Paul Poet transforms Christoph Schlingensief’s Container Project: Performance into Image

An Event, its Effects and Discontents

Wiener Festwochen (Viennese Art Festival), June 2000: long considered the enfant terrible among European performance artists, Christoph Schlingensief (1960–2010), is at it again. In a fortress-like compound made of shipping containers and placed next to the opera house, Schlingensief stages a weeklong Aktion (political performance). Formally akin to the then-booming Big Brother television show, the performance stages an “intervention.”¹ The “houseguests” have applied for asylum in Austria and several are recent refugees, people displaced by the civil and ethnic wars in former Yugoslavia or forced into migration by famines in Africa. The “show” is (co-)produced by members of the public passing by on their way to and from the city center but also lurking online. To top it all, the happenings in the compound are streamed live, 24/7. Online, the audience votes for their “favorite refugee,” with the vote enabling the foreigner to stay in the country after an arranged marriage to an Austrian, while votes taken over the phone expel a houseguest from the compound. S/he is to be escorted from the premises live, each night at 7 p.m.²

Schlingensief’s Aktion meant to uncover any subtle (and not so subtle) workings of prejudice and xenophobia in the immediate aftermath of right-wing electoral success in Austria in 2000. Beginning with the title, Bitte liebt Österreich! – Erste Österreichische Koalitionswoche (Please love Austria: First Austrian Coalition Week), it invited protests by all those it targeted, from the (anonymous but vocal) public to the (inter-) national and boulevard press, all the while involving them in the production. Public, press and other media organizations, as well as artists, but also accused politicians became co-producers of “factual” declarations, name-shaming, and “misreadings.” While pedestrians’ protests proved to be self-revealing—as they confirmed accusations of xenophobia—and are well documented on film, television, and in newspapers, Kronen-Zeitung, the largest, most populist daily in Austria, feigned protest. It riled up the public over the originally chosen, but ultimately retracted subtitle “Konzentrationswoche” (concentration week, in allusion to concentration camp), while revealing a performance script that had the layout of the compound but was captioned “Lagerplan” (camp plan) rather than “Lageplan” (location map).³ Ultimately though, Krone only proliferated any and all insults by endlessly repeating them. Xenophobic media slogans, along with actual and fake brand logos, decorated the container walls, emphasizing insult and offensiveness through their loud, in-your-face visual presence. The signs were so omnipresent that leftwing protesters mistook them for xenophobic overreach, climbed the outer walls and tore them down. The project’s message seemed ubiquitous: xenophobia is everywhere, as is latent fascism. Schlingensief’s intent was more complex, though, as he aimed to move beyond exterior signs and expose internalized habitus: “Everybody was meant to read xenophobic Austria as a character, a role or a person that anybody can inhabit and that everybody has internalized.”⁴ The declared intent aimed to transcend the performance itself, lifting temporal art into a realm of experiencing a human condition, up to and in all its (self-) destructiveness.⁵ In its volatility and controversy, the performance revealed, as Anna Teresa Scheer observes, that left- and rightwing ideologies (and respective attributions by the other side) may be entirely insufficient to discuss the issues at hand.⁶

And yet, this snippet-like account can only convey parts of the performance. The project website (with clips from www.freewebTV.com) and an out-of-print book contain elements of the original design, scripts, and media-materials commenting on the weeklong happening.⁷ They inventory and archive them, presumably, without any editorial intervention or any efforts to organize the visual material. But these media, like any other, fall short of preserving the nature of the performance action. As it had played out live across different spaces, multiplied and augmented in several media, it resisted and undercut any unified message. (The different titles underscore the latter point.) Rather these aspects point to an event that yielded multidirectional...