{"id":1827,"date":"2016-04-30T01:27:32","date_gmt":"2016-04-29T23:27:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.schlingensief.com\/weblog\/?p=1827"},"modified":"2016-04-30T01:58:02","modified_gmt":"2016-04-29T23:58:02","slug":"der-untergrundkuenstler-goethe-institut-copy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.schlingensief.com\/weblog\/?p=1827","title":{"rendered":"THE UNDERGROUND ARTIST (GOETHE-INSTITUTE)"},"content":{"rendered":"
Christoph Schlingensief died 2010 at the age of only 49 years. The action artist\u2019s creative diversity still successfully eludes simple classification. Schliengensief\u2019s former associate J\u00f6rg van der Horst poses the question about his contemporary relevance.<\/strong><\/h5>\n

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Early in 2010 the uneasy feeling crept up on Christoph Schlingensief that he was working too hastily, even too little. Perhaps he sensed how little time remained to him. Sometimes he resigned himself in the face of the superior strength, the constant physical and psychological presence, of his cancer, which had been diagnosed after a routine examination in January 2008. Then he again drew on his own powerlessness, on fear and doubt, driving forces that had shaped his work since the 1980s. He developed a sheer rage for life and a work mania against \u201cthis shitty cancer\u201d. What for the people around him had previously been already difficult enough, now became increasingly impossible \u2013 namely to keep up with the pace at which Schlingensief thought and acted, at which he, the driven artist, conceived ideas and plans and then again discarded them.<\/p>\n

Scratching open the surface<\/h5>\n

He dedicated two outstanding projects of his last two years to his illness \u2013 the Fluxus oratorio Eine Kirche der Angst vor dem Fremden in mir<\/i> (i.e. A Church of Fear against the Alien Within Me) (2008) and the ready-made opera Mea Culpa<\/i> (2009). They address his desire to live and the certainty of suddenly having to die before his time. They are conjurations. Schlingensief celebrates himself, his insecurity, his despair and, even more, his future death. This is poignant, a High Mass. It is also kitschy and somehow cruel, an exorcism. But it is truthful. You credit these initiatory rites because they open a panopticon in which he had always been underway.<\/p>\n

Together with the publication of Schlingensief\u2019s cancer diary, So sch\u00f6n wie hier kanns im Himmel gar nicht sein<\/i> (i.e. Heaven Can\u2019t Be as Beautiful as It Is Here) (2008), which became a bestseller in Germany, Kirche der Angst<\/i> and Mea Culpa<\/i> contributed significantly to a broad and emotional discussion of how public someone should make his private suffering. Especially because Schlingensief made use of the theatre artist\u2019s privilege to act out his suffering on stage. \u201cMade use of\u201d, \u201cacted out\u201d \u2013 these are deliberately chosen words in this context. They describe methods pertinent to all Schlingensief\u2019s work. It is the work of an artist who distrusts surfaces and therefore scratches them open. A work difficult to describe, the work of a true underground artist.<\/p>\n

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