The Deconstruction of the Romantic Total Work of Art in Christoph Schlingensief
Christoph Schlingensief was aGermanfilmandtheatre director,actor,artist, and author.
I met Schlingensief in 2009 when he was recovering from his cancer surgery. Since he was a Catholic, he wanted to talk with me about his death. From then on, I was for him a kind of spiritual guide. However, since his earliest performance experience as an altar boy, Christoph was unable to separate his personal from his public life. And so I could not avoid becoming involved in his public performances as well.
This was also the background of my involvement in the Venice Biennale 2011, at which Schlingensief was posthumously awarded with the “Golden lion for the best national Pavilion”.
In this pavilion we restaged his 2008 fluxus oratorio ‘The church of fear’, in which Christoph had rebuilt a replica of the church in of Oberhausen where he served as an altar boy for about 12 years.
A Schlingensief retrospective is currently displayed in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
In my following paper, I will focus on Schlingensief’s ambiguous relationship to Richard Wagner. Manaus – Bayreuth. Why is Wagner so important?
Because Wagner is the prototypical example of, what we would call in Germany, the modern Idea of “Kunstreligion” (Art as Religion): Namely, the modern conviction, that Art can provide us with an illusionary substitute for the religious promise of salvation after religions of the past have lost their credibility.
This tradition can be traced back to the tradition of Early Romanticism, which emerged in Germany 1795, and it culminates in the avant-garde art of the 20th century, as art historians like Hans Belting have demonstrated.
Anglophone admirers of German Romanticism frequently forget that the leading representatives of this movement were not only artists, poets and musicians, but also philosophers – frequently in one person. Hence, I will start the more theoretical part of my paper with a short collection of the philosophical roots of this romantic upheaval.
The Key to this revolution is Immanuel Kant, or more precisely, Kant’s philosophical account of the (according to the Kant) most fundamental features of our modern world.
· Functional Differentiation – Truth – Beauty – the Good.
According to this account of our modern condition, only science can provide us with an account of what is objectively true. However, the Kantian tradition did not deny the significance of the symbolic language of the past.
Symbolic expressions are indispensable inasmuch as they permit us to maintain the scientific conviction that it is possible to draw a clear and distinct line between the determined (“objective”) and the undetermined (“subjective”) realms of human experience and knowledge. This is the reason why the focus on ‘subjectivity’ is the key to Kant’s so called ‘Copernical turn’: I have to know myself in order to distinguish between subjective imaginations and objective facts.
However, the philosophers of Early Romanticism went soon a step further than Kant. Within a few years after the publication of Kant’s writings, they deconstructed Kant’s attempt to draw a strict demarcation line between objective knowledge and subjective imagination. But part-way through this movement came to a standstill in an aporetic attitude with regard to the modern dualism – and precisely this aporetic or ironic attitude led to the emergence of the modern ‘Kunstreligion’ (Art as religion)
More precisely, the aporetic basic attitude of the Romantics was the upshot of Johann Fichte’s failed attempts to provide a rationalist account of the most fundamental phenomenon of Kant’s philosophy, namely the phenomenon of self-knowledge. Let me shortly summarize why this debate was so important, and why it culminated in an aporetic attitude with regard to the modern split between subjectivity and objectivity.
I am able to observe myself as an object – for example, when I look in the mirror. However, Fichte had convincingly demonstrated that my ability to recognize myself in a mirror could not be the mere outcome of an act of mirroring, or reflexive self-observation.
If I am looking in my mirror image, I only see an “object” (B); I do not see anything, which informs me about the “subject” (A) that is looking in the mirror. The only thing I know about this “I perspective” is that it is not a passive object that can be observed in the world, but a spontaneous “subject” (A) which is actively observing the world. Consequently, my ability to know that the person (B) in the mirror is identical with the subject (A) that is looking in the mirror presupposes a kind of familiarity with myself as subject (A) that is not based on a kind of objectifying knowledge (B), but pre-reflexive knowledge.
Folien: Fichte bis Schelling
However, as the Early Romantics pointed out, Fichte’s conclusion included a fatal mistake. If we presuppose that there must be some sort of intuitive familiarity of the spontaneously acting “I” with itself, this might explain why I am familiar with myself as a spontaneous “subject” (A). But this does not yet explain why the “person” (B) I am observing every morning in the mirror is “me” as well. Hence, Fichte’s pre-reflexive knowledge cannot be reduced to a kind of intuition of myself as “subject” (A). Self-consciousness presupposes an intuitive familiarity of myself with myself that is prior to the distinction between the “subjective” and “objective” modes of knowledge; it is neither reducible to a kind of “objective” (B), nor a kind of “subjective” (A) knowledge; it has rather the character of a kind of familiarity with an unknown variable (X).
Now, we might call this unknown variable “the Absolute”; but this means that we cannot know what kind of entity this absolute being is. We only know that it is neither an “object” nor a “subject”, and that it holds the fundamental polarity of subject and object together.
However, as soon as we reduce the Absolute to a neutralised formal principle of identity that keeps the balance of subjectivity (A) and objectivity (B) checked, its desirability becomes ambivalent.
This was precisely the conclusion drawn by one of the two pivotal figures of the Early Romantic movement, Friedrich Hölderlin, whilst listening to Fichte’s 1794/95 lectures on the Doctrine of Science in Jena. If the vanishing point of the philosophical strive for truth coincides with the ‘undimm’d ether’ of an irreflexive principle of identity (X), then the ‘Absolute’ is not only the ground of, but also a threat to, its non-identical (A-B) counterpart. For the philosophical desire for simplicity coincides now with the longing for a state in which every longing vanishes, and this ‘amounts to death’. To quote one of the key passages of Hölderlin’s Hyperion-Fragment of 1794/95:
We feel the limitations of our being / And the hindered power strives impatient / Against its shackles and the spirit longs / Back into the distant, undimmd ether./ And yet within us there is something, that / Wants to keep its chains, for if the divine / In us encountered no resistance, then / Wed not feel one another or ourselves./ But not to feel oneself, amounts to death,/ To know nought, to be obliterated,/ Are for us the same.[i]
In view of this abyss-like consequence of the Kantian project to develop a functional account of the limitations of human reason, the Early Romantics tried to develop strategies that counterbalance the aporetic strive for the truth by the symbolic enactment of an illusionary salvation that veiled the ambiguous face of God in the sublime beauty of art.
We can cope with the fatal attraction of God’s inscrutable simplicity, but only within the cultured framework of artistic events. The “naked truth” has to be “re-enacted”. Goethe summarized this key philosophical finding of the Early Romantics with unparalleled irony in the closing words of his masterpiece Faust:
All that is fading / is but a semblance;
the insufficient here, / Grows to event;
The indescribable, / Here was enacted;
The ever feminine; / beckons us upwards.[ii]
Friedrich Nietzsche provided a more condensed summary of this conclusion in a poem, addressed to Goethe that is only superficially opposed to the less offensive poetry of the diplomat from Weimar:
All that is unfading / is but a semblance!
God the beguiling / Is a poet’s dissemblance..[iii]
Medieval philosophers, like Aquinas or Nicholas of Cusa would not have put their trust in the mirror-logic that provoked this self-referential poetry. As a result, he would have struggled to understand the death obsession that inspired the mainstream European philosophers and artists after the Early Romantic upheaval, such as Franz Schubert, Arthur Schopenhauer, Edgar Allan Poe, Richard Wagner, Alfred Hitchcock, Jacques Lacan, Quentin Tarantino, and Damien Hirst. Post-modern nihilists, like Hirst, are admirably skilful in unmasking the bourgeois obsession with death and mercantile balance sheets
However, I do not want to engage today with the problematic philosophical basic assumptions that provoked the Romantic upheaval and the emergences of the modern idea of art as religion. I rather want to show, how Christoph Schlingensief tried to deconstruct this idea from within the (romantic) tradition of modern avant-garde art.
One of the most influential interpreters of Schlingensief is the German-Russian art- and media-theorist Borys Groys, who is currently teaching in New York.
As Groys points out correctly, Schlingensief’s artistic practice was deeply rooted in the modern avant-garde-tradition, and particularly the tradition of Dada and Fluxus. This tradition shares with religious and liturgical traditions the goal not to express something meaningful, but to create situations were human attempts to articulate something meaningful fail.
Boris Groys has offered an excellent analysis of this feature of 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.”[1]
Groys reading of Schlingensief’s focuses on experiences of negativity in illness and death, and the petrified language of a religious symbolism which has become indifferent to meaning. Schlingensief montaged the flotsam of a history of art, cinema, literature, and music that had lost all orientation, by mixing in religious symbolisms in order to create a Gesamtkunstwerk decidedly bereft of meaning. Is that a sufficient interpretation?
I don’t think so. Schlingensief’s ready-mades were about more than the gesture of iconoclastic negation—they were about the eighty-year-old opera-chorus singer Elfriede Rezabek, for instance, who sang the song of Isolde’s Love-Death from Wagner’s Tristan in her frail voice.[2]
Or Schlingensief’s art was 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. Shortly later he 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-Winckler-Haus, a residential home for disabled people.
Finally, in the Fluxus oratorio A Church of Fear vs. the Alien Within, Achim and Kerstin Grassmann shouted “Avantgarde—Marmelade! Avantgarde—Marmelade!” (avantgarde – marmalade..).
When Achim died of a heart attack on December 26, 2009, the editor at of a German Theater podcast wrote:
What the show celebrated: a human being! … 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.[3]
How serious this human feature of Schlingensief’s art was, became undeniable when his performances began to organize themselves around “the alien thing” within himself, the cancer in his lung (here you see the x-ray records of his lunge).
According to German curator and Jesuit Friedhelm Mennekes, his role at that point approached that of John Paul II as he lay dying.[4] And this observation is correct: Christoph perceived John Paul II always as the paragon of his late performances: A person who publicly celebrated the fullness of life, even in suffering.
Christoph’s artistic performances staged life. And this life was in Christoph’s view not a beautiful illusion: It was in his view more perfect than everything artists can create by artificial means.
This focus on the fullness of life sheds light on the title of Schlingensief’s cancer diary, which has become a bestseller in Germany: It Couldn’t Possibly Be as Beautiful in Heaven as It Is Here!
The “here and now” of our real live is always better than the “fairylands” that artists, philosophers, or theologians contrive. No “possible world” can compete with this real one.
In contrast to this interpretation of Schlingensief’s art, which I have outlined in my contribution to the Pavillon Volume of the Venice Biennale 2011, Borys Groys discovers in Schlingensief a kind of death instinct – a desire to transcend 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.”[5]
This quotation is consistent with Groys’ intention is to read Schlingensief as a pre-eminent representative of the (post-)modern religion of art: