at the point where I would say, yes, the Nazis had a lot of fun with that, that was exactly their world. They could all march to that. […] That was their goal: one day they’d be in a little courtyard, a gas can under their arms and a cyanide capsule in their mouths, celebrating death.24 We should note, first, the convergence between this remark and Friedrich Nietzsche’s harsh attacks on his erstwhile friend in The Case of Wagner, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Nietzsche contra Wagner: My objections to Wagner’s music are physiological objections […] that I no longer breathe easily when once this music operates on me. […] Wagner makes people morbid. […] In Bayreuth people are only honest in the mass, as individuals they lie […] they renounce the right to their own tongue and choice, to their taste, even to their courage, as they have it and use it within their own four walls with respect to God and
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the world. […] In the theater one becomes mob, herd, woman, Pharisee, voting animal, patron, idiot—Wagnerian.25 To the late Nietzsche’s eyes, the nineteenth-century program of redemption through art as religion seemed a variation on the illusory promises of the Christian heaven: “These are the consumptives of the soul: hardly are they born before they begin to die and to long for teachings of weariness and renunciation,”26 Zarathustra already explains in a passage that takes aim not only at modern Christianity but also at Schopenhauer, the philosophical source of Wagner’s programmatic goals. Against the Schopenhauerian “will to transcend life,” Nietzsche posited the “yes” to life. But this “yes” became enmeshed in self-contradictions because, to the end, Nietzsche’s thinking clove to the modern conviction that saying yes, that assent had to originate in a creative activity, and thus must negate “passive virtues.” Where Boris Groys, championing passivity, negates activity, Nietzsche championed an unrestrained activism that negates passivity. The “happiness of him who takes”27 was as alien to him as the amoral happiness of unreserved assent—how else could he have hurled a moralizing “contra” at his former comrade in Nietzsche contra Wagner?28 Christoph Schlingensief was the happy counterpart to Friedrich Nietzsche’s unhappy consciousness. Neither did he eschew the “happiness of him who takes,” nor was his thinking infected by the dialectic of saying no. “God speaks forever only yes; the devil, nay: whence he cannot be one with God, with him be aye,” says Angelus Silesius.29 The language of Schlingensief’s art is no different. There is no delete key, no “no”—it has that in common with the language of God and that of dreams. And that is why it would never have occurred to him to respond with a “contra” to Richard Wagner’s beguiling music— Schlingensief’s father was a Wagnerian, after all. In his ears, the master’s “death-sounds” were associated with childhood memories: as the father was listening to The Valkyrie, almost drowned out by the noise of the household vacuum cleaner, the tune from Walt Disney’s The Jungle Book could be heard blaring from the child’s room. … That sort of thing could not possibly be bad per se? But how can we put all of this together? The final act of Mea Culpa is indicative of Schlingensief’s attitude toward the “Wagnerians.” As the father, who has already been dead for a year and a half, tries to drag his son to heaven, the cancer-stricken son, accompanied by the master’s death-sounds Nietzsche already denounced as “water vapor,” exclaims: I love you so much. But now you can leave, too. Get lost. Go away. Beat it. […] I’m so happy that I’m still here. I have no desire to sit on some cloud. The modern fable of “the heavens”30 was no less suspect to Schlingensief than the green hill of Bayreuth. To him, both smelled of “fairyland.”31 But that did not stop him from working with the material. Rather than negating Bayreuth, he subjected it to creative transformation and metonymical displacement, to Ouagadougou, for example, where it became Remdoogo. The green hill became an opera village in Burkina Faso, with a school and a clinic, and teenagers playing soccer on the green lawn and disrupting the solemn
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ceremony of art-as-religion with their noise. Remdoogo: that is the Schlingensiefian montage of The Valkyrie and The Jungle Book on a grand scale; the vision of a place firmly built in stone and clay where life absorbs art rather than the other way around. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
13 14 15 16 17
18 19 20 21
22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30
31
See Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994). Paul Celan, “The Meridian,” in Collected Prose, trans. Rosemarie Waldrop (New York: Routledge, 2003), 37–56, here 39–40. I am grateful to Ingrid Anna for pointing me to this passage. Harald Falckenberg and Frank Berberich, “Nach der Lust Kalte Gier. Die Konjunkturen des Kunstmarkts und die Chancen für Junge Künstler,” Lettre International 89 (2010): 106. See Jacques Derrida, “The Purveyor of Truth,” in The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 411–96. Boris Groys, “When Words Fail,” in the present volume, 193. See “Mea Culpa,” http://www.mea-culpa.at. “Eine Rose für Achim” (Nachtkritik), http://www.schlingensief.com/weblog/?p=479; see also Schlingensief’s own obituary for von Paczensky, “Achim ist gestorben,” http://schlingenblog.posterous.com/achim-ist-gestorben-beerdigung-am-612010-auf. See Jacques Derrida, “At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am,” in Re-Reading Levinas, eds. Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 11–48. See “Schlingensief: ‘Grosser Zeuge unsere Zeit’,” http://www.domradio.de/aktuell/66811/schlingensief-grosser-zeuge-unsererzeit.html. Gerhard Stadler, “Der Vorhang,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, May 31, 2005. See Burgtheater, Christoph Schlingensief. Mea Culpa. Heft 194 (Vienna, 2008), 5–7. John Paul II had already addressed the subject in 1984, in his Apostolic Letter Salvifici Doloris: “On the Cross, Christ attained and fully accomplished his mission […] In weakness he manifested his power, and in humiliation he manifested all his messianic greatness.” Apostolic Letter Salvifici Doloris of the Supreme Pontiff John Paul II to the Bishops …, http://www.vatican.va/holy_ father/john_paul_ii/apost_letters/documents/hf_ jp-ii_apl_11021984_salvifici-doloris_en.html (April 4, 2011). See http://www.kirche-der-angst.de. Carl Hegemann and Boris Groys, “Metanoia. Der Künstler als unbewegter Beweger oder die Welt als ewige Ruhestätte,” Lettre International 90 (2010): 117. Ibid. See Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra gentiles, Opera omnia (Editio Leonina), vol. 13–15 (Rome, 1918–1930), I c. 13 n. 10. Georg Seeßlen, “Mein idealer Künstler zurzeit,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 53, March 4, 2010, 38, as well as “Über Christoph Schlingensief und das, was Kunst zur Zeit können, dürfen und wollen sollte,” http://www.filmzentrale.com/essays/schlingensieflaudatiogs.htm. http://www.temporaere-leichenhalle.ch. See Reiner Manstetten, “Negative Theologie und negative Anthropologie – zur Aktualität Meister Eckharts,” Theologische Quartalschrift 181 (2001): 112–33, c. 6. Sermon 46 (“Haec est vita aeterna”), in Meister Eckhart, Deutsche Werke, Die deutschen und lateinischen Werke, ed. J. Quint (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1976), II 382,3–7. The title of Robert Musil’s magnum opus derives from Meister Eckhart. As more recent scholarship has shown, the text also contains numerous references to and excerpts from Meister Eckhart. See Niklaus Largier, “Robert Musil, Meister Eckhart, and the ‘Culture of Film’,” in Religion: Beyond a Concept, ed. Hent de Vries (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 739−50. In recent Musil scholarship, the theorem of “non-saturation” is also called “optionalism.” See Bazon Brock, “Über die Dramaturgie der Verknüpfung von Anfang und Ende,” in Auf Leben und Tod. Der Mensch in Malerei und Fotografie. Die Sammlung Teutloff zu Gast im Wallraf, ed. Wallraf-Richartz-Museum (Munich: Hirmer, 2010), 14. I am grateful to Christian Bauer for pointing these matters out to me. Boris Groys, “Sprachversagen. Zur Arbeit des Künstlers und Theatermachers Christoph Schlingensief,” Lettre International 90 (2010): 116. [My emphasis.] Ibid. Burgtheater, Christoph Schlingensief. Mea Culpa, 20; Christoph Schlingensief, So schön wie hier kanns im Himmel gar nicht sein! Tagebuch einer Krebserkrankung (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2009), 171. Friedrich Nietzsche, Nietzsche contra Wagner, in The Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, vol. 3: The Case of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, The Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, trans. Thomas Common (London: Fisher Unwin, 1899), 67–69. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Preachers of Death,” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Graham Parkes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 39. Ibid., “The Night-Song,” 92. For a deconstruction of this self-contradiction, see John Milbank, “Can Morality be Christian?,” in The Word Made Strange. Theology, Language, Culture (Cambridge, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 1997), 219−32. Angelus Silesius, Cherubinischer Wandersmann, in Sämtliche poetische Werke in drei Bänden, vol. 3 (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1952), II 4. The premodern concepts of theosis (deification) or visio dei (vision of God) were focused not on an alternative “possible world” but on the intensification of the present time. “This life” was considered to be unredeemed only insofar as we have lost the gift of existing before God with unquestioning confidence here and now (or put another way, to drink a glass of milk without longing for something else). It is the obsession with “possible alternatives” to this world that has turned it into a “fallen place.” See Christoph Schlingensief, “Die Kirche ist ein Märchenpark,” Cicero (January 11, 2010), http://www.schlingensief.com/ weblog/?p=481. An unabridged German version of this essay is in preparation, which relates to the genealogy of the (post)modern religion of art, and includes a critical discussion of Carl Hegemann’s romantic interpretation of Schlingensief.
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ANDY HOPE 1930 MATHEMATICALLY CARNIVAL LABYRINTH
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Extinct
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ELFRIEDE JELINEK THE SQUANDERER
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omething affected this man, affected Christoph Schlingensief, that made him positively hurl forth anything he absorbed, made him pour out all his good gifts—from such a pouring-forth comes the word profuse. He always gave away everything within him. And no one understood how so much had ever gone into him in the first place. Perhaps because he had already given it before it could even really take its place in him (perhaps also because he was already occupied, already possessed by other things he would probably also have given away again at once?). A man everything tore through as though hurled up into the air by a storm, and across to us. That’s how I see him. He couldn’t possibly take as much as he gave. Letting everything in as though in a fever, the evil germs as well; everything, everything was welcome to Christoph, since that’s what it was supposed to be good for, to make something out of it and then, with his friends, collaborators, to steer it back across to us. The Animatograph, a sparkling carousel of life that invited everything and gave it all away again as a gift. But there cannot be so many gifts given, someone must pay for it all. We paid for no more than an admission ticket, and often not even that. Christoph picked up the whole bill. He gave it all away and then paid the bill on top. It was impossible to him that he would have everything he sucked in to himself, keep it as insight, as the result of something, as spirit, as whatdoIknow, to consider it a sort of profit and cash in on it, for himself alone, he could not hog it, he always had to hurl it away at once, not in the sense of throwing it away, he hurled it toward us, and so became ever more effective for us without becoming any less for himself. Only something began to rave within him over which he then no longer had any power. He probably squandered himself in giving. The more he gave in his art (or whatever you want to call it), the more imbued by life he would comport himself, and then there was no longer any recognizable difference between inside and outside. A rich man who always made others ever richer. Christoph didn’t lock himself up, he did the opposite, he unmoored himself from himself in his work, he thrust out into a lake as children thrust a stick into an anthill or indeed as mariners put out to sea. He freed that sea of its shores and cut the ropes. And in the end he was life itself, and life became he, literally transformed into him; he could identify himself with life in his work, and his life was destined by his giving everything away that would have let others live ten lives, provisions included. But it was expropriation as appropriation. One hopes that he got all of it back and is still getting it. He was the one who gets and the one who has given everything, and it was by this one-to-one that he defined himself, that was his life. That, in fact, was that. Was precisely: everything.
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SCHORSCH “TUFFI” KAMERUN THAT’S PROBABLY WHAT THEY CALL FREEDOM
“C
hristoph’s at the station, picking up the German Nazis.” So the press lady at Zurich’s Schauspielhaus told me when I asked. The town was up in arms. A clear-cut case. Typical. Hmm, but is that actually political? Those who wanted to know more precisely right away had failed to understand the moment. For the methodical examination of this sort of Schlingensief action amounted to a slowing of his creativity. Conversely: that was his permanent advantage. Because he permitted virtually no dissection of his work. That was how he always remained one step faster, ahead of those who thought they had finally come close, were finally right on it. Fiddlesticks. Because those moments were exactly when the twist came. Intuitive, hardly conceptual. And the mistaken belief of being on the same level with him thanks to “solid preparation,” that was even more wrong. Because then people needed to work off the ballast of their analytically approximate approaches when something altogether different was suddenly at issue. Once we were all sitting on the rehearsal stage, waiting for the arrival of the starter. All brimming with things to offer. Then Christoph came in and showed us his first film—which we were all familiar with—and the next thing he announced to us was that he was going to start off by doing nothing for a week. Major alarm! Never have so many very good dramaturges been seen (in one place) whipping themselves into a (perfectly unnecessary) frenzy. Instead of regarding the gap that had opened up in the daily theatrical grind as an opportunity, immediate measures were taken to “save the project,” and masses of additional materials were carted in with even greater urgency, materials condemned to assured uselessness. It wasn’t until I took part that I realized that only a certain amount of distance (at work, not in private life) created the possibility that one would be “part of it.” For in the Schlingensief cosmos, full immersion meant simple absorption for those visible in the light next to him. The others, the loyal fellow creators and fellow combatants, received special rewards, the highest of which was clear membership in the team or family. That was certainly why all the amateurs, the disabled people, and the ones who had their own major narcissistic disorders, were the only authentic possible people in the Schlingensief show trial. Because they ran along their own parallels, and so remained miraculously free. And the writers of reports likewise had an interesting aerial view of the whole thing only when they described the phenomenon and not the quality of the particular foreground, such as a successful/unsuccessful performance or an exhibition space featuring rotating-stage recollections (the Animatograph). His theater was permanent. And always intentionally all-encompassingly consistently inconsistent. And yes: Christoph Schlingensief was not a political artist! That diminishes him. He played in many simultaneous spaces. These were society, fucking up, childhood dreams, anti-ideals, childhood curses, ultradirect philosophy, daring-oneself-in-not-bearing-it, love for art, existential sentiments, and “life” as much as “non-life.” And in his super-agility he was the super-fastest one, which made him a constantly interesting media artist. “I’ve proven to you that there’s no way to stage this play,” he said after a dress rehearsal. Major ala … !! And once again “the project” was “at risk.” I told him, well, he didn’t have to be part of it, there were enough others. We ended up doing it the next day. With him right in front, of course. He just needed to have briefly indicated the possible exit, only the more vigorously to barge right in through the entrance. “Perhaps I’m not going to show anything this time.” And that is his greatest achievement: to demonstrate that it is possible
Schlingie and me, Attabambi-Pornoland, Schauspielhaus Zürich, 2004
SCHORSCH KAMERUN
Schorsch and Christoph, Botanic Garden, Rio de Janeiro, 2006
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to cancel art. The famous “chance” in failure. The idea “really” initiated was much more important to him than its orderly implementation. And that’s what they then call freedom. But freedom nonetheless brings the human being to an end, and so this insight was useful to Christoph Schlingensief the bearer of himself forever only for a very brief moment. So stay on it. Standstill is detachment. Better to smack the next fat piece into the greedy maws of the project providers as they tremble with joy. Heating the stew is still how you set it in motion. And I am so grateful to have seen it. How there were fresh and daring ventures. How new things were tried out. With the most direct dedication. It was, in the more recent past, the last culmination of a gigantic contraption of ribbons in which the individual threads derived from the greatest moments of experimentation. And it was laid out completely openly for all to see, everyone was free to join in and have a look. In a daydream. We miss that immensely. The gap between our real days and Christoph’s fantastic constructions of them won’t be closed for a very long time. And that was what my aunt Anke sensed when, together with innumerable people he had touched, she felt an intimate loss when Christoph died, even though she had only read his book from a safe distance. Fuck that silence.
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ALEXANDER KLUGE THE COMPLETE VERSION OF A BAROQUE INVENTION BY CHRISTOPH SCHLINGENSIEF
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ewish tombs in the twelfth century bear an emblem: a hare. In 1943, the symbol on the stones attracted the attention of Oberrottenführer Hartmut Mielke when his convoy was bulldozing Jewish cemeteries in central Germany so that the sites could be used for the construction of water tanks for fire trucks. The motif returns on tombstones from the seventeenth century: outstretched, prone hares “sleeping” or “slain.” The Oberrottenführer, who was a dedicated local historian in his spare time, knew that this use contrasted with pagan depictions of hares in Celtic areas south of the Rhön Mountains, where hares are documented as appearing on sacrificial stone altars, but not on tombs. In an article in the Zeitschrift für deutsche Vorzeitforschung [Journal of German Prehistoric Studies], vol. 14 (1809), 143ff., Alfred-Erwin Jahn, cousin of Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, the “father of gymnastics,” had already described the collision between the “hare” as a symbol of fertility (in a spring myth associated with the goddess Ostara) and the “theatricality of Golgotha”: the “somber departure of the son of God, who will not return for a long time.”It was from this passage that Richard Wagner drew inspiration for the Good Friday spell he inserted into the third act of his Parsifal. The suffering of the cross and the mirth of “nature’s vernal laughter”: the contrast seemed to him an apposite expression of the “taxing burden of compassion.” Christoph Schlingensief now seized the scene Wagner had conceptualized through this perspective when he was working on his production of Parsifal in Bayreuth. He had long searched the score and the texts associated with the opera for something that would touch his heart. A slain hare, bought from a business specializing in game meat, was taken to a basement at Berlin’s Humboldt University, where it was given over to the process of putrefaction for several weeks. At the behest of Kairos-Film, Walter Lenertz set up a 35mm Arriflex camera equipped with a time-lapse motor. The lighting was arranged. Care was taken that there would be flies in the chamber. The camera recorded the decomposition of the carcass at regular intervals for a number of weeks. The experiment confirmed an insight from Walter Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Benjamin discusses a metaphor that everyday consciousness finds hard to bear: the hairy animal body bursts open, broken apart by living and liquefied forces, so-called worms, at work on its inside. The skeleton comes to the surface. It was of such “necrotizing nature” in which “new life” is already “forming zealously” that the time-lapse camera gave account. It turned out that Benjamin was right when he called “the intensity of maggots of various sizes breaking out all over the ruined landscape of the former hare” a cause for consternation. The sight of the decomposing hare, displayed in a large-format projection during the “Good Friday spell,” was profoundly discomforting to the festival audience in Bayreuth. After all, what they saw was not the “resurrection” of a hare but the “continuation of life in the forms of decay”: others live on what has died. In the end, the hare had under-
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Decomposition of the Hare V, Bayreuth, 2004–7, Film Still
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gone liquefaction; worms teemed in it, they, too, “doomed to die,” for after consuming the hare they were left without further sustenance in their basement compartment. That was HARD TO BEAR AS A MEANS OF EVENING ENTERTAINMENT, but quite apposite as a contribution to the establishment of the truth. During the international press conference after the dress rehearsal, Schlingensief rejected the charge of “pessimism” leveled against his concept. He found himself incapable of seeing the greed with which the maggots captured by the camera clung to life as either pessimistic or optimistic. Rather, he said, it was positive that the camera could record such things, enabling the process to be repeated ad infinitum in the minds of future observers. If that wasn’t something like “rebirth”! “Conquering the conqueror.” The seriousness of the music, he said, proved it; there was no presenting it without giving offence. Wagner’s music, tamed by Pierre Boulez, proved incapable of mitigating the shock.
ALEXANDER KLUGE
DIETRICH KUHLBRODT A CHANCE ACQUAINTANCE
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y 1984 I had grown tired of meeting market deadlines when writing about films. No launch date? No text! So it was welcome news that the people at Hamburg’s Abaton Theater had put together the series, Unknown Films by Unknown Young German Directors. I went, curious to see a film, any film, without the constraint of having to deliver a review. Tunguska—Die Kisten sind da [Tunguska—The Boxes Have Arrived], by a guy whose name I would learn to pronounce over time without stumbling. Schlingensief. I was greatly impressed by the film. The expressionistic implication of film history was apparent in what seemed like a natural combination with the extensive quotations of avant-garde techniques (Oskar Fischinger, 1934), all produced with an air of mischievousness. Young people behind and in front of the camera. Alfred Edel, who was my own age, among them. The film played with its viewers—and with the movie theater employee who operated the projector. The flick caught fire, with a circular hole eating its way from the center to the edges. That’s what it looked like. But we were all brave. The screening wasn’t discontinued, and finally we got to discuss the film. Schlingensief, who was twenty-four, smiled a little nervously. He told us that people in other theaters had actually interrupted the screening and looked for the fire extinguisher. Not one of the viewers laughed. The mood was that of a high school faculty meeting, although Schlingensief exuded the oversized charm typical of someone his age. “But that’s all just so pubescent!” someone carped. I was outraged: “Why is pubescent negative? Rimbaud wrote The Drunken Boat when he was in puberty! And it wasn’t like bad stuff followed once he’d grown up—nothing at all followed!” I called Mr. Schütte at the Frankfurter Rundschau. “I’ve seen a great film no one knows about!” The cool question: “How many columns?” “Four!” “Photograph?” “Yes!” And thus appeared the first Schlingensief review. Under the headline: “Schlingensief, the Rimbaud of New German Cinema.”
Schlingensief called me and asked if I wanted to be in his next film. I did. The shooting for Menu Total started only a few months later. Brigitte Kausch, my wife, and I became members of the Schlingensief family. For two decades. We were a generation older than he. “Dear Parents,” he began his e-mails and text messages, “your son Christoph.” We had our roles. That was an ambivalent experience, though an enriching one. In the very first films we discovered qualities in ourselves that were the opposite of who we thought we were. I need to be more explicit. I had a job, after all. Prosecutor in Hamburg. And I had to squeeze the shooting schedule in the Ruhr area into my work schedule, taking time off from prosecuting Nazi crimes. And here’s the thing. As Schlingensief’s father I acted in Menu Total and then again as the Nazi father, in uniform, bawling Nazi songs. Finally, in Terror 2000, I played the neo-Nazi father, dressed in an SA uniform complete with swastika. Why did I do that? Why did Brigitte let things out I would never have suspected were in her? The answer: in Schlingensief’s family, we were under the influence. And we let it happen. To this day, we haven’t seen a therapist. And it’s good we haven’t. Back to Schlingensief’s magnetism. By 1984, he had been making films for sixteen years. High school films, then exercises from the time when he dropped out of the university before his first semester was over—he studied philosophy—and decided to go for a professional career in film. He told me about that time in his life as we were shooting
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Menu Total, and I, the staid public servant, was blown away as I heard how he had tried to take up his studies, had failed, and only then saw the big opportunity and seized it. The beginning was Venice. The early ’80s. The film festival. Schlingensief went. Not for the films, but so he could bump into Wim Wenders. The two had never met before. Wenders, this was the opportunity Schlingensief saw, was to write a letter of recommendation: Schlingensief, a twenty year old no one had heard of, would apply to the University of Television and Film in Munich. Wenders complied. And, against expectations, Venice was not the opportunity. Schlingensief’s application was sneered at and rejected. No university degree, then? What is someone like Schlingensief to do? He decides to skip university and become a professor straightaway, or at least an adjunct, of Film Studies at the University of Art and Design in Offenbach. And that’s what happened. Drawing on the university’s resources and recruiting its students, he shot Tunguska—Die Kisten sind da, the film that so enlightened me. And Wim Wenders saw Menu Total at the 1985 Berlinale, and it made him totally sick within ten minutes. He was the first to come running out of the Delphi Theater. In retrospect, Venice had not been the opportunity to do it by the book and go down Wenders Avenue. But that was probably exactly what made it the greatest opportunity for the path of Schlingensief’s genius, vaulting over all obstacles and conventions. So thank you, Lido! It turned out, however, that not everyone was enthralled by the talented Christoph Schlingensief. A provocateur! In the early 1990s, spots now legendary ran on television, in a show hosted by Friedrich Küppersbusch. ZAK, two, three minutes each. Broadcast on the regional station in North Rhine-Westphalia, which includes Oberhausen, where Schlingensief’s father had his pharmacy. And the neighbors! Savagely satirized by Schlingensief. Der Stasihund [The Stasi Dog], Pornos für Russland [Pornos for Russia]: Brigitte shone in these films. We met for a parent-parent conference in Oberhausen. Schlingensief’s parents told his elective parents of their woes. “Isn’t what he’s doing horrible? And the neighbors are saying so as well!” They treated us as their equals, appropriately, given our age. We shared their worries, since we had two children and knew our way around parent-teacher conferences. But didn’t being friends with Schlingensief’s parents now put us on a different level? No problem! I had read the German translation of Foucault right when it finally came out in 1983. Multiplicity of identity; that was pure enrichment, certainly not some kind of psychological split! So it was with great pleasure that I accepted an invitation from the nationwide television station RTL and joined Schlingensief for an appearance on the show Der heiße Stuhl [The Hot Seat]. That must have been in 1990 or 1991. On said seat sat the new minister for youth, family, etc., Kohl’s girl, Angela Merkel. Our assignment was to attack her. “What is your stance regarding the extreme right-wing skinheads in the newly acquired accession states, and how do you counteract their violence?” – “I went to meet them, and we talked.” – “Did you also talk to their victims?” – “No, but I may well do so in the future.” The audience jeered. After the show, Merkel approached us, smiling, and wanted to know: “Are you guys a bubble?” We didn’t contradict her, although I still don’t know what sort of bubble she meant. It can’t have been anything too terrible, since she continued: “You absolutely have to visit me at the ministry, will you?” She looked into Schlingensief’s
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eyes. How so? We had provoked her, after all! What had happened? It must have been something like Schlingensief’s charisma. Charisma cannot be explained. But it brings people to do things that upon careful consideration they wouldn’t do because they wouldn’t have come up with the idea. That makes the charismatic both shady and creative. If you’re generally regarded as shady—say, as a provocateur—you have to come up with something that’ll earn you respect, that’ll draw not just attention but perhaps even praise. Schlingensief, who was shady, knew what needed to be done. We met at the Frankfurt airport to fly to New York, where we would stage a performance to drown Germany and her evil history in the Hudson River. Schlingensief showed up wearing peyot, an ultra-Orthodox hat, and a caftan. In the cabin he demanded kosher food. He got it. In New York, the Goethe-Institut’s chief press officer received us—or was it the consulate’s? In any case, he turned pale and predicted that Schlingensief, wearing this get-up, would be shot today or the next day. The three of us drove to Times Square, where we parked the car directly beneath a no parking sign. My job was to stay there and watch out. Walter Lenertz hoisted the camera on his shoulder, and Schlingensief walked up Broadway in the middle of the street, between the lanes. As he reached the first cross street, a yellow cab came his way and slowed down. An arm shot out the window. Bang? No—the driver spread his fingers to signal victory. Schlingensief held up his picket sign: DON’T BUY GERMAN GOODS. Germans, don’t buy from Jews. In Manhattan, if you’re not a press officer, you understand.
able to operate. I had practiced rules no. 1 and 2 before. In the circus. A real circus, integrated into a Schlingensief production at the Prater, this time in Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg. The show was live. “Get on the horse.” “Hold on to the high bar.” “Hang by your knees.” I hung, hoisted up beneath the vault. Holding a microphone. “Give a speech.” I gave one, unprepared, but with enough adrenaline coursing through my veins. I know that the current trend is to prevent actors from reciting their lines by playing soccer before rehearsals or badminton during rehearsals. It’s just that with Schlingensief I had no lines. What I said, I said off the top of my head, and it was my business.
Schlingensief’s appearances, I think, always worked because he was always fully aware. Strictly speaking, he didn’t even make appearances, he was simply there. And since I was often part of his work, I came to understand what he wanted from me. “Be yourself,” he said in the great 1990s at the Volksbühne. And to the actors, seasoned professionals, he would say no less frequently: “Don’t playact!” And so it came about that we, the parents, were called to Vienna’s Burgtheater for the penultimate rehearsal weekend for the Jelinek play Bambiland, to break the actors of the habit of acting. Brigitte was excellent at that, I wasn’t sure that it would help the group dynamic. Even today, we’re friends with some of those actors. That, indeed, was Schlingensief’s rule no. 1: Be yourself. When Sophie Rois, standing on the stage, began to declaim, Schiller-style, he sent one of her disabled fellow actors up to her to cut her off in the middle of a performance. Sophie stopped, waited, and said: “Schlingensief, if you need me, I’m in the staff cafeteria,” and off she went. That exit was a real Rois, the woman herself. Rule no. 2: If you’ve made a mistake, talk about it. Never gloss over a slip of the tongue, for instance. Go for it, right into it! Was it a mistake to do the container action in Vienna? Ausländer raus! [Foreigners Out!] How am I supposed to do that, “talk like Haider”? “Talk the way you think Haider talks!” That was two days before I stood atop the container in front of the opera and thanked the ladies and gentlemen of Vienna for sending their wooden navy into the North Sea in 1861, toward the mouth of the Elbe River, to break the French blockade of the river and free Hamburg’s merchants. They were freed. And then this: to prevent a blockade of Austria, the chairman of Hamburg’s Christian-Democratic Union has traveled to Brussels today. He sends his greetings to all of you! Great applause. From the wrong side. But I was in the middle of it. In the Haider mistake. And
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AINO LABERENZ
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TORSTEN LEMMER CHRISTOPH WORKS!
Working with Christoph Schlingensief when you’re an extreme rightist music producer? Can it be done? Yes, it can be done! In 2001, Christoph was looking for neo-Nazis willing to renounce their affiliations for his production of Hamlet at the Zurich Schauspielhaus. The actor Peter Kern, whom I knew from Düsseldorf and who was a member of the Hamlet cast, invited me to Zurich and introduced me to Christoph. Christoph persuaded me and half a dozen of my right-wing buddies to participate in the theater project. The rehearsals at the Schauspielhaus and the actions held in town were enormously taxing. In the beginning, both sides had their ongoing doubts. Christoph asked himself: Are they really willing to get out, or are they just trying to ride my coattails to fame? And we were asking ourselves: Is Christoph really serious about this, or is he only showing us off to garner even more publicity? He was serious. On the other hand, we actually just wanted to provoke the leftist culturati. Opening night was coming closer and closer, and the nervousness mounted. Christoph’s inimitable style, his constant desire to find a way to come together, the nightly discussions, the rehearsals to the point of exhaustion, and last but not least, his unshakeable trust in my people and myself were the crucial factor that prevented the situation from escalating. And it engendered the ever-growing desire in us to leave the right-wing scene behind. On the one hand, there was Christoph, a strong personality who allowed people to see his weaknesses; on the other hand, was us right-wingers—weak personalities pretending to be strong. At some point, we had come to an irreversible decision: we would get out. Christoph works! He quite personally paved a way for me to return to the “center of life.” Without him, I might still be the same producer of stiflingly stupid and, most importantly, xenophobic music even today. It is only because of the push Christoph gave me that I am now married to an Arab woman and we have a little son. My other right-wing Hamlet comrades-in-arms all got out as well. One example I might mention is my friend Jan Zobel, who is now married, has a child, and works a good job for an international company. I am grateful to Christoph; he was my star in dark times, showing my buddies and me the way to a new life.
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Nazilein.komm [Little-nazi.come], Zurich, 2001
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MATTHIAS LILIENTHAL EIGHTY PERCENT INTERNAL DYNAMICS MATTHIAS LILIENTHAL IN CONVERSATION WITH FRANZ WILLE
Franz Wille: Matthias Lilienthal, you discovered, or rather, and even better, instigated Christoph Schlingensief for the theater. What was it like at Berlin’s Volksbühne in 1993?
Lilienthal: His estrangement from the publicly funded repertoire theater consisted more in the need to find his own role in it. And he deeply detested professionalism. Whenever— this was true later on as well—a production started to approach perfection, he would smash it all apart. For 100 Jahre CDU I drove to the psychiatric clinic in Teupitz with him, where he had already been for Terror 2000, visiting his friends. That is where the clique, the family, consisting of Achim, Kerstin, Helga, and others involved with many productions had formed. To Christoph, they were all much more normal than I was. That’s how it was in life as well as in aesthetics.
Matthias Lilienthal: Dirk Nawrocki, Frank Castorf’s assistant, got there first. Dimiter Gotscheff canceled on us at short notice, and then we read a report in the Berlin city magazine, Tip, about Schlingensief’s Terror 2000 and we watched his films. That’s when we approached him. The idea was initially that he should produce a remake of his film on the stage; the result was 100 Jahre CDU [100 Years of CDU]. When Christoph started, he didn’t have the slightest clue about the theater. Even then his directing style was very bold and simple, but you had to be somewhat close to things to understand what he was driving at, since a camera zoom is of very limited use in the Volksbühne’s grand hall. The production premiered and drew huge attention, but few people really liked it. Things that were brazen and impertinent in the films sometimes slid into mere satire on the stage. After the third performance, I said to him: “You’re very different from the show, please join your actors on the stage.” Initially he just delivered an introductory speech; during the next performance he went on, had the lights turned off, a song was played, and he talked about the death of his uncle and that he was so desperate that he now needed to shoot up. This private and petit bourgeois family story and his desperation, with which he cast a spell over the audience, authenticated everything that came before and after it in the show. That was the moment Schlingensief was born for the theater.
Wille: Here is something Schlingensief said early on: “An actor who works with all his strength to become completely caught up in a role will in my eyes always remain a pitiful figure.”
Wille: A moment of personal conviction that covered all allegations.
Lilienthal: Exactly.
Lilienthal: But of course that too included merciless dissimulation; it goes without saying he didn’t actually shoot up. The situations he played with, after all, very often came from his closest biographical context. Just now the memorial service brought me to Oberhausen’s Altmarkt Square for the first time, with his parents’ pharmacy in that sort of tiled 1950s building, with the church where he was an altar boy for twelve years, the Caritas office on the left, a band of boozers on the right—the entire filmic and theatrical world of Schlingensief was really already there in one piece. You could positively imagine the six year old with his Super 8 camera, capturing and collecting these situations.
Wille: How could the professional actors bear that?
Wille: When Schlingensief came to the Volksbühne he was a fairly experienced and quite professional film director; he had also been unit manager for Lindenstraße for several years and knew the trade. Which you wouldn’t necessarily have known from his films … Lilienthal: … nor from his theater. That was a deliberate and calculated aesthetic choice. In terms of his mastery of the trade, he could easily have made an ordinary film. Die letzte Stunde im Führerbunker [The Last Hour in the Fuhrerbunker], for example: shot in a single night in some bunker in the Ruhr area, and the question of what happens when you expose yourself to this situation. These were conscious decisions, after all: fucking bunker, fucking darkness, Volker Spengler, Hitler, and a long night. Wille: Calculation also in the theater?
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Wille: The professional dramaturge at a repertoire theater, by contrast, was … Lilienthal: … a neurotic idiot, and Achim, who needed ongoing psychiatric treatment, a real friend. He also organized the weddings for this family, they attended every birthday party; it was affecting to see how he always took care of them, they were almost his first priority. They also all attended the memorial service. I think he could also only bear the actors—Margit Carstensen, Irm Hermann, Sophie Rois, Bernhard Schütz, or Martin Wuttke— when they were there as well.
Lilienthal: At first there was of course a great deal of insecurity about what it was they had been summoned to, and there would also be people time and again who didn’t feel like working with him a second time. An old warhorse like Joachim Tomaschewsky, who was almost eighty at the time, didn’t have a problem with a style that went against everything he had done before. There was the sense of a vital family, a great energy. A new metaphor, a new invention every thirty seconds that conveys a power that spreads from one to the next. Of course there were also disappointments. There were no more than vestiges of what actors know as “directing.” Meltdowns, too, were a regular occurrence, and he wouldn’t show up for the rehearsals for five days, and someone had to carefully pilot him back in. Wille: The first productions were almost unanimously slammed by the critics at the time, including myself. Where did the theater take the power of conviction to persevere and keep working with him? Lilienthal: After Kühnen ’94 we resented the critics, because we always thought, you can dislike Schlingensief, but it’s not like he’s not coming out of a tradition. Viennese Actionism, Nitsch, Beuys, Kenneth Anger—it was all in there, and people had to see that. Wille: But many people felt that it was heartwarming Actionism from the museum of 1960s avant-garde theater, work that by the 1990s seemed to have long been shelved in the basement of theater history.
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Lilienthal: But Schlingensief knew exactly which artistic contexts he was referring to, and that at least went a long way toward refuting the charge of arbitrariness that you could always also overhear in many reviews. As a dramaturge, you also allow yourself to be corrupted by the person, since the person is a promise of the future; the hope, at least, that that promise will be made good on. So we in the theater are at a major advantage, because we’re living with that person, whereas the critics have no more than the two or three hours of the performance. Still, in retrospect, if you now look at the old DVDs, I think that a lot of it makes a great deal of sense. Wille: But the critics weren’t the only ones at the time to fail to see the background in theater history; Frank Castorf, too, thought that the early stuff was pretty horrible, didn’t he? Lilienthal: I don’t know exactly what Frank thought. Wille: Beyond his aesthetic procedures, Schlingensief’s theatrical appeal has a lot to do with his personal qualities as a performer, with that charming mixture of the rabble-rouser and the Boy Scout troop leader. Lilienthal: One good example is Tötet Helmut Kohl [Kill Helmut Kohl]. Among other things, it was about the second manifesto of Surrealism, which includes the proposition that the fundamental Surrealist act is to walk out into the street, take a gun, and shoot the next guy you see. Christoph freed this proposition of its generality, got on the subway at Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz with eighty spectators—all wearing paper hats—and then he recited these sentences from the manifesto with the spectators. There was also a scaffold like the one from the Grand-Guignol, and he asked, “Do you want Helmut Kohl to die?” And everyone enthusiastically shouted, “Yes.” Any CDU voter would have jeered along with the rest of them during that show, and wouldn’t have had a problem. The signs of Dada and the carnivalesque were clear enough. It wasn’t until four days later that the Berliner Kurier ran a press photograph showing the banner KILL HELMUT KOHL, and that’s when the scandal broke. Wille: What was Schlingensief’s charisma? Lilienthal: He was totally hyped-up, was permanently bubbling over, and at the same time he was like a medium that let everyone get to him. He looked at the world as though it were a film and then translated this film into a screenplay, playfully overdrawing its features … Wille: … and built a sense of immediacy and closeness to his spectators, even though they didn’t know him very well as a person—which is ultimately a fundamental theatrical situation.
Lilienthal: Eighty percent internal dynamics, accompanied by desperate attempts to prepare that always failed one way or another. For the early productions he always wrote scripts, in the case of 100 Jahre CDU, it was a modified version of the Terror 2000 book; Kühnen ’94 was actually meant to be a film, but after Terror 2000 he simply couldn’t get the financing together for the production. Terror 2000 had been co-financed by the public broadcasting station WDR, but it was never aired, which hurt Schlingensief deeply. From Rocky Dutschke onward there were no scripts anymore, and the complex series of events on the stage instead tended to be pieced together during rehearsals. When he did Ausländer raus! [Foreigners Out!] in Vienna, there was this great widespread enthusiasm for Big Brother, which became the initial situation inside the containers, and then Jörg Haider and his FPÖ [Freedom Party of Austria] joined the government for the first time in Austrian history, and there was the situation with the asylum seekers, and he put the two things together. The objective was that the asylum seekers would sit in the containers and the Austrians would vote them out. Christoph then also studied the rhetoric used by the FPÖ and found out why people offering rational arguments on talk shows had such a difficult time with the FPÖ’s people: because the latter never gave arguments, but instead made a claim true simply by repeating it often enough. And when Christoph then sat on a talk show with the FPÖ’s spokeswoman for cultural policy, who said that what he was doing was political agitation rather than art, he yelled: “Ms. Unterreiner, you’ve never even been to the theater.” A claim that was most probably incorrect, but, in its Dadaist idiocy, threw the debate off-track far enough where the FPÖ itself didn’t know what to do anymore. Christoph yelled that sentence ten times in a row and walked off the set as the great winner. The impression people were left with was that Ms. Unterreiner had never even been to the theater and so was in no position to presume to decide what theater was and what agitation was. Wille: How vulnerable or sensitive was Schlingensief to criticism? Lilienthal: Oh, totally. He would memorize a bad review by heart and get depressed. He was far from indifferent. Wille: That’s an astonishing need for affection in someone who was, in his work, always looking for conflict. Lilienthal: There was a profound need to be loved. The absurd thing is that many reactions to his death are now in fact satisfying the hope he had always felt. I am sure it has a lot to do with his relationship with the parents, this quest for recognition. That played an extremely large role. And parents and society are then somehow one and the same thing. Wille: So then he was the good boy who wants to be praised by his parents.
Lilienthal: He was also permanently in touch with everyone. No doubt the person with the highest texting frequency I know. A permanent communicator with whom input and output were only fractions of a second apart. Wille: How much was planning in his productions, and how much was internal dynamics?
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Lilienthal: By all means, yes: in every talk show he would be the nation’s favorite son-inlaw—good-looking, eloquent, brilliant, intimate, intelligent, energetic, surprising. Wille: How would you agree on new productions with him? Was there a master plan? Or was a new project usually largely a product of chance and opportunity?
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Lilienthal: We always simply agreed on the next date. So there was the slot first, then ideas would be developed. The fact aside that it had nothing to do with the canon of plays usually staged at repertoire theaters, it was perfectly regular repertoire planning.
be discussions afterwards, no doubt a wild mixture of interpretation and idiosyncratic adaptation; I’m sure that was an important source. He hardly studied at a university, but he picked things up in many places. In Munich, he lived in the same building with Thomas Meinecke, and they also had important intellectual arguments.
Wille: Controlled from a highly efficient Schlingensief office. Wille: How did he see himself? Lilienthal: There was no real office at the time of Ausländer raus! The office phase didn’t start until around 2000. Before then, his computer and his cell phone were the office. The large office with associates and assistants had always been one of his ideals: Andy Warhol and the Factory. The other point of orientation was of Fassbinder. That was evident, for example, in his hiring of Fassbinder actors. After Oberhausen, where he grew up, he first went to Munich and applied to the film academy. Didn’t get in, lived in Schwabing; that, too, an attempt to emulate Fassbinder. Wille: Another point of reference was Beuys. A similar mixture of the artist, the charismatic, the shaman, the media character …
Lilienthal: As a filmmaker. After his first bout with his illness, there was also the idea of making a film again. He asked Oskar Roehler, with whom he had co-written the screenplay for Terror 2000, to write the book, and he called a long list of producers and told them, “I am totally ill, don’t have a lot of time anymore, give me money now, I have to shoot a film.” Wille: What remains of his work? Lilienthal: I think people will see the films in new ways. Wille: And in the theater …
Lilienthal: … and don’t forget the politician: Schlingensief’s Chance 2000 was an extension of Beuys’s running as a candidate for the Green Party. Wille: Schlingensief, who despised professionalism, was a great professional when it came to his image in the media. As a person of public interest—the reactions after his death demonstrated this as well—he was a media star, outshining everyone else in the German theater world. Lilienthal: On the one hand, I’m sure that has to do with the different genres in which he worked: film, theater, opera, the visual arts. They reinforced one another, and then there were the numerous talk show appearances. He was one of the few artists who affected many people in profoundly upsetting ways in these formats. Toward the end, there was also his battle against his illness, which he turned into a grand spectacle. There was a time, after all, when Frank Castorf likewise drew the attention of a wider public as an East German who many people felt spoke for them. Back then they were equals. Christoph was also an absolute virtuoso in the way he used press releases, media appearances, blogs, articles in newspapers. And he maintained his website with the utmost professionalism before many of us even figured out what that was all about. When I went to Cameroon with him, he took a picture of us at the airport in Paris, and ten minutes later the photograph was up on the website.
Lilienthal: … he has established dilettantism as a positive force. In combination with an intelligent way of thinking about the world. The more explicitly the evenings were actions, experimental arrangements, the safer he felt. Wille: Did he feel safe in front of an audience? Lilienthal: He enjoyed it. When we opened Hebbel am Ufer, he blessed the building with a performance. Things were getting out of hand in several places because there were way too many people, and as the orchestra pit was already shaking menacingly, we had to push people away so the situation wouldn’t get dangerous. So he said to me that that was not the way to do it: “You have to love the audience, they have nothing against you, treat them as friends.” Even when he felt most miserable toward the end, he completely thrived in communication with five hundred laughing people.
Wille: Schlingensief was very present on a variety of levels and ventured into contexts that others would shy away from. You don’t direct a Wagner opera in Bayreuth off the cuff. How competent was he in fields like that, and how much did he know about what? Lilienthal: He was a brilliant collagist who read up on certain fields in great detail. He was an absolute specialist in matters relating to Viennese Actionism. The year and a half during which he maintained Werner Nekes’s archive was important—he showed films, including many documents from Viennese Actionism, at weekly screenings in Mülheim. There would
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JONATHAN MEESE JONATHAN MEESE IS MOTHER PARSIVAL
JONATHAN MEESE
Jonathan Meese is Mother Parsival Performance, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, Berlin, March 28, 2005
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MICHAELA MELIÁN AND THOMAS MEINECKE READ TEXTS BY CHRISTOPH SCHLINGENSIEF FROM MODE & VERZWEIFLUNG AND SING A SONG BY VIER KAISERLEIN
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he idea really came up around ten days ago at the memorial service in Oberhausen when Chris Dercon asked us: you already knew him back in the day, very early on, whether we shouldn’t do something here in this exhibition—you, Michaela, also attended the opening, didn’t you, and saw him for the last time. And then we remembered, he wrote these texts. At home we then realized that there were exactly three, so there aren’t that many of them, but there was a time when he moved—I think I was living with Sanne at Bergmannstraße 48, and I was twenty-four, Sanne was twenty-two—Christoph by chance moved, though it wasn’t quite by chance, because his parents had made arrangements for him to move to a place with a pharmacy below, and they knew the pharmacist as well, I think; he moved into the building where we were living and tried to get into the film academy. And that didn’t work out. And then he registered at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, to study I don’t even know exactly what, was it philosophy and something else maybe, but he ended up not really going to school, and what he actually did was this magazine—we founded this magazine Mode & Verzweiflung in 1978, and he joined us, wanted to contribute. There was this band, F.S.K., in which Michaela and I have been playing in for thirty years, and he then became some sort of permanent support, he always went on tour with us and played on this little home organ, Helge Schneider-style art was really what it was, he played standards on this little home organ on his thighs, with this sort of arpeggio turned on, and it was a kind of solo-entertainer music at a time when the possibility of perceiving something like that as ironic hadn’t been established, so in that regard it was a radical act, and he always came on tour with us, and that’s how, on tour with F.S.K., he met his music mates, including, actually, the singer Tobias Gruben, who then unfortunately also died a few years later, but who then started a band with Christoph that was called Vier Kaiserlein that then toured with F.S.K. and so on. And he was also over at Sanne’s and my place every night really, listening to records, or hauling his most recent acquisitions—lots of musical instruments or equipment—up into the attic, film cameras, too, this Super 8 camera that was subsequently flung down from the Bavaria statue, still running and recording as it was falling. In any case, we really spent some very intense time together for several years. And so then he wanted to contribute to Mode & Verzweiflung, and wrote these texts for it, which I think are the only ones. He wasn’t one to write, generally speaking. And when we came home from the memorial, we realized, oh, there are only three. There was an issue of Mode & Verzweiflung that looks like this, it was actually finished in 1981 and then came out in 1983, and the city of Oberhausen, where Christoph was from, comes up throughout the issue. And we all had this idea, everyone would write something about the city of Oberhausen, and we repeatedly read these texts to each other so they would correspond: Rekord in Oberhausen, by Christoph. Duisburg Communists Play Contemporary Classical Music in Oberhausen, by Berg Lauchstaedt. Idiot as Model: A Cheerful Mood of New Beginnings in Oberhausen, by Thomas. Rekord in Oberhausen, by Christoph Schlingensief.
12:45 p.m.: Gotta get the hell home, he thought, bolted from the building on Lothringer Straße at the corner of Elisabethstraße, ran across Kaplan-Küppers-Weg, repeatedly looked through the slightly iced-up driver-side window at the choke as he was still breathing on the door lock, and soon opened the driver-side door. The motor started right away, too.
MICHAELA MELIÁN AND THOMAS MEINECKE
An event held on September 11, 2010 during the exhibition “Patti Smith & Christoph Schlingensief” (June 25–September 18, 2010) at Galerie Sonja Junkers, Munich, recorded by Franz Bergmann.
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This was not the first time he was driving. He was now on Helmholtzstraße at the corner of Stöckmannstraße and needed to go to Grevenstraße. He first drove up to the light, where he then turned left in the direction of Marktstraße. After several congestions and a yellow Taunus that had taken his right of way on Friedrich-KarlStraße at the corner of Marktstraße, he kept to the right, crossed Bebelstraße and then Concordiastraße, which leads immediately past the VOT Motormarkt, making it a shortcut for its parallel, Goebenstraße. Now he was on Straßburger Straße, which, as is well known, leads directly in the direction of Buschhausen and offers an easy turn he had taken on several occasions onto Mülheimer Straße, after passing the building of the Oberhausen civic center on the right and having to turn right away onto Grillostraße. From Mülheimer Straße it was now another ca. 800 meters to the freeway entrance ramp toward Sterkrade-Königshardt, which has not only been widened to two lanes but is also in some places separated by 2–3 m-high acoustic fencing from Rolandstraße, Freiherr-vomStein-Straße, Alsenstraße, or the abovementioned Buschhausener Straße, which run behind it. He was now approaching the freeway entrance described a moment ago: but instead of going straight ahead, as he was wont to do, in the direction of the sewage treatment plant, he made a right in the direction of Osterfelder Landstraße, a route he was as yet unfamiliar with. Oh yes, he liked to drive! He had been driving for some time on Kaiserfeldenstraße, had crossed Monningerstraße and Nohlstraße, and now turned left onto an unnamed street that passed by the Osterfelder and Bottroper collieries. The sky was a luminous red, everything looked impressive. Now the road petered out. He stopped to look for a place to turn around, such as was always at his disposal, say, along the Landwehr or in the Flockenfeld. When he had gotten out of the car, he saw the five vehicles more clearly, which he had been observing for a considerable period of time in the rearview mirror. They must have followed him. He got back in, turned as discussed, and drove past the other cars in the direction of Grevenstraße. He paid no attention whatsoever to the drivers of the vehicles that had stopped behind him, instead resuming his trip. Christoph Schlingensief, “Rekord in Oberhausen,” Mode & Verzweiflung. Thermometer der Zeit 6 (Summer 1983).
Now I’m also going to read Krönung. Krönung, by Christoph Schlingensief. It never ever ceased to fascinate him how the little whitecaps on his morning coffee would swim in the center as a little round lid only to leave their trajectory in a sudden and perfectly unmotivated act that was almost provocative, hitting the rim of his coffee mug, where they at once split up into thousands of individual little foam lids and spread as though they wanted to keep the coffee alive by maintaining a certain distance from the coffee mug rim. Or it might also be that the coffee simply wouldn’t brook any little lid, urging it toward the exit, where it would be torn apart upon arrival into thousands of particles. He was as yet incapable of deciding in favor of one of the two solutions at his disposal, since
MICHAELA MELIÁN AND THOMAS MEINECKE
there was sure to be a third or a fourth possible solution as well. He was, moreover, not yet quite clear about the meaning of these investigations; he was dealing, after all, with a dark brown—the color was achieved by adding milk—and slightly bitter— he had run out of sugar—liquid that just happened to have this habit of wearing a little foam lid during the first seconds after its arrival in the coffee mug, the way others among his acquaintance were likewise in the habit of wearing a hat, a cap, a scarf, or gloves when first arriving at his apartment. That morning, in any case, he let his coffee provoke him to such a degree—he had once again failed to get the little lid into his mouth before it burst apart, to slug it down and get it out of harm’s way—that he refused to drink the coffee and resolved to force down the two rolls from the day before, the hardboiled egg, the sausage, and the leftover piece of stollen without taking any fluids. He would rather choke than be in cahoots with his coffee and have to take responsibility in the face of a matter he hadn’t wanted in the first place. No, he wouldn’t make things quite so easy for his coffee. Christoph Schlingensief, “Krönung,” Mode & Verzweiflung. Thermometer der Zeit 6 (Summer 1983).
And now I’m also going to read Christoph’s text from the issue after that, no. 7, which came out in 1984, it’s called Morgen ist auch noch ein Tag [Tomorrow Is Another Day], and at the time we were in the habit of writing a brief intro for every contribution, which reads in this case: The conflict between two creatures serves Schlingensief as an opportunity for a fabulous Oberhausen forest piece. Tomorrow Is Another Day, by Christoph Schlingensief. Silence had fallen. And only the wind was rushing through the lofty treetops of the Breckerfeld forest. Here and there a small branch would fall to the ground, and the old and decayed trees could be heard groaning. The sun was still shining, warming the damp and fragrant forest soil. Yet evening would descend soon—and the animals of the forest would then congregate and retire to sleep, warming each other—and only the owl would fly about with its highly developed eyes and keep watch until the next morning. “What am I going to do?” the little lark asked the great wise owl. “Just look at me … I have become so scrawny and delicate that I can no longer even find my way back into my home and now seek your protection and advice. Only a few months ago I was frolicking with the other animals of the forest. We flew all the way to the valley. Past peasant Gröhner’s little farmstead, past his shepherd dog and the great pasture, all the way to the paddock. There we would rest, and everyone would have something to tell. But now I am more scrawny and delicate than ever before. I barely make it to the first meadow, and everything around me seems to have become big and menacing. Even my friends now abandon me and just keep on flying. Oh, owl, what is all this supposed to come to.” Then the owl opened its large wide eyes, turned its head back, and took a long and probing look at the lark. “Well,” the owl said after quite a while, “just look at you. How often have I sat here and gazed after you. How fast and nimbly you flew about, and you in particular were one of the fastest laraks in the entire forest. But now you are sitting here and asking for ad-
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vice. Well, I will advise you, since I have also known for a long time.” Hearing this, the lark calmed down a little. For it had been so very excited and anxious the entire time. “Whenever you flew about in the forest,” the owl continued, “whenever the birds rested and conferred, you were one of the most boisterous and garrulous. And you never noticed when your friends briefly stopped here and there to nibble on a berry or a piece of root. No, you would then turn to someone else and talk to him. Now you are gaunt and weak, and your eyes show you nothing but mirages and lies, so that you overlook all the red juicy berries and must continue to go hungry. One or two more weeks, and I will have to bury your lifeless body so the voracious ants will not find it and, zealous workers that they are, gnaw it down to the bones.” The lark had turned very silent and pale. No one had ever criticized her so harshly. So what was she supposed to do now? “Well,” the owl continued, “if only you had a little more strength, you might try to eat a berry and would immediately feel improved. But now you are sitting here and once again wasting time. Time that will cost you your life, unless you act soon.” “But now it is dark and all berries are invisible,” the lark groaned. “You may be right,” the owl whispered sagely, “but tomorrow is another day!” Christoph Schlingensief, “Morgen ist auch noch ein Tag,” Mode & Verzweiflung. Thermometer der Zeit 7 (Fall 1984).
And now the only thing we’ve really got left is this one song that then came out on this sampler called Wunder gibt es immer wieder [Miracles Happen Again and Again] produced by the Hamburg-based label ZickZack, it features many bands, doesn’t matter, for example, one band that you would today know from different contexts is Tom Holert’s. Well, you wouldn’t really know it, but you would know Tom Holert today. Tom Holert is someone a person may know. There are bands called Tempelfreuden, Knusperkeks, Radierer, etc., but F.S.K. is featured on it as well, and so is Vier Kaiserlein. And about Vier Kaiserlein you might say, I don’t know whether they had more than two gigs. They probably did. But these two gigs were in Munich; one time they were our opening act at the Academy of Art, in 1982 or 1983, and the other was at the Alabamahalle in Munich. Christoph’s solo-entertainer act then quickly expanded with the addition of a woman who also lived at Bergmannstraße 48. A hotbed that house, so to speak. Claudia Hauser, who was actually studying ballet, sang in that band. Tobias Gruben, who was really still in high school in Starnberg then also sang, and someone who was also a student in Munich named Christoph Gerozissis played the guitar. Christoph Gerozissis now works at Anton Kern Gallery in New York. Matthias Colli also played the guitar, and Matthias then later worked as an actor and screenwriter on Christoph Schlingensief’s first films. Claudia Hauser, I don’t know what became of her. Neither do I.
Vier Kaiserlein, Einsam. I froze when I saw her, I took a second look to make sure, but suddenly she turned around and looked at me and so there we stood. (Baba bababa ba ba) I instinctively walked toward her (ba ba bababa ba), it was as though she had never left me. This face, this flesh, this silhouette (baba bababa ba ba), that never stops haunting me. (Ba ba bababa ba.) Sensations were racing through my brain, I wanted to touch you, kiss you, hug you. And I walked toward you, trembling, when something stopped me in my tracks. Lonely through the streets (the streets), alone through the night (through the night), I will never forget you (never forget), you killed me (killed). Say why (why), say why (darling why why), say why (why why why why why), say why, say why. I immediately knew what was up, a feeling, a mixture of rage, hatred, and desperation boiled up inside me. (Baba bababa ba ba.) Yes, of course, his suit was the most expensive brand to be sure, but did you not see who he really was? I wanted to give you love, tenderness, and understanding (ba ba bababa ba), but you never wanted anything but money. Never anything but money. It did more for you. Ha, but so I was utterly over you. I don’t want to listen to your lies any longer, girl, you just don’t deserve me. Lonely through the streets (yes, now you are walking lonely through the streets), alone through the night (and you are walking through the night, ha ha ha). I will never forget you killed me (you never want to forget that I killed you and you’re not supposed to forget it either). Say why (girl, you with your endless questions). Say why (and why why why). Say why (now you’re asking why). Say why (you could’ve thought of that earlier, couldn’t you). Say why (I wanted to give you love, wanted to give you tenderness, you wanted nothing but money). Say why, say why (you’re stupid is what it is, you’re stupid).
Should I sing the refrain … ? The thing was that it was actually Tobias speaking the lyrics, and Christoph would then always just press some key on the home organ, setting off these automatic arpeggios, and Claudia sang in her very high soprano voice. Since I cannot sing soprano … I’ll sing it. … I’ll read the lyrics, and he’s going to sing the female role. The song is called Einsam [Lonely], lyrics and music by Christoph Schlingensief, recorded by the band Vier Kaiserlein.
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KLAUS MERTES REQUIEM FOR CHRISTOPH SCHLINGENSIEF, OBERHAUSEN, AUGUST 30, 2010
Homily on John 11: “I am the resurrection, and the life …” Logged from memory after sermon delivery Dear Aino Laberenz, dear mother Schlingensief, dear relatives and friends of Christoph—I will take the liberty of keeping to his first name, especially since Christoph, the great I-sayer, has united all of us here in one We—dear sisters and brothers. 1. I am Christ does not say: “I proclaim unto you the resurrection, and the life.” The word he chooses at this moment must be taken exactly. “I am the resurrection, and the life.” A man speaks through what he is more than through what he says. He speaks through what he is even before he can speak: as a baby in his mother’s arms, as a lover in the arms of his beloved, as a man who marvels and is deeply moved, who celebrates and dies. To be means to speak before one speaks. What brings a man suffering, what brings joy—in these he surely speaks. What annoys and upsets him, what appeals to him and delights him, in these he says something. Yet courageous is the I that says: “I am …” Christ articulates his own being. He steps outside the speech of mere being by deliberately putting what he is into words. Then everything depends on his telling the truth—on his not staging anything in order to conceal, to distract, to embellish, to shine. The staging that then takes place serves the purpose of showing what is. To do so is hard work and at the same time a gift when it succeeds. “Show your wound,” show your joy, show what moves you. My being urges to articulate itself—my fear, my grief, my rage as well as my joy, my exultation, my gratitude. But when I do so, when I show my I to the world, I expose myself to a risk—to self-doubt as well as the doubts of others: “He is a self-publicist, a narcissist, a provocateur.” Try as we might, we cannot vanquish insinuations, the logic of suspicion, and misgivings of all sorts. They are something we must bear when we articulate ourselves. By articulating my being, I, in any case, enter into conflict—with myself, with my family and friends, with the public. Yet experience teaches me that there is no going back once I have begun to articulate myself. To fall silent would be to take back—and take back not just something I have said—for that I can always do; we can apologize for, and correct, our mistakes and errors. My articulate self, by contrast, I cannot take back, for in doing so I would take myself back in false humility. Today we must complement the “I am” of the gospel with an “I was.” We are bidding farewell to Christoph Schlingensief. Only now, in his death, does his life stand before us in its entirety, does it speak to us as a whole, abruptly cut down and at once complete in itself—for even succumbing to the brutal demon that is cancer can be done in one way or another, and Christoph chose a particular way of dealing with it so as not to merely succumb to it. What this life means to every single one of us is not something we can put into words now; it will become apparent. It will be a voyage of discovery to understand ever better who showed himself, what showed itself to us in him. Many a thing will surprise us, when an encounter, a word, a facial expression of his comes to mind; many a thing will appear in a new light, many a thing, perhaps, will make sense for the first time.
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2. Resurrection and Life We just sang: “Jesus, mein Freudenmeister” [“Jesus, Master of My Joys”]. What, then, is Jesus, and before he begins to speak? “Resurrection and life” are the two words that, together, stand for a single matter. I translate both as “festival.” Wherever Jesus appears, he is cause for a festival. Every man exudes what he is: one enters a room and exudes reproaches. The other alarms me with his mere being. In Jesus, the fundamental mood he exudes is that of a festival. Wherever he is a festival ensues. His very birth is cause for a festival among the angels in Heaven. The shared meal and drink epitomize the festival: wherever Jesus is there is eating and drinking—and not just a little, as we know from the archive of defamation the gospels also preserve for us: “Behold a gluttonous man, and a winebibber.” His presence sets a festive mood and especially among those who are not invited to the festivals of the righteous and noble. That is also why his festivals are scandalous. They are perceived as a provocation. No doubt about it—they do provoke; but they are not celebrated with the intention to provoke. To the contrary, these festivals gather us, they reconcile and strengthen us. This is not about a perennial good mood. To Christoph’s mind, Jesus was the one who invented “the whole suffering business.” The death sentence was the attempt of his enemies to put an end to the festival because it confused and discomfited them. The conflict Jesus incurred by saying “I” came to threaten his very existence. Grappling with Jesus, we must grapple with the suffering, must delve even into the agony at the Mount of Olives, into the abysses of mortal fear, into the struggle between resistance to the encroachment of death and submission its power. The celebration of life must prove itself before the reality of mourning and death. “It couldn’t possibly be as lovely in heaven as it is here.” This sentence, which I can also imagine Jesus as saying, is true only if it can stand in the face of the brutal reality of violence, pain, and death, which are also parts of this earthly life. 3. Do You Believe It? What I remember from the Church of Fear is the grand closing scene. Christoph, impersonating Christ, stands at the altar, the altar of this church, recreated for the production, and distributes the host. As he does so, he plays with the Words of Institution spoken by Jesus, “This is my body”: “This is not my body.” “This is your body.” It is an iridescent identification with the person of Jesus; it is taken back, but not in a way that would take it back. It is a play with something with which we cannot play, skirting blasphemy or even crossing that line. A risky transgression. To speak of Jesus, in any case, also means to speak of oneself. “Take and eat what you are,” Saint Augustine writes. The Last Supper—Jesus celebrates it as a festival on the eve of his death. Death does not undo the festival. Jesus dies a believer: “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.” He dies his death in a way that makes it a profession of life, of the devotion to joy, of the trust in God’s open arms. By letting go of myself, by allowing myself to fall into the ground of all celebration: God. For this was, from the very beginning, the occasion of the festival: the love of the Abba in Heaven for his Son, and through his Son, his love for men, and in par-
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ticular for those who believe themselves to have fallen out of all love. To allow oneself to be drawn in by this love is the challenge of the gospel. “To believe” has become a weak word in our usage: to take propositions to be true that we cannot know to be true with certainty. But in Scripture, “belief” or “faith” means more than that. The term describing the opposite of “faith” is “fear.” “Why are ye fearful, O ye of little faith?” Jesus asks his disciples on the Sea of Galilee. Faith is a power. I do not feel it always, but I can let myself be infected by believers that articulate their I as believing even unto death—as in the case of Jesus. Belief leads people to do what is impossible, to leap over bounds, to pursue their goals undeterred. Belief is the power that keeps Jesus himself alive even unto death; that enabled him to let go entirely in death and to throw himself into the arms of the Father in Heaven, wholly and without reservation, neck and crop, filled with the hope of life. Belief makes life arise from death—makes that it is not only passively resurrected, but that a man is not utterly debased even in death, not a mere victim even then. “Do you believe it?” Can you believe that in death you will be wholly preserved? That you are being expected—by Jesus, who is the resurrection and the life, by Mother Mary, by those who have gone before you? That the night of death is illumined by the light of God? I leave the question unanswered, but add: no man has the right to judge another man’s belief from outside—nor to judge another man’s lack of belief. Be that as it may: in this hour of farewell, we gaze full of gratitude at the life of Christoph Schlingensief, from beginning to end, and prepare ourselves for the prayer, the Church prays for Christoph in the Eucharistic Prayer: “In baptism he died with Christ: may he also share his resurrection.”
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EVA MEYER-HERMANN A BARBED SEED
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was flying from Los Angeles via Panama to Manaus. It was April of 2007, in the middle of Brazil’s rainy season. During landing, the plane bounded up and down like a puppet. We could already see the jungle, soaked with the humidity of the last rain that sat above it in wafts of mist. As we flew through the roiling air masses, lightning repeatedly flashed through the rapidly shifting cloud formations. The turbulences amid the heavy thunderstorm were so menacing that I prepared myself to bid farewell to it all. A crash and our deaths seemed imminent. Yet our aircraft bravely fought on, seized and violently shaken by gusts of wind, forced from its path and yet regaining its course time and again. Only the raw and almost inconceivable beauty of what I saw beneath consoled me in my growing sense that the end of times had come. The word “primordial” came to my mind, a concept I hadn’t even known I knew. Far and wide there was nothing to be seen but shimmering bodies of water and areas of deep green. Water and earth seemed to exist in inviolate union, and the white shreds of cloud floating above the forests further veiled their formlessness. “Land” and “river” were virtually incomprehensible notions in this chaos “before creation.” And yet the gigantic body of water now slowly approaching must be the Rio Negro, the river that converges with the yellow waters of the Rio Solimões in Manaus, a striking confluence that creates the Amazon River. In trying to describe this intense and existential feeling during the approach from the air (it is almost impossible to reach Manaus any other way), I am tempted to use the image of a “primeval soup.” It was as though we were so soaked, so saturated with humidity that body and feeling became almost indistinguishable from place and existence. I felt myself and my body to be at one with the world—which was far from the world I had previously known. It was a world “before” the world, a “primordial” world. What we usually call landscape seemed to be a union of all elements. Water, earth, and sky welcomed and devoured me. I had come to Manaus, a city of around two million people, for no more than a few days to attend the premiere of the opera The Flying Dutchman, which Christoph Schlingensief had been commissioned to direct. During the preparations, Schlingensief, a.k.a. “Chriszeraldo Samenohr” [or “Chriszeraldo Seed-ear”], had kept me posted about what was happening with the production in Brazil: “[…] and a seed has already flown into my ear. that’s when the amazon tried to fuck me. and so two days later i had to go to a clinic. where mr. ear specialist, seated at a camping table with stone-age instruments, some very sharp and guaranteed not to be disinfected, picked the inside of my ear for thirty minutes before removing a thorn, and when i thought that that was it he said that there was something much larger. and i can show it to you. he then pulled a seed measuring a full centimeter out of my ear. it had barbs and had already started to soak. i almost fell over. […] i am increasingly losing sight of the text. and pictures just speak louder.” The production photographs on his website were indeed as promising as they were confusing: instead of showing, as one might expect, the stage of the grand old Teatro Amazonas, they captured orchestra musicians dressed in shirts and tailcoats in the depth of the jungle. I also recognized actors from earlier productions Schlingensief had directed, such as Karin Witt, who was now enshrouded like a bride in a cloud of white gauze. Her scintillating counterpart, it seemed, was a dark-skinned beauty dressed in a sparkling bikini and a lavish headdress. And everything was set before the backdrop of rampant tropical vegetation. But how would this dovetail with the plot of The Flying Dutchman, an opera set on the seashore? It is about a revenant, a sailor doomed to restlessly cruise the seas, seeking redemption ever since he committed blasphemy. The contradictoriness of his hope is evident in his aria from act one: “Long though the earth may
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Nocturnal excursion into the jungle after dress rehearsal and procession for The Flying Dutchman, directed by Christoph Schlingensief, Manaus, April 20–21, 2007
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put out new shoots, it yet must perish.” But his redemption requires that he find “a wife on earth who’d be true to him till death,” and it is for this purpose that a father sells his daughter to the Dutchman—a peculiarity about this Wagner opera I have always wondered about. The opera seemed very text-heavy to me, and the line, “My child, will you bid this stranger welcome?” with which the Dutchman is recommended to Senta’s loyalty has struck me as one of its most moving passages. But Schlingensief wrote that “the text was becoming ever less important”—and my memories of my days in Manaus, which I now reconstruct from the distance of a few years, prove him right. It is pictures, it is sounds and emotions that stay with us, and it was with pictures, sounds, and emotions that his production in Manaus made such a profound impression on me. Schlingensief had directed his first opera in 2004, a production of Wagner’s Parsifal in Bayreuth that remained in the repertoire for four years and that I would not see until 2007, after the Manaus The Flying Dutchman. When I embarked on my little excursion to Brazil, I had only recently met the artist in person, having been introduced to him in connection with an Allan Kaprow retrospective I curated. In the late 1950s, Kaprow, an American artist, had made a decisive contribution to the emerging art form of the happening. Schlingensief paid close attention to what new scholarship on the subject brought to light, and based on Kaprow’s revolutionary 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (1959), he rapidly developed a play of his own, which was staged at Berlin’s Volksbühne in 2006 under the title Kaprow City. Yet far from imitating or appropriating Kaprow’s conception of art, the play represented a congenial adaptation to the changed circumstances. Kaprow City took the play of simultaneity and dissimultaneity and the impossibility of multiple human perception, themes contained in the American model, to extremes. The play performed a striking balancing act between the individual artistic trigger and a form elaborated in a grand collaboration uniting the actors and their audience. Rather than merely sitting in the audience room, the spectators would also come to the back of the stage in small groups, where they were permitted to step onto the revolving stage and to move freely amid the labyrinthine segments of space and between the actors’ and participants’ actions. I left the show in Berlin with the happy sense that I had not only witnessed moving moments in a play but also learned a great deal about creativity, individuality, and society. During the public “dress rehearsal” in Manaus, a firework erupting against the deep blue starry sky of the tropics—its wreaths of light flashing up in the dark seemed as foreign to the setting as the wads of smoke released by exploding gunpowder—jolted me out of my meditation on Kaprow and Schlingensief. But the firecrackers were not the only noise drowning out Wagner’s music; the rhythmical sound of drums that had gradually risen eventually became so powerful that it utterly supplanted Wagner’s imperious imitations of nature by musical means. For the past several hours, hundreds of guests had attended the romantic operatic spectacle on the large square outside Teatro Amazonas. In the fashion of pop concerts, the organizers transmitted the appearances of soloists and choruses to video screens and loudspeaker systems around the building. Nothing was static about this performance; the props and extras were in constant movement or developed their peculiar parallel rhythms, such as the rapid jerking beat of a samba dancer atop a float decorated with a blue cow’s head. The air was unbearably humid and hot; we sat in soggy dresses on wet plastic chairs. The audience had gotten used to the tinny pitches of the grand orchestra and
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the fact that, as was inevitable in such climatic conditions, the sensitive classical instruments were increasingly out of tune—and yet the entire performance seemed a mirage, a perfect synthesis of image and sound. The entire audience finally got up as though entranced, cheering and applauding while numerous bands of traditional samba drummers marched in, bathing the artist, the conductor, and the soloists with their deafening noise and carrying them off. In their wake, some in the audience and several musicians grabbed wheeled and portable stage props and formed a procession. We marched through the entire city, and as the formation gradually turned into a general street carnival the rhythms grew hotter, we danced until our feet burned, our throats were parched, and the last pieces of fabric on our bodies were drenched in sweat. Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman, the samba bands, local desperadoes who mingled with the reeling procession: that night they all met in a single magnificent fusion of continents and mentalities. A few hours later, I stood with Schlingensief at the rail of a typical double-decker Amazon steamer gliding quietly through the pitch-black night toward an unknown destination. One might have expected to catch a whiff of fresh air, but the balmy breeze was hardly enough to cool our heat-flushed skin. Much as we strained our eyes, there was no light to be seen anywhere; the surface of the water seemed endless. We had long left the harbor of Manaus behind. And as there was no recognizable current, we didn’t even know whether we were crossing the river, or traveling upstream or downstream. There was no way to orient ourselves, no recognizable goal. Only now and then a few treetops appeared, reminding us that the waters of the Rio Negro rise by several meters during the rainy season, nearly drowning many plants. Most of our fellow travelers had fallen silent, everyone dwelling on his own thoughts, when one of those quiet and delicate dialogues unfolded that we cannot repeat or retell, though they bring us the fleeting sensation of happiness. It was as though the melancholy mood that had set in after the emotionally charged music and the exuberant celebration, as well as our extraordinary situation, our being nowhere in particular, called for unreserved honesty. Later on we would sometimes remember our exchange in the middle of the night on the dark river. It is impossible to recount how we spoke about death and what we said about it. Schlingensief’s father had recently died, and I too had lost my mother as well as a close friend that year. There is no quintessence we draw from such conversations, but perhaps we gain confirmation of the consequences death has for our own lives. At that moment, the thought of the omnipresence and closeness of death seemed to justify to us both the uncompromising spirit with which we pursued our own work. When the artist, one year later, learned of his own cancer, he began to broach the subject of death quite directly in his productions, and in retrospect he interpreted his work on Wagner, and on Parsifal in particular, as a harbinger of fate: “I am glad I did it, even with all the vexations it also brought. I am sure my intense study of the constant closeness of death in the Parsifal plot also gave me ideas I would have been better off not thinking. But at the time it seemed more important to me to probe the depths than to stake the project on surfaces or on bringing the opera up to date. To me, Parsifal was a work about bidding farewell to the world, and I took that seriously. Perhaps too seriously.” The steamer’s docking maneuver struck me as more than adventurous. How was the ferryman even supposed to navigate in pitch-black night and between trees rising from the deep waters? We did not see even a hint of a riverbank anywhere. I doubted that I would ever feel
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solid ground beneath my feet again. Yet a slender wooden pier appeared almost miraculously, and after a few insecure steps down a slippery plank we were back on land. It took a little while until the props we had brought along, totems on long poles, had been unloaded and we set out on our journey. To my horror, we walked deep and ever deeper into the jungle, a long procession, one behind the other, and the light of a camera or cell phone flashing up here or there showed no more than bits and pieces of the ground on which we set our feet, clad, mostly, in only the lightest footwear. I do not know how long we walked through the tropical vegetation until we finally arrived at a half-ruined building. One after another we entered the house, climbed about in it, scrambling up almost invisible stairs, over fallen trees and broken steps. Again and again there were moments of absolute darkness, moments of blindness during which we could have stumbled over walls or fallen from landings. In retrospect, the uncertain situation on the water seemed almost more bearable than this jungle adventure in a former monastery whose rooms no longer had roofs, where trees and climbing plants grew rampantly into the sky and into the ground at the same time, where our naked legs were utterly unprotected, exposed to any creature living on the earth. Only the music I heard now and then, tinny tunes from a boom box someone had brought along, calmed my nerves. After the overture to The Flying Dutchman, I recognized the memorable chords and melodies of the grand choruses and arias. Sometimes someone would sing along. Then the music would suddenly be accompanied for brief moments by flares, dazzlingly bright and pure white light that turned us into gigantic silhouettes, transforming every drop of dew into a diamond; the subsequent plumes of fog, too, would be briefly lit up by signal rockets. Like the music itself, the curt directorial instructions resounding from everywhere at once echoed in my mind, human voices that betrayed fear as well as the spirit of adventure. People filmed, took photographs, or simply sat quietly, gazing and wondering, until finally we all stood around a great fire that slowly burned the largest totem, draped with photographs and crowned with a cow’s head, to ashes. Schlingensief and his Bolex camera were time and again clearly recognizable in the light of the fire; there was no doubt he was the protagonist of this event.
irritated some; but I no longer wondered why samba dancers and bands of drummers paraphrased Wagner’s natural imagery, or why rotating cones of natural rubber were used as symbols of prosperity in act two instead of spinning wheels. The films projected onto sheets of white cloth, many of them products of multiple exposures, showed episodes from the rehearsal phase, when Schlingensief had led the entire orchestra out into the jungle, as well as very recent material from our nocturnal excursion. Even things I had seen or been told about during my touristic tour suddenly seemed to me like a dream as they flickered across the cloths: the dancing group of indigenous people as well as the strange fish that possessed the ability to survive for a long time on dry land. Suddenly, all these fresh impressions from a faraway land made sense, fusing with the opera’s mythology—which had until now felt profoundly European to me—to produce a new image. I witnessed a state that rebuffed conventional notions of art. Or is it conceivable that the “primordial” and art might coincide, that “before creation” there is creation? The highest (artistic) fulfillment would then be virtually indistinguishable from regression. These are discomforting thoughts I cannot follow to their logical conclusion; they bring Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo to my mind, in which another man conceives the absurd idea of taking romantic opera to the jungle. Schlingensief no doubt built on this figure. Yet where Fitzcarraldo’s monomaniacal ego trip highlights the endless travails of a creative act, Schlingensief, it seems to me, sought to overcome this individualist and egocentric view. The enormous feat that is his The Flying Dutchman not only involves the audience in various ways, as so many earlier productions had done. As the action proceeds, the concrete site of the performance itself intrudes upon the European work of art. The “dress rehearsal” had already taken place in the public sphere; the samba drummers and dancers gradually took over the theatrical leadership in the opera, their percussions drowning out the Wagnerian swells, and finally led the action from the stage of the theater to the stages of the street. Robbing the opera of its end, the production spun the thousand ramifications into which Wagner’s ending dissipates into the tropical reality. In the medium of an encompassing music that, as it were, no longer had a single author, we received intimations of a sense of community.
Dawn was coming by the time we returned to the harbor of Manaus, our minds full with what we had experienced, our bodies exhausted. Without any involvement of the artist, I then spent Saturday and Sunday working through the usual tourist program. A trip by ferry across the Rio Negro and then, in little diesel-powered boats, on smaller rivers leading straight into the jungle; gazing in awe at the gigantic water lily leaves that are said to support the weight of a child; a visit to an indigenous village community featuring the presentation of a ritual dance, followed by jewelry shopping. The ecologically correct jungle hotel with its tourism offerings was part of the program, as was a typical local meal. In contrast with what I had seen and experienced the night before, it all struck me as banal and pointless. What was all this in comparison to the almost liturgical event that had taken place out there in the jungle (which now, in the light of day, seemed unthreatening to me)? I longed to go back to the music and the images of Wagner’s opera as Schlingensief had unfolded it before our eyes and ears. And when evening finally came and I sat in Teatro Amazonas for the opera’s premiere and heard the opening bars of the overture, I was reunited with the world. It was a festive opening night whose audience, clad in evening gowns, walked across the red carpet while the world outside seemed to be ending amid violent showers of rain. The way the production interwove elements from the Brazilian setting with Wagner may have
What grew in Manaus into a multifaceted art event and festivity would soon be implemented in the reality of social practice and cultural politics in Schlingensief’s project of an opera village for Africa. At the rail of the ship on the Rio Negro, he had talked about music as a keynote shared by all human beings across linguistic and cultural boundaries. Though this yearning for union was powerful in him, he was perhaps aware already there, in the jungle, of the insurmountable difficulties that oppose it. His last production for the stage (Via Intolleranza II) made the discrepancy between the desire to immerse oneself in a community and the impossibility of really getting closer to another human being painfully palpable. The belief in the integrative power of creativity and the danger of exoticism is the irresolvable contradiction we must endure.
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WERNER NEKES SPLINTERS OF MEMORY
H
e calls me in the fall of 1984: “Christoph Schlingensief. Can I stop by some time? Help out? I’ve made several 8mm films when I was in high school, with fellow students and friends. I’d like to show them to you.” He comes to see me the very next day, complaining about the misfortune of not getting accepted to the Munich Film Academy. My view that that was the best thing that could have happened to him—would he have wanted to grow mold in the cages that are television-studio editorial offices?—is consolation to him. I have just finished shooting for the film Was geschah wirklich zwischen den Bildern? [What Really Happened Between the Images?], and spent several weekends working with Helge Schneider and Andreas Kunze developing chains of associations for the film Johnny Flash. At the moment, Astrid Nicklaus and I are editing the rush print of Was geschah wirklich zwischen den Bildern?, the first film about my collection of objects from the early history of film, a survey of all important strands of filmic language that ultimately led to the birth of cinema. There is a shot in which I insert zograscope prints into a Dutch folding zograscope that then represent the passing of time by showing, when lit in front and from behind, a daytime and a nighttime view; Astrid doesn’t like the take. It would be cumbersome to have my cameraman Bernd Upnmoor, who always captured wonderful images for me, come from Hamburg for a quick pickup shooting, and so I ask Christoph whether he thinks he can do the shots. Christoph is enthusiastic about being thrown in at the deep end, having helped Franz Seitz with several outdoor shots using a 35mm camera for Dr. Faustus in 1982. Dore O. sets up the scene, and Christoph does a single take, which is now in the film. Christoph was unfailingly obliging, absolutely reliable, and incredibly eager to learn. From now on he accompanied me as my student and friend. He spontaneously made friends with all members of the crew working on the film I was shooting on weekends, Johnny Flash, including Dore O., Volker Bertzki, Bernd and Birger Bustorff, as well as the actors, Helge, Andreas, and Marianne Traub. Christoph had become a member of the team. I could trust him implicitly, give him a camera and quickly describe to him which scene featuring Marianne, Andreas, or Heike Melba Fendel I needed for continuity. During a meeting between the music manager Toi and Mother Potzkothen—Andreas in a double role, and Dore was standing in for Andreas at the moment where he/she knocks on the window—Christoph spontaneously helped me avoid crossing the line, for which I was grateful to him. Later on, I helped him find his way through the jungle of film subsidy programs, and allowed him to use my film and studio technology. At the time I was a professor film at the University of Art and Design Offenbach, which enabled me to hire an assistant. Christoph was delighted to draw his first regular salary, and I was glad I didn’t have to drive the distance by myself once or twice a week. Christoph, who was actually quite fearful by nature, was not even afraid of driving on black ice in the winter. He also always kept an on-board pharmacopeia, introducing me to Echinacea and Umckaloabo. He gave up his apartment in Munich and moved to Schreinerstraße in Mülheim an der Ruhr. Marianne worked for the cultural film promotion program at the Filmbüro, which we had recently been able to set up in Mülheim thanks to Johannes Rau’s support. Her responsibilities included setting deadlines for applications. Her generosity was convenient for us, since we could work on our project outlines and screenplays through the last night, after the deadline, and then submit them by pushing them through the mail slot at her house. But doing so did not mean that funding would be guaranteed. Working with incredibly limited resources, in comparison to today’s production budgets, shooting without major movie stars, and relying on a great deal of improvisation,
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we were able to realize many unconventional but important films. With commissions, filmmakers were free to make decisions about projects that didn’t have an eye on commercial success, that didn’t have to be works of a bland and wrinkle-free taste. They found their audiences thanks to Atlas-Film’s distributor for highbrow cinema, FifiGe, and municipal movie theaters, and garnered a lot of praise and honors in screenings at festivals, in museums and independent venues, and during international tours through Goethe-Instituts and the like. The utter radicalism of Dore O.’s poetic films and my own innovative and sometimes not immediately accessible films, such as Uliissess, which were unexpectedly successful also in commercial terms and found large enthusiastic audiences, gave Christoph the courage to chart his own personal path in film. During the summer break, he joined Marianne and her two daughters, Nicola and Ariane, on a visit to me and Dore in Sweden, my second home. He became friends with Ariane, who had worked in my film archive for some time, they moved in with each other, and for the next six years she was his girlfriend and edited some of his films as well. When he got a job as a unit manager for Hans W. Geißendörfer’s Lindenstraße, Christoph bought a Hymer motor home, and for a while they lived at the WDR compound in Cologne. In the summer of 1984, I was able to curate, with Dore O., the first temporary exhibition from my collection, “Alchimie des Blicks” [Alchemy of the Gaze], in conjunction with a Federico Fellini exhibition, for the inauguration of the German Film Museum in Frankfurt. Christoph was often among the first to admire my newly acquired exhibits, seeking to fathom their mysteries and play with them; these were “optical toys,” also called “philosophical toys” around 1820 because they inspired a reflection on processes of perception. Later on, he was delighted to be able to present a find to me, a praxinoscope by Émile Reynaud (ca. 1870). His study of my collection would later be reflected in his Animatograph, but also in his choice of multiple projection or “expanded cinema,” a technique involving several 16mm projectors, for his exhibitions in Munich or Zurich. He was utterly fascinated by the abundance of visual material Georg Buschan laid out in his four volumes on Die Sitten der Völker: Liebe, Ehe, Heirat, Geburt, Religion, Aberglaube, Lebensgewohnheiten, Kultureigentümlichkeiten, Tod und Bestattung bei allen Völkern der Erde [The Customs of the Peoples: Love, Marriage, Weddings, Births, Religion, Superstition, Lifestyle Habits, Cultural Peculiarities, Death, and Burial in All Peoples of the Earth]. It is probably from this fascination that his love for the peoples of Africa derives. Working with students from Offenbach at a location right in our backyard, the Rauen quarry in Kassenberg, he shot his first feature film, Tunguska—Die Kisten sind da [Tunguska— The Boxes Have Arrived]. Next was Menu Total, which was shot at Schloss Styrum in Mülheim. I was offered the rambling vaults of a bunker in the neighborhood as a home for my collection. Yet the numerous underground rooms were too damp for my potential museum. I described the hidden location to Christoph, and he rapidly developed a film production schedule tailored to the premises on Bergstraße: 100 Jahre Adolf Hitler—Die letzte Stunde im Führerbunker [100 Years of Adolf Hitler—The Last Hour in the Fuhrerbunker]. He veiled his messages, which attested to his social commitment, in the garb of cinematic trash. These disguises duped a movie audience that turned up its nose at B-movies. To cultivate his provocative taste and aesthetic preferences, he founded Filmclub 69. Everyone in the audience had to register as a member to enable Christoph to circumvent regulatory limitations. Using 35mm projectors he had bought from second-hand dealers,
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he deliberately presented films in bad taste that serious film critics scorned, such as works by Russ Meyer or Otto Mühl, or Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Almost all screenings were complemented by outrageous appearances and performances by radical artists who were delighted to meet an often exhibitionistic audience at Filmclub 69.
with budgets large enough to shoot several “dirty films.” There is little to indicate that future exceptional talents from the region will be supported in their cultural work. The politicians in charge were asleep when economic promotion annexed cultural promotion in a bear hug that has smothered culture. That was also the tenor of Christoph’s speeches. We owe it to him to take what he said seriously.
Together, we traveled to several festivals to present our films. One of them is in Figuera da Foz, Portugal: I spend almost the entire flight to Lisbon standing next to him in the back of the plane, talking to him to distract him from his great fear of flying. Not until we have made it to the grilled sardines on the beach, the tumbler of smooth cognac next to a small cup of espresso, and our conversations with José Viera Marques and Manuel de Oliveira do we make our peace with the world again. At the Berlinale I run into Udo Kier, whom I have known since the 1960s; the two of us are serving on the youth-film jury at a school in Itzehoe. We have a long talk with Derek Jarman; we are on the same wavelength. Tilda Swinton joins us; she is enjoying the enthusiasm with which her acting in Caravaggio has been received. Moving quickly, Christoph wins Udo and Tilda over for a project, a film to be shot on the small island of Langeneß. The film is presented at the Hof Film Festival the following year: Egomania—Insel ohne Hoffnung [Egomania—Island Without Hope]. In 1988, he plays a minor part in Dore O.’s film Blindman’s Ball. In 1990, Dore O. shoots a series of photographs with him based on Frans Masereel’s Die Idee, which she will use as a dream sequence in her film Candida. In 1989, a group including Nam June Paik—whose work I have felt great appreciation for since the 1960s—and myself are busy with the plans for the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. While I teach media art in Cologne, Christoph moves to Berlin. His reports are full of his excitement over the freedoms he enjoys while working with Frank Castorf, and he tries to get me to join him at the Volksbühne with my own ideas. But my collection has grown to an alarming size, and so I prefer to take care of it, inventorying the objects and planning exhibitions. Our friendship continues, but our paths gradually move apart. We meet only occasionally, he invites me to show my films at the Volksbühne. He integrates films from my collection in his stage plays. He comes to Mülheim to see my most recent film, Der Tag des Malers [The Day of the Painter], which moves him deeply. He stops by when he comes to Oberhausen to visit his parents, asking me to show him my most important new acquisitions and explain them to him. He asks me to shoot the decomposing hare for his production in Bayreuth. I would love to do it but am about to open an exhibition in Melbourne. The show “Tandem” at the Mülheim Kunstverein provides an opportunity for a more extended meeting. Over dinner, he pulls out his laptop in order to hear my views and criticisms of his Animatograph. He explains his pictures and the structure, which he realized in Iceland. I am touched when he tells me that he will forever be grateful to me, among others, for teaching him to always bring his current projects along, prepared at all times to present them. We meet for the last time when the city of Mülheim, which usually does nothing to facilitate the work of its artists, throws the Ruhr Prize at him just to get a mention in the national press for once. Bazon Brock’s laudation ought to be published in print. Düsseldorf, too, hastily awards him the Käutner Prize before it is too late. Christoph generously overlooks the circumstances and delivers wonderful acceptance speeches in Mülheim and Düsseldorf. He points out how desolate today’s cultural policies are, which support launch parties for “great movie stars”
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HANS ULRICH OBRIST MULTIPLICATIONS CHRISTOPH SCHLINGENSIEF IN CONVERSATION WITH HANS ULRICH OBRIST
Hans Ulrich Obrist: I want to start at the sources. I would be very interested to know who your “heroes” are. Christoph Schlingensief: My father, definitely. And Alfred Edel, and, I never met him, but still: Luis Buñuel. Hitler, a little bit, Mother Teresa … Obrist: And you once told me that Werner Nekes was important to you. Can you say something about that? Schlingensief: Yes, Werner was important because he was a film director who made films in a way that I couldn’t have imagined beforehand and didn’t want to imagine either. “Experimental filmmaker,” “avant-garde filmmaker,” that is what it was called then. Nekes made films by using a photo camera in order to take his shots, picture by picture, twenty-four pictures per second. In doing so, he of course didn’t necessarily give priority to the action. I was his assistant for several years, and assisting him was very interesting indeed, because what I really wanted to do was mainstream movies, which is to say, American-style feature films and crime thrillers. And suddenly you’re watching Empire with Nekes, and you think to yourself, “What did Warhol do here, why didn’t they use this material differently? One could employ it in a more meaningful way!” But Nekes then time and again persuaded me to keep watching. At some point, when I wanted to give up on Empire, he said: “Just keep your seat, something very exciting is coming up in a bit!” I said, “But I can’t do this anymore,” went to the bathroom, and when I came back he said, “Well! Now you’ve unfortunately missed it!” And so I said, “Yes, but what did I miss?” And he responded, “A yellow VW.” But the film is black and white, as far as I know. In any case, I had missed a VW, which was a sensation in that film. That’s the sort of thing Nekes taught me. That’s also when Beuys showed up in his hall. Obrist: The first thing I heard about Beuys in my early teens in Switzerland was interestingly enough the idea of a political party. Which, I think, was also very important for your party, Chance 2000. Schlingensief: That had always been a dream of mine, having a party one day, I wanted to give a speech in the Bundestag just once. I didn’t want to give it myself, I would have liked one of the welfare recipients from our group to give a speech there—his name was Werner Brecht, he’s already dead. He was this big [indicates size using his hands]—he usually had a burn mark here on his nose because at night he would fall asleep while smoking in bed. He didn’t say a whole lot. But he was there and he wasn’t dead yet and he liked to smoke, that was really all he had to offer. I would have liked to see him standing for fifteen minutes at a lectern where all those important and powerful people churn out their pieces of wisdom. Just smoking, looking up a little now and then, nodding off a little; to my mind that would have been the greatest masterwork in terms of making a political statement. Unfortunately that didn’t happen. It remains an unrealized project, a project awaiting implementation.
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This idea of the party, in any case, was meant perfectly seriously, we wanted to put together a party of minorities that would be in the majority. The idea that you join forces without therefore having a “lobby,” or whatever else it is you need to have in the background. But on the way there you realize that you probably do need it, if you want to sort of turn the corner. And then, working with people who consider themselves outsiders to begin with, who see themselves as the “happy unemployed.” We constantly had problems because of course we said, “Unemployment has got to go!” But then people would show up who said, “Being unemployed is great, I get money, I don’t have to work, I hang out at home, I’d much rather have it that way, I’m happily unemployed.” Of course these things then pose problems for a party. But we really fought—and we held a couple of very nice events. The whole thing started during an Alfred Biolek talk show I was invited to. On the show I said that I would like to found a party, Chance 2000. After the show I immediately called my girlfriend at home because I wanted to ask her what she thought of the show—but I didn’t even get through! I then called the neighbors, who told me that the phone had been ringing nonstop at our place. So that was when the whole thing got started. Then there were 20,000 members, and we had twelve state associations—and I hadn’t even known what all of that was! We had to drive around all the time and give election speeches and meet people of one kind or another. There was also the APPD, the Anarchist Pogo Party of Germany, which then always tried to upstage us. One day I was coming back from a speech in Munich, from students who had been deeply moved by the whole thing, and then this woman, pierced all over, approached me, grabbed me, and stuck her tongue in my mouth—I turned away like this: eww! [Covers his mouth with both hands] Then there was a photo, that I distinctly remember, and later that night I read on the APPD’s website that I was now the APPD’s minister for misleading propaganda—the chairwoman, Ms. Karin Suchandsuch, it said, had given me a rapturous welcome—and I had gratefully accepted the offer. Next to it was the picture where she stuck her tongue down my throat. So these were the methods one had to use. Then we wanted to have six million unemployed people going for a swim in Wolfgangsee on August 2, 1998. Obrist: Yes, that is one of my favorite happenings! Schlingensief: It was also meant seriously! I really thought that buses upon buses would arrive in the end! And the papers started checking whether the water would actually rise by so and so many meters so that it would completely flood Helmut Schmidt’s—no, his name was Helmut Kohl!—weekend home and just sweep him off. That was the idea: that six million unemployed people in Wolfgangsee, if they jumped in at the same time, would pull it off. When we arrived at the hotel, the people there, sympathizers or fans, let us all stay for free. When I swam a little too far to the left in the lake, the Federal Border Patrol would come in a motorboat and instruct me via megaphone, “Mr. Schlingensief, you must swim back at once!” If I had kept swimming for two more strokes of the oar I would have entered Kohl’s closed territory. Sometime that day someone dropped off a letter at the reception that con-
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tained a death threat, made of these letters that were cut out and pasted onto the paper. I responded by trying to call the police in Sankt Gilgen. But they weren’t in. And then I asked the lady at the reception where the police were, and she said, “Well, of course they aren’t at the office, they’re all here in our garden. One’s over there in the shrubbery, and another two are sitting over there in that Opel Rekord.” So I went over to them and knocked, one then rolled down the window—he knew immediately who I was, since we were the reason for the surveillance. I then said, “I’ve received a death threat here, would you mind reading it?” And then he took the letter, read it through and said, “Go away, go back!” He got out of the car and he reached for his gun—they really thought we were going to shoot the next moment. Later a district attorney came, from Salzburg, who said that I was being threatened, I was now getting two security people from Helmut Kohl’s detail who were supposed to walk by my side, and I got to choose whether they were to walk right next to me and catch the bullet or the knife or someone trying to hit me—or whether I just wanted them to be in the same room with me and remove my body—those, he said, were my two options. I then got along with them very well. They carried this sandwich bag on their abdomen with the gun in it. I told them they should stay close enough to me where they would still be able to respond, but they didn’t have to stay too close, they could also go eat something sometime or what not. And then the great day came, four o’clock, and there were, I think, 300 people from our party and eighty from the APPD, who again came as well. And they then started fucking on an area of the lawn. And they really had it going on down at the beach—but I wanted the event to go down in an orderly fashion. I wanted use to be a credible party, and if you’re a credible party you don’t fuck. Well … Obrist: What happened next? Schlingensief: And then we went into the water, and as we were swimming with our 300 people, they kept on doing it. The mayor of Sankt Gilgen had threatened to sue us for millions if a single picket fence were to be destroyed! I tried to keep pushing everyone in the water further and further forward. Then the Border Patrol motorboat came again and the policemen yelled, “Swim back!” That’s when I first noticed that our clothes were all soaked with water, we were almost drowning, swimming really became incredibly hard work. I just kept saying, “Call Mr. Kohl!” and, “Tell Mr. Kohl that we’re here! Let him show himself to us just once!”—and the policeman said, “Swim back! Get lost! You’re not going to see him!” I hung on to his boat because I was exhausted and kept saying, “Please tell Mr. Kohl he should come to the window just once, just wave once, or do anything! I’m running out of steam, and so are the people, you have to do something! Tell him he should just come out—we don’t even believe anymore that he exists!” And then the policeman started radioing, and kept calling into the mike, “Yes, he is supposed to just come to the window, can’t he wave or something? They’ll be gone right away—he is just supposed to wave!” Well, Kohl didn’t come wave. So I made a U-turn, yelling, “We have to go back, there is no way out anymore! Kohl is dead!” Back ashore I then announced, “4:32 p.m., Helmut Kohl is dead, Germany is leaderless! We are taking power.” And that was the end.
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Obrist: The first time we met was in 1997, at the police station in Kassel, where we did this Hybrid Workspace for the first Berlin Biennial together with Klaus Biesenbach and Nancy Spector in collaboration with Catherine David. When we arrived in Kassel you were already at the police station, you had once again almost triggered a constitutional crisis, and that also had something to do with Kohl. Schlingensief: Yes, weirdly enough at that time things often had to do with Kohl. That was 48 Stunden Überleben für Deutschland [48 Hours Survival for Germany], and we had a room to ourselves. I had bought cheap sandbags from Oderbruch and had them piled up there. So there were gigantic mountains of sandbags, and we sat in front of them in German army apparel, I had some kind of John Lennon wig with sunglasses, and I signed books I had brought along from a bookstore. There were endless lines, these crowds of smart documenta visitors, who waited for me to give them some pointless book from the barrel, and I would write something in the book, and they would go back home having been given something at documenta, by a real artist whose name they didn’t know and whose book was guaranteed not to be his book—after all, I couldn’t possibly have written as many books as were in that barrel. We then also led Japanese groups into that room and told them something about German art. And then we didn’t let them leave the room anymore, whereupon one Japanese man somehow escaped and then called security staff to free the other Japanese people, or Asian people in any case. There was a night with the party chairmen, which is to say with Werner Brecht, Achim von Paczensky, a whole large group of my disabled associates, who were all in the state party leadership, and we all spent the night there. That morning I got a wakeup call—I was told that Lady Diana had just died in London. But I didn’t believe it, really didn’t—the Internet wasn’t all that much to shout about back then. In any case I’d received the news, so I immediately took out the microphone again, had breakfast, and spoke into the mike, “Ladies and gentlemen, I have just been told that Lady Diana died in a car crash in London! That old bitch has finally bitten the dust.” That was the sentence. Obrist: Can you tell me about the court trial? Schlingensief: Later on there was a court trial, too, featuring witness statements such as: “My wife and I went to documenta as we had done every year”—every year!—“and were walking across the grounds and gathering information about the state of contemporary art. We were very interested and were just taking an interest in this or that when we suddenly heard: ‘Diana—the old bitch has finally bitten the dust!’ So I said to my wife: ‘Listen, something isn’t right here! Something sinister is going on.’ After the situation had quieted down a little, we then heard people yelling: ‘Kill Helmut Kohl!’ At that moment I said to my wife: ‘Now we must intervene! We are needed here!’ And so we took appropriate action.” So these were the witness statements I got—numerous people applied to testify! There were really reams of witness statements. And the whole thing was, again, in this room, this Hybrid Workspace set up by documenta—it’s not like it was on the street or in a department store. We then kept going. Then a first troop of six police came and took a porn poster away from Werner Brecht. He had taken his private collection of porn magazines
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along for the trip, and so a Beate Uhse poster was taken away from him. So we filed a complaint against this policeman who simply took it along as indication that something pornographic was taking place. That was so absurd, since we were in the middle of documenta. I’d thought that, well, everything is permitted in art, we know that by now—which is also why some people don’t think particularly highly of art anymore—but there in that place, that was so crass that we kept going. Suddenly fifteen police with a shepherd dog came in, and the dog then also bit the performance artist Hanayo’s leg as she was holding her newborn baby in her arms. Bernhard Schütz and I were made to stand against the wall and then marched off to the car in handcuffs. As we arrived at the car, one of the policemen said, “Unlock the car,” and the other policeman said, “No, you’ve got the key!” And the first one goes, “Unlock the car now”—“No, listen, I gave you the key, I don’t have the key, you have the key!” And Bernhard Schütz—well, he is a very wild actor from the Volksbühne—he kept saying, “Really, so the key is gone? Hey, what’s going on here? Who’s got the key?” So he was riling them up, which made me very uncomfortable. Then we were driven away and interrogated, and at some point, after half an hour, our handcuffs were taken off. Then a policeman came in and said he was very sorry, something had gone wrong, there had been a misunderstanding. And I kept saying, “My God, we’re at documenta here, the paperwork’s all been filed in advance.” Then Catherine David and you and Klaus Biesenbach etcetera came and you got us out. Carl Hegemann was standing outside with a liberation brigade of thirty holding up posters saying, FREEDOM FOR SCHÜTZ AND SCHLINGENSIEF! But there was a court trial nonetheless, and Bernhard Schütz and I had to pay 3,000 marks each. We recouped that money in one evening at the Volksbühne, the Volksbühne paid the fines and we did something or other for it. Somehow told some story … Obrist: Another project that generated a lot of controversy as well was Ausländer raus! [Foreigners Out!]. There are these moments with Géricault’s Raft of Medusa where that painting really almost triggered a constitutional crisis. Especially when the painting was then brought over to England. Schlingensief: What happened at the time in Austria was that the Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) suddenly—and utterly inexplicably—proclaimed that it was willing to form a coalition with the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ). Then a call came from Luc Bondy, who had long flirted with the idea of having me do something during the Vienna Festival. He said, “Meet right away!” And then he asked, “Do you have an idea what we might do?” And around the same time there was this Big Brother boom in the paper, but then there was also a report about Indians who were locked in a container trying to escape their country, and tried to drill a hole into the container wall with a small piece of metal. But they all suffocated in the container because they were so tightly packed together. And then I said to Bondy, all we would really have to do would be to translate into reality the slogans Mr. Haider and his crowd up there used, because politicians usually get scared of their own statements when you do that, and so we needed to place FOREIGNERS OUT! nicely, to have billboard advertisements just like them. And then we needed to capture the game they were playing with this coalition between the ÖVP and the FPÖ into an image that any Austrian could participate in. That’s how we came up with the container, for which we initially didn’t get a permit
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—obviously, it was foreseeable that there was something funny going on. The idea was: one container, ten asylum seekers inside whom the Austrians can then “vote out” by phone or through this televoting system. So you call night after night and say, “That Mumba Bumba’s got to go!” and, “Out with him!” and then a state limo picks him up and drives him to the border and he gets deported. People were also able to see all of it on the Internet, with film and so on, for an international audience. But at first we didn’t get the site we wanted: in front of the Hotel Sacher, in that corner where the shopping district starts. We were told, “Can’t do that!” So we had to go see a Mr. Schmitz, who sat there in his unbelievable office with a large chandelier, really lordly. His assistant was wearing a toupee that always sat a little crooked, and for two full hours Mr. Schmitz did nothing but look at us, smoking his pipe and going, “Nah … can’t do that, nah … can’t do that either, uh, nah …” And this other guy never said anything but, “Yes, I understand very well, Mr. Head of the Department, sir, I understand very well! That’s exactly how I see it!” And we were ready to give up when Schmitz suddenly said, “Just a moment!” took out a ruler, drew some lines, and moving the ruler back and forth and back again, “Can’t do in front,” he then says, “nah, nah, can’t do that, because there are the plants in front of the parking garage, and if we put it there they won’t get any air,” or in any case only some weird air, and they would die, it would alter the entire biotope inside the parking garage. And so that didn’t work—“but here, that works!” And then all I saw was how the man dropped his toupee. I kid you not: Schmitz had actually moved the thing to the beginning of the street, right next to the opera, which was of course even better for us! And the toupee was lying around somewhere, the guy was looking for it and yelping with glee, I would say it was a gleeful yelping squeal. But Luc and I didn’t want to act like we were grateful, so we just said, “There? … Well … Hmm …” So we spent another ten minutes exclaiming, in a tone of mild skepticism, “Well … You really think?” And Schmitz kept sucking on his pipe. And then this man with the toupee said, “Yes, that is a wonderful idea, Mr. Head of the Department—wonderful, wonderful!” And so we’d received his permission, done deal, and we walked out, “Well, thank you very much, hmm, yes, unfortunately …”, and we walked around the block, and gave each other a hug, and screamed with joy. In any case, it was an unbelievably great place. Also because all the Japanese with their buses would always—I’ve nothing against Japanese people, even if that’s how this is coming across—so there were these bus stops, where the tour groups would get off, and the first thing they saw was the sign up above: FOREIGNERS OUT! Then the tour guide would come and say, “Foreigners Out, Foreigners Out!” The Japanese walked through this place as though they were about to be shot. Then the Kronen-Zeitung got started and launched this gigantic campaign against us, alleging that I had raided the Petzler ladies’ corsetry store—“Brutal terrorist assault on Petzler’s Ladies’ Corsetry! Schlingensief storms ladies’ wear department!” That sort of thing. Then they would print a counter-statement, then the district attorney would come in, which is to say, the domestic secret service, would come in, the whole thing was blown out of proportion because the government was incapable of taking the sign down, they did not manage to do that, it would have been like giving in. So we were in this checkmate situation, day after day. Then one Thursday there were I
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don’t know how many thousand people on that square, students and all sorts of people. Matthias Lilienthal helped organize all of that, and it blew our minds how many people came. The whole thing then picked up incredible momentum, so that in the end Daniel Cohn-Bendit stood at the microphone as well, Peter Sellars stood at the microphone, Einstürzende Neubauten, everyone was suddenly there, and when I came back to Berlin I was suddenly the star who did something so humane and gracious. That was really the reason why I subsequently did U3000 on MTV, a show in which I completely denounce myself and pull out my dick in front of the Hellwig family. That is to say, where I gave myself a major beating, since I also didn’t know how to deal with the embrace, because of course it reflects exactly this ambivalent situation: it’s not a good project, nor is it a bad project. It’s not going to change anything, but it can make some real noise. It’s being watched around the world, too, and the government can’t stand it —that’s really the greatest thing you can possibly experience. But I should say it again, it didn’t change anything. Obrist: Something I absolutely wanted to talk about, because it leads to all of your current projects, is this way you pop up in different contexts. On the one hand, after all, you are very much at home in the film context, but then from this home base you also broke into the field of theater, where you are equally at home. And for several years now, really for as long as we’ve known each other, since the late 1990s, you’ve also done more and more work in the art context as well, in museums, galleries, Kunsthalles. Can you talk about how, with film as your home base, you break into these various areas, and what these areas mean to you? Theater, art, and there is also radio, with the radio plays. Are these parallel realities, or are they all different contexts of production? Schlingensief: Well, the basic fact—I recently read in a book somewhere that one must avoid building a private mythology—is of course that as a child I grew up with my father’s camera, it was simply there, the camera was, and I liked it. My father shot everything with it that was there to be shot, and at some point he used this camera the wrong way by producing a double exposure. These were Double 8 films: you had to expose them in one direction, then turn them around under a bedcover, then expose the other side. And this process of switching the film around under the bed, that’s what my father did twice in a row, hence the double exposure. He came with the film, lights out, blinds down, screen set up, everything already smelled a little, this dust on the lamp, you know the smell from slide presentations back in the day. And then the film started, and suddenly you’d see me running around. I was drinking water while at the same time there were waterfalls over me. Then my mother and I were sitting on the beach, and people of some kind were running around over us. That totally grabbed me—that that was possible, that one piece of visual information came together in this way with another. I don’t have any theory about this, nor did I need to meet a curator for it, I didn’t read any art criticism about it, I really didn’t, although Nekes then later showed me films by Brakhage that reminded me of it at several points, but I really experienced this in a very pure and unadulterated way. And that is also what I appreciate so much about it, that to me these experiences are—some people may call that naïve—by
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and large just part of me, it just happened this way, and that’s how I’ve learned it. And I can use it, I just know how to, when I’m shooting with the Bolex and turning the crank, how often I turn forward, how often I turn backward, what I use double exposures for and what not, which aperture to use. That’s just in my blood, and so it’s become part of me. I didn’t need to go to film school for that, that’s what I learned there. And so it’s also why I was so delighted as a child when I projected my film on a television screen and kept the television sound running. I turned the picture off, and suddenly my film had sound. This method, I think, gradually seeped ever deeper into my consciousness: that these things also add to and complement one another, also expand each other, by all means is true. The expanded conception of art, I think, is nothing special at all. Now I’ve reached the expanded conception of the sick person, and this expanded conception of the sick person in turn also has to do with the fact that I cannot accept that the cancer is supposedly just a fact now that takes place in my life, while on the side I also paint something. Or point my camera at things a little. As though one had nothing to do with the other. And so time and again I also had strokes of good luck: that I didn’t get into the film academy and then entered into a whole different territory with Nekes, or slid, with Alfred Edel and Dietrich Kuhlbrodt, into this sort of experimental Frankfurt School sound. That’s where the Filmbüro Nordrhein-Westfalen was very important, there was the documentary film section of the Oberhausen Short Film Festival, but I often also sat there with a personal preference for films that grabbed me, that operated to expand or where my mind can still abide in them in a certain way. So I wasn’t necessarily the political director. I once sat on the German jury at the Oberhausen Short Film Festival, and I was seated next to a guy from the union, and we spent hours looking at documentaries of one kind or another that were really abysmal shit, these films that would come to the West from the East, and in exchange the people from the Communist Party of Germany/Marxists-Leninists would drive eastward across the border and show their crap there. But there were also great films, I must say. Obrist: How about the art world? On several occasions you’ve used the medium of the exhibition—where films also turn up again, but in the most diverse contexts of production. Back in the day, in Venice, with the Church of Fear for “Utopia Station” we collaborated with Molly Nesbit and Rirkrit Tiravanija, but since then you’ve done a lot more with exhibitions, including a major solo exhibition at Haus der Kunst. What does the medium of the exhibition mean to you? Schlingensief: Well, the theater of course has a problem—so you’re coming from film, where you can influence everything, you can edit, you can cut this actor you don’t like, you can tilt the picture away, you can insert another intertitle there, can turn the action on its head, everything is possible. That’s great. And you can put music to it—if you want it to be silent, you turn the sound off, that’s all perfectly feasible. On the stage, by contrast, there’s a creak, the actor who’s supposed to be silent creaks, or he has that nasal way of speaking you can’t stand, but then there’s no way for you to somehow edit it out. So you’re constantly asking yourself, how do you get that guy there out? And my aversion would grow more intense, to the point where I sometimes thought, so we’ll just turn off the light
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altogether, then we won’t see whether he’s even there or not anymore. But that’s hard to keep up for two hours straight. So the theater, too, wasn’t really so good. That’s why I went out into the street to do these actions, and now this is the point of contact, where the filmic register, which I have a pretty good handle on, with its abilities to respond quickly, perhaps to redirect certain balls, also to see when a medium of this sort responds, when the perpetrator actually sits in the media. For example, I say “Kill Helmut Kohl!” once on a stage or in an exhibition space. But the newspapers then print the sentence 680 times in one week, “Kill Helmut Kohl!” So it was all over the papers! But what they wouldn’t write was that it happened, let’s say, in a theatrical space—only five papers did! But now that also isn’t too much fun to me anymore, and I don’t have major ambitions in that direction. Now it’s back to the image, and then the visual arts come in and also strike me as an odd sort of spectacle, where when you go to these fairs, look at these booths, that strikes me as utter nonsense—these gallery owners that bark when you walk toward a picture. “Are you interested in the picture? Do you want to know something about it? Blah blah …” So I don’t believe that there’s really an essence to that. I know, of course, that there certainly are artists who have something to tell, who, working under certain compulsions, do good work as well, who really have some brains in their heads. But by and large it’s an insanely funny spectacle held by charlatans who simply fart out some fashion article and disappear as quickly as they came. They just have the good luck that someone writes about it, and that someone then collects it. Once I was invited to a dinner in London, in an apartment stuffed chock full with art, expensive, expensive, expensive. They bought it—with a shopping cart, like, in with it!—and installed it. But I now take a closer look, also perhaps because this last year I have more time, and when I see something and I get the feeling that there’s really something seething on the inside, or there’s someone who is really attached to a scholarly task, however private it may be—when it’s scientific, that’s completely okay. When he’s doing research around it and also couldn’t not do it, and he wants to know something and really toils working on it, then that is okay with me—but I now also see that. But I would assume that many people don’t see that, that before it they are not only at a complete loss, but also primarily thinking, “I want to be part of this.” And that’s what would be so nice about it, if maybe we could also gradually begin to dissolve this system and simply switch to the object of utility, where we would simply say, “That’s so great, thinking that sort of thing, and what’s even greater is when you see that there’s someone who cannot but think that way.” These situations of compulsion, they need to be created, and that doesn’t necessarily always require money. But money is great. And once you’ve then sold a picture, there are a whole lot of wonderful things you can do with it …
We should put up a couple of pictures here, look, here, I’ll be riding around here for hours, with nothing to see, why don’t you do an exhibition here.” So we did a little exhibition at her place along her staircase, and now she’s riding through a sort of art course and having fun. And sometimes she even stops the lift and wants to take a closer look. So this “Stairlift to Heaven” is really how I would see my mother ascending to heaven, where I would think, “That’s how she’s going to heaven now.” Obrist: One final question. You told me that you just did a new work at the Ruhrtriennale, A Church of Fear vs. the Alien Within—can you say something about that? Schlingensief: Yes, that was my first work after cancer. It consists of texts I spoke into a dictaphone in the evenings during the first weeks after diagnosis; I then turned them into a Fluxus oratorio with the help of my friends. After the whole shit you have to go through there, you suddenly get back to a point where you continue to be very worn out and reduced, but still, with your friends and your wife’s love, you suddenly start being able to do something again. I can’t run quite so fast anymore, I have to walk a little more slowly, or spend more time sitting on the chair and looking straight ahead. But that also enables me to direct things more, perhaps to keep more of a distance—in the past I would immediately start flying off the handle, right in everyone’s faces, and always talk about what’s going to happen next, and jog and shake things and so on. Which means of course that no actor knows anymore what’s going on, no one knows what that’s supposed to be anymore. Perhaps I now have the chance to sometimes take a longer look. In Duisburg it worked this way; it didn’t become embarrassing that I’m over-sharing. Because I think that exactly in this multiplication of over-sharing, also in this multiplication of media—some of it is a sound recording, some is text being recited, the third is text being acted, the fourth is being read by a layperson—it isn’t embarrassing. These four possibilities, when they come to overlap, expand any text. And it gets out of the grief, out of a theater of vicarious sufferers.
No, but art really is important, especially because I can put the things in a room, I can again arrange the art in the room the way I used to edit films. Obrist: You’re showing the African Twintowers—Stairlift to Heaven tonight. Schlingensief: It is dedicated to my mother. Because my mother has a stairlift. When she first rode it up—and that thing moves very slowly—she said, “Aww, how boring this is!
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PETER RAUE MEMORIES OF CHRISTOPH SCHLINGENSIEF
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hen the editors invited me to put my memories of Christoph Schlingensief into words, I was delighted and quickly accepted. How much there is to say, how much to remember about this unforgotten one! It would not be difficult to tell stories and write them down, I thought. But when I began to put my ideas down on paper, I realized that writing about Christoph Schlingensief is much more difficult than I had thought. I have no right, do I, to take the most personal things he shared with me and spread them before the world: his laughter, his tears, his rage, the moments when he opened his heart. And yet he, more than almost any other artist in the world, was someone who showed his wounds, who never concealed them. “Who shows his wounds shall be healed. Who does not show his wounds shall not be healed,” the actors chanted in A Church of Fear vs. the Alien Within. Sharing what we experienced together with the public makes sense only when it goes beyond the anecdotal register, when it is illuminating, symptomatic. I would be satisfied if these lines accomplished nothing but to correct the picture of Christoph Schlingensief as a “provocateur,” a distorted picture some people never tire of painting. There was nothing he was less! He was, first and foremost, an artist who pursued questions about God and death and happiness and love in radical fashion—quite literally: to their very roots. Provocation was never his aim, nor did he ever shrink from it when it seemed necessary to say what he had to say. A free-thinking, deeply Catholic, amiable man, someone who—and for artists this is not self-evident—was approachable and approached others with deep sympathy, Christoph Schlingensief was, as I once put it to him, the “ideal son-in-law.” And I am touched to this day when I think of his text message: “Asked Aino’s father for her hand in marriage yesterday. He immediately said yes. I cried I was so happy.” These are not the words of a provocateur but those of a man of deep feeling, a sensitive and indeed sometimes delicate man. In the following I will limit myself to three small scenes, three sketches of Schlingensief, three portraits of a great artist and enchanting man. Parsifal. The production in Bayreuth that, as he was convinced, brought on his cancer and cost him his life. We spoke on the phone almost every day during the rehearsal period because he felt he did not want to, and could not, defy the resistance Wolfgang Wagner mounted to his directing. Had he not received so much support from the great composer and conductor Boulez, Parsifal would never have premiered. On the way to that goal: collapses, hospital, desperation. And an unfathomable strength with which he waged the struggle for his directorial ideas, for the integration of video in the production, for the inclusion of the hare—“something dies with the hare, while life at once erupts”—and refused to let the king of the hill’s concerns over a lack of “fidelity to Wagner” dissuade him even one iota from the concept behind his production. Shortly before the premiere, the house management informs him that he is prohibited from entering the building on opening night; he was officially barred from the house. The reason: the idiotic worry that he might want to disrupt the performance by protesting. Yet another desperate call, yet again his boundless rage. I propose: “On opening night you casually walk in to see the show, and if they don’t want to let you in based on the house ban, they’ll have to march you off in handcuffs. That’s what I’m going to tell the other side’s lawyer—he acts for the house management.” I can still hear his laughter of relief over this “solution.” A day after I had communicated the “response” to the house ban, he called me: “The ban has been lifted.”
Every two years, the Society of the Friends of the Nationalgalerie awards the “Prize for Young Art.” A jury selects the four most interesting artists from around a hundred and twenty submissions. The four artists on this “short list” are given the opportunity (and the financial support) to design one room at Hamburger Bahnhof. Their works are shown to the public for several weeks before a new jury determines who has emerged from the contest as the winner, the best artist. The prize is awarded in a solemn ceremony. The award speech, the famous proclamation “The winner is …,” is always delivered by a prominent figure from the art world. At the time I was the president of the association that offers the award, and so I asked Christoph whether he would be willing to hand it over. He agrees without hesitation, shows up for the event on time, dressed quite festively, the chairman of the jury hands him the sealed envelope concealing the name of the winner. After a few opening words and the expression of our gratitude to Schlingensief for having accepted this post, Christoph steps onto the podium, takes the envelope in his hand, and tears it to shreds, explaining that “every human being is an artist. Art awards are absolutely ridiculous. There is only honest and dishonest art, and there is not the slightest reason for these awards. Put an end to the award bullshit,” he shouts at the crowd. Bafflement. Laughter. “Christoph, are you serious?” I ask him as he still stands on the podium. “Perfectly serious, or else I wouldn’t say it.” Steps off the podium and happily sits back down on his chair. A provocateur? Not at all. For he is serious, he thinks the whole prizing and praising of art is ridiculous, counter to art, a perversion. We somehow saved the situation, identified the award winner, announced his name—and the only question everyone asked at the party after the ceremony was: “Is Christoph right?” And now a very brief final scene: I run into Christoph Schlingensief on Potsdamer Platz a few hours after he was in the “tube.” He does not seem depressed. “What’s the result of the exam, Christoph?” “Well—overtime.” That was in late May of 2010. The overtime lasted for no more than three months, until he died on August 21. Overtime: ever since his cancer diagnosis, he fought for every bit of playtime. With an incredible sense of humor. With indescribable desperation. With courage and dignity. How we would have wished for more playtime! For “it couldn’t possibly be as lovely in heaven as it is here.” I am sure: Christoph is wrong about this one. There was one little piece of heaven on this wide earth Christoph Schlingensief wanted to build before he would leave: in Burkina Faso—located in West Africa, one of the world’s ten poorest countries—he planned his “opera village.” A school, a canteen, a hospital, and the so-called opera. Not in order to stage La Traviata in Burkina Faso, but to provide the country’s high school students with access to the arts next to, and integrated with, their normal education—access to the music of their country, to “World Music,” to filmmaking, photography, dance, painting: play without limits. This is not about Europeans spreading their pedagogy; people from Burkina Faso will direct the school, teach, make music, play, and dance with the children. After Christoph’s death, it took a while before the forces gathered that would continue his work, before Aino Laberenz, who had been involved with the project from the very first idea Christoph had for it, found the courage to keep going. But now the work is proceeding apace: funding is being collected, the architect Francis Kéré is realizing his gorgeous plans—and the first students are scheduled to attend the
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school as early as the fall of 2011. The project has been met with widespread approval in Ouagadougou (from the responsible ministry as well as the city’s artists, filmmakers, dancers), and people we talk to smile radiantly whenever Christoph is mentioned. So there will be one place—for many many years, we hope—in that poor beautiful country where this world is at least nearly as lovely as they say heaven is. CHARLOTTE ROCHE THE SOIL OF BURKINA FASO
PETER RAUE
CHARLOTTE ROCHE
The Soil of Burkina Faso, 2011
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STEPHANIE ROSENTHAL 18 IMAGES PER SECOND CHRISTOPH SCHLINGENSIEF— THE IMAGE-MAKER
“T
he black space is a moment of pupation. After the black space, new life returns. But the black space is no less alive, for it really makes the emergence of life possible.”1 The black space, a term describing the interval between two individual frames in film, seems to be a central concept in Christoph Schlingensief’s work. It is, by figurative extension, the moment when we do not know which direction things are going, when we can open our minds to the new and different. In and with his art, Schlingensief unremittingly ventured into this black space, time and again surrendering himself and his art in order to rediscover both. As Christoph Schlingensief and I were working on the exhibition “18 Images per Second” held at Haus der Kunst, Munich, in 2006/7, we talked a great deal about what this black space meant to him. To prepare for the exhibition, I spent some time with him in Manaus, Brazil, where he shot the films for the show. He was there to direct Richard Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman for the opera festival at Teatro Amazonas. I learned in Manaus that Schlingensief, on the stage as much as in film, did not look for his images— he found them. The images built on one another, emerged from one another, developed in concert with the actors. Schlingensief made situations, actions, processes possible and then assembled them in ways that made sense to him. An essential element was the superimposition of images, and hence of meanings. He created spaces of the imagination for the beholder: spaces that took shape only by virtue of the black space of what one could not see. The title of the exhibition referred to this circumstance: “Eighteen images per second is the speed at which the eye no longer perceives the black between the images that is necessary to advance the film, the black space, that is to say, as flicker. But that already starts to happen at sixteen images per second, so that eighteen images is almost already two images too many, and at twenty-four images per second, the excess already amounts to six pictures.”2
Christoph Schlingensief was, to my mind, one of the best image-makers. The pictures he managed to capture were full of magic, conveying the mood of the particular place where they were recorded in a unique way. By writing “image-maker,” I am referring to the fact that he created images on film, in three-dimensional space, and within me. My aim in organizing the exhibition “18 Images per Second” at Haus der Kunst was therefore to focus attention on the installational and visual strengths of his work. The exhibition became an important turning point, both in Schlingensief’s oeuvre and with regard to its context. Until 2000, Schlingensief had been considered from the perspectives of theater, opera, or film. After his participation in the 2003 Venice Biennale and several smaller presentations at German and Austrian museums, Christoph Schlingensief’s show at Haus der Kunst was the first time audiences saw a larger installation at a site dedicated to the visual arts. The exhibition sought to trigger a shift of perspectives and enable visitors to break free of set ways of looking at his art. The artist himself, we hoped, would escape the label of the provocateur that had clung to him; and the use of the installation format would relieve his work of the demand for linear structures. At the time, Schlingensief made the very deliberate decision to step aside as a visible agent to allow people to take an unvarnished look at his pictures. He accordingly resolved against the use of actors in the installation, focusing entirely on the presentation of his films in an installation format. Having launched his career in the theater in the early 1990s, he now, in 2006, found himself increasingly returning to film. He more and more frequently shot his films abroad: “Working in foreign countries, shooting abroad is of elementary importance to me. […] This work is becoming ever more important to
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18 Images per Second, Haus der Kunst, Munich, 2007, Installation View
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me because I don’t see any charge in Germany. What I see is discharge. […] It is very important to me that I not appear as an exporting artist but instead seek to make the connection.”3 For Munich, Schlingensief shot twelve 16mm short films in Manaus, which he presented in the context of a giant sculptural Last Supper scene. The latter towered over eighteen cubicles: twelve set into its support structure, six arranged in front of it. The Last Supper itself was also manufactured in Manaus, modeled after a float in the city’s carnival. The back wall of the support structure contained a wall of eighteen monitors on which Schlingensief displayed parts of his film The African Twintowers. The six booths in the front part of the section were legible as shrines or nuclei of Schlingensief’s engagement with film in general and his Munich installation more specifically. The twelve shorts, running on rattling projectors, were shown as infinite loops in the twelve booths beneath the Last Supper scene. The twelve booths corresponded to the twelve apostles, though who was who and how Schlingensief had assigned the films remained unclear. Each film had its own booth, and each booth its own projector. The length of the loops determined how many rolls of film ran. Schlingensief deliberately exposed the film to dust, and hence to its destruction. The powerful presence of the projector (the rattling noise, the heat of the light bulb, and the smell of hot celluloid) heightened the involvement of the beholder’s body, physically influencing his or her perception. The small spaces created a mood of intense intimacy, putting the beholder in direct interaction with the filmic image. The shorts focused on the human pursuit of resolution and redemption, a subject that had increasingly been on Schlingensief’s mind ever since he directed Parsifal in Bayreuth; it was also a central theme in The Flying Dutchman. According to Schlingensief, the flying Dutchman sought an image that would redeem him, without ever finding it. Senta (the central female character in Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman), the woman who loved him, likewise had an image she wished to see fulfilled, which brought her no happiness. The protagonists of the twelve black-and-white films are actors like Karin Witt and Klaus Beyer with whom Schlingensief had worked for years in his theatrical, opera, and film projects. As in much of his work, one motif emerges from the other. No beginning; no end. The images are like those in a dream, from a different time and yet recognizably made just now: timeless. Karin Witt, playing the role of Senta, appears in the jungle, as a petite bride next to indigenous peoples, or as a fertility goddess buried beneath fish. Other scenes include a Brazilian child, wearing a bashful smile, standing in the jungle; an old Brazilian man on the beach, holding a mirror reflecting the camera and Schlingensief behind it; a band of indigenous peoples, their bodies painted and clad in grass skirts, playing flutes on the beach; a large passenger ship traveling up the Amazon. Alternating surges of brightness and darkness, a pulsating image, and cross-fades are characteristic features of these blackand-white films. The viewer frequently receives the impression that Schlingensief is using the camera to capture the sunlight itself, leaving nothing but a blindingly white picture. This effect was achieved by using a 16mm Bolex camera, a model made in the 1930s, robust and particularly wieldy. A small lever on the Bolex enabled Schlingensief to drown the pictures in light or darkness and then bring them back. Schlingensief was fascinated by the Bolex, which he described as a very “palpable” instrument: “You have to wind this camera up by hand, you can select different film speeds, and using a crank you can even shoot
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backward. You can do double exposures and quintuple exposures. The Bolex is simply an instrument straight from my dreams. It forces you to limit yourself in a way that is very productive, since a reel of film only lasts for just over three minutes.”4 Schlingensief accordingly had to switch reels as frequently as every three minutes. The action would not stop, and what happened as he was exchanging the film stock remained untold, swallowed up by darkness. Equally important are the images he does not show, what remains when a bright light is extinguished: the afterglow that creates new images. Schlingensief wanted to activate the afterimages his pictures leave on the beholder’s retina for his art. He worked with the knowledge that images change in our recollection, becoming superimposed on other images, that the images we remember are slowly drained of their color, that remembering also means forgetting. The multiple exposures in his films reflected this awareness, as did the fact that the open roles of film were exposed to the destructive influences of the environment. The dust that accumulated on the films left more and more scratches until the images finally disappeared. Schlingensief did not think that the cinema was a format suitable to the presentation of his films, as he sought to create a more direct relationship between the picture and its beholder. In Munich, he began to work on a new form of presentation that was clearly related to his work as a theater director. Having integrated films into his work for the stage for years, he had learned how to use them in an open scenic space. Works such as his Animatographs (the Animatograph at Neuhardenberg, 2007, as well as Area 7 at Vienna’s Burgtheater, 2006) were already filmic spaces the beholder could enter. “18 Images per Second” was the logical extension of the same idea. He continued to pursue the themes that had appeared in his films and theatrical and operatic work, although his formal language had become starker and clearer. The element of performance had disappeared. He no longer appeared in person, and the installation stood for itself, but as such it also stood in for him. Schlingensief was always present in his works. It was as though his art invited us to enter into the labyrinth of his mind, but without particular consideration for the fact that we had only just come aboard; the machine rattled on, telling us of people, stories, and myths, things he had read and others he had heard, things real and unreal. The attempt to put the images we had seen into a sort of order in our own minds foundered. It all went too fast! And so we immersed ourselves in the stream of images, relished being carried away by it, and later emerged, refreshed. Schlingensief was not interested in the one image, not in the ultimate image; for what mattered to him in the end was the black space between the images, and what comes into being at that moment in the process of beholding. Schlingensief sought to use the black space, the moment of not seeing or the inability to see, to set our inner screens aglow. 1 2 3 4
Christoph Schlingensief in conversation with the author, Manaus, Brazil (Easter 2007). Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.
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KARLHEINZ SCHMID DEAR CHRISTOPH
S
unday, August 22, 2010, eight o’clock. Stunned by the news of your death that came yesterday—in the end, it was a surprise after all—and having slept only a few hours, I gaze into the morning sun, little big Scorpio brother, and find no way forward in my gloom. As though paralyzed, my mind keeps returning to something Bazon Brock made us take to heart: Death must be abolished, this damn mess must stop. Your fiftieth birthday was to be in a few weeks, the opera village project in Africa needed ongoing work, and of course you had hoped to make a personal appearance in Venice next year, where you were to design the German Pavilion at the Biennale. It would have been an honor for you to represent the nation and to irritate it as well, to challenge and provoke.
we went our separate as well as shared ways—you in Oberhausen, I, your senior, in Hanau in Hesse. Boy, the parallels we kept discovering by chance. For a while I thought, pardon my English, that you were shitting me; it wasn’t possible, was it, that there would be someone out there whose biography, at least the milestones, was a virtual carbon copy of mine. These familiar paths running along similar lines no doubt proved a link between us, helping us get through even the rough patches when you would pull stunts from the cornucopia of perfidy, no holds barred, to the limits of what our relationship would bear.
Susanne Gaensheimer, the German curator, now probably has to ask herself whether Schlingensief without Schlingensief isn’t even worse and more impossible than Beuys without Beuys. Alas! Christoph, this damned lung cancer, which you had bravely stood up to since 2008, has torn you away from us much too early. That we will miss you is a lousy formula of mourning I can’t inflict on you even posthumously. But I need you to know up there on Cloud 24, or down there in the fires of Satan, that we already now suspect how great the loss is, how much the international culture scene will suffer because one of its leading initiators and contrarians has made his last exit.
I had to learn that you didn’t mean to hurt me and Gabriele personally—after we had helped you get a well-paid commission to direct a production—that your merciless, borderline, sometimes antisocial, even inhuman methods, not infrequently camouflaged as art, were directed against a system that struck you as questionable. But when you played the role of the smoothly polite son-in-law, be it at the Wagners’ in Bayreuth, be it on the (Berlinale’s) red carpet at home in Berlin, you often gave the impression that you didn’t in fact mind the pomp and circumstance at all. Yes, you were a player on the social stage, and you played people, too, dear Christoph, and before your illness led Gabriele to judge you with a certain leniency, she would often say that a player and cheat like you could not but burn in hell later on. That, she thought, would only be fair.
Months ago, you wrote to me that “these fucking metastases were once again on the advance,” that “these little growth enthusiasts,” to whom you had already had to sacrifice your entire left lung, were up to mischief again, and that yet another chemo had failed to work. In an act of helplessness as much as piety, I took a printout of your e-mail, and unceremoniously pinned it to the wall next to my desk, directly beneath the framed photograph of the vigorously beating organ I had received at the last minute, shortly before your illness was diagnosed, thanks to a heart transplantation. Do you remember, Christoph, how, in 2008, during the first months after your surgery, we exchanged e-mails nonstop, hell-bent on sharing even the most intimate feelings, telling each other to have courage?
But today, one day after your unspeakable exodus from the world of culture, which is saddening to all of us, let us be hopeful and assume that you will end up above—for your recent good deeds, in Africa, if for nothing else. A Burkina Faso indulgence, that is to say. In your book entitled So schön wie hier kann’s im Himmel gar nicht sein! [It couldn’t possibly be as lovely in heaven as it is here!], you made the astonishing admission that there are various rules. “There’s a boundary one must not transgress,” you write on page 175, “lest one open the door to one’s own disintegration.” Little wonder, then, that you—whom many people would describe as an artist ruthlessly possessed by his ideas, including the controversial work with your disabled “freak stars”—were occasionally able to feel your secretly soft heart.
And so today I must write the last page of our correspondence, open a final chapter, by saying farewell. A chainsaw massacre, as it were. But how to pay tribute to you; how to encompass everything you have accomplished, how you stretched, and sometimes overstretched, the narrow idea of art? “Failure as Opportunity”—do you have any idea how much this slogan you propagated has ushered in a new way of thinking? What was weak, what met with little success or none at all—these marks of a loser, which society had once frowned upon, gradually really came to be understood, and not just by your fellow artists, as an opportunity to free life from the normative strictures of daily career rituals and transpose it into a different kind of value register. What was sensational, too, was how you—whose individual projects drew plenty of harsh criticism, including my own—straddled the disciplines and cast off the petit-bourgeois thinking in genres. Film, theater, opera, literature, the visual arts—hand in hand, arm in arm, head to head, or ass to ass. One gaffe after another.
Of all days, on Christmas Eve of 2007—hardly an accident, I would think—you, the bastard, sent a sort of apology to Gabriele and me for an earlier collaboration at Berlin’s Volksbühne that had been most grueling, with a lot of backstabbing on your part. The project, your lines read, had “not exactly been the crowning achievement of my athletic endeavors.” That showed true greatness, quite in contrast with the cowardly retreat you beat in February 2005, something we will not soon forget. It was quite the lesson, and we were beside ourselves. My heart, already weak at the time, was twitching.
And yet we’re both from most upstanding middle-class families, only children both of us, the sons of mothers named Anni who both gave birth to us, seven years apart, exactly on October 24, not knowing we would neither want to be pharmacists nor post office clerks. As narrow-gauge filmmakers, department of Super 8, or as altar boys, censers preferred,
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What remains, dear Christoph, are the profound memories of a man who—like few others— showed us time and again in his untiring creative work, whether it tended toward construction or destruction, what art can do, should be, could be. An existential balancing artist is what you were, a tightrope walker who feared no height—though you always knew that the danger of falling was dialectically tied in with any flight of creative euphoria. Intoxicated with the theatrical productions of life and death, you conducted your noisy acrobatic exercises on this earth or a few feet above, were able to conduct them longer than the severity of your illness had allowed us to expect. Now the time has come for eternal quiet. Away with the megaphone! Silence—silence, too, outside on this Sunday morning shortly after ten. I hope we will see
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each other one day on Cloud 24. Then, Scorpio brother, you can finally answer me these questions: Why was your poison stinger longer than mine? And looking back, were your claw attacks worth it, personally and socially? That’s a balance you still need to draw up. You’re getting detention, Christoph! Affectionately yours, Carlo ELISABETH SCHWEEGER A PERSONAL PERSPECTIVE ON CHRISTOPH SCHLINGENSIEF
KARLHEINZ SCHMID
“T
he great power, however, rests in uncertainty, in the conviction that there are no solutions but only transformations and changes of form … that, to me, is not fatalism, it is a very big yes to life.” (Christoph Schlingensief)
I understand Schlingensief as someone who knew about the world, had a pronounced sense of his mission, and was always on air, always live. It seemed as though he was driven by a duty, a responsibility that cast a spell over everyone he met.
To comprehend Schlingensief in a few sentences, to describe him in a single page strikes me as impossible. His work and he himself were so fascinating because he always acted emotionally and yet was invariably perfectly clear in the use of, and engagement with, the media conditions and communicative abilities of our time. He didn’t speculate, he confuted every expectation, he picked a fight, he didn’t use “coolness” or skepticism to stand aloof. He spoke of opacity and meant authenticity. In this way, his art created forever more interfaces with its environment, inevitably inviting people to interact with it.
Schlingensief’s work has left a deeply profound imprint.
Since the early years of the last century, art has come to work with greater and greater energy on its own boundaries and on dissolving the individual disciplines; in Schlingensief it became an instrument that, no longer requiring interpretation, was instead able to prove itself wrong. Schlingensief thus triggered a turning point at which art must define itself in a new way. His Viennese container project Ausländer raus! [Foreigners Out!] attested to this redefinition of art, in which art in the classical sense failed to recognize itself because it suddenly found itself confronted with forms from reality shows, among other things. Working in the art context, Schlingensief successfully staged an aggressive intervention in political issues by employing form, style, and content in antithetical fashion: “Refuting [Jörg] Haider is impossible; doing a test run of Haider is possible.” Accordingly, the participants in his productions were not always actors but also included people directly affected by an issue: foreigners, former neo-Nazis, disabled people, etc. So he did test runs, as though in a laboratory, of what it means to stigmatize someone and to expel him from the country at the end of the day. Similar ideas drove his project of founding the party Chance 2000 or the Church of Fear. Art became a test laboratory. And it was only logical that he would say about the theater: that’s politics. Schlingensief refused to see art as independent from life. The separation between art and life did not exist for him. In repealing the boundaries between the disciplines of art and the conduct of life, and in the gift that enabled him to use all means the modern world of media put at his disposal with absolute impudence, he turned art into an instrument, even a weapon. It allowed him to take specific stances and to interfere, to broach the issues of the day: that is, to use his art to make a difference in its social context, a form of action that ultimately found its most concrete realization in the opera village project, Remdoogo. This impulse arose out of a conception of freedom he insisted on and claimed for himself. That is why he also permitted himself infringements that seemed to amount to breaches of rules, in the registers of content as well as style, and through them he did not create reality, as the theater is wont to claim it does, but attacked it, turning art into reality and vice versa.
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As theatrical productions of today’s world, informed by German traditions and yet of universal human validity in their moral high-mindedness, his works established a new iconography that tied art most closely to everyday life. He generated new ways of grasping and looking at reality, new interpretations of art: nothing remained untouched in his work—Catholicism encountered the world of consumerism, different cultures collided, morality met immorality, systems were perverted into their opposites, he beat the entertainment industry at its own game and execrated the conventional publicly funded repertoire theater as an entertainment factory. He interwove all devices of art and put them to use. Film, for instance, the artistic means that was second nature to him, a technical instrument beholden to movement that allows for cuts, slashes, contortions, false perspectives, etc., also shaped the aesthetics of his later work, be it on stage, in the art space, in the public sphere, in the book. His art is contradictory, without ideology, open. He shied away from nothing, took what he needed, from Goethe to Immendorf, from Nietzsche to Warhol, from Schönberg to Jelinek, jumbling it up and patching it together into new shapes—a way of working that produced astonishing screenplays, texts, shows, installations. He was a congenial plagiarist, a DJ as well as VJ of art, something he acknowledged frankly and publicly. Truth, in its incredible complexity, rose up before us, and its power to amaze and affect us was ineluctable. Art, he thought, “becomes interesting when we face something we cannot altogether explain.” So it was only logical that Christoph Schlingensief would go to Africa. Working there, he could kick something off, set something in motion, but he clearly recognized his limitations; the language and the different culture, to begin with, were barriers to understanding. Suddenly the only option was trust. Suddenly the only thing to do was to marvel in beauty. He created something, and in so doing engendered movement. And miraculously demonstrated that artistic thinking and action can move mountains and lead to insight, insight of which a self-possession that fights back, that can stand up, can be itself, believes its own ego and the other’s capable. This was most evident in his play Mea Culpa, where he flips death the bird with great serenity, declaring himself the creator of his own life. Schlingensief made us shake and tear at our own perceptions until we were left unnerved, entranced, crazed, amazed. Together with the artist, who, often in the thick of it, acting as moderator, driving force, actor, seducer, took aim at a reality that seemed to have spun out of control. A loving moralist, sickened by the German character, its past and its uncertain future (he once spoke of the putrid smell in Germany), but also by the opacity of the world in general; but which he could never have done, never wanted to do without this world—he simply loved it.
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His “stomach was twisting itself into a knot,” he once called out to me via text message. Every single instance of injustice, every failure of understanding affected him personally, drained his body of its strength. He was like a seismograph, recording everything, needing his art for self-protection, a gifted chronicler of our time who used the means of art to render magnificent liberties (back) to life. GEORG SEESSLEN ART IN FILMS? NO. ART AS FILM
ELISABETH SCHWEEGER
I I will try to answer, in a few words, the question: What is so darn special about the films of Christoph Schlingensief? The first answer is very easy: they are beautiful. That may come as a little surprise, because when they came out, the critics and audience talked about creative chaos, about rebellion, about bad taste, and of course about the potential for scandal. They did not talk a lot about beauty, did they? Christoph Schlingensief’s films were considered the work of a rebellious, slightly messy, slightly uneasy, though very gifted low-budget or now-budget little brother of the great masters of New German Cinema, like Herzog, Wenders, or Fassbinder. And they were considered a link, or let’s say a short-circuit, between trash and art, underground and art house, the aesthetics of DIY-punk and traditional avant-garde. And, let us not forget: they did not have a lot of friends in German film culture then. Christoph Schlingensief’s films were certainly not meant to provoke Hollywood remakes. They were not meant to fit into primetime TV programs. They were not even meant to fulfill the dreams of the Sunday afternoon art-house audience. They were meant right from the beginning as works of art. Usually that does not include a feel-good guarantee. But it does include the category of beauty. An unseen beauty, that is. The reason may be that the beauty of these films does not reveal itself so easily in the codes of film history—though they are full of film history—but more openly in the terms of modern art. So let’s say, and that is already the second answer: Christoph Schlingensief’s film opened the doors of cinema to a series of tendencies and techniques of modern art, beginning with Dadaism and Surrealism, which was already present in the work of Luis Buñuel or Federico Fellini, leading to Pop art, Fluxus, Happening, Situationist art, the Orgies Mysteries Theater of the Vienna School, Abstract Expressionism, reenactment or street art, and including concepts like the Gesamtkunstwerk, the complete or synthetic artwork, or the soziale Plastik [social sculpture] of Joseph Beuys, who was really very influential for Christoph Schlingensief. So we do not have here, like we are used to having, films with art in them, but we have art as film, and “radical art” for that matter. And then, from these two fields of conflict, struggling with the codes of traditional cinema and transforming methods and styles of modern art into cinema, we find two other strong impulses. The first of course is the open if sometimes ironically reflected autobiographic context. Maybe in itself it was a reaction to the heroic biographies of the preceding generation: a petit bourgeois growing up in a more or less happy and loving family, far from the great German Oedipus tale that was present in all political and artistic discourses so far. In every Christoph Schlingensief film we see the child from Oberhausen at play. The second impulse is a close connection with what is called trash movies, mainly American films—for
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example, those by Radley Metzger, Russ Meyer, or Herschell Gordon Lewis, and with the midnight movies of the new Fauves like Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre or George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. I think it was not only the roughness, this daring glance to the other side, and of course the close relationship between filmmakers and their audience that influenced Christoph Schlingensief, but also the fact that these masters of exploitation had developed a code of cinematic representation of the body, of pain and rage, that denied all Hollywood masquerades and myths. Now, these are the four sources of what I called, strangely enough, the beauty of Christoph Schlingensief’s films: the struggle with traditions, codes and conventions of filmmaking, the influence of modern art, the strain of magic autobiography, and the codes of open secrets in what are called trash movies. These four elements find themselves put together in a form of composition that is in turn centered around, let’s say, two strange attractors. Number one: the myths of Christianity, often filtered through the autobiographical experience and not nearly as blasphemous or fishing for cheap thrills as some of the critics would have it, but in a very direct form of embodiment, of reenactment. Number two: the myths of German history, from fascism to the fall of the Berlin Wall. And these political aspects of the films in particular lead us to the center of this conceptual art of embodiment. It is not about showing something. It is not about documenting something. It is not about sharing ideas, formulating images of dissidence. But it is, exactly what would be realized in his later work for other media, for the stage, even for public places, about acting it out. Bringing it to a bodily performance. Living it. Right in front of the camera. That is, of course, a very strange, very unique connection between religious and political, artistic and social impulses. And that is the third answer to our question: Christoph Schlingensief’s films bring together, not without conflict, very different codes, very different zones, very different image / language units of our social life. There are no borders between politics, religion, intimacy (including sexuality), and representation. And that is, I think, what radical art is all about. II Rainer Werner Fassbinder once replied, when he was asked what his films were about, that he made films not about something but with something. He made films with lighting, with people, with places, with words, and so on. And that is the case even more in the films of Christoph Schlingensief: we see what a film is made with. Usually, discussing a film, you begin with plot, characters, style, and perhaps meaning. But there are some films where this kind of discussion does not make very much sense. Maybe we can go a little deeper, treating even more fundamental elements of filmmaking: space, time, and subject. Subject not in the sense of theme or motive, but in a strictly grammatical sense: what is I? How do we construct a we? And so on. The spaces in Christoph Schlingensief’s films are easily described: it’s a sort of urban niche, a wasteland, a place where children used to play, sometimes forbidden, games, somewhat
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forgotten, archaic places where human codes are negated. Again, there are autobiographic subtexts, again there are Christian and political metaphors at work. “It is not we who construct the space, the space constructs us,” was what he said, and we can see his films as models of space constructing subjects. Time in Christoph Schlingensief’s film is far away from the usual grammar that reaches from “once upon a time” to “it happened yesterday.” It’s pure present. It is even not a “happening” but a going-on. This is the time in a Schlingensief film: something is going on. Always now. When we met at his Munich exhibition at Haus der Kunst, Christoph showed me around. And there was this arrangement of projected films, complete with a lot of things memorializing his childhood. And you could see the film as a material literally getting weary, getting wrecked, dying at the end, being reanimated, and dying again. And it seemed perfectly clear to me what a film was in this context. A living being. I think we can understand Christoph Schlingensief’s films by seeing them as living beings, including the possibility of changing, of being a little absent, getting lost and being found again, leaving traces, and so on. So they reflect time in another way, not in themselves but in their connection with the spectator. That, of course, is the same thing social sculpture intends. Subjects in a Schlingensief film are not persons in the sense of psychological realism, complete with back stories, plausible reactions, everyday behaviors; nor are they mythic figures, as familiar from genre films, like heroes, heavies, sidekicks, and so on. They are artists in their own right, acting something out or reenacting something, including rage, pain, despair. What we see is not I, not we, but a kind of you. It’s neither make-believe nor identification, but dialogue. And that kind of a cinematic “you” is a utopian view that can be found in works as different as those of Godard, Pasolini, and Alexander Kluge. The actors, or the artists participating in this acting-out and reenactment, are moved around in these places in a way that is neither dance—choreography—nor a staging of action and reaction; maybe we could call it some kind of roundel. That is a form of dance in which the individual is taken away by the movement of others, in a chasing or fleeing, one of the archetypal movements of film, but also in the sense of a death dance, which is a very deeply rooted form of representation of society especially in German culture. Maybe the death dance is overshadowed by the presence of death, impersonated in a living skeleton, but it is also meant as a dance of life, giving the participants the opportunity to act out their social roles, the bourgeois, the maiden, the priest, the soldier, and so on. In this roundel or death dance everyone has his opportunity to perform, to act out, and then move on.
in the desert where they can sort things out, rest a little, talk a little, even make love or kill each other. Of course there are also many recurring motifs in Schlingensief’s films, first of all acting out images of German history, or let’s say, sub-history. It all begins with taking the myths literally or pictorially, from Hitler being buried in the German subconscious to the cannibalism in German reunification. And there is this recurrent drowning, hiding, searching of film reels. This has a lot to do with its function as a social sculpture and a living being, and it is a direct reflection of film as a subversive, forbidden act. (Of course we all know the story of United Trash, where the reels had to be hidden in order to protect them from the police.) If we understand them as a moving form of what Joseph Beuys called soziale Plastik, social sculpture, then we see Christoph Schlingensief’s films not only as works and as statements but also what Beuys, again, called the “nomadic gesture.” Everything that is happening in them tends to not stay within the frame. Every film by Christoph Schlingensief is at the same time film and anti-film. We see that an impulse to be more than a film, to leave, to destroy the frame, to overcome the deadness of film, is also an impulse of self-destruction. And again we are close to Joseph Beuys, who asserted the union of art and anti-art. Usually, discussing a film you begin by a description of what is going on on the screen. But that is of no use in a Schlingensief film. People moving around in strange places, crying, yelling at each other, being astonished by themselves, acting something out that was buried in themselves or elsewhere, forming strange roundels of chases and flights and so on. Crossing our view. In this case we must describe what is going on inside ourselves. Because in the art of reenactment, embodiment, happening, Situationist or Actionist performance you cannot read a work of art the way we used to learn to read a film in seventies film theory between Marxism, psychoanalysis, and Structuralism; you must participate in a way. And that is my last answer to our question: Christoph Schlingensief’s films foreshadow the nomadic gesture of moving pictures. Leaving the cinema and reaching for life.
III For film to be a living being, as an art of presence, it is necessary to have a reliable stock company or something like a factory, some kind of nomadic family whose members seem not to make a movie but to cross a movie, like nomads crossing some place
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FRANK-WALTER STEINMEIER THE ARTIST OF DEMOCRACY
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t was the opening night of the 2009 Berlinale, and as always during the Berlinale season it was too cold in Berlin, and not even Dieter Kosslick could do anything about that. But he had appointed Christoph Schlingensief to the International Jury—showing once again what committed art in our times can mean and what it can set in motion. Christoph Schlingensief sat at the large table in one corner of the Adagio, in the belly, so to speak, of the Berlinale Palast. On the margins of the whole hubbub, and yet at its center. Amid the Berlin cold, the African warmth of his heart. A member of my staff sat with him, they had known each other for more than ten years, ever since Christoph Schlingensief’s production of Brecht’s Rosa Luxemburg fragment at the Volksbühne in Berlin. I sat down next to him, and we immediately got to talking about his Africa project. A festival hall growing from the inside out, a living space for continents and arts in which the separation of art from non-art would be abolished. What I really wanted to ask him at the time was whether he would not realize the same concept here in Berlin at the Humboldt-Forum. But then he immediately brought up the matter that was closest to his heart: his festival hall for Africa. He spoke about his love for Africa, about the need to do more for culture there, and about a second need: the need to firmly anchor art in society, here as much as there. About how art affects society and what it receives from society, in short: about democracy and art.
A short while ago, we launched an Africa initiative spearheaded by the Foreign Office. The initiative was the immediate fruit of my trips to the continent, from which I had returned with the impression that it was high time to strengthen our involvement there, to help in particular with the establishment of democratic societies, which always also requires the instruments of cultural policy. More specifically, we needed to build schools, set up school broadcasting stations, and ask the Goethe-Institut to increase its efforts there. That evening at the Berlinale, however, Christoph Schlingensief told me that although Goethe was all good and fine, he needed more Marx. Less beautiful speeches and more filthy lucre. From this request, our conversation led us to the question of the responsibility every individual has in his place. His responsibility as an artist, mine as a politician, but both anchored in, and dedicated to, the framework of society. It was a moving evening; an evening that moved me very much because our paths had crossed again after several years, and we were able to start a new conversation that was at bottom an old one: about responsibility and participation. In the national framework, but importantly in the international one as well. But it was also an evening on which, working together, we were able to set something in motion. The very next day I asked my staff to study the situation, to develop proposals, to lend active and practical support to Christoph Schlingensief’s project. A few days after the Berlinale we sat down together one more time, discussed initial proposals, expanded them, and filled in several details, and one year later, when we opened our 2009 conference on cultural issues at the Foreign Office, the package he had wanted for his festival hall had been put together.
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Today, two years later, I can only hope that German foreign policy remains conscious of what we initiated back then, proceeding along the path we charted and enlarging the measures we implemented. I can assure those now in charge that I, in my new function, and the representatives of the opposition in general will not withhold their support of these issues. For that, too, is political responsibility: to have the greater common cause in view and not to abandon it for the sake of egoistic impulses; to live democracy rather than just talk about it. That was, time and again, the point on which we converged in our conversations. In my political language and work, it was the struggle against the egoisms and particular interests in politics, and for shared responsibility. Against a mentality that prizes stinginess above all, against the dangerous view that all will be provided for if everyone looks out for himself. As though a society were an addition of egoisms. That is the point of departure in my political work, and my impression was that it was also one of the driving forces of what Christoph Schlingensief did as an artist. Embedded in his artistic work was the attempt to fight with the weapons of art. To insist on the rights of the individual against the narcissistic excesses as well as humiliations of a society founded on egoisms. In that regard, I see a common thread that begins with 100 Jahre CDU [100 Years of CDU], runs through Chance 2000, and finally leads to the festival hall in Africa. Responsibility, to my mind, is the key term here. Such responsibility is most closely associated with a second aspect that, in my eyes, makes Christoph Schlingensief the artist of democracy. A warmth that comes from the heart, or to use a more neutral term, empathy. In this regard, too, he stands in a great tradition led by the august pioneer of art in democracy, Joseph Beuys. “Everyone ought to be encouraged, really”: that was a Beuys line Christoph Schlingensief quoted in conversation with me on various occasions, indicating that his aim was precisely to expand the concept of art to include all human activity, and expressing his conviction that this view could become the basis for something new and magnificent. Such as the opera village in Africa, which draws its energy from the union of life and art—may it grow and prosper as Christoph Schlingensief’s legacy, his baby. But achieving this aim requires artists and other people—and I explicitly include politicians in this group—to work together in the shared conviction that people must be encouraged to participate, to join forces and pitch in. Policy can and must help to make such collaboration happen, in particular in the fields of cultural and educational programs. That is the fairly precise opposite of a politics that redlines, reprimands, and excludes. That is also why I emphatically reject populist doomsayers and those who prattle on about a Leitkultur, a “guiding culture.” I believe that this is a cynical approach to politics, one that fuses intellectual narrow-mindedness with a lack of empathy. And so it does not seem coincidental to me that these same people displayed the greatest hostility toward Christoph Schlingensief’s works. How they howled when he exclaimed, “Kill Helmut Kohl!” And as Christoph Schlingensief told me with palpable dismay, when he
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approached a painting during a visit to the chancellor’s office in 2009 he was asked not to destroy it. These people took offence at the way his art demanded responsibility and accountability. Quite literally: with the entire Schlingensief family, he demanded accountability, from Kassel to Wolfgangsee, from Vienna to Burkina Faso. It was a long journey, a journey that included moments of wonderful poetic beauty and others full of irritation and the destruction of what seemed indubitable certainties, and ultimately led him to the clarity with which he described the motives for his commitment in Africa. But his was also an art that demanded accountability from those who, buoyed by cynical arrogance, believe themselves superior to others. For cynicism as a way of life works best when we do not take the other person seriously, when we do not accept him for who he is. It was against this cynical coldness that Christoph Schlingensief fought with the African warmth of his heart. Precisely because he bore such a great excess of empathy within himself did he seek to hold others and himself accountable. But not in order to denigrate them; his aim was to make a different, a better life possible. Also and especially when his art crossed the threshold of pain. The battle he fought was not fought in vain; and it is up to us to live up to this legacy.
FRANK-WALTER STEINMEIER
SANDRA UMATHUM THEATER OF SELF-QUESTIONING: ROCKY DUTSCHKE, ’68, OR THE CHILDREN OF THE REVOLUTION
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hen the Volksbühne reopened under a new directorship in 1992, film director Christoph Schlingensief was brought into the circle of those who had made it their task in post-socialist East Berlin “to observe meticulously, to make—as malignantly as possible—the disease in the national body of Germany the subject matter of theater and to create feelings of uncertainty.” In his luggage, the Catholic son of a pharmacist from the West German town of Oberhausen brought with him much exploitable material from his own biography and postwar history.
in order to give a name to the ambiguity of reality and fiction with which the theater of the 1990s had been so preoccupied. This ambiguity has been internalized as a stylistic device of contemporary theater. But back then it was a challenge, and frequently an overwhelming one, for many theatergoers. The incursion of reality into the theater was an affront, and it was often possible to listen to conversations after a performance that were about little other than whether something had been staged or was the result of chance, mishap, or a spontaneous decision.
His first production, 100 Jahre CDU—Spiel ohne Grenzen [100 Years of CDU—Game without Limits, 1993], showed the “vision of a fascistic madhouse Germany.” In an attempt to recreate the state of chaos in which Germany found itself after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Schlingensief put it all on stage and, in doing so, transformed the stage into a madhouse as well. Faster than any professional television junky could have done, he and his protagonists zapped through the German TV landscape. There were quotations from game and talk shows, news programs, and calls for donations, until the absurdly distorted stage figures overlapped with the various television formats, representatives, and content. The former German president Richard von Weizsäcker sang a song about the lovely Bellevue Palace and stupid Berlin; a UN officer bet that he would be able to paint a Star of David on the window of a Turkish grocery and be back in the studio in ten minutes; victims of a neo-Nazi attack warbled the famous pop song of a children’s charity. Schlingensief served up a mixed bag from which the grimacing visage of the media-generated fun society stared back at the audience.
Schlingensief has explored the generation of undecidable situations and the play with them like no one else. But it wasn’t only that the planned and the unplanned, the invented and the true sometimes became so inextricable that you scarcely knew what to think or how to respond; with Schlingensief, even categories like right and wrong, good and bad were put to the test in such a way that you seemed to lose track of your own value system. He produced disorientation, with the result that his viewers were left to themselves, to their perception, bewilderment, ethics, and doubts, and not least to their understanding of theater itself. Yet Schlingensief never simply delegated this self-questioning to the audience. He also conducted it himself.
The critics panned the production. It was described as a “politically adolescent gaffe.” Its director was certified as having “no talent” and lacking a concept. Schlingensief felt he hadn’t been taken seriously. During the sixth performance he sat in the canteen wondering how the thing could be salvaged. Having got up some Dutch courage, he stormed onto the stage, rammed a syringe into the blood-bag under his shirt, bit on a blood capsule and screamed, “Lights down!” Then he continued, “I am the pharmacist’s son from Oberhausen, and now you’ve got me. You wanted it.” Schlingensief looked bad. He was covered in fake blood from head to foot. With tears in his eyes he began to talk about the death of his grandmother. You could have heard a pin drop in the auditorium. His appearance had apparently unleashed consternation and confusion. Directors are figures rarely seen on stage. They usually only come to the premiere to take their applause. But Schlingensief had his say—and an enigmatic one at that—in his own piece. Was his appearance on stage really a part of the production? Was his emotional outburst real or was he only acting? And was the story true or invented? Schlingensief had set a situation in motion that held the answers to these questions in abeyance. It could all have been simulated. But the possibility that everything was genuine, and that reality had indeed snuck into the theater, provoked the audience into abandoning its aesthetic distance. Schlingensief’s entrance threw everything into confusion. Regardless of whether you were prepared to give credence to his emotions or not, you couldn’t really be sure if he was being sincere. Today, almost two decades later, audiences have long become accustomed to such ambiguous situations, which are a characteristic of postdramatic theater, as Hans-Thies Lehmann has shown. He was one of the first to talk about the “aesthetics of undecidability,”
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Schlingensief’s tearful, bloodstained appearance on stage was the result of a spur-of-themoment decision. But with his next production Kühnen ’94—Bring mir den Kopf von Adolf Hitler! [Kühnen ’94—Bring Me the Head of Adolf Hitler!, 1993], his presence on stage became a significant feature of his theater work. Initially, he was unsure about what to do with theater. But he soon realized that it offered him possibilities that were unavailable to him as a filmmaker. With film there comes a point in the editing room when you have to tie yourself down. Theater, on the other hand, allowed Schlingensief to intervene even after the premiere and to go on reorganizing and altering scenes that had been set during rehearsal. But it wasn’t enough for him to adjust his productions only before or after a performance, so he put himself on stage—as director and actor in one—where he could respond as needed to everyone and everything, and be able to take up and spontaneously deal with anything from the critics to the audience to the activities of his fellow actors, or even his own aimlessness. But this also meant that what had been developed in rehearsal was in danger of being thrown out the next moment. All of a sudden, no one was sure of his or her role, neither Schlingensief himself, nor his actors or audience. In Schlingensief, a director came to the theater who refused to deliver productions as simulated reproductions. He was instead interested in the possibility of situational resetting, of variation, of the surprise effect, and the revelation of what is usually concealed: the gaps, the mistakes, the perplexities, or the moments of failure. During the 1990s, playing with variables became a trademark of Schlingensief’s theater, and with it he revealed what few directors had explicitly dealt with until then: that performances are not only unpredictable, but also singular events, unrepeatable in the sense that the actors are not in the same physical and mental condition each evening and that the audience is always different. Because Schlingensief had abandoned the assumption of exact repetition in favor of difference and uniqueness, it was not uncommon to tell someone about a particularly impressive scene that this person, who had seen the production on another night, hadn’t experienced.
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June 1996: a little more than twenty years after the death of Ulrike Meinhof, and only a few days after the premiere of Rocky Dutschke, ’68—Schlingensief was no longer an unknown entity in Berlin. Several of my friends told me I shouldn’t miss the production. At last, quite a different kind of theater. You could sit on the floor and even actively take part. When we arrived at the forecourt of the Volksbühne, the participatory theater had already begun. Some of those present, easily recognizable as the Volksbühne’s then-typical audience, were sitting on the steps up to the foyer drinking beer and smoking cigarettes, while the others had gathered around a brass band that was marching behind a banner bearing the words: NO POWER FOR ANYONE! Actors dressed as police were calling out various orders into the crowd and busily checking out the area when Schlingensief turned up to present two of the evening’s main protagonists in a kind of twin pack: Rudi Dutschke (1940–79), spokesman of the West German and particularly West Berlin student movement of the 1960s, and himself, master of ceremonies and spokesman of the performance. In an ill-fitting wig, and with a megaphone in his hand, he evoked Dutschke without quite disappearing behind him. The years 1968 and 1996 were curiously brought together in this double role. “To the party headquarters!” yelled Schlingensief / Dutschke into the megaphone and led the audience towards the PDS,1 building at the end of the street, where a banner with the slogan HAVE NO FEAR! was hanging from one of the first-floor windows. The theater police wanted to stop the crowd, but already a few were trying to storm the PDS headquarters. The rest of the crowd looked amused. The theater police refused entry and ensured order. Schlingensief / Dutschke fired two shots, and then everyone went back to the main entrance of the Volksbühne. A second Rudi Dutschke, this time embodied by the actor Sophie Rois, was riding around on a bicycle. Schlingensief bawled into the microphone, “Who wants to shoot Rudi Dutschke this evening? Volunteers come forward!” Then three shots rang out —just like in 1968 on the Kurfürstendamm in Berlin-Charlottenburg, where the eloquent thinker of the political protest movement and the SDS (Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund / Socialist German Student Union) was struck down. Rois / Dutschke fell off her bicycle. Theater nurses hurried over in order to carry the wounded person away. Then the demonstrators were asked to take their seats in the auditorium. Everyone who had come for an evening at the theater had been transformed into actors in a street scene that revived the late 1960s—its political campaigns, demonstrations, and features belonging to the past. The students of 1996, who were now entering the theater in jeans and T-shirts, were putting themselves on display as the heirs to those events whose news-at-a-glance comeback had just been made possible through their participation. Whether you wanted to be or not, you were already part of the picture. Schlingensief had shifted the opening of this production to outside the front doors of the Volksbühne. But that wasn’t all. He had also used this opening for the instantiation of his altered concept of the audience. After 100 Jahre CDU and Kühnen ’94, he had begun to include the spectators as active participants in his productions. This integration of the audience—from which other productions, such as Passion Impossible: 7 Tage Notruf für Deutschland [Passion Impossible: 7 Day Emergency Call for Germany, 1997], Chance 2000 (1998), and Bitte liebt Österreich! [Please Love Austria!, 2000] drew their essential life—began with Rocky
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Dutschke. In this respect, Rocky Dutschke was not simply a turning point. In view of Schlingensief’s attempt to challenge the conventionalized receptive patterns of the audience, it was also a first test run. In the foyer leading into the auditorium, we went past blurred photographs of the rehearsals and the actors. The photos were countered by various quotations: “There are no utopias any more, there is no meaning any more, there is no significance any more, there is only this vacuum, this empty space. We don’t know where we are going in this empty space, how we should move, which direction makes sense. So we act. The play emerges from this.” Or: “There is no accommodation with this world any more; we only belong in it to the extent to which we rebel against it.” These and other quotes from Dutschke, Heiner Müller, Adorno, Wolf Biermann, and others ushered the audience through to the corridor around the auditorium itself. Naked men and women cavorted about on mattresses on the floor—an echo of Kommune 22—while theater police carried out occasional identity checks. A young woman was positioned at the entrance and stamped people’s wrists with the word EINREISE [entry]. The stage designer Bert Neumann had removed all the seating, replacing it with a stand in the middle of the stalls upon which stood a tent and a banner explaining that this somewhat ramshackle installation represented Luckenwalde, the small town in East Germany where the real Dutschke had grown up. At the back of the auditorium there was a lectern. The theatergoers could find themselves a place somewhere on the wide steps of the floor, which had been affixed with narrow yellow-and-black tape bearing the phrase MORE EMOTION! While the audience was filling up the space, on stage the Workers and Veterans Choir of Berlin-Neukölln sang Ernst Busch’s version of “Spaniens Himmel” (The Spanish Sky). A large banner hung from the circle, upon which the central question of the evening was written in large letters: WHO THE FUCK IS RUDI DUTSCHKE? Gradually, the performance itself began. The audience was divided up into different classes: music, geography, and politics. We ended up in the music class and huddled with our fellow pupils on the left of the auditorium, while at the lectern Schlingensief / Dutschke and his ensemble of disabled, amateur, and a few professional actors reenacted the run-up to and opening of the exhibition in Luckenwalde that shortly before—on April 11, 1996, exactly twenty-eight years after the attack on the town’s famous son—had been initiated in remembrance of Dutschke by some dedicated school students. The Volksbühne became Luckenwalde, and the audience everything in one: pupils, visitors to the exhibition, and witnesses to a play located somewhere between plan and improvisation that so relentlessly put its amateurishness on display that its distanced stance could hardly be misunderstood. Rocky Dutschke, it now at least became clear, was not aligning itself with the pupils in Luckenwalde. Unlike them, Schlingensief and his ensemble were clearly not interested in producing a glorifying homage to Dutschke. The homage they paid was to make him the pivotal figure of a revue with political content in the good old Volksbühne tradition from Erwin Piscator to Benno Besson—an act which was neither apotheosis nor genuflection. Instead they used this icon of the Left, his life, and its significance for 1968 primarily as the supplier of images from an era that, as Schlingensief once said, “still had something holy
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about it.” In Rocky Dutschke these images, lodged in the collective memory, served as the pattern for scenes in which the events of the time were reenacted and played out, events which Schlingensief and his ensemble, and large sections of the audience, had not experienced themselves. But this reenactment and playing out had nothing at all to do with realistic imitation. It was much more of an extreme struggle with both the past and, by entering the past, its repercussions in the present. In the permanent oscillation between resignation, plaintiveness, irony, and anger, Rudi—and with him 1968 and its heirs—was put through the ringer in a manner that could perhaps only be undertaken by a younger generation. What happened during the performance can hardly be described in sequence. Sometimes up to three Dutschkes rampaged through the auditorium: portrayed by Rois in a striped T-shirt and open fly button as a hysterical pill popper, by Schlingensief armed with either megaphone or microphone, and / or the actor Bernhard Schütz, who fired sentimental revolutionary compound sentences into the audience in the student leader’s circuitously academic style. At other times, Rois appeared as “Norma” and Schütz in a dress. Dutschke’s mother (Rosemarie Bärhold) complained about how her son had preferred to go to the West instead of into the NVA [Nationale Volksarmee / National People’s Army], and on stage the journey to West Berlin was played out with the participation of the audience. Theatergoers voluntarily or involuntarily placed in the limelight mingled with the ensemble, and suddenly Dutschke’s transit to the West was grotesquely interwoven with 1989. The journey came to an end before the audience really knew what exactly was expected of them. The lights went up; ugly close-ups from an operating theater appeared on a screen above the stage, followed later in the evening by images from a concentration camp. One of Schlingensief’s disabled performers appeared as Wolf Biermann and endlessly strummed a guitar. Rois/Dutschke hammered on a blackboard. Now and then actors yelled “Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh!” through the auditorium, while a woman explained how every year she went with her family to Bergen-Belsen, where her husband recited the names of the six million murdered Jews. Seriousness and slapstick combined in an uneasy symbiosis. A corny joke mingled with an image of torture, the stuttering Dutschke—who after the attack was limited in his ability to articulate himself—was immersed in sentimental television falsity. From the flotsam and jetsam of German history, Schlingensief and his team mounted a synaesthetic frontal attack on the senses. Sometimes one scarcely knew where to look, and whenever it seemed as if it was going to get really funny, embarrassment put a brake on the laughter. From time to time Schlingensief interrupted the performance and explained, with the help of chalk diagrams on a blackboard, what had happened up to that point. “I’ll give you a summary,” he shouted before recapitulating. But instead of providing an answer to the question of how all this material was related and what it had to do with Rudi Dutschke, he explicitly invited the audience to not make connections between the images. In an impassioned attempt to defy arbitrariness and loss of meaning, Schlingensief confronted his audience with both of them. The critics accused this production of all kinds of things. Schlingensief had turned Dutschke into a “halfwit” and produced “ballsy shallowness.” Only a few reviewers took the trouble to look more closely, and only some recognized that with Rocky Dutschke, Schlingensief— defiantly, angrily, but also with tongue-in-cheek zestfulness—was lamenting both the fact
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that the revolution had taken place without him, and that since 1968 a know-it-all paralysis has become widespread. Using theatrical means and a theatrical setting, Schlingensief worked off both circumstances: he reenacted the revolution and, in doing so, produced exercises in de-paralyzation. It was no surprise that such exercises also affected the traditional role of the audience. “The images alone aren’t enough,” said Schlingensief, “you have to feel things, understand them physically.” The time of undisturbed, distanced enjoyment of art was gone. No one asked if you wanted to take part. When one gentleman was required to drop his trousers in order to bath his bottom in milk in the style of an African ritual (and actually did so), it soon became clear that things could become uncomfortable. Following this scene, two of my friends went to sit at the edge of the auditorium in order to be on the safe side. They were well advised. Only ten minutes later Bernhard Schütz stormed up to my boyfriend, of all people, and before he knew what was happening, Schütz had taped his ankles and was dragging him by the arms to the stage. “You’re coming with me!” he screamed. Neither my boyfriend nor I knew how to respond. We weren’t used to being bulldozed in such a way in the theater, a space where events usually only take place in an “as-if” mode. But here this convention was being circumvented. Here the game was suddenly becoming serious. Here someone was really being tied up and couldn’t tell how far things would go. What should we do? Start a discussion? Wave our arms? Scream? Out of the question. We didn’t want to make a bad situation worse. As I was trying to undo the tape, another actor (Astrid Meyerfeldt) came running up. She yelled at my boyfriend, “Why are you putting up with this? Why aren’t you defending yourself?” And while she got involved in a scuffle with Bernhard Schütz, she shouted at the audience, “And you lot? You’d rather gawk than intervene?” The situation then calmed down, but it left a stale aftertaste, and not only because of the shock created by Schütz’s aggressive behavior. It was primarily to do with the fact that both actors had unmasked the audience as compliant spectators. We left the theater towards the end of the performance when Schlingensief was standing in a boxing ring, surrounded by portraits of socialist heroes from Karl Marx to Ché Guevara, and inviting the audience for a free beer. The evening had been strenuous. Schlingensief’s banquet had been difficult to digest and had plunged us into a whirl of contradictory emotions, attitudes, and opinions. Rocky Dutschke had been wonderful and enervating, tiring and exhilarating, profound and banal, ugly and beautiful at once. Schlingensief had not only confronted us—at a rapid pace—with all the clichéd tableau images from 1968, Dutschke’s biography, and East Germany, but also with various chapters from the history of avantgarde theater. It had been an encounter with the past, somewhere between a whale of a time and harassment, which showed that through theory alone, and from a distance, much can become romanticized. We sat for a long time on the steps outside. It wasn’t easy to grasp what we had experienced, and this was certainly one of the reasons why Rocky Dutschke attracted only cursory interest from both critics and theater scholars. How can one talk in a helpfully interpretive way about a work that can’t be dealt with through conventional explanatory models? And how can it be integrated into theatrical discourse when it has thrown all known categorical
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access possibilities overboard? During the mid ’90s, being a critic or a theater scholar still meant reading the theatrical signs, and asking how directors interpret plays and actors their roles. But Rocky Dutschke was not only a celebratory departure from literary theater. It had also radically put the permeability of the fourth wall to the test, along with the rules of role-playing and the standard “as-if” mode characteristic of institutionalized theater. ANTJE VOLLMER It hassled and accosted its audience, some of whom were treated to unpleasant experiences. Schlingensief may have remained silent on the question of who Rudi Dutschke really was, but by approaching the insurgent leader of ’68 using all theatrical means, he became an insurgent himself: a director who has explored the possibilities of theater in multiple directions and who, by thwarting every convention, has contributed to both the establishment of a new aesthetics of the theater and to an altered approach to discursive theater criticism and scholarship. 1
2
The PDS emerged from the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED / Socialist Unity Party of Germany), which renamed itself in February 1990. From July 2005 onwards it was known as Die Linkspartei.PDS (Die Linke.PDS / The Left Party.PDS) until it fused with a new left-wing party, the WASG, on June 16, 2007 to become Die Linke (The Left). Kommune 2 (1967–8) was a commune in Berlin-Charlottenburg that attempted to combine collective living with political activity. Its name was a reference to the recently founded Kommune 1, in contrast to which it was also known as the “political commune.”
SANDRA UMATHUM
CHRISTOPH SCHLINGENSIEF: MYTH AND OVERPAINTING, NEPAL AND PARSIFAL
I There were not many of us who had made the trip to Neuhardenberg to experience Christoph Schlingensief’s open-air course Odin’s Parsipark (2005). A secret society on a bus trip. We were received like a royal delegation of exceptionally knowledgeable experts. Christoph Schlingensief’s vibrant enthusiasm was always the most persuasive Market Gate of Miletus to the archaic world of his images, iconographies, and obsessions. A seducer who could make ice and cynicism melt. He had found something new; he was undergoing an artistic metamorphosis. The era of his actions, which had frequently been read as purely political although they were always intended as more than that, had been exhausted, even in his own view of him self. He had challenged Helmut Kohl and the entire increasingly indolent federal German society by calling for Chance 2000 to be given to the homeless, the jobless, the chanceless. He had unmasked Austria’s respectability by putting cages decorated with the Haider slogan, FOREIGNERS OUT!, and filled with real people on the city’s central square (2000). In his production of Hamlet (2001), he had brought real, existing neo-Nazis on stage, not just demanding that a way be paved for them to return to society but paving that way. With his voodoo magic outside Möllemann’s office, he had painted an exaggerated but acute picture of a politician trying to boost his party in the polls by tapping anti-Semitic resentment (2002). Afterwards it was as though he was in a fever, sensing that he had touched upon larger and buried catastrophes. When his action then led to a debate in the Bundestag over the limits of the permissible, when Möllemann accused Schlingensief of “incitement to murder” and finally fell from the sky after deliberately failing to deploy his parachute, Christoph Schlingensief was profoundly shocked by the prophetic value of Dadaist voodoo actions. Rarely did an artist rely as ruthlessly on the power of art to change reality as he did, absolutely fearless in that regard. But he also knew of the magical power of myth, of its exposed location on the boundary between life and death. II Christoph Schlingensief paid two visits to Nepal, to the city of Bhaktapur. Until recently, Bhaktapur was a place that had fallen out of global time. Set in the shadows of the Himalayas, with medieval lanes filled with guilds and artisans, the city is a grand melting pot of cultural amalgamations that have generated ancient traditions of pilgrimage and trade. Each alley is studded with little altars, small temples, and shrines that honor all the gods: the animist spirits from the mountains and rice paddies of the Newa, the Hindu divinities of the Brahmins, the altars at which Tibetan and Indian Buddhists pray, the golden sanctuaries of the kings of the Kathmandu Valley, the numerologists of the Confucians, and the disconcerting sacrificial rituals of white lambs and black buffaloes chased from the city that derive from the Jewish or the Christian tradition. The undisguised magical-animistic intensity of the sacrificial feasts with their haunting processions of drummers and fertility rituals was at once shocking and fascinating to him. After these impressions, he created the most beautiful film sequences for the grand Grail and sacrifice scene in Parsifal that flickered across the gauze veil concealing the dark stage
ANTJE VOLLMER
before act three opened. Christoph Schlingensief stood at the center in gigantic hoof-like high heels, a horned king at the heart of tragedy, the tumescent song of the he-goats. It was only logical that Christoph Schlingensief would return to Nepal when he was preparing his third grand opera, the Szenen aus dem Leben der Heiligen Johanna [Scenes from the Life of Saint Joan] by Walter Braunfels. That was around the turn of the year 2007/08. This time he went to the river where the Hindus wash and cremate their dead. Shooting, he came so close to the fire that he almost burnt himself; he had long transgressed the bounds of permissible interference with the sacred act. It was here that he created the film sequence “Der König wohnt in mir” [The King Lives Within Me], the head of the dead priest-guru strewn with blossoms from which flames burst forth. It became the breathlessly still opening image of the production, anticipating the death of Joan, with which the opera closes. “Redeem the redeemers at last!” That was the motto the artist Christoph Schlingensief had adopted for his own life. When he returned from this trip, he felt so cold that not even the flames in the fireplace in his own home could warm him up. A few days later, he received his first cancer diagnosis. III Carl-Hans Graf von Hardenberg nearly died at the Neuhardenberg Manor: a few days after July 20, 1944, the SS came to arrest the co-conspirator, and pretending to bid farewell to his wife, he shot himself in the chest. Due to an old battlefield injury, it failed to strike his heart, as did the scissors he grabbed from the hand of the doctor trying to dress his wound that he rammed deep into the wound. Hardenberg barely survived the concentration camp. Nine months later, in April 1945, the vast plain in front of Neuhardenberg, near Seelow Heights, was the site of the last decisive battle before Berlin, with more than fifty thousand soldiers killed. A senseless shedding of blood. In 2005, a long course was laid out in Neuhardenberg for us to walk along, a sort of scavenger hunt that led us past many waypoints, including a small sacrificial altar, as dusk slowly fell over the grounds, until somewhere out there we arrived at a sort of shack. This was the centerpiece of Schlingensief’s arrangement: a concrete silo, a wooden shed, a second stable at Bethlehem. Inside stood the sanctuary: the Animatograph. I have rarely seen Christoph Schlingensief so happy, so aglow from within. The Animatograph—a “walk-on photographic plate” (Schlingensief)—was a small rotating stage on which the visitor could sit down. Multiple projectors showing different films flooded it with pictures blending into each other to create entirely new images. There were episodes from his earlier films, animal portraits from Namibia, sacrificial scenes from Nepal, the Icelandic Odin landscapes, almost all of it in black and white and hues of gray. “Do you see that,” he said, “at last the pictures are generating themselves!” What he fed into the arrangement had become matter, the stuff of images, spectral beings, shimmering substances. The images had come to rule over the artist. He had served them, and now they took control of the direction, creating picture-like phenomena that, barely seen, disappeared into nothingness or blurred into the next sequence. Here was a spherical creative process. Some musicians spend their lives seeking to find the primeval music; Christoph Schlingensief sought the
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primal images, images that are pure artistic energy. Therein lay his affinity for Wagner, whom he understood at once. He never visualized, let alone interpreted, Parsifal. He simply created images the way Wagner created music. They were twins in their quest for another state. Here, on this remote location in Neuhardenberg, this other state emerged on a dark night and disappeared again. It had been proven then: art creates itself. IV This was at bottom always what he sought; it was always how he worked. Nothing could be further from the contemporary director’s theater than his permanent interventions into his own directing, often jumbling everything up. Christoph Schlingensief unswervingly followed his star, leaving everything to the artistic moment, entrusting himself to it. What appeared to be provocation, disruption, confusion was forever only the product of his humility, his almost childlike trust that everything can come into being anew out of the artistic magic of the moment. All that was inflexible, all that was predetermined meant death to him. V I saw him just as happy one more time when, already ravaged by his disease, he spent an entire day with his wife, Aino Laberenz, in the grand Beuys exhibition at Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof. There he crouched, his back against a wall, his arms wrapped around his knees, and saw the promised land: on the large concrete wall across the room, Joseph Beuys met the coyote and welcomed in it the primal ground and the myth of America. Christoph Schlingensief laughed, shook his head, snorted with delight, was consoled. Two kings had seen each other; a greeting passed between them, and recognition.
ANTJE VOLLMER
APPENDIX
CHRISTOPH SCHLINGENSIEF
Christoph Schlingensief was born in Oberhausen on October 24, 1960. At the age of eight, he shot his first film. After subsequent short films, he created his first feature-length film, Tunguska—Die Kisten sind da [Tunguska—The Boxes Have Arrived], in 1984. Films that followed include Menu Total (1985–6), Egomania (1986), Mutters Maske [Mother’s Mask, 1987], the Germany trilogy of 100 Jahre Adolf Hitler—Die letzte Stunde im Führerbunker [100 Years of Adolf Hitler—The Last Hour in the Fuhrerbunker, 1988], Das deutsche Kettensägenmassaker [The German Chainsaw Massacre, 1990], and Terror 2000—Intensivstation Deutschland [Terror 2000—Intensive Station Germany, 1991–2], as well as United Trash (1995–6) and Die 120 Tage von Brottrop [The 120 Days of Bottrop, 1997]. In 1993, Schlingensief directed his first theater production at Volksbühne, Berlin. 100 Jahre CDU—Spiel ohne Grenzen [100 Years of CDU—Game without Limits] was followed by Kühnen ’94—Bring mir den Kopf von Adolf Hitler! [Kühnen ’94—Bring Me the Head of Adolf Hitler!, 1993], Rocky Dutschke (1996), Die Berliner Republik [The Berlin Republic, 1999], Rosebud (2001), ATTA ATTA (2002), Kunst und Gemüse—Theater ALS Krankeit [Art and Vegetables—Theater A(L)S Illness, 2004], and others. Schlingensief directed at almost every major theater in the German-speaking world; his work includes Hamlet (2001), starring neo-Nazis willing to renounce their affiliations, at Schauspielhaus Zürich; Elfriede Jelinek’s Bambiland (2003) at Burgtheater Vienna; and AttabambiPornoland (2004), again at Schauspielhaus. Between 1997 and 2003, Schlingensief worked in television, hosting the shows Talk 2000, U3000, and FREAKSTARS 3000, a series featuring “non-disabled” people. In 1997, he created his first performative project outside the theater context: Mein Filz, mein Fett, mein Hase [My Felt, My Fat, My Hare] at documenta 10, Kassel. In the following year, he founded the political party Chance 2000—Beweise, dass es dich gibt [Chance 2000— Prove That You Exist], which received 56,000 votes in the 1998 German Bundestag elections. During the 2000 Vienna Festival, Schlingensief held the container action Bitte liebt Österreich [Please Love Austria]. In 2003, he participated in the 50th Venice Biennale with Church of Fear which he also presented at Museum Ludwig, Cologne, in 2005. In 2007, he realized the exhibition “18 Images per Second” at Haus der Kunst, Munich. In 2004, Schlingensief started directing operas including
CHRISTOPH SCHLINGENSIEF
Parsifal at the Bayreuth Festival (2004–7) and The Flying Dutchman at Teatro Amazonas in Manaus, Brazil. The rotating stage Schlingensief developed for Parsifal also served as a prototype for the Animatograph, which was first deployed during the 2005 Reykjavik Art Festival, Iceland. After stops in Neuhardenberg and Namibia (both 2005), the Animatograph was included in Kaprow City at Volksbühne, Berlin (2006), and in Area 7 at Burgtheater, Vienna (2007). When he was diagnosed with cancer in 2008, Christoph Schlingensief tackled his illness head-on in his production Der Zwischenstand der Dinge [The Intermediate State of Affairs] at the Maxim Gorki Theater, Berlin (2008); the Fluxus oratorio Eine Kirche der Angst vor dem Fremden in mir [A Church of Fear vs. the Alien Within], which premiered in 2008 as part of the Ruhrtriennale festival; the readymade opera Mea Culpa at Burgtheater, Vienna (2009); and Sterben lernen—Herr Andersen stirbt in 60 Minuten [Learning to Die—Mr. Andersen Dies in 60 Minutes], a coproduction of Neumarkttheater and Schauspielhaus, both Zurich. In 2008, Schlingensief developed the idea of Remdoogo, a festival hall for Africa, which he conceived with the Burkinabè architect Francis Kéré. The groundbreaking ceremony was held on February 8, 2010. His final work for the stage, Via Intolleranza II (2010), was created in collaboration with artists from Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso. In May 2010, Susanne Gaensheimer invited Christoph Schlingensief to exhibit at the German Pavilion of the 54th Venice Biennale, 2011. The present volume documents his plans for the pavilion. In light of his death, Gaensheimer has realized an exhibition of existing works by Schlingensief. Christoph Schlingensief was professor of Fine Art at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Braunschweig. He received numerous distinctions, including the 2010 Helmut Käutner Award and the 2011 Hein Heckroth Stage Award. In 2010, the Filmmuseum Düsseldorf honored him with a retrospective of his filmic oeuvre. A second filmic retrospective was organized by Filmgalerie 451 at Kino Babylon, Berlin, between 2010 and 2011. On numerous occasions, Schlingensief was invited to include his productions in the Berliner Theatertreffen; in 2011, after his death, Via Intolleranza II was also part of that festival. Christoph Schlingensief died in Berlin on August 21, 2010.
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THE AUTHORS
ELKE AUS DEM MOORE is director of the Visual Arts Department at the Institute of Foreign Cultural Relations (ifa).
SCHORSCH KAMERUN is a musician, author, and stage director. He lives in Hamburg.
HELKE BAYRLE is a filmmaker and lives in Frankfurt am Main.
ALEXANDER KLUGE is a filmmaker and writer. He lives in Munich.
KLAUS BIESENBACH is a curator and the director of MoMA PS1, New York.
DIETRICH KUHLBRODT is a lawyer, author, and actor. He lives in Hamburg.
JOHN BOCK is an artist and lives in Berlin.
AINO LABERENZ is a costume designer. She and Christoph Schlingensief married in 2009.
FRANK CASTORF is the stage director and artistic director of the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, Berlin. THOMAS DEMAND is an artist and lives in Berlin and Los Angeles. CHRIS DERCON is a curator and the director of the Tate Modern, London. DIEDRICH DIEDERICHSEN is a cultural scholar and critic. He lives in Berlin. SUSANNE GAENSHEIMER is director of the MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, and curator of the German Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale, 2011. BORIS GROYS is an art critic and professor of aesthetics, philosophy, and media theory at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design. CARL HEGEMANN longtime dramaturge at the Volksbühne, Berlin, regularly worked with Christoph Schlingensief starting in 1997. He has been professor of dramaturgy at the University of Music and Theater, Leipzig, since 2006. IRM HERMANN is a stage and screen actress and lives in Berlin. JOHANNES HOFF is a theologian and teaches systematic and philosophical theology at the University of Wales. ANDY HOPE 1930 is an artist and lives in Berlin. ELFRIEDE JELINEK is a writer and lives in Munich and Vienna.
THE AUTHORS
TORSTEN LEMMER was a producer of radical right-wing music and represented a breakaway faction of Die Republikaner in the Düsseldorf city council. He left the right-wing scene in 2001 and has since spoken out against racism and right-wing violence. MATTHIAS LILIENTHAL is the dramaturge and artistic director of the Hebbel am Ufer / HAU, Berlin.
STEPHANIE ROSENTHAL is chief curator at the Hayward Gallery, London. KARLHEINZ SCHMID is a journalist and publisher of KUNSTZEITUNG. ELISABETH SCHWEEGER is artistic director of the KunstFestSpiele Herrenhausen, Hanover. GEORG SEESSLEN is an author and film critic. He lives in Kaufbeuren. FRANK-WALTER STEINMEIER is chairman of the Social Democratic Party of Germany in the Bundestag. SANDRA UMATHUM is a theater scholar and a visiting professor in the Department of Dramaturgy at the University of Music and Theater, Leipzig. ANTJE VOLLMER is a journalist and was vice president of the German Bundestag until 2005.
JONATHAN MEESE is an artist and lives in Berlin. THOMAS MEINECKE is a musician and author. He lives in Eurasburg, Bavaria. MICHAELA MELIÁN is a musician and visual artist. She lives in Eurasburg, Bavaria. KLAUS MERTES is principal of the Canisius-Kolleg, Berlin. EVA MEYER-HERMANN is a freelance curator. She lives in Cologne. WERNER NEKES is a film director and lives in Mülheim an der Ruhr. HANS ULRICH OBRIST is a curator and the co-director of the Serpentine Gallery, London. PETER RAUE is an attorney and a patron of the arts. He lives in Berlin. CHARLOTTE ROCHE is an author, singer, and moderator. She lives in Cologne.
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IMAGE CREDITS
Cover, 60–62, 256 6–7, 128 (top), 129 (top), 130, 131, 132 (top), 133 198 (bottom right), 366–67 28 30–53 67–99 67, 73, 79, 83, 89 95 106, 118, 119 107, 114 (bottom) 108, 111 (bottom), 113 (bottom), 114 (top) 63, 109 (top), 110, 111 (top), 112 (top), 115 (bottom) 116 (top), 198 (center right), 208 113 (top), 115 (top) 109 (bottom) 112 (bottom), 117, 128 (center, bottom) 129 (center, bottom), 132 (bottom), 253 116 (bottom) 137 156–57 159 198 (top left) 198 (top right) 198 (center left) 198 (bottom left) 210 238 (bottom) 242 269 272 284 315 318
IMAGE CREDITS / TEXT CREDITS
TEXT CREDITS
© David Baltzer / bildbuehne.de © Georg Soulek
165–68
© Heta Multanen © Roman Mensing, artdoc.de in collaboration with Thorsten Arendt, artdoc.de © Filmgalerie 451, Christoph Schlingensief © Filmgalerie 451, Design: Carmen Brucic © Filmgalerie 451, Design: Assmann / Stock © Thomas Goerge © Thomas Goerge, Francis Kéré © Francis Kéré © Christoph Schlingensief
169–71
© Christoph Schlingensief, Aino Laberenz © Perfect Shot Films © Aino Laberenz © Sibylle Dahrendorf © Helke Bayrle © Marcus Leith © Jan Windszus © Gudrun F. Widlok © Ahoi Media © Bayreuther Festspiele GmbH / Jochen Quast © David Gierth © Margarita Broich © Katja Eichbaum © Christoph Schlingensief, Walter Lenertz, Alexander Kluge © Jan Bauer © Franz Bergmann © Eva Meyer-Hermann © Aino Laberenz, overpainting by Charlotte Roche © Wilfried Petzi, Haus der Kunst
191–96 241–44
259–65
297–307
323–26 341–48
Based on an interview with Frank Castorf by Maria Seifert (ORF Austrian Broadcasting) on August 23, 2010. © 1958 by Hannah Arendt Bluecher Literary Trust. Permission by Mohrbooks AG, Zurich. A German version of this text was first published in Lettre International 90 (2010). A German version of this text was first published in: Alexander Kluge, Das Bohren harter Bretter: 133 politische Geschichten (Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2011). The conversation between Matthias Lilienthal and Franz Wille was conducted in September 2010 and first appeared in print in the magazine Theater heute (October 2010). This interview was conducted during the Marathon Talk Prelude: Spaceship Berlin at Hebbel am Ufer / HAU Berlin, on November 1, 2008, as part of the festival Fressen oder fliegen. Art into Theatre—Theatre into Art. A German version of this text was first published in KUNSTZEITUNG 169 (2010). This text is an edited version of “Theatre of Self-questioning: Rocky Dutschke, ’68, or the Children of the Revolution,” in Christoph Schlingensief: Art without Border, eds. Tara Forrest and Anna Scheer (Bristol: intellect, 2010), 57–70. Translated from German by Michael Turnbull.
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FILM CREDITS
A Church of Fear vs. the Alien Within Concept / Direction: Christoph Schlingensief; Stage Design: Thomas Goerge, Thekla von Mülheim; Costumes: Aino Laberenz; Lighting: Voxi Bärenklau; Film Editing / Video: Heta Multanen; Sound: David Gierth; Dramaturgy: Carl Hegemann. With: Margit Carstensen, Angela Winkler / Anne Tismer, Mira Partecke, Komi Mizrajim Togbonou, Stefan Kolosko, Karin Witt, Horst Gelonnek, Kerstin Grassmann, Norbert Müller, Achim von Paczensky, Klaus Beyer; Singers: Friederike Harmsen, Ulrike Eidinger; Composition / Percussion: Michael Wertmüller; Répétiteur / Organ: Dominik Blum; Gospel Choir: Angels Voices and Children’s Choir of the Aalto-Theater under the direction of Alexander Eberle. A production of the Ruhtriennale. World Premiere on September 21, 2008 in Duisburg. 16mm-Projections from A Church of Fear vs. the Alien Within Camera: Christoph Schlingensief, Voxi Bärenklau, Heta Multanen; Editing: Christoph Schlingensief, Heta Multanen; Lighting: Voxi Bärenklau; Scenography: Thomas Goerge; Costumes: Aino Laberenz. Included in these films is footage created for previous productions: Camera / Editing: Walter Lenertz, Meika Dresenkamp, Kathrin Krottenthaler, Hermann-Josef Schlingensief Via Intolleranza II Concept / Direction: Christoph Schlingensief; Stage Design: Thekla von Mülheim, Christian Schlechter; Costumes: Aino Laberenz; Lighting: Voxi Bärenklau, Michael Dietze; Film Editing / Video: Meika Dresenkamp; Sound: David Gierth; Dramaturgy: Anna Heesen, Carl Hegemann. With: Brigitte Cuvelier, Kerstin Graßmann, Mamounata “Kandy” Guira, Friederike Harmsen, Claudia Sgarbi, Isabelle Tassembedo, Jean Marie Gomzoudou Boucougou, Jean Chaize, Issoufou Kienou, Stefan Kolosko, Amado Komi, Johannes Lauer, Ahmed Soura, Nicolas Ulrich Severin Tounga, Abdoul Kader Traore, Wilfried Zoungrana. A production of Festspielhaus Afrika gGmbH, in coproduction with Kampnagel, Hamburg; Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Brussels; and the Bayerische Staatsoper, Munich. In cooperation with Burgtheater, Vienna; Impulstanz; and the Festwochen, Vienna. World Premiere on May 15, 2010 in Brussels. Menu Total Direction / Script / Camera: Christoph Schlingensief; Editing: Eva Will; Music: Helge Schneider. With: Helge Schneider, Wolfgang Bertzky, Alfred Edel, Dietrich Kuhlbrodt; Production: Christoph Schlingensief; In Production: May 1985; Production Location: Mülheim and surroundings (Speldorf, Zeche, Rosendelle);
FILM CREDITS
Length: 81 min.; Format: 16mm; black and white © Filmgalerie 451 Egomania—Island without Hope Direction: Christoph Schlingensief; Camera: Dominik Probst; Editing: Christoph Schlingensief; Music: Tom Dokupil, Christoph Schlingensief, Helge Schneider, Ella Johson. With: Udo Kier, Tilda Swinton, Uwe Fellensiek; Production: Christoph Schlingensief; In Production: March 1986; Production Location: Hallig Langeneß, Hamburg; Length: 84 min.; Format: 16mm; Color © Filmgalerie 451 100 Years of Adolf Hitler—The Last Hour in the Fuhrerbunker Direction / Script: Christoph Schlingensief; Camera: Voxi Bärenklau; Editing: Christoph Schlingensief; Music: Tom Dokupil. With: Volker Spengler, Brigitte Kausch, Margit Carstensen, Dietrich Kuhlbrodt, Alfred Edel, Udo Kier; In Production: 11/28/1988 (8:30 a.m.) –11/29/1988 (2:30 a.m.); Production Location: Mülheim (Bergstraße Bunker); Length: 60 min.; Format: 16mm; black and white © Filmgalerie 451 The German Chainsaw Massacre—The First Hour of Renunification Direction / Script: Christoph Schlingensief; Camera: Christoph Schlingensief, Voxi Bärenklau; Editing: Ariane Traub; Music: Jacques Arr. With: Karina Fallenstein, Susanne Bredehöft, Artur Albrecht, Volker Spengler, Alfred Edel, Brigitte Kausch, Dietrich Kuhlbrodt, Reinald Schnell, Udo Kier, Irm Hermann, Eva Maria Kurz, Ingrid Raguschke, Mike Wiedemann; Scenography: Uli Hanisch; Assistant Director: Udo Kier; Production Location: Duisburg; Length: 63 min.; Format: 16mm; black and white © Filmgalerie 451 Terror 2000—Intensive Station Germany Direction: Christoph Schlingensief; Script: Oskar Roehler, Uli Hanisch, Christoph Schlingensief; Camera: Reinhard Köcher; Editing: Bettina Böhler; Music: Kambzi Giahi, Jaques Arr. With: Margit Carstensen, Peter Kern, Susanne Bredehöft, Alfred Edel, Dietrich Kuhlbrodt, Udo Kier; Scenography: Uli Hanisch; Production Coordination: Renée Gundlach; Production: Christoph Schlingensief; Production Location: NVA Barracks Massow, near Teupitz, 30 km from Berlin; Length: 79 min.; Format: 16mm; Color © Filmgalerie 451
Christoph Schlingensief, Oskar Roehler; Editing: Andreas Schumacher. With: Udo Kier, Kitten Natividad, Joachim Tomaschewsky, Johanny Pfeiffer; Production: Christoph Schlingensief; Production Location: Harare, Zimbabwe; Length: 79 min.; Format: 35mm; Color © Filmgalerie 451 Interview Film Direction / Interview: Frieder Schlaich; Camera: Elfi Mikesch; Editing: Robert Kummer; In Production: 5/1/2002; Production Location: Massow; Length: 77 min.; Color © Filmgalerie 451 Remdoogo—An Opera Village in Burkina Faso: The Search Travels with Christoph Schlingensief to Cameroon, Mozambique, and Burkina Faso, in search of a site for an opera house. From January 2009 until summer 2010. A 15 minute selection of documentary footage from the construction of the opera village to the opening of the school in fall 2011. Distribution: Filmgalerie 451, Frieder Schlaich; With: Christoph Schlingensief, Francis Kéré, Celina Nicolay, Aino Laberenz, Peter Anders, Matthias Lilienthal, Henning Mankell, Thomas Goerge, Meika Dresenkamp, Gaston Kaboré, Irene Tassembedo, and many others. A film by: Sibylle Dahrendorf, Ingo Brunner, Phil Thornau, Christoph Krauss, Bianka Schulze, Oliver Karsitz, Mohamed Yameogo, Lena Trunk, Michael Bogár and many others. © Sibylle Dahrendorf, Michael Bogár, Perfect Shot Films 2010 Panorama-Projection Camera / Editing: Lionel Some, Burkina Faso, 2011 In Search Of Camera: Christoph Schlingensief; Editing: Aino Laberenz, Constantin Hartenstein
United Trash Direction / Camera: Christoph Schlingensief; Script:
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THE EDITOR WOULD LIKE TO THANK
This book was published on the occasion of the exhibition of works by Christoph Schlingensief at the German Pavilion, 54th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, June 4–November 27, 2011.
Christoph Schlingensief
GERMAN PAVILION Curator: Susanne Gaensheimer Artistic Consultation: Aino Laberenz Dramaturgy: Carl Hegemann Stage Design: Thomas Goerge Light Design: Voxi Bärenklau Film Editing and Video: Heta Multanen Film Program: Filmgalerie 451 / Frieder Schlaich, Constantin Hartenstein Press and Communication: Bureau Mueller / Markus Müller, Ulrike Bretschneider, James Thomas Project Management: Christine Kaiser Schlingensief Office: Meike Fischer Technical Realization: Ruhrtriennale / Joachim Janner, Harald Frings Architectural Supervision: Clemens Kusch, Martin Weigert Assistant in Venice: Natasa Radovic Project Coordination until December 2010: Eugenia Teixeira Commissioner: Federal Foreign Office in collaboration with the Institute of Foreign Cultural Relations (ifa) Partners: Goethe-Institut, AXA Art Insurance, MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main, Friends of Museum Folkwang Essen, Bionade Media Partner: Deutsche Welle DW-TV Graphic Design: Double Standards, Berlin PUBLICATION Edited by: Susanne Gaensheimer With the Assistance of: Eva Huttenlauch Copyediting: Leah Whitman-Salkin Translation: Gerrit Jackson Transcriptions: Clemens Krümmel Image Research and Consultation: Patrick Hilss Installation Documentation: Roman Mensing, artdoc.de, in collaboration with Thorsten Arendt, artdoc.de Graphic Design: Double Standards, Berlin Printing and Binding: GGP Media GmbH, Pößneck
COLOPHON
Sternberg Press Caroline Schneider Karl-Marx-Allee 78 D-10243 Berlin www.sternberg-press.com ISBN 978-1-934105-42-9 All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. The following catalogue— including all texts, contributions, photographs, and other image material—is copyright protected. Any use or reproduction of the contents or images is strictly prohibited. Every effort has been made to contact the rightful owners with regards to copyright and permissions. We apologize for any inadvertent errors or omissions. For queries regarding copyrights, please contact
[email protected] © German Pavilion, 54th Venice Biennale, 2011, Estate Christoph Schlingensief, Courtesy Hauser & Wirth, Ruhrtriennale, Thyssen Bornemisza Art Contemporary © Legal Succession Christoph Schlingensief: Aino Laberenz © All Feature Films: Christoph Schlingensief, Filmgalerie 451 © The Photographers © The Authors © 2011 Sternberg Press
Voxi Bärenklau Florian Berktold Klaus Biesenbach Michael Bogár Ulrike Bretschneider Claudia Buhmann Oliver Canis Bice Curiger Sibylle Dahrendorf Willy Decker Chris Dercon Norbert Draszanowski Leonhard Emmerling Tomas Ewald Harald Falckenberg Hartwig Fischer Meike Fischer Harald Frings Peter Gauweiler Christine Gemmer Thomas Goerge Monika Grütters Tatjana Günthner Constantin Hartenstein Carl Hegemann Hans Friedrich Heimann Hans Markus Heimann Margarethe Franziska Heimann Michael Helmbold Christina Henneke Patrick Hilss Stefan Horsthemke Eva Huttenlauch Gerrit Jackson Joachim Janner Alex Jovanovic Christine Kaiser Francis Kéré Alexander Kluge
Bianca Knall Hans-Georg Knopp Stephanie Kratz Clemens Krümmel Martin Kurz Clemens Kusch Aino Laberenz Klaus-Dieter Lehmann Matthias Lilienthal Helge Malchow Roman Mensing Elke aus dem Moore Markus Müller Heta Multanen Hans Ulrich Obrist Brigitte and Arend Oetker Ludwig von Otting Cornelia Pieper Chris Rehberger Petra Roth Nicolaus Schafhausen Friedolf Schiek Frieder Schlaich Christian Schlechter Rosa Schmitt-Neubauer Caroline Schneider Robin Schönefeld Elisabeth Schweeger Felix Semmelroth Lionel Some Ulrike Sommer James Thomas Rainer Traube Regine Rack Natasa Radovic Oliver Reese Andreas M. Vitt Martin Weigert Leah Whitman-Salkin Iwan and Manuela Wirth And all the authors
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Via Intolleranza II, Arsenal, Vienna, June 12, 2010
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