{"id":813,"date":"2014-05-02T10:18:24","date_gmt":"2014-05-02T08:18:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.schlingensief.com\/weblog\/?p=813"},"modified":"2015-03-24T00:26:02","modified_gmt":"2015-03-23T23:26:02","slug":"former-auteur-in-love-with-outrage-new-york-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.schlingensief.com\/weblog\/?p=813","title":{"rendered":"FORMER AUTEUR IN LOVE WITH OUTRAGE (NEW YORK TIMES)"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Art of Christoph Schlingensief at MoMA PS1<\/strong><\/p>\n

By KEN JOHNSONMAY 1, 2014<\/em><\/p>\n

In 1998 the German artist Christoph Schlingensief organized the Last Chance Party, a deliberately absurdist mix of art and politics that encouraged ordinary people to nominate themselves as candidates for the coming parliamentary elections.<\/p>\n

One of the party\u2019s campaign events took place at Lake Wolfgang in Austria, where Helmut Kohl, the chancellor at the time, had a summer home. Mr. Schlingensief called on Germany\u2019s six million unemployed people to swim in the lake all at once, the idea being that they would raise the water level enough to flood the chancellor\u2019s home. As it turned out, only a few hundred people turned up \u2014 journalists and police officers, mostly \u2014 but you couldn\u2019t say the event was a failure, for by means of it, Mr. Schlingensief put into circulation a vivid metaphor about the potential power of democracy.<\/p>\n

Many other similarly amusing and inspirational stories are told at MoMA PS1 in \u201cChristoph Schlingensief,\u201d a persuasively hagiographic survey of the amazingly adventurous career of one of Germany\u2019s most celebrated artists of recent times.<\/p>\n

Organized by Klaus Biesenbach, director of MoMA PS1; Anna-Catharina Gebbers, an independent curator; and Susanne Pfeffer, artistic director at the Fridericianum, in Kassel, Germany, the exhibition consists mostly of documentary photographs, video clips and explanatory wall texts arranged in chronological order. Mr. Schlingensief (1960-2010) may or may not have been a great artist \u2014 it\u2019s hard to say. But, if you judge by this show, he was certainly a galvanizing personality.<\/p>\n

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He was a charismatic performance artist and natural-born comedian, not to mention boyishly handsome: The Hollywood biopic would have to star Jim Carrey, whom he physically resembled. But more important, he was the catalytic director of potentially explosive situations in conventional theaters and in nontraditional settings. His genius was to zero in on, and run roughshod over, the fault lines of politely conformist society with hilariously outrageous \u00e9lan. Imagine a merger of Joseph Beuys and Andy Kaufman.<\/p>\n

Mr. Schlingensief started out as an auteur of farcical, politically incendiary, low-budget cinema. Four of his best-known early films are simultaneously projected in one gallery at PS1. Three belong to \u201cThe Germany Trilogy,\u201d a series that includes the hysterical, self-explanatorily titled \u201c100 years of Adolf Hitler \u2014 The Last Hours in the F\u00fchrer\u2019s Bunker\u201d (1989); \u201cThe German Chainsaw Massacre\u201d (1990, released here as \u201cBlackest Heart\u201d), in which a butcher\u2019s family turns people into sausages hours after the reunification of East and West Germany; and \u201cTerror 2000 \u2014 Intensive Care Unit Germany\u201d (1992), which is about neo-Nazis and opportunistic journalists and politicians.<\/p>\n

The fourth, one of his last feature-length films, is \u201c120 Days of Bottrop\u201d (1997), about an inept director\u2019s effort to remake Pier Paolo Pasolini\u2019s \u201cSal\u00f2, or the 120 Days of Sodom\u201d (1975). To watch any of these wildly antic movies for a few minutes is to regret his retirement from filmmaking.<\/p>\n

In the late \u201990s, Mr. Schlingensief plunged into his anarchic, Brechtian-Beuysian brand of theater, causing near riots on occasion. A high point was \u201cPlease Love Austria,\u201d a reality television show parody that was his official contribution to the 2000 Vienna International Film Festival. Mr. Schlingensief and his team constructed a village of shipping containers and had it occupied by 12 people from other countries who were supposedly seeking asylum in Austria.<\/p>\n

Webcams broadcast their activities to spectators, who were encouraged to vote out those they disliked. This provoked a storm of indignation. At one point, protesters, who may have been plants, stormed the village in an effort to liberate the asylum seekers.<\/p>\n

By that time, Mr. Schlingensief was already a figure of considerable celebrity and notoriety, thanks to several popular television projects. Broadcast in 1997, \u201cTalk 2000\u201d was a talk show with celebrity guests in which Mr. Schlingensief interrupted interviews to discuss his own personal problems or suggest that they all take a brief nap together.<\/p>\n

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