Abstract
Some voices questioned if it would be possible to exhibit Christoph Schlingensief’s work without him, following his death in 2010, due to its performativity and the artist’s role. Indeed, the German Pavilion at the 2011 Venice Biennale became more of a memorial to the artist. Its design was finished without Schlingensief, and instead of setting up an African wellness center, the abandoned set of The Church of Fear of the Stranger in Me (Die Kirche der Angst vor dem Fremden in mir, 2008) was installed, accompanied by films and other documents on Schlingensief’s Opera Village Africa in Burkina Faso.[1] Accordingly, the Schlingensief retrospective at Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin in 2013–2014 was perceived as a “ghost train” and confusing “obstacle course” by some critics.
Highlights
Some voices questioned if it would be possible to exhibit Christoph Schlingensief’s work without him, following his death in 2010, due to its performativity and the artist’s role
This ghostly manner and criticism is related to aspects of performativity and presence in Schlingensief’s work
Similar difficulties have been addressed in the theoretical discussion of performance art as ephemeral and immediate in general, and Amelia Jones has even argued comprehensively that the documentation of performance art and its display functions supplementary to performances, as they are dependent on documentation to attain a symbolic status.[3]
Summary
Some voices questioned if it would be possible to exhibit Christoph Schlingensief’s work without him, following his death in 2010, due to its performativity and the artist’s role. This essay aims to understand and analyze the Berlin exhibition as a (visual) maze due to its curatorial concept and to further examine how Schlingensief constantly provoked visual labyrinths, visual labyrinthine structures, or labyrinths for the gaze He produced chaotic scenarios and irritating images, in particular as he worked with multimodal collages, blurring boundaries between media such as theater and performance, spoken texts, projections, and involved bodies, thereby playing with modes of representation and presence, as well as selfexposure. Schlingensief’s contribution to the art world is not the work of an enfant terrible or provocateur, but lies in his play with the boundaries between reality, authenticity, and staging as different modes of representation Even though he used elements that were already established in the avant-garde tradition, his approach and the disturbances of plays were often perceived as shocking “intrusions of reality” by the audience, as an embodied experience.[7]. It was the gaze that dragged one into his performances—because what is one to do or say when Schlingensief calls for the killing of Helmut Kohl, or even proclaims “Foreigners out!” in the public space of Vienna? The public was confronted with this very question on the occasion of the Vienna Festival Weeks in 2000
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