Yesterday in Graz I figured I’d stay away from theatre and stick with art. My first stop therefore had to be Kunsthaus Graz. Mention that you are going to Graz to pretty much anyone in the London art world and they’ll bring up the Kunsthaus. Not that this piece of architecture is universally liked by London art world insiders – many view it as too flashy and tending to overshadow the art it shows – but nonetheless it can’t be ignored! The building was designed by Peter Cook and Colin Fournier. The former was a founder member of London based 1960s utopian architecture group Archigram. The designs made by members of Archigram remain popular with a certain curators but the group’s plans were never really realised – so it isn’t unusual to come across people in London who view the Kunsthaus as the nearest thing there is to a ‘finished’ Archigram project (and some use it to illustrate the argument that it’s just as well that Archigram weren’t able to see their ideas translated into built structures). I found the plonking of what Cook and Fournier’s call the “Friendly Alien” amongst a bunch of baroque buildings a great visual pun  – but then neither baroque nor blob architecture really groove me, since I much prefer the more ‘classic’ modernist forms Archigram were reacting against.

Given that Archigram were pro-consumerist and worked on the assumption that there were infinite resources in the world, Kunsthaus Graz seemed like an appropriate venue to host Romauld Hazoume’s Beninese Solidarity with Endangered Westerners. Hazoume is well known for the use of items such as petrol canisters in his works, and has said about this: “I send back to the West that which belongs to them, that is to say, the refuse of consumer society that invades us every day.”� Money too is an essential of consumer society and it is of course only a representation of wealth; we’ll all be far richer once money is abolished! The short English language text explaining Hazoume’s take on aid covers some of the essentials – more than 40% of this money is spent on NGO administrative costs and endemic corruption creams off more, with the result that aid rarely goes where it is actually needed. Not mentioned in the material accompanying the show is that the world belongs to everyone and the poor should not have to rely on ‘charity’ from the rich. Aid is simply one of the many ways in which the bourgeoisie attempts to buy off those who might otherwise expropriate their expropriators (and rather than supply the readies themselves, the bourgeoisie often merely campaign for working class ‘westerners’ to cough up dosh in the form of donations)! Likewise the disparities in wealth between rich and poor individuals dwarf the disparities between rich and poor nations. There are rich and poor everywhere and aid for poor westerners from rich Africans makes every bit as much – or as little (depending on your perspective) – sense as the reverse.

Without leaving the building I was able to boogie along to Camera Austria for the exhibition Unexpected Encounters. I certainly wasn’t expecting the talk in the supporting textual material of the ‘restoration of capitalism’ and ‘the period of real socialism in the former Yugoslavia’. Like everyone else on the left – and by left I mean those with the type of views denounced by Lenin in Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder – I see Yugoslavia and the whole of the former Eastern bloc dominated by the USSR as capitalist. Of course people do argue about whether to call this historical empire capitalist or state capitalist (with those opting for the former denouncing those who chose the latter for fetishising the notion of bureaucracy); but even ultra-leftists who disagree with aspects of Amadeo Bordiga’s analysis of the agricultural question in the Russian revolution (the basic argument being that the transition from the formal to the real domination of capital takes place when you reduce those employed in agriculture to 10% or less of the work force, and this is what Bolshevism achieved) generally agree with the conclusion that while there was a revolution in Russia, it was a bourgeois and not a communist revolution.

Then there are all the old arguments about whether workers’ control was capitalist or communist. The Bordiguists, of course, argued that if the workers in a specific factory controlled that factory, they in effect owned it, and that therefore relations between one factory and another would inevitably have to be commercial, and so rather than having communism, you’d still have capitalism! These debates -which I first found myself involved in more than 30 years ago – seemed to have a lot of bearing on the material presented in Unexpected Encounters. But to reuse words I first read in a text by Jacques Camatte, one might say of the Camera Austria curators: “it is as if they’d never encountered left-communism in all its originality, nor understood the nature of its break with the Third International…”

Next I moved on to Close Link by Barbara Hoelbling and Mario Hoeber at Ex-Zollant/Halle. The installation looked at those in isolated or vegetative states of consciousness due to illness, and according to the blurb confronted ‘visitors with their own very personal, unexplored relationships.’ All the medical equipment in the show made me realise I’d never explored the forms of sexual fetishism connected to doctors and hospitals; that said, even if there’d been a rubber nurse on hand to give me a quick enema, I’m not sure I’d have gone for it – since dominance and submission isn’t really my thing! In a different part of the same building I also checked out Economic Factor Closet Clutter, where it was possible to swap fashionable clothing instead of buying it (that said ‘proletarian shoppers’ tend to favour stealing it). The items were either too high fashion or too bohemian for my tastes, and there was no sign of the type of low class sportswear I favour among the items, although the event was clearly popular with locals – to the extent that there were even a couple of uniformed cops checking it out, yikes!

To top off my cultural OD for the day I decided to go and see My Name Is Janez Jansa (2012, directed by Janez Jansa – born 1964 as Emil Hrvatin) again – I’d seen it earlier in the year at Transmediale in Berlin and thought it sucked big time, but I decided to give it one last chance. Viewing it for a second time I liked it even less. Basically it is a TV-style documentary about three artists who in 2007 all legally changed their names to Janez Jansa, also the public name of the then prime minister of Slovenia (although his legal name was and is Ivan Jansa).

A lot of academic talking heads are used to give the documentary an appearance of gravitas – but only, of course, if you haven’t yet realised that academic study is yet another manifestation of pointless bourgeois ideology. Whether the individuals in question are genuine academics or just presented as such doesn’t make much difference, since academia is beyond parody and the hierarchical effect is the same regardless of whether the bozos on camera are real professors or just actors. One interviewee even suggests the art world doesn’t like the Janez Jansa name change performance because it is literal rather than a simulation – which left me wondering what century this twerp was living in since the rhetoric about simulation associated with Jean Baudrillard was popular in art world centres such as New York and London during the rise of post-modernism in the 1980s, but is now considered terminally unhip. That said, the three artists engaged in the Janez Jansa performance are simulating political activism – but they don’t by this means escape the political, rather they remain as conservative as the SDS party of Ivan Jansa, which all three joined.

What came across in the film, but even more strikingly in a post-screening talk given by its director Janez Jansa and his two Janez Jansa collaborators (born respectively as Davide Grassi in 1970 and as Ziga Kariz in 1973), was their obsession with their own position within the institution of art. Noticeable by its absence from the film is any discussion of the collective use of names and identities among those critical of the institution of art starting with the Christ Society Ltd of the Berlin dadaists, and continuing even more thrillingly with the Luther Blissett Project of the 1990s. What I Am Janez Jansa does is produce a weak and conservative version of these earlier multiple identity projects that involved thousands of people using the same name.

While those initially behind the Luther Blissett Project invited anybody who wanted to do so to use the name, the elitist Janez Jansas seek to generate media and art world interest in themselves by a far more restricted usage of multiple identity concepts. But more than anything else what came across from watching the director Janez Jansa and his two associates speak was just how insufferably dull art world elitists always are! While those involved in the Luther Blissett Project were upfront about their equalitarian political intentions, the three men promoting themselves and their art as Janez Jansa play at refusing to explain their actions. And like every other deluded elitist they don’t seem to realise that they aren’t outsmarting their audience, who on the whole are perfectly capable of reading their actions as well as their words.

Today began well when I turned up for the Curational Dialogues at Rotor only to discover the discussion was in German. Okay it wasn’t the beginning of my day since that was a shower and breakfast which were also great.  Often I wish I could speak German – for example, when I’m reading Marx or Hegel – but in this instance I was very happy I didn’t. Hearing curators speak often puts me in a bad mood, and later in the day I would recall being put in a exceptionally bad mood by what I considered a piss poor talk at The ICA in London by Andrea Phillips, because she was cited in some art notes for work on display in Grazer Kunstverein.

From what I could see, Measures Of Saving The World – Part 3 at Rotor looked wonderful, but with so many people milling about listening to the curators it was hard to get a proper view of  the work.  So I left thinking it was best not to review that show. Other people getting in my line of vision wasn’t a problem when I got to the Kunstlerhaus to see the exhibition What Is Art? I was the only person in the gallery for the hour and a half I was there, aside from the two staff members I clocked (one there to take money on the entrance – and she insisted I had to pay despite the fact I should have been let in for free when I showed my pass  – and one keeping an eye on the work downstairs).  What Is Art? raised so many issues that I’ll need to dedicate a whole blog to reviewing it, so I won’t describe it here I’ll do that later….

It was with a sense of relief that I moved on to Grazer Kunstverein, where I was able to groove to videos of Trisha Bown’s dance moves and admire Doug Ashford’s abstract paintings. From there I boogied along to Ex-Zollant/Halle for the Liquid Assets show. I got angry when I read in the book accompanying the exhibition:

“Perhaps the present moment is a good one to suggest that capitalism is not inherently evil – it depends how it is exercised. In the post-war era, capitalism evidently helped many people prosper; and the wealthy do, after all, provide valuable jobs…”

Obviously most of us wouldn’t need to work nearly as much as we do if the world’s wealth was more equitably distributed. So yes the wealthy force us to do work we’d rather not do by ripping off what should belong to us all; and while capitalism and the alienation that accompanies it may not be inherently ‘evil’ (an idea too obviously drawn from religious ideology for me to want to make use of it), capitalism is inherently bad for both us and the planet! Anyway while aspects of the explanatory material put me in a an atrocious mood (I told you earlier that what curators say often does this to me) I was very happy to look at works like Gustav Metzger’s Mass Media – an installation made from bundled together newspapers.

Having taken in way more art than I could possibly blog, it was time to head out of town to Peggau for The Forest Project by United Sorry and Friends. After a monologue by Robert Steijn (who made sure I had a printed English translation before he began), we headed into the woods and the real drama began. My understanding of what I was about to witness was that it was intended to connect me to the forest and explore male sexuality. I loved the opening which was just bodies moving in very minimal ways, with these actions creating noises that weren’t much louder than the the sounds of nature around us. The minimal mood continued with long sticks positioned between the legs of various male performers who proceeded to make a kind of burlesque of pagan fertility rituals. By this time some of the actors were already naked, an impressive feat considering how cold and damp it was. The minimalism that moved me was lost when the odd piece of guitar playing became the performance of full blown songs. The expanded musical content with increased nudity was less poetic and more like a neo-hippie happening.

All was not lost, however, since after more than two hours we were eventually moved on to a waterfall where the entire cast got naked and most also immersed themselves in the cold water running down from the hill. Here we returned to a more poetic and less musical vision of minimal movements. Throughout the piece I’d been bothered by the fact that there were more than a half-a-dozen European men (including two musicians) and one Asian female performing the work – which seemed unbalanced. Eun Kyung Lee looked like she took far more exercise than the males she was working alongside, and as a consequence she moved way better than anyone else. Therefore the fact that my eye kept favoring Lee over every other naked body in my field of vision probably says very little about my sexual orientation. Sometimes less is more. If The Forest Project had been shorter and either all male or more balanced between male and female, I think it would have been even more thrilling!

It’s about 17 years since I was last in Graz for the Steirischer Herbst Festival. On my return the sky was grey, the weather cold and damp, and the town looked less prosperous than when I last visited. Maybe it’s just the gloom but I don’t recall seeing empty shop units last time I was here.

The first performance I caught was Gym Club choreographed by Massimo Furlan. It’s based on his interest in local figure Arnold Schwarzenegger, a bodybuilder turned Hollywood movie star and more recently a right-wing politician in the USA. In the theatre I thought I’d gone back to the seventies, which was presumably Furlan’s intention.  A half-hour series of comic group exercises constituted half the piece and they reminded me of Carry On films and the Benny Hill TV Show of that era – but rather than taking up a minute or two of screen time, the joke was repeated until you couldn’t stand it any more.

Various exercises were parodied, including Pilates moves like leg extensions which were performed atrociously. Instead of staying in a box like position on all fours, engaging the core and placing the spine in a neutral position before extending the leg without moving anything else, a performer had his back pushed down by a helper while allowing his hips to sway about.  This completely defeated the object of the exercise, if it was intended as exercise rather than a laugh riot.

There were also fleeting and deliberately pathetic attempts a yoga positions like crow, but at its core this section was based on female aerobics classes of the seventies all done very badly for comic effect by four male and two female dancers. One of the female dancers acted as exercise instructor, and one of the males was really fat to add even more extreme craziness to this piece of physical comedy. All the exercise moves were so pitifully and incorrectly performed that they clearly wouldn’t have done much to raise the heart rate or tone the muscles.  There were even pulsing stretches, something that sports scientists today would advise against, even if they were popular a few decades ago.

Having witnessed the dancers perform mostly exercise designed to tone and slim female bodies (if they had been executed correctly), the four males abruptly and absurdly took to throwing body builder poses. Finally a couple of the dancers used costumes to act out a fantasy of having gained huge muscles. Logically the piece made no sense at all, but then humour isn’t logical and nor is dance.

Later I went to see Marzo by the Italian dance collective Dewey Dell. In this a bunch of freaks in outrageous costumes act out an unintelligible psychodrama. The sound was great and the original music Back Fanfare by Demetrio Castellucci sounded at time like breakbeat – and it was played at reasonable volume through a good speaker system.  Since breakbeat gives me wood, I enjoyed Marzo even more than Gym Club! My only regret of the day was that I arrived in town too late to make it out of the city again to catch The Forest Project by United Sorry!