ich habe gerade gekocht, ich koche sonst möglichst nicht, sofern es sich vermeiden lässt. gekocht mit einem hauch zu viel salz und einer riesigen portion wut für die österreichische politik. unstillbarer wut für die nationalratswahl und wie in einem schockzustand. bei dem vorläufigen ergebnis der steiermark war mir regelrecht zum heulen, gut, dass ich zwiebeln geschnitten habe. düstere zeiten kommen auf uns zu. kann es dieses ergebnis sein, das österreich will?

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!