Sex, Drugs, Rock’n’Roll

Fake blood, rotating circus screams, cake-sex-Nazi-fetish – more Nazi-fetish – a fortiori Nazi-fetish: I finally made it to the Kunstwerke-exhibition today, a three-floor-wide video-panorama of Schlingensiefs visual legacy. Since I was caught on some sort of seemingly unavoidable December-flu this week, I was quite weary while walking through the exhibition spaces. Péter Nádas, when he wrote about his Berlin-experience, pretty much described the way I felt today: “I kept grasping at straws, hoping for an extraordinary insight meant only for me, for a new situation to arise, something, a change of mood, that would at last define me within this undefinable nothingness; I kept hoping to find something worth saving, something that would lend meaning to things, deliver me from this animal existence, not something from my past – I was sick and tired of my past – and not anything from my future either, since I had given up on the future long ago, always reluctant to plan ahead even for a moment.” Drowning in standby, waiting for something. Honestly speaking, I didn’t quite get there – to the something. Naturally, I find many of Schlingensiefs works (say, “Foreigners Out!” or “Chance 2000” or even the Möllemann-thing) brilliant, transgressive, powerful. But today I was torn between skepticism of Schlingensief being incorporated into some sort of urban scene (the beautiful German people) and growing skepticism towards some of the works themselves, since after some time of polite reception everything seemed to boil down to me looking for something more loud, more crass, more voyeuristic-radical-edgy. In that sense the works seemed to demand something quite known, even a bit boring. On my way out, on Kunstwerke’s mens-toilet, I found a small image; someone must have painted it with a pen. It’s two eyes watching their recipient and above: “Sex, Drugs, Rock’n’Roll” in Hebrew letters. It sounds pathetic, but that was the something. I decided I’ll give the whole thing a second try soon, in a more healthy state.