Manfred Grübl / Linda Klösel / Aussicht Performance / magazine version NR. 1
In Version No. 1, social and artistic areas of action are sounded out in different media and placed together empirically in an open “paper.” The newspaper and CD/DVD edition is part of a conceptual art project in which marginalizing market conditions are contrasted with personal initiative.
While the first CD/DVD edition, presented in the fanzine Version No. 0, focused on electronic music, the second edition addresses philosophical and conceptual approaches. This edition is limited to 11 copies with ten artists each from the fields of art, music and philosophy, who use sound as the basis for their trans-media work. Rashim, for instance, use manually scratched CDs as their sound storage medium, Olga Neuwirth reflects on time available on a CD, Gerwald Rockenschaub uses visual elements to generate sound and Karlheinz Essl comments on various genres of art such as painting, film and performance with subtexts. One section of the edition features the documentation of an exhibition opening in the course of which the alarms of numerous parked cars were made to go off. Existing resources were employed for producing sound in this subversive action (Grübl/Jermolaeva). Version No. 1 is a companion to this intervention and includes contributions on the most various fields of performative action.
“Socrates was in the habit of accosting people on the streets of Athens, regardless of their social position, age or profession. Not caring whether they thought he was an eccentric or impertinent, he asked them to explain why they shared certain opinions that were commonly accepted as reasonable and what for them was the meaning of life.” (Alain de Botton) Questioning something so consensual, but usually unquestioned, lies the chief potential of performative practice. Performative methods can be applied anywhere; they are subversive means of making established structures the subject of critical debate. Since performative action is not entrenched in institutional structures, it is a politically independent form of artistic expression, which both breaks and reinterprets existing codes.
In our times, “postmodern” politics of resistance are permeated by aesthetic phenomena. Some examples for these are cross-dressing as practiced by the Japanese Visual kei musicians and their fans, who emphasize the female side of their personality, or flash mobbing. The latter stands for aesthetic-political protest reduced to its minimal frame: people gather at a specific time at a previously specified place and disperse after some brief and usually trivial activity. Slavoj Žižek calls this urban poetry without any true purpose.
In the present edition Jürgen Klauke is asked about his performative practice in which he repeatedly addresses various areas in a state of identity formation; Artur Zmijewski speaks to Jacek and Katarzyna Adamas about their struggle against a landfill in Worlawki in Poland and Elfriede Jelinek describes her state of alienation from her own play while it was being rehearsed by a director. Teresa Margolles, a Mexican artist, depicts the situation in Culiacan and Sinaloa, Mexican towns on the US border, where three hundred and fifty people have been murdered since the beginning of 2008.