{"id":809,"date":"2014-02-26T11:01:13","date_gmt":"2014-02-26T09:01:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.schlingensief.com\/weblog\/?p=806"},"modified":"2014-02-26T11:01:13","modified_gmt":"2014-02-26T09:01:13","slug":"the-holy-fool-from-oberhausen-gallerist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.schlingensief.com\/weblog\/?p=809","title":{"rendered":"THE HOLY FOOL FROM OBERHAUSEN (GALLERIST)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Christoph Schlingensief\u2019s Riotous Art Comes to New York. A provocateur who wanted to be loved.<\/strong><\/p>\n

By Zo\u00eb Lescaze 2\/25 5:19pm<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Eine<\/p>\n

\u201cT\u00f6tet Helmut Kohl\u201d (\u201cKill Helmut Kohl\u201d) read the banner that got German artist Christoph Schlingensief arrested. It was 1997, and the sign aimed at the conservative chancellor was part of his project for Documenta, the prestigious quinquennial art festival in Kassel, Germany. He could have gotten off the hook by telling the authorities it was \u201cjust art,\u201d but he and the young curator backing him had other plans.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wouldn\u2019t tell the policemen, \u2018Hey, it\u2019s art, it\u2019s Documenta, it\u2019s up on a stage,\u2019\u201d said Klaus Biesenbach, who had invited Schlingensief to the show. Instead, he and a throng of protesters marched down to the station and demanded that Schlingensief be freed. Schlingensief only relented and agreed to pay a fine when, back in the small town where he grew up, his mother heard the news of his arrest from the local butcher and wouldn\u2019t stop sobbing. \u201cChristoph didn\u2019t care about the police, he didn\u2019t care about the world press, he didn\u2019t care about anything,\u201d said Mr. Biesenbach, now the director of MoMA PS1 where Schlingensief\u2019s first U.S. museum exhibition will open on March 9. \u201c[But] he really cared about his mother being sad.\u201d<\/p>\n

Schlingensief (pronounced Shlin-gun-zeef) made a career out of calling out the most delicate aspects of Germany\u2019s contemporary culture and revisiting the most damning moments of its past. By the time he died of lung cancer in 2010 at age 49, he was \u201cpop star famous\u201d in Germany, as Mr. Biesenbach put it, but he remains virtually unknown this side of the Atlantic, outside of art circles. The PS1 exhibition, which lands in New York after a run at the Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, and includes his early films\u2014madcap phantasmagoria styled after slasher B-movies\u2014as well as documentation of his many theater projects and performances, and a monumental installation, aims to change that.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe was our holy fool,\u201d Patti Smith told The Observer in a phone interview. A close friend of Schlingensief, she will perform at the exhibition\u2019s opening. \u201cHe was foolhardy, he had no fear, he would pretty much do anything, but he also had such an angelic mission.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cChristoph was so obsessive, so focused, so nuts that even if you didn\u2019t like his work, you had to stand back in amazement and keep your mouth shut,\u201d John Waters wrote in an email. \u201cThat\u2019s what I call art power.\u201d<\/p>\n

Schlingensief grew up in Oberhausen, in the Ruhr valley, an economically depressed region of western Germany once rich with coal mines and steel mills. Schlingensief, whose father ran a pharmacy on the town square, started making films when he was 8 years old. After being twice rejected from the Munich School of Film and Television, he briefly studied philosophy at university, then dropped out and began producing low-budget films, heavily influenced by the enfant terrible of New German Cinema, Rainer Werner Fassbinder. <\/p>\n

He gained widespread notoriety with his German Trilogy, made between 1989 and 1992. The second part, The German Chainsaw Massacre, portrays the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall as a frenzied bloodbath starring a family of West German butchers that turn East Germans into sausage.<\/p>\n

That Schlingensief\u2019s PS1 exhibition opens there just after a retrospective of the late Los Angeles artist Mike Kelley makes sense. Like Kelley and another inflammatory Angeleno, Paul McCarthy, Schlingensief often depicted what he found disturbing, hypocritical and abhorrent about contemporary society. He fashioned a surrogate family of actors and collaborators, including marginalized people like the mentally disabled and avant-garde performers such as Tilda Swinton and Udo Kier. He freely used trashy sex and campy gore in his film and theater productions.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you watch the early films and projects by Paul McCarthy and if you then watch The German Chainsaw Massacre,\u201d said Susanne Gaensheimer, the director of the Museum f\u00fcr Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt, \u201cthen you really wonder why isn\u2019t Christoph Schlingensief also part of the fundamental visual canon of contemporary art?\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Das<\/p>\n

\u201cAs a director, he was really very energetic,\u201d said Voxi B\u00e4erenklau, a close friend and cinematographer, who worked with him on that film among many others. \u201cHe was really a crazy guy working. He could be a really nice guy in a private situation, but at work, he was a devil. He was really obsessed with his ideas, and he was really screaming a lot. All the time, he was screaming.\u201d<\/p>\n

Schlingensief\u2019s films garnered him a few critical allies and a cult following, but it was not uncommon for a large part of the audience at any given screening to leave the theater midway through. They weren\u2019t offended merely by the films\u2019 graphic imagery but were also uncomfortable with his relentless interrogation of Germany\u2019s post-reunification culture and its fascist past. His 1997 arrest was the tip of the iceberg; he made a regular practice of attacking politicians.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe was not very successful in the movies in Germany, because everybody hated him,\u201d said Mr. B\u00e4erenklau. \u201cI had to deny that I worked with Christoph here in Germany, because I couldn\u2019t get a job at that time mentioning that I am working for Christoph. This gave me a hard time, and it lasted very long, until 2008, which is not a long time ago.\u201d<\/p>\n

WDR, a German public broadcasting station that features news, comedy, sports and children\u2019s shows in its programming, produced Terror 2000, the final installment of the German Trilogy, but ultimately opted not to air it. The film did show in certain cinemas, but some Berliners used butyric acid to destroy the copies held at one theater, calling it \u201cmindless, racist and sexist propaganda.\u201d<\/p>\n

WDR, a German public broadcasting station that features news, comedy, sports and children\u2019s shows in its programming, produced Terror 2000, the final installment of the German Trilogy, but ultimately opted not to air it. The film did show in certain cinemas, but some Berliners used butyric acid to destroy the copies held at one theater, calling it \u201cmindless, racist and sexist propaganda.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI think Christoph switched to theater involuntarily, because after Terror 2000, he couldn\u2019t shoot any movies anymore,\u201d said Matthias Lilienthal, a former chief dramaturge of the Volksb\u00fchne theater in Berlin, who met Schlingensief there when he was forced out of filmmaking. At the Volksb\u00fchne, Schlingensief effectively began translating his film works into performances, incorporating projections and improvisation. He began consistently appearing in his own productions after once unexpectedly (and drunkenly) deciding to deliver an unplanned monologue in the middle of one of his plays.<\/p>\n

Theater led him to public art performances. In 2000, after a right-wing anti-immigration party joined Austria\u2019s governing coalition, he installed a shipping container outside the Vienna opera house and asked 10 people identified as asylum seekers to live inside it for a week. In the manner of the reality TV show Big Brother, Austrians were invited to vote two immigrants out of the country each day.<\/p>\n

His work became increasingly hard to categorize. \u201cIn Germany, I think it was really difficult for him, because he wasn\u2019t an artist just working in one category, and this overlapping was really hard to handle for the critics,\u201d said Aino Labarenz, his wife and longtime collaborator. Up to the day he died, critics were still saying he \u201cwasn\u2019t a real artist or wasn\u2019t a real theater man, or he wasn\u2019t a real filmmaker.\u201d<\/p>\n

The criticism hurt him deeply, but he had charismatic ways of coping. When he got a bad review, recalled Mr. Lilienthal, Schlingensief would often call the critic and spend over an hour explaining his disappointment and the intentions of his work. \u201cHe was a kind of\u2014how do you say in English? Verf\u00fchrer?\u2014a seducer,\u201d Mr. Lilienthal said. \u201cIf I would do the same, the critics would hate me even more afterwards.\u201d <\/p>\n

Schlingensief\u2019s work ultimately found its place in the art world. In 2003, the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist invited him to install a piece at the Venice Biennale. That same year, he began working with the Zurich-based gallery Hauser & Wirth. <\/p>\n

He kept one foot in the performing arts and in 2004 restaged Parsifal at the Bayreuth Festival. In his version, Wagner\u2019s dove was replaced with high-speed video footage of a rapidly rotting bunny rabbit corpse churning with maggots. \u201cI\u2019ve seen a lot of stupid, repulsive, irritating, befuddling and boring things on opera stages over the years, but Schlingensief\u2019s dead-rabbit climax was something new,\u201d wrote Alex Ross in The New Yorker.<\/p>\n

\"Passion<\/p>\n

\u201cI had questions about it myself; I didn\u2019t take to it immediately,\u201d said Patti Smith of Parsifal, which she covered for a German newspaper. But as the opera unfolded over five hours, it \u201cwas so alive, chaotically alive\u201d that she found herself \u201creally engaged.\u201d Ultimately, though, it was Schlingensief himself who won her over. <\/p>\n

\u201cHe came on the stage\u2014I had never seen him before\u2014and he was so engaging and also full of life,\u201d she said. \u201cYou know, he just filled this opera hall with so much energy. And as he was being booed, he just smiled away. He had a tux on, and he looked so handsome, and he just laughed and smiled and took on everything that people threw at him. And because he was so engaging and so charming, people started turning from booing him to cheering him, so it was really something to see.\u201d<\/p>\n

After the opera, a storm descended on Bayreuth, and Ms. Smith met Schlingensief in a hotel where he and his ragtag crew were taking cover. Before the night was through, he\u2019d invited her to accompany them to Namibia for a project. She went.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you befriended him,\u201d said Ms. Smith, \u201cyou were really entering a world, which was both demanding and generous.\u201d<\/p>\n

Schlingensief\u2019s untimely death was deeply mourned by his fans and collaborators. \u201cReally right to the end, right to the end of his life, it really did seem like we were losing a beautiful and mischievous saint,\u201d said Ms. Smith. \u201cIt\u2019s still difficult to believe he\u2019s gone.\u201d As is often the case with artists who generated mixed reviews during their lifetimes, Schlingensief\u2019s work received its highest accolades after his death.<\/p>\n

In 2010, a few months before he died, Susanne Gaensheimer, the Museum f\u00fcr Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, director, invited him to represent Germany at the Venice Biennale. The German pavilion is an inherently controversial structure\u2014it was rebuilt in 1938\u2014and at least one architect, and an artist, has advocated destroying it. In making her choice of artist, Ms. Gaensheimer felt it was \u201cimportant that the artist I would work with ha[ve] a critical relationship toward German themes or aspects of German history and German culture.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the time of his death, Schlingensief was planning to transform the pavilion into a grand \u201cwellness center,\u201d featuring a fully functional sauna, a swimming pool, a hamam and spa services such as massage and cryotherapy. Visitors would be able to research their genealogy via saliva samples and get preventative tomographic scans. But executing that plan wouldn\u2019t necessarily be true to his vision; there was enough time left for him to change his mind, as he often did.<\/p>\n

Ms. Gaensheimer rallied museum heavyweights like Tate Modern Director Chris Dercon and Schlingensief\u2019s closest collaborators, including Ms. Labarenz, Mr. B\u00e4erenklau, Mr. Lilienthal and the writer and dramaturge Carl Hegemann, to essentially co-curate the pavilion. Instead of trying to guess at Schlingensief\u2019s intentions, the team went with a retrospective approach. They dedicated one room to Schlingensief\u2019s films, which played continuously on several screens, and another to his opera village in Burkina Faso. The village, which boasts a school educating 150 students, a canteen and an infirmary, continues today under the direction of Ms. Labarenz.<\/p>\n

\u201cAino said that, before he died, there were only two projects left that were important to him,\u201d said Ms. Gaensheimer. \u201cOne was the opera village in Burkina Faso, and the other was the pavilion, so I considered that as some kind of order to really do it and to make him present in the art world, because he\u2019s mainly present in the theater, film and opera worlds.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

The main room of the pavilion was a recreation of Schlingensief\u2019s hometown church, which stands on the same town square as his father\u2019s pharmacy. He served as an altar boy there, and it later became the site of his memorial service. Originally conceived as the set for a Fluxus oratorio delivered at the 2008 Ruhrtriennale, A Church of Fear vs. The Alien Within integrated 12 16mm projections, chest X-rays illuminated by light boxes, a hospital bed and recordings of Schlingensief candidly confronting his mortality. He had written the soliloquy immediately after one of his lungs was removed.<\/p>\n

The pavilion didn\u2019t escape criticism from Germany. Die Zeit, a national weekly newspaper, called it \u201clukewarm\u201d and wrote that Schlingensief \u201cdid not deserve the Golden Lion,\u201d the Biennale\u2019s highest honor, which a jury that included John Waters awarded to the pavilion.<\/p>\n

\u201cChristoph would have been so happy about this, because he was really kind of a child. He was so proud, when he was getting prizes, because in Germany, they didn\u2019t like Christoph very much at all,\u201d said Mr. B\u00e4erenklau. \u201cNobody. He had really a hard time with all his shows and all his movies, but at the very end, he was successful. But it was too late, unfortunately.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hauser & Wirth, which has since opened branches in London and New York, represents the Schlingensief estate but has never mounted a Schlingensief show. \u201cThere was and there is not much of a market for Christoph Schlingensief\u2019s work,\u201d said Florian Berktold, a director at the Z\u00fcrich branch, explaining that the artist \u201cwas not thinking in terms of collectible artworks\u201d until the end of his life. Two Schlingensief pieces have sold at auction since his death: an acrylic on cotton painting that fetched just under $7,000 and a model for his 2003 Biennale presentation, Church of Fear, that sold for $19,383.<\/p>\n

The focal point of the upcoming MoMA PS1 exhibition is one of Schlingensief\u2019s three \u201canimatographs\u201d: a colossal 60-foot cube that contains a rotating stage, projections from all sides, an East German army shelter and a watchtower. The version of the piece coming to Queens belongs to Hamburg-based manufacturer Harald Falckenberg; another is in the private collection of Swiss former it-girl Francesca von Hapsburg. \u201cIt takes collectors who are brave,\u201d said Mr. Berktold.<\/p>\n

Schlingensief\u2019s work may soon become more accessible to collectors, at least in format. The 18-screen installation that was born out of his trip to Namibia, The African Twin Towers (2007), also going on view at MoMA PS1, will eventually be editioned and sold. The estate is still in flux, as Ms. Labarenz and others parse through the wealth of material Schlingensief left behind, but Mr. Berktold said he expects a market to gradually grow.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, exhibitions like the Venice Biennale and, now, PS1, may finally be earning Schlingensief what he strived for during his lifetime. \u201cHe wanted to be loved,\u201d said Mr. Biesenbach. \u201cHe couldn\u2019t believe it that people wouldn\u2019t give him unconditional love, because with everything he did, he wanted to make things better. [His projects] were always good and never evil, and they were always trying to be utopian, making the world a better place.\u201d <\/p>\n

Quelle: GalleristNY.com, 25.2.2014<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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