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Christoph Schlingensief

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Christoph Schlingensief
Image
Schlingensief in October 2009
Born
Christoph Maria Schlingensief

(1960-10-24)24 October 1960
Oberhausen, West Germany
Died21 August 2010(2010-08-21) (aged 49)
Berlin, Germany
OccupationDirector

Christoph Maria Schlingensief (24 October 1960 – 21 August 2010)[1][2] was a German theatre director, performance artist, and filmmaker. Starting as an independent underground filmmaker, Schlingensief later staged productions for theatres and festivals, often accompanied by public controversies. In the final years before his death, he staged Wagner's Parsifal at the Bayreuth Festival and worked at several opera houses, establishing himself as a Regietheater artist.

Early life and education

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Schlingensief was born on 24 October 1960 in Oberhausen. His father was a pharmacist and his mother a pediatric nurse. As a child, he worked as an altar server and already made short films with a hand-held camera.

Having passed his Abitur exams, he twice failed to gain admission to the University of Television and Film Munich. From 1981 he studied German language and literature, philosophy and art history at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, but also dabbled as a musician and finally dropped out in 1983 to work as an assistant to the experimental filmmaker Werner Nekes.[3] After working as a teacher at Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach am Main and Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, he became a production manager on Hans W. Geißendörfer's TV series Lindenstraße.[4]

Career

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Already as a young man Schlingensief had organized art events in the cellar of his parents' house, and local artists such as Helge Schneider or Theo Jörgensmann performed in his early short films. He considered himself a 'provocatively thoughtful' artist. He created numerous controversial and provocative theatre pieces as well as films, his former mentor being filmmaker and media artist Werner Nekes.

Film

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Image
Schlingensief at the 2009 Berlinale reception, with his partner Aino Laberenz [de] (right), Alice Waters and Gaston Kaboré

Already Schlingensief's debut feature film, the surreal, absurd experimental Tunguska – Die Kisten sind da! ("Tunguska – The Crates Are Delivered!", 1984) was well received by critics. Growing up in the shadow of the New German Cinema, Schlingensief was deeply influenced by the likes of Rainer Werner Fassbinder—many members of whose stock company of actors such as Udo Kier, Margit Carstensen, Irm Hermann or Volker Spengler became regulars in Schlingensief's films—or Alexander Kluge, with whom he collaborated on numerous occasions. To said period of film, Schlingensief delivered both a heartfelt homage as well as the final coup de grâce with The 120 Days of Bottrop [de]—starring Helmut Berger, playing an inept director's effort to remake Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975)[5]—in much the same way he dealt with German avant-garde cinema 15 years earlier with his first feature film Tunguska – The Crates Are Delivered starring Alfred Edel [de]. Drawing parallels to the work of British filmmaker Derek Jarman, Egomania – Island without Hope (1986) starred Kier and Tilda Swinton. Other influences include Luis Buñuel, Werner Schroeter or Herbert Achternbusch—and Schlingensief's filmic works have been compared to just as wide a range of filmmakers, from Jean-Luc Godard to Russ Meyer.

With his "Germany Trilogy", consisting of 100 Years of Adolf Hitler – The Last Hour in the Führerbunker, The German Chainsaw Massacre – The First Hour of the Reunification and Terror 2000 – Germany out of Control, Schlingensief came to prominence. Since then he shaped the cultural and political discourse in Germany for more than two decades and established himself as one of the country's most important and versatile artists. The "Germany Trilogy" deals with three turning points in 20th-century German history: the first movie Hundert Jahre Adolf Hitler ("A Hundred Years of Adolf Hitler", 1989) covers the last hours of Adolf Hitler, the second The German Chainsaw Massacre (1990), depicts the German reunification of 1990 and shows a group of East Germans who cross the border to visit West Germany and get slaughtered by a psychopathic West German family with chainsaws, and the third Terror 2000 (1992) focuses on xenophobic violence after the reunification process.

One of Schlingensief's central tactics was to call politicians' bluff in an attempt to reveal the inanities of their "responsible" discourse, a tactic he called "playing something through to its end".[6] This strategy was most notable in his work, the multimedia installation Bitte liebt Österreich or Please Love Austria (alternately named Foreigners out! Schlingensiefs Container). Produced in June 2000 at the time of the FPÖ and ÖVP coalition in Austria, this reality television-like installation was a direct public answer to the party slogan "Ausländer Raus" (Foreigners Out).[7] It consisted in real life asylum seekers that instead of being voted out of the show were to be voted out of the country. Please Love Austria attracted international support, a media frenzy and provoked countless debates about art practice.[8][6] A documentary film based on the performance has been made by Paul Poet and released in 2002.[9]

In 2009, he joined the jury of the Berlin International Film Festival with Tilda Swinton as jury president.

Television

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Schlingensief's use of re-enactement was consistent throughout his career. This creative strategy led him to create four television series mainly conceived around the variety talk show format.[10] These shows gave him considerable celebrity and notoriety in Germany. Broadcast in 1997, Talk 2000 was a talk show with celebrity guests in which Schlingensief sometimes interrupted interviews to discuss his own personal problems.[5] In U3000 (2000), he and his crew were filmed acting crazily on platforms and in cars of the Berlin subway system; the program aired on MTV Germany.

In Freakstars 3000 (2002), a six-part American Idol-style parody, two dozen people from the Thiele Winkler Home in Berlin, an assisted-living home for the mentally disabled competed for spots in a new band.[5] The location was also retained as the shooting set of the program, which was originally broadcast by the music channel VIVA.[10]

Art

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In 1997, Schlingesief staged an art action at the documenta X exhibition in Kassel as part of the performance space "Hybrid WorkSpace", which was curated by Klaus Biesenbach, Nancy Spector and Hans-Ulrich Obrist. During the performance, Schlingensief was arrested for carrying a placard with the words "Kill Helmut Kohl!".[4] In November 1999, invited by P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center and organized by Klaus Biesenbach, Schlingensief carried out a performance at the Statue of Liberty in New York City, where, kneeling down at the foot of the statue, he handed Germany over to globalization.[11]

His exhibition The Last Hour, with its twisted metalwork from a crashed car, footage of a long tunnel and paparazzi pictures of Princess Diana, was in 2006 rejected by the Frieze Art Fair in London's Regent's Park and instead ended up in a little-known gallery space in Bethnal Green.[12] He later joined the Hauser & Wirth gallery. The Last Hour goes back to Schlingensief's own chronology, when in 1997, during Documenta 10, he announced Lady Diana's death before it happened and subsequently getting arrested for "slendering the memory of a dead person".[13] In 2007, the Haus der Kunst, Munich, mounted an exhibition of Schlingensief's work; it presented African Twin Towers and short films that have been shot while the artist directed The Flying Dutchman at the Teatro Amazonas in Manaus, Brazil.[14]

Theatre

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Image
Schlingensief speaking at the Deutschlandsuche 99 performance in front of the Volksbühne, 1999

In the 1990s, Schlingensief directed a series of chaotic, satirical productions at the Volksbühne theatre in Berlin. He also directed a version of Hamlet, subtitled, This is your Family, Nazi~Line, which premiered in Switzerland, the so-called neutral territory equated with the Denmark of the opening line in Shakespeare's play where there is something foul afoot. Events around the piece questioned and attacked Switzerland's 'neutrality' in the face of growing racism and extreme right wing movements. The artist duo Ubermorgen provided the Internet platform Nazi~Line[15] for the project, where former members of Neo Nazi groups were sought and then cast as actors to play characters in the drama on stage as a way of re-integrating the ex-Neo-Nazis with the common workforce of the theatre.

Schlingensief's work covered a variety of media, including installation and the ubiquitous 'talk show' and has in many cases led to audience members leaving the theatre space with Schlingensief and his colleagues to take part in events such as Passion Impossible, Wake Up Call for Germany 1997 or Chance 2000, Vote for Yourself in which he formed the Last Chance Party where anyone, and more specifically targeted were the unemployed and disabled citizens, could become a candidate themselves in the run up to the federal election of 1998 in Germany.[5] The party was created in a circus tent positioned in Berlin's Prater during a performative event directed by Schlingensief and involving members of the Sperlich circus family. They subsequently engaged in a tour of Germany, attempting to gather enough signatures to be allowed to run in the national elections, which they eventually did with an event culminating on election night, September 28th 1998.[16]

The same year he made a performance project for an Austrian festival for new art Steirischer Herbst called Chance 2000 for Graz: eight pillars were built at the central Marienplatz square, where homeless people were invited to sit on, and the deal was that the one who sat there longest could win 7,000 shillings, plus every day the artist threw 20,000 shillings on passers-by in front of the eyes of those who sat on the pillars.[17] The project was interrupted with help of the right-wing Freedom Party of Austria, that collected 10,000 signatures against it.

With his demands for people to "prove they exist" in an age of total TV coverage and "act, act, act" in the sense of becoming active not 'actors', his work could be considered a direct legacy of Bertolt Brecht, as it demands involvement as opposed to passivity and merely looking on as is the case in traditional text-based theatre. In an age of extreme media fatigue, his was a fresh voice albeit and undisputedly containing echoes of the past, often humorous and subversive yet never cynical. His influences included Joseph Beuys and his idea of social sculpture, and artists Allan Kaprow and Dieter Roth. At the time of his death, he was involved in productions for the Ruhrtriennale[18] and for the Berlin Staatsoper's "Metanoia".[19]

Opera

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In 2004, at the invitation of Wolfgang and Katharina Wagner, he staged Wagner's Parsifal for the Bayreuth Festival.[20] When he accepted the Wagner family's invitation, it caused surprise because of his iconoclasm and his well-known aversion to all things tainted by association with Hitler; however, he had been invited to the festival before in 1991.[21] Film clips and costumes focused the action on the conflict between Christianity and Islam. The production, in the first years conducted by Pierre Boulez, was revived in 2005 and 2006, but unlike other Bayreuth Festival stagings it was not filmed.

In his last productions, such as the fluxus oratorio Church of Fear and the ready made opera Mea culpa, he staged his own cancer experience,[22] and related it to his first 'stage experience' as a young altar boy.

Opera Village Africa

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Schlingensief's commitment to developing nations later took him to Burkina Faso, where he was awarded a concession to build an opera house, arguably his most ambitious project.[23] The project, which received funding from the German government,[18] was also to include a theater and film school, and an infirmary.[3] Construction began in January 2010, near Ouagadougou, and was later continued under the guidance of Schlingensief's wife and long-time assistant Aino Laberenz, whom he married in 2009.[4] In 2012, numerous internationally renowned artists have donated works for a fundraising auction at the Hamburger Bahnhof, among them Marina Abramović, Pipilotti Rist, Georg Baselitz, Christo, Olafur Eliasson, Andreas Gursky, Wolfgang Tillmans and Günther Uecker. Patti Smith, a friend of Schlingensief for many years, contributed a drawing that she made in the summer of 2010 during a joint exhibition in Munich.

Death

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After learning he had lung cancer in early 2008,[18] Schlingensief wrote about his illness and in 2009 published Heaven Could Not Be as Beautiful as Here: A Cancer Diary.[3] Also, he already organised part of his estate and entrusted it for archiving to the Berlin Academy of the Arts. He died on 21 August 2010 in Berlin, Germany, at age 49.[24] In a note to his death in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Literature Nobel Prize Laureate Elfriede Jelinek wrote:

Schlingensief was one of the greatest artists who ever lived. I always thought one like him cannot die. It is as if life itself had died. He was not really a stage director (in spite of Bayreuth and Parsifal), he was everything: he was the artist as such. He has coined a new genre that has been removed from each classification. There will be nobody like him.[25]

Venice Biennale

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In 2011, the jury of the 54th Venice Biennale awarded the international exhibition's highest honor, the "Golden Lion for best national pavilion", to Germany for its display of work by Christoph Schlingensief. Organized by curator Susanne Gaensheimer, who completed the exhibition after Schlingensief's death,[26] the German pavilion was transformed into a replica of the church where the artist spent his teenage years as an altar boy in order to present Fluxus Oratorio, the second of his three-part final work, created after he had undergone surgery to remove a lung. The exhibition presented multimedia documents—from videos to x-rays—relating to his battle with terminal cancer. A side room showed footage and a maquette made as part of Schlingensief's project to build an opera house in Burkina Faso, while another wing displayed a selection of films from throughout his career. In an interview with Berliner Zeitung, artist Gerhard Richter had previously criticised Schlingensief's appointment as "a scandal", associating the selection of the multitasking director with "the decline of painting".[27]

Projects

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1990s

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  • 1990–1993 he directed a series of films known as the Germany trilogy
  • 1993 he directed his first stage piece "100 Years of CDU" at the Volksbühne Berlin
  • 1994 Kuhnen "94, Bring Me the Head of Adolf Hitler!" at the Volksbühne Berlin
  • 1996 Director of the movie United Trash
  • 1996 Rocky Dutschke at the Volksbühne Berlin
  • 1997 My Felt, My Fat, My Hare, 48 Hours Survival for Germany (documenta X, Kassel)
  • 1997 Passion Impossible, Wake Up Call for Germany, Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg and Station Mission for the Homeless
  • 1998 Chance 2000, an Election Circus, Prater Garden, Berlin and other locations nationwide
  • 1999 Freakstars 3000 at the Volksbühne Berlin

2000s

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References

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  1. ↑ "Christoph Schlingensief ist tot". Süddeutsche Zeitung. 21 August 2010. Retrieved 24 August 2010.
  2. ↑ Zachary Woolfe (27 July 2014). "Operatic Heart of a Chaotic Career: The German Gadfly Christoph Schlingensief at MoMA PS1". The New York Times. Retrieved 28 July 2014.
  3. 1 2 3 William Grimes (25 August 2010), Christoph Schlingensief, Artistic Provocateur, Dies at 49 The New York Times.
  4. 1 2 3 Hugh Rorrison (24 August 2010). "Christoph Schlingensief obituary". The Guardian. Retrieved 6 May 2012.
  5. 1 2 3 4 Ken Johnson (1 May 2014), Former Auteur in Love With Outrage The New York Times.
  6. 1 2 Varney, Denise (2010). ""Right now Austria looks ridiculous":Please Love Austria! - Reforging the Interaction Between Art and Politics". Christophe Shlingensief: Art Without Borders. Intellect Ltd. pp. 108–113. ISBN 9781841503196.
  7. ↑ Obrist, Hans Ulrich (2010). "Multiplications - Christoph Sclingensief in conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist". In Gaensheimer, Susanne (ed.). Christophe Schlingensief, German Pvilion, 2011 (1st ed.). Sternberg Press. pp. 302–303. ISBN 9781934105429. Around the same time there was this Bif brother boom in the paper, but then there was also a report about Indians who were locked in a container trying to escape their country, and tried to drill a hole into the container wall with a small piece of metal. But they all suffocated because they were so tightly packed together. And then I said to Bondy, all we would really have to do would be to translate into reality the slogans mr. Haider and his crowd up there used, because politicians usually get scared of their own statements when you meant just like them. And we needed to capture the game they were playing with this coalition between the ÖVP and the FPÖ in an image that any Austrian could participate in.
  8. ↑ "Foreigners Out! Schlingensief's Big Brother of Xenophobia | Diggit Magazine". www.diggitmagazine.com. 27 September 2023. Retrieved 14 July 2026.
  9. ↑ Bitter, Anna (10 February 2020). "Foreigners out! Schlingensief's Container". Filmgalerie 451. Retrieved 17 July 2026.
  10. 1 2 Forrest, Tara (2010). "Pruductive Discord: Schlingensief, Adorno, and Freakstar 3000". Christoph Schlingensief, Art Without Borders. Intellect Ltd. pp. 125–127. ISBN 9781841503196.
  11. ↑ "Searching for Germany '99" (PDF). press.moma.org. Retrieved 26 September 2017.
  12. ↑ Christoph Schlingensief obituary The Daily Telegraph, 31 October 2010.
  13. ↑ Hoff, Johannes (2011). "Life in Abundance: Schingensief's deconstruction of (post) modernism". Christoph Schlingensief, German Pavilion, 2011. Sternberg Press. p. 215. ISBN 9781934105429.
  14. ↑ Christoph Schlingensief, "18 Images a Second", May 25 – September 16, 2007 Haus der Kunst, Munich.
  15. ↑ https://www.naziline.de Nazi~Line
  16. ↑ Gade, Solveig (2010). "Putting the Public Sphere to the Test: On Publics and Counter-Publics in Chance 2000". Christophe Schlingensief. Intellect Ltd. pp. 89–90. ISBN 9781841503196.
  17. ↑ Christoph Schlingensief Chance 2000 für Graz Offsite Graz.
  18. 1 2 3 Shirley Apthorp (23 August 2010), Schlingensief, Who Put Putrid Bunny on Bayreuth Stage, Is Dead Bloomberg.
  19. ↑ George Loomis (12 October 2010), The New Opera 'Metanoia' Goes On, but Without Its Provocateur The New York Times.
  20. ↑ Jeremy Eichler (27 July 2004), "A Hullabaloo for an Opening at Bayreuth", p. E1, The New York Times.
  21. ↑ John Rockwell (22 June 2003), "The Weird Twilight of a Wagner" The New York Times.
  22. ↑ Kaspar Mühlemann: Christoph Schlingensief und seine Auseinandersetzung mit Joseph Beuys. Europäische Hochschulschriften, series 28: Kunstgeschichte, vol. 439), Peter Lang Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2011, ISBN 978-3-631-61800-4
  23. ↑ Till Briegleb (7 June 2012). "Halleluja der Ambivalenz". Süddeutsche Zeitung. Retrieved 26 December 2014.
  24. ↑ Apthorp, Shirley (22 August 2010). "Schlingensief, Who Put Putrid Bunny on Bayreuth Stage, Is Dead". Bloomberg. Retrieved 24 August 2010.
  25. ↑ Lukas Kubina: "Christoph Schlingensief passed away", dld-conference.com 2010
  26. ↑ Georg Diez; Nora Reinhardt (3 June 2011). "German filmmaker, theater director and artist Christoph Schlingensief died before finishing his upcoming exhibition at the Venice Biennale, but preparations went on without him". Der Spiegel. Retrieved 29 May 2011.
  27. ↑ "Richter Criticizes German Pavilion" Archived 10 August 2011 at the Wayback Machine Artforum.
  28. ↑ Deutscher Pavillon 2011: Christoph Schlingensief / 4 June – 27 November 2011 La Biennale di Venezia, Venice 2010
  29. ↑ Festspielhaus Afrika
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