Bombistic Maximalism, Transparent Analysis, and Feminist Actionism: On Some Mimetic Techniques in Contemporary German Theatre

Abstract

The premise of postmodernism, including the death of the author and the dissolution of the text into electronic media, has questioned the critical character of literature and theatre in relation to social structures. Feminist writers and artists such as the performance artist Ginka Steinwachs, the playwright Gisela von Wysocki, and the performance artist and filmmaker Valie Export, however, invigorate social analysis by articulating in their texts, plays, and videos the nature of woman as commodity in contemporary society. Through different uses of dramatic mimetic techniques they demonstrate that contemporary society is permeated with the concept of exchange. This concept of the female figure as item for exchange has been critically explored in such texts as Steinwachs's George Sand (1983), Wysocki's Abendlandleben (1987), and Export's performance piece Korperkonfgurationen (1973). This article will show how these texts expose contemporary society to criticism by means of mirroring its system. In fact, the work of the three artists presented here is located between two different traditions of dramatic mimesis, one that is based on the idea of disappearance through identification and one that is grounded in the idea of mimesis as the productive framework for women's language. In their Dialectic of Enlightenment Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno developed a theory of mimesis, and they located this theory at the intersection of myth and enlightenment. The Shaman's rites, they claim, were directed to wind and rain: the magician imitated demons, behaved frighteningly or made gestures of appeasement. Mimesis is, therefore, a strategy of impersonation in which the magician disappears through identification with another being. In the magic phase, dream images may be related to an object through similarity and name, not necessarily through representation. The connection between image and object is not one of intention but one of relationship (see Horkheimer/Adorno