Johannes Hoff

Life in AbundanceSchlingensief’s deconstruction of (post-)modernism

- draft version -

CAMILLE. What do you say, Lucile? LUCILE. Nothing. I love to watch you speak. CAMILLE. And 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 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 whom his own comrades-in-arms have 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 at their faces. Die. What sort of word is that, tell me, Camille? Die. I must think it over.

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 were at stake, Lucile glimpses something rolling 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 to 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 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 generation 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 functions as a self-referential medium around which we can congregate. 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 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. Hence the difficulty of translating 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 counterword in a post-modern global village. That is why one would look in vain for such a gesture in Schlingensief’s art-blind oeuvre. The faith in the decisive 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 X 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 provide 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] 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 post-modern 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 be seen 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 ready-made projects, dedicated to his own illness, are exemplary in this regard. For the ready-made 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 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, 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-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!” (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]

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 inner circles 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.

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 lovingkindness 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 importantly 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, 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 become subsequently an “observer of his own frantic activities.”[14]

Groys’s reading 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 had 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 unworldlines 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 with “life in abundance.” Abstracting from the Aristotelian terminology, this “act” could even be called motion in the highest degree.[16]