Get dirty with monochrom
Eye Weekly -- February 1, 2007 -- Volume 16, Issue 18
In the annals of performance art, perhaps few figures are as notorious as Hermann Nitsch and Gunter Brus, key members of the Vienna-based Actionist collective, who staged a panoply of days-long happenings in the '60s and '70s involving animal guts, defecation, crucifixion, feathers and a whole lot of writhing.
Johannes Grenzfurthner of the contemporary Viennese collective monochrom uses the Actionists as a reference point, “but only,” he says, “because it's impossible not to if you're a performance artist working after 1965.” Contributors to Blackwood Gallery's “Unterspiel” exhibit of emerging Viennese artists, monochrom perform their own pseudo-Actionist Premature Burial as a Field Trial for Near Death Activities Feb. 7, for which they will ask a handful of volunteers to be buried alive for 15 minutes each – in a real coffin, in real dirt, with a eulogy detailing the history of body-snatching and forensics.
Grenzfurthner's trepidation about the Actionists' influence may have something to do with monochrom's political bent (he describes the group as “postmodern leftists”) and, more specifically, with his contention that performance art as the Actionists understood it – to wit, as a transformative, taboo-breaking thing – is impotent, or at least in need of an overhaul.
“In the Actionists' day, it was easy to get arrested in Vienna doing what they did in public spaces,” Grenzfurthner says. “Nowadays, you'd be lucky to have someone put a picture of the event on Flickr. And, of course, most of the Actionists' performances are far less hardcore than anything on, say, Jackass.”
The problem, according to Grenzfurthner, is the widely held notion in the West that all oppressive hierarchies have been shattered: no longer under the palpable shadow of institutions like the church, we assume we're free agents, and thus stop caring. The monochrom collective's response is to become what Grenzfurthner calls “an experimental lab” whose purpose is to “find out what potential [i.e., for radicalism, for mobilization] still exists.”
A quick glance at monochrom's long list of projects and performances (the collective was founded in 1993 and, to date, has instigated well over 100 of them) evinces a variety of strategies, some hare-brained, some brilliant. Many involve the internet: their computer game Soviet Unterzoegersdorf – The Adventure Game, in part a parody of the post-WWII Russian occupation of Austria, was listed as internet game of the month for Nov. 2005 by Edge magazine; their own website (http://www.monochrom.at/) functions as a busy, enthusiastic chronicle of their own and others' art projects.
"Premature Burial as a Field Trial for Near Death Activities" broaches many things, such as the still-firm grip of religion on a presumedly secular society and our increasingly paranoid-cum-sanitized view of the body. To date, monochrom have staged Premature Burial in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Vancouver, and never, by the way, finds it hard to muster up volunteers – though, true to the Actionist spirit, usually manages to ruffle a few.
“We tend to get goths,” says Grenzfurthner. “In Vancouver, they were afraid and didn't want to do it. Maybe we confronted them with the real side of their death-based youth culture. Who knows? Capitalism's great at absorbing and remodelling pretty much anything you can imagine. There's a lot to be discovered by digging a hole.”
DAVID BALZER
Monochrom's “Premature Burial as a Field Trial for Near Death Activities” begins 4-6pm and 7-9pm, Feb 7. Shuttle bus departs from 7 hart house circle at 3pm and returns at 6pm. Blackwood Gallery, Kaneff Centre, University of Toronto at Mississauga, 3359 Mississauga Rd N. 905-828-3789.
http://www.eye.net/eye/issue/issue_02.01.07/arts/artsweek_1.php
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