figura cuncta videntis

FCV_Kern_PLOTTKORR_20101108.indd 1 09.11.10 09:38 FCV_Kern_PLOTTKORR_20101108.indd 2 09.11.10 09:38 thyssen-bornemisza a r t contemporary F i g u r a c u n c ta v i d e n t i- the all-seeing eye / : homage to ­christoph s schlingensief

verl ag der buchhandlung Edited by eva ebersberg er walther könig, köln and daniel a zyman

FCV_Kern_PLOTTKORR_20101108.indd 3 09.11.10 09:38 table of contents

7 work in transit 2 8 christoph Animatograph – f r a ncesca von habsburg schlingensief I c e l a n d Edition (House of Parliament / 9 R ising from the House of Obsession) ­Ashes of Live A rt da niel a zym a n 31 Burrowing into the ­G lobal ­Context : ­Schlingensief ’s ­Animatograph , Read through 16 P e r f o r m ! A ristotle and Hegel A ndr eas Schl a eg el mirja m schaub 53 first A id K it for Deeper Meaning Alex a nder Klug e in Con v ersation w ith ­Chr istoph Schling ensief

58 palli W.D.M. (The Walt banine Disney Massacre)

66 jonathan Jonathan Meese meese ist Mutter Parzival

71 Parsifal’s New Voices . Jonathan Meese’s Performance and the History of the My th A ENE AS bastia n

79 a Conversation ­between Jonathan Meese and the ­Philosopher Slavoj Žižek

FCV_Kern_PLOTTKORR_20101108.indd 4 09.11.10 09:38 84 ragnar The End 130 john bock Malträtierte kjartansson Fregatte 86 The End – Rock y Mountains 135 the Ballad of the Undead M a rk ús Þór A ndr ésson da niel a zym a n

92 CHICKS ON SPEED 1 4 4 Anetta Mona Chişa AND DOUGLAS GORDON and ­Lucia Tkáčová Af ter WITH CHRISTOPHER ART the Order JUST RULES! 1 49 the Rules of the 9 7 A performance is G ame while Playing it ­always happening R aluca Voine a a . l . steiner

15 4 n e v i n Hochparterre , 104 dan graham, tony aladaĞ Himmelpfortgasse oursler and ­laurent Wien p. berger featuring japanther and the 156 Talking Streets, Crossing Lives G udrun A nk ele ­huber marionettes Don’t Trust Anyone over Thirty 109 Ecstasy and Abstraction. Dan 162 gregor 19 – 20:30 Uhr G raham’s ­Description of ­Counter schneider 31.05.2007 Culture in Rock My Religion und Don’t Trust Anyone over Thirty 167 waiting for Schneider. Diedr ich Dieder ichsen A Conversation between G regor Schneider and Susanne ­Pfeffer That Didn’t Take Place 116 japanther It Never Seems to End 172 authors’ and ­A rtists’ Biographies 1 21 The Dilemma of the Rock Rebel ; or, How Dan ­G raham’s Champion Juicer 182 colophon Plays Center Stage in Con v ersation with ja pa nther

FCV_Kern_PLOTTKORR_20101108.indd 5 09.11.10 09:38 FCV_Kern_PLOTTKORR_20101108.indd 6 09.11.10 09:38 Work in transit my desktop. I was dizzy with excitement! A Fr ancesca von Habsburg project was born, and while sometimes I wait respectfully for months (even years) for some When Christoph Schlingensief first artists to become available and then conceive walked into the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art and develop their projects, here was one that I Contemporary offices in Vienna in the winter could absolutely see happening immediately. of 2004, I don’t believe that he really knew At the very same time, I was planning my next where he was, who I was, and certainly not trip to Iceland in January 2005 and had heard what the T-B A21 foundation does! But it about the appointment of Jessica Morgan of seems that his instincts were right on target. the as curator of the Reykjavík He works very spontaneously, but at the same Arts Festival, which was conceived around the time nothing about his work is not deeply Dieter Roth retrospective at Reykjavík’s two considered in his mind, which races at the major museums, the National Gallery of Iceland most extraordinary speed. He rushed me and the Reykjavík Art Museum/Hafnarhus. A through two hours of a stream of images, perfect combination of coincidences started video clips, entire acts of Richard Wagner’s to push the Animatograph into its first journey. Parsifal with music, from one continent to What better company could Schlingensief the next, jumping back and forth, developing have for his art installation than Roth and his ideas through a visual language that left some of the new-generation artists whose me aghast! His seductive charm, together work he certainly had some influence over, with the “tourbillion” of images and ideas, fit such as John Bock and Jonathan Meese? He perfectly together with a language that I had liked the idea very much, and a month later been learning recently through the production we were scouting about Iceland. Braving the of the puppet rock opera Don’t Trust Anyone subzero temperatures, I watched Schlingensief over Thirty by Dan Graham and Tony Oursler. immerse himself in the culture, the people, the It is a language that is not defined by any history of Iceland, but most of all in the sagas. single art form but that involves a matrix of There was a moment in the truly remarkable expression, one that is layered with images National Museum of Iceland when the of Schlingensief’s extraordinarily rich commitment to Iceland and this project really visual language—and while the bad boy of took form. I could see the images flashing German theater dreamed of other horizons, through his mind. In the following months he already had them all in his laptop. we drew up a plan for the future travels of A couple of weeks later I received the Animatograph—which included Nepal, a QuickTime rendering in 3D of the Namibia, and the rain forest of Brazil—as a first Animatograph, with projections of collector of myths and sagas from around the Schlingensief’s past work flowing over world. These myths represent man’s obsession screens as it rotated around and around with fear and a currency of protection

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FCV_Kern_PLOTTKORR_20101108.indd 7 09.11.10 09:38 against evil in all parts of the world. It is I hope that you enjoy this exhibition appropriate, in the end, that the Animatograph as much as we enjoyed creating each one of was born in Iceland, and from there would these projects. I also hope that we have given continue its journey around the world. a proper and respectful contextualization It needs to be understood that the to Christoph Schlingensief’s work. I still Animatograph is a “work in transit,” collecting can’t believe that he has left us because his sagas, myths, symbols, and paranoiac fears legacy is so rich, lively, and spontaneous. from all continents that are translated into We very much miss his presence in an ever-evolving sequence of images: the our midst, as, I am sure, do many other Animatograph collects and disseminates institutions that have worked with him. His at the same time as it circles our lives and passing is a massive loss for contemporary questions our existence. It is our Holy Grail. expression, in whatever form it takes. In the meantime, Thyssen- Bornemisza Art Contemporary has commissioned and produced an extensive series of performative works in various contexts—more systematically between 2005 and 2007, when we developed an interesting partnership with the Staatsoper Unter den Linden, . With the Staatsoper we coproduced a series of performative projects in its spectacular storage facility, the Magazin. The series, which was supported by the German Federal Cultural Foundation, was titled Relation in Movement. Some of these productions were also presented in collaboration with the Vienna Festwochen. We developed an intense relationship to performative works over the years that we are quite proud of, and we also gained a new interdisciplinary language that set us apart in the world as proponents of performance projects. This exhibition is a rearview-mirror insight into a series of these projects, with a view into the future of our commitment to continue this line of production through a number of new commissions and performances.

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FCV_Kern_PLOTTKORR_20101108.indd 8 09.11.10 09:38 R ising from the Ashes of Live Art: Figura cuncta videntis ( The A ll-Seeing Eye) documents of past projects, and video- daniel a zyman based installations that are informed by the aesthetics of the performative, as well as some Since 2004 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art new commissions created or re-created for ­Contemporary has developed an ongoing pro- this show. The exhibition seeks to underline gram of performances and performance-based the processual, durational, ephemeral, and works in various contexts and, more systemati- dynamic nature of aesthetic production as well cally, in the Relation in Movement series, real- as the transformative quality (in the process ized at the Magazin of the Staatsoper Unter den of rapid development from articulation to Linden in Berlin. As live events, performances dearticulation) of the residual or aesthetic are time-bound and ephemeral, and in many production that possesses a performative cases they resist being transformed into auton- disposition. The works inadvertently keep omous artworks. Often existing or unfolding articulating the question of their own in between the aesthetic space of art, theater, status, as expressed by Guy Brett: “Can the dance, and film; performer and audience/par- ashes of live art explode, by some process ticipant; viewer and viewed; inside and outside; of poetic re-presentation, into new life?”1 and real and imaginary space, they situate art as The unequivocal answer would be no/yes. a temporal intervention within a specific ­spatial As its centerpiece, the exhibition context. Artists who work in performance presents the Animatograph (Iceland Edition) ­shatter and rivetingly complicate these divi- by Christoph Schlingensief, the German sions and recombine categories of social, polit- filmmaker, artist, and theater director who ical, aesthetic, and environmental experience. passed away in August 2010. The Animatograph The artifactual residues of the is a many-faceted installation that refigures performative may be documentary (drawings, the gaze as the all-seeing eye, providing both a writings, records, relics, films) or spatial metaphor for a universal ur-narration and an (environments, sculptural assemblages) or apparatus for its navigation. Realized at the may consist of objects produced “out of KlinK og BanK Gallery in Reykjavík, Iceland, actions.” Without the exclamatory gestures it is the most prominent corpus of work by of their original agents, the residual objects Schlingensief and will be reinstalled in Vienna and documents only partially retain the for the fourth time as a homage to the artist. explosive kinetic energy, tension, humor The show’s title, Figura cuncta videntis, is a (more often than not), and exuberance of their term borrowed from Schlingensief’s extensive original making. It is within this dialogical repertoire of appropriations and détournements relationship that the works presented in Figura derived from the medieval text On the Vision cuncta videntis: The All-Seeing Eye operate. of God by Nicholas of Cusa. Schlingensief’s Figura cuncta videntis presents a rotating apparatus—or soul-writer—would selection of eleven performative installations, enable, according to its creator, the transition

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FCV_Kern_PLOTTKORR_20101108.indd 9 09.11.10 09:38 from relative to absolute or performative vision, light, the eye and the triangle are the most or as Joseph Leo Koerner writes in regard to successful emblems of two great bourgeois Nicholas’s notion of absolute vision, “from revolutions of the 18th century (French and the self’s limited and deluded perspective American) and of the Enlightenment in to a viewpoint that can, like the figure of the general.”4 And yet it is hardly possible to negate omnivoyant itself, encompass all individual the organization of social control exercised by perspectives.”2 However, the omnivoyant act of the all-seeing eye, in which “nothing escapes seeing, which becomes particularly important the supervision” (Ledoux) or invoked by Michel for Baroque perspectivism, is fundamentally Foucault (1975) in the panoptical “watching reciprocal—seeing and being looked at— machine” that announces the concentration or polysemous—looking into pure vision, universes of control and surveillance.5 devoid of any objects, rather than looking at. It is therefore no coincidence that the figura cuncta videntis reunites the space So we look at one another and cannot shake off the of the theatrical with the space of the political gaze. But we are also being observed. So who is really in Schlingensief’s oeuvre. The theatrical in his looking at whom when we stand before this icon cuncta paradigm does not take place behind Denis videntis. Simultaneously? The icon stares at both of Diderot’s “fourth wall” but rather is unlocked, us even though we thought it was only us that could unleashed within the most intense encounter no longer evade its gaze. The room scrutinizes us of the personal, communal, and mythological. rather than we the room.—Christoph Schlingensief It is a space of transformation, a passage through which we attain the restless experience of seeing. The juxtaposition of the all-seeing eye and the Conceived over many years, during space of theater has a prominent precursor in Schlingensief’s work on Richard Wagner’s the form of an illustration to Claude Ledoux’s Parsifal for the Bayreuth Opera, and finally treatise on architecture titled The Eye of the realized in Iceland, at the site where the Member of the Audience Reflecting the Theater first parliament was convened in 930 and of Besançon, published in 1804. As stated by mythology has been preserved shock-frosted Wolfgang Kemp, “The natural disposition in the form of the Edda, the Animatograph is of our sight organ is in accordance with the “a soul writer,” according to Schlingensief, structure of the auditorium: the theater is “a walk-on photo plate. An organic body all eyes.” Here again, the eye looks at us and situated between mankind’s oldest wish for mirrors the image of the auditorium back government (Þingvellir) and the house of to us, and yet the gaze remains undirected, ungovernable obsessions (Holmur). Here, on “toward nothing special, but see[s] all and this earth crust fringe, spirits ride our bodies; everything.”3 This undetermined space, here the biggest film I’ll ever make begins.” which examines us, as Schlingensief would Just as the Animatograph is deeply have it (following Heidegger and Derrida), rooted in Wagner’s Parsifal, the performance is the “clearing in which being takes place,” Jonathan Meese ist Mutter Parzival (Jonathan a space of radical otherness, “tout autre.” Meese is Mother Parsifal) is a performative Taken further, the ocular symbolism counteraction to the Wagnerian opera. appears on the Great Seal of the United States, Presented at the Magazin over three nights in the pyramid with an eye at its peak, first used in March 2005, Meese’s (solo) performance in 1782. “Combined with any form of symbolic unfolds as an “immediate and violent

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FCV_Kern_PLOTTKORR_20101108.indd 10 09.11.10 09:38 Claude Ledoux, The Eye of the Member of the ­Audience Reflecting the Theater of Besançon, 1804

action” (following Artaud), investing the total Detail from United States One-Dollar bill theatrical space with archaic, spiritualistic, and shamanistic rituals. Meese has been obsessing A grand historic narrative of a over the grand Germanic narration for many different kind is the reference material for years, producing and assembling hundreds John Bock’s operatic production Maltreated of sketches and drawings and extensive Frigate, shown at Berlin’s Magazin in 2006. writings, documents, and manuscripts. His The catastrophic shipwreck of the French habitual artistic method of collecting and vessel Medusa off the west coast of Africa juxtaposing different forms and types of on July 2, 1816, became a cause célèbre not materials—photographs, drawings, , because it was the consequence of a natural , writing, stage sets, installations, disaster, but as a social drama that produced and theater props—literally coagulates on the crudest violation of morality for the sake of stage into a slow-motion, at times violently personal survival. Bock’s spectacle in ten scenes eruptive, performative / aesthetic collage. The oscillates between rock opera and theater of pantheon of historic and fictional characters— the absurd, between performative installation more often than not composite figures such and puppet show. But more importantly it as Mother Parsifal and Artaudaddy—are is an idiosyncratically narrated parable of impersonated by the artist’s multiple personas displacement, inescapable misfortune, and or artist-egos (Jonathan, ME, Meeseewolf, individual struggle against systemic and and others) in a real-time permuting défilé collective collapse. Performed in a condition of Parsifal, Hagen of Tronje, Saint-Just, of suspension and alarming disequilibrium (in Kundri, Wagner, Nietzsche, Hitler, and so a police van suspended from a thirty-meter- on. Meese’s “oeuvre is based on the principle high ceiling), the play spectacularizes processes of generating many different references of subjectivization and desubjectivization. starting from a single center, namely Meese The body, language, speech, and subjectivity himself as an artist,” states Fabrice Hergott.6 are gradually expropriated, massacred, Through this process the artist effectively is dismembered, and rejected from the symbolic and becomes a vehicle for his own citations. order. It is the space of the abject, from which the

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FCV_Kern_PLOTTKORR_20101108.indd 11 09.11.10 09:38 subject is evicted, rejected from life. The loss of items is the original cover of Neil Young’s first distinction between subject and object, self and solo album from 1968, which was influential for other, creates a severe breakdown of meaning the entire production, its spirit and the music. and social coherence. But ironically, the abject, When the punk band Japanther as always, evokes laughter and amusement, came to perform in Don’t Trust Anyone over which is in part what constitutes it as abject. Thirty in Vienna, they had just started moving Don’t Trust Anyone over Thirty, a from the underground spaces of clubs and rock opera conceived by Dan Graham and garages (and any other available space) created in collaboration with Tony Oursler into the limelight of performance and the and other artists, revisits a historic moment white cube of the gallery. As one of the duo in closer proximity to us today, (also) explained: “Japanther have a long standing narrating the tale of a breakdown, namely tradition of playing in real time and space. the failure of the youth revolution of the On bridges, under bridges, out moving trucks 1960s to create a “new social movement.” in Manhattan, in bathrooms… . Taking risks In the words of Mike Kelley, the artists in order to advance our chosen art forms.”8 tackle the ageism of the Sixties’ New Left and, so too, Japanther’s It Never Seems to End the continuing ageism and antihistorical tendencies (2010) is an homage to the encounter with of the various subsequent American “underground” Christoph Schlingensief, the artist for whom youth movements. For those of us who are now long real-time and the streets were to real locus past the age of thirty, the age at which you became of theatre, and a nod to Dan Graham. It is “a useless, it is a bitter experience to look back and see trance ritual performance in which the two how a generation was seduced by this cult of youth. We performers deprive themselves of solid food were blind to the fact that our beliefs were a by-product and sleep for three and a half days in the hope of the capitalist commodity fetishism and planned that beta brain waves will inspire new levels of obsolescence we were supposedly against. The rock creativity.” This is the lapidary description of a opera is the perfect form for such an exploration: it was self-experiment whose outcome is possibly less born kitsch, and signaled the death of the delusion that important than the process of its realization. In rock musical was inherently a “revolutionary” form.7 specific, it begs the question as to what relation Structurally, Don’t Trust Anyone any premeditated aesthetic act—staged in over Thirty is a narrative composed through a performance space or on the streets, for the joyful, “schizophrenic” overlapping that matter—has to reality and to common of textures, counterpoints, slogans, and notions of risk, safety, and physical endurance. clichés, continually splicing together When Marina Abramovic´ and Ulay disparate media—opera and punk rock, the drove a van around in circles for hours on proscenium and the television screen, the end for their 1977 performance Relation in 1960s and the 2000s, real people and puppets. Movement (which gave its name to the series of The Storyboard is an entire wall/room performances at the Magazin of the Staatsoper), installation of drawings, collages, photos, and the action was defined by the limits of fatigue videos, unfolding the creative process and spirit and the provisions of fuel. Temporality and of the rock opera. The Storyboard reveals the “real time” are constitutive elements of opera’s visual and audio elements in a collagelike the performative and their distinguishing synopsis and features documents of the concept features. Performances take place in “real and references to the hippie era: one of the time,” in the insufferable standstill and in

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FCV_Kern_PLOTTKORR_20101108.indd 12 09.11.10 09:38 the “condition of time.” The present is not engage the collective consciousness and create constituted as a commodity; the action is not deep-rooted narratives that script the way we a symbolic quotation but irreducibly itself. structure and perceive symbolic aspects of reality. Another feat of endurance was set up In The Elementary Structures of Kinship, by artist Gregor Schneider in the framework of Claude Lévi-Strauss observes that “the religious his performance 7–8:30 PM 31.05.2007 (2007). life of … societies is dominated by beliefs In an act of reversal between performer and affirming an identity of substance between viewer, Schneider imposed an enervating and the clan and the eponymous totem.”10 This excruciatingly long waiting time on the audience “identity of substance” is both demonstrated that came to see the announced performance. and ritualistically shed by (1) the neutralization Eight hundred or more visitors were made to of the W.D. product; (2) its transformation by wait in line for hours before being allowed to applying heat, smoke, and liquid (all of which enter the Magazin in Berlin, and when finally are primary processes associated with the the doors opened, allowing individuals to enter cultural act of cooking); and (3) its transfixion one at a time, they were led into an empty space on the altar. Altars function as places where and ushered out of the Magazin’s back door totemic objects are preserved and localized without the promised fulfillment of an aesthetic (given a place to rest) but also “tranquilized” and act. “There is nothing to see” was uttered as a domesticated in order to be controlled by and to hysterical outcry by some of the disappointed communicate with the powers within the totem. visitors who had made the rounds. But there could Nevin Aladag˘ explores though her work be no certainty as to whether expectations were Hochparterre, Himmelportgasse Wien (Mezzanine, fulfilled or not, or whether there was something Himmelpfortgasse Vienna) the liminal zones to get or not to get, so the audience stayed. where fiction and reality meet. Whereas common The absolute singularity of the event— wisdom has it that forms of documentation an undisputable feature of “real time”—is represent the authentic (through voices, inscribed into the performance itself. As one critic physicality, the capturing of the moment) and noted: “In the Magazin, those waiting are waiting art and theater produce fictionalized narratives, exclusively for the Magazin. Ergo, those waiting Hochparterre counteracts this assumption with a in line become the event itself. Quite simply, thoroughly developed method of representation Schneider has constructed a space with people.”9 by the artist. By conducting a series of interviews In their work, Palli Banine and his with neighbors, city dwellers, tourists, and other partner Davíð Örn Halldórsson perform the accidental passersby, Aladag˘ is attempting to ritualistic transformation or sacrifice of W.D. render a composite portrait of the area around merchandise by dipping various Disney products T-B A21’s space on Himmelpfortgasse. Edited into paint and preserving them in melted wax on down to an eight-minute loop, the interview a sacrificial altar in a salubrious and—arguably— snippets are “performed” live by an actress who culinary act. Attention is placed both on the lip-synchs the interviews replayed through objects of sacrifice/transformation and on the the PA system. So whereas the interviews and processes of their transformation. Clearly the voices are “real,” as in the tradition of verbatim selection of commodities produced by today’s theater, they are actually being performed by most successful myth-producing entertainment an actor/performer, whose own individual conglomerate is effective on a highly symbolic interpretation and rendering (of the original level. They carry a totemic character in that they interview) we can watch. The breaking point

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FCV_Kern_PLOTTKORR_20101108.indd 13 09.11.10 09:38 between what we see and what we hear is all the art,” states A.L. Steiner, one of the core Chicks. more vivid in moments in which a male voice is Ragnar Kjartansson’s performative so perfectly incarnated that we actually envision works combine—more often than not— the speaker through his female impersonator. durational live performance, music, and The feminist rock band cum art uncompromised romanticism. Once he collective cum record label cum fashion line performed for several days in a row Robert (et al.) Chicks on Speed bursts and liquefies all Schumann’s Dichterlieder (Schumann Machine, disciplinary borders in constantly performed Manifesta, 2008) in a “psychedelic loop.” Earlier and re/invented acts of self-empowerment he occupied an abandoned community house and subversion. Not adhering to any given in the remote countryside of Iceland to play form allows them to hop back and forth, enter the blues on guitar and make watercolors of and disengage with, take up and dismiss— licks and tongues in endless variations day in simultaneously and instantaneously—the and day out over a period of months (Reykjavík competences and material and artistic outputs Arts Festival, 2005). For another project he associated with certain genres and cultural orchestrated a big band performing a sad professions. To counteract any complicity with majestic melody to the words “sorrow conquers (male-dominated) production and distribution happiness” in a thirty-minute-long take (God, systems, the Chicks have set out to own 2007). In The End – Rocky Mountains, he ventures their means of production and distribution out into the wilderness of the Canadian Rockies in the form of a record label, an online with his collaborator Davið Þor Jonsson. Their store, and a clothing and cult accessory line. extravagant performance en plein air is set The oversublimation of the aesthetic against the pristine majestic landscape. Two language and the space of art opens up onto a solitary figures dressed in heavy winter gear field of anti-aesthetics associated with a trashy yet equipped with, among other instruments, look, dilettantism, resistance to learned musical a grand piano, guitar, and amplifier inscribe and acoustic forms, and an unmaking of all themselves into grand nature to nonchalantly representational articulations in favor of a limbo perform country music. It is as if only the genius state between articulations and their undoing. loci would allow them to explore the true nature As radical rule breakers and transgressors, of their tunes or as if the soul of the music lay Chicks on Speed have developed a language within the landscape that they occupy. The of affect and emotion, “operating within classic dichotomy of culture versus nature, of the aesthetic of maximum visibility” (Linda inner and outer landscapes, merges here in a Williams) and the “appropriation of a subversive subtle orchestration. The outcome is a five- representation of sexuality” (Birgit Pelzer).11 ART channel installation, each screen dedicated to RULES! is in many ways a symbolic work for the one instrument and one take but synchronized collective. It took the form of a series of concerts to a multi-instrument arrangement: a romantic performed predominantly in art spaces but was loop in which performative time is made to last. in fact an improvised and constantly rescripted Anetta Mona Chis˛a and Lucia performative and musical critique of the power Tkácˇová’s After the Order is an ephemeral mechanisms with the art system. “The recipe monument taking the shape of a human combines mid-90’s eurotrash music and feminist pyramid, dedicated to a (re)presentation and statements to concoct a contemporary live piece the spontaneous formation of a social power switching between pop clichés & performance structure. Inspired by sports and propagandistic

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FCV_Kern_PLOTTKORR_20101108.indd 14 09.11.10 09:38 events (famous Spartakiads in former Soviet and the exhibition space both perform the times), folkloric or religious rituals (known to divide between artistic and social subjectivity. be performed by castellers in Catalonia and Posing the question “How much reality can we rituals in honor of Lord Krishna in the province bear?” art historian Kristine Stiles concludes: of Maharashtra, India), it explores the symbolic “Whatever one’s response, the artists who qualities of the organization of a number of have made action art received, transmitted, people into an interdependent structure. Every and made visual more reality than we knew human pyramid has to be built from the bottom before their actions, creating new worlds, up. Interdependency and even distribution of new cosmologies of human experience.”12 weight is thus key to any attempt at reaching stability. The higher a pyramid grows, the more Notes weight is put upon the shoulders of the first 1. Guy Brett, “Life Strategies: Overview and Selection: Buenos Aires / / Rio de Janeiro / level’s participants. In fact, they carry the weight Santiago de Chile, 1960–1980,” in Out of Actions: Between and provide for the structural foundation. Performance and the Object, 1949–1979 (Los Angeles: The social symbolism of the human Museum of Contemporary Art; New York: Thames & pyramid takes an interesting turn in the film by Hudson, 1998), 202. 2. Joseph Leo Koerner, The Moment of the same name, directed by the ethnographer Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art (Chicago: and filmmaker Jean Rouch. Rouch’s Pyramide University of Chicago Press, 1993), 130. humaine (1960) is a complex documentation 3. Wolfgang Kemp, “The Theater of Revolution: A New Interpretation of Jacques-Louis of an experimental setting revealing the issue David’s Tennis Court Oath,” in Visual Culture: Images and of racism seen through the eyes of young Interpretations, ed. Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, black and white students in a lycée on the and Keith P. F. Moxey (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1994), 216, 217. Ivory Coast. Whether seen in a postcolonial or 4. idem neoliberal or postsocialist context (as is the case 5. Luc Gruson, “Claude Nicolas Ledoux: of Chis˛a and Tkácˇová’s pyramid), the human Visionary Architecture and Social Utopia,” in pyramid exemplifies the fine stratifications of International Conference of Territorial Intelligence, Besançon 2008, Papers on Tools and Methods of Territorial society and the ever-changing order between Intelligence, MSHE (Besançon, 2009), 303. those who benefit from the vantage point at 6. Fabrice Hergott, in Jonathan Meese: Mama its top and the ones who get stomped upon at Johnny (: Walther König, 2007), 307. 7. Mike Kelley, liner notes, in Dan Graham its base. Here the performative enactments do and Marie-Paule Macdonald, Wild in the Streets: The not attempt to create a perfectly shaped athletic Sixties (Ghent: Imschoot, 1994). structure of bodies, nor is the challenge to reach 8. Ian Vanek, quoted in Alex Nino Gheciu, “Japanther Sees Evil in CMW,” Torontoist (blog), March a maximum height. The enactments take the 1, 2010. http://torontoist.com/2010/03/japanther_see_ notion of the “new order” from a symbolic level evil_in_cmw.php. of representation to a personalized, physical 9. Holger Liebs, Süddeutsche Zeitung, embodiment in which each of the actors August 1, 2007. 10. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary takes on a given role within such scenarios. Structures of Kinship (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 20. Figura cuncta videntis tests the 11. Linda Williams and Birgit Pelzer. In: boundaries between art, performance, theater, Sabeth Buchman, “Fetish,” unpublished essay. Magazin Textuelle Bildhauerei, 5, 2010. and film and between the artifact and the 12. Kristine Stiles, “Uncorrupted Joy: exhibition space. Since theatricality enacts International Art Actions,” in Out of Actions, 329. an encounter between the aesthetic realm of artifice and social reality, the “fourth wall”

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