Schlingensief kept on economy payroll, Parsifal is dead.

First time I noticed Schlingensief, introduced by a friend who was the king of German super 8, I saw "The Chainsaw massacre" a early super 8 movie made by Schlingensief, he was a scholar of Werner Nekes a German director. Schlingensief later has grown out of underground moviemaking, towards claiming a domain, a non conventionalist in the conventional theater business, a perfect match. In this time the German theater in stagnation, nothing new after Living Theatre, Pina Bausch, even Peter Zadek by inviting the Neubauten did not steer up the theater business, as much as Schlingensief did.

His relation to art was inconsistent, he called it art shit, and that he wants to avoid to become art shit, (Kunstscheiss) but on the other hand he tried to sell pictures through a gallery.
He robbed and steal, from everyone and from everywhere in the holy artistry. Fine arts, performance art, actions, fluxus, you name it, Schlingensief took it all, as the self-service takeaway hero. In parts, or as a whole and mixed it back together in his stage compositions. Even psycho theater and role play was part of his concept ala Jerzy Grotowski, Jacob Moreno, yes softer but there. Parts of Viennese actionism, american Happening or euro Fluxus . His call for murdering Helmut Kohl and Schuessel, the first the German Chancellor the second the Austrian was not executed, but the open call for peeing into Helmut Kohls beach was a big media success, printing him to the front page of germans bulvar paper "BILD". The multi variety, the huge productions, took there tall, he burned out. The hungry theater and entertainment business, where he got addicted to, did not leave him out of the claw's and self-evidently drowned him to down under. There are always two in such a game, one who allows and one who pushes. If you ask me to write more about death, I cant, I had no near dead experience, I am not aware of my previous lives, I am not doing extreme sports and I am not doing power meditation.

Some one said that as artist you can do 2 major / significant works in your live not more. I have seen Schligensief twice, ones on the Vienna airport, checking in to Berlin, nervous followed by his small young girlfriend Aino. I said to myself, poor guy misused by all the theater managers, after doing his job they send him back to Berlin in economy class, I was on a economy flight to London the same day.

The second time also in Vienna, on the trial stage of the Burgtheater, a fabulous performance even better then the mane act of Area 7 later in the Burgtheater. Simple, powerful expressionistic and a joy to see how particles of performance art made there way into mainstream theater. I was impressed, he had a lot of experience of composing the bizarre and the conventional, the planed and the improvised, the professional actors and the amateurs together, into his very individual story line.

The costumer base he played for, especially the young and middle age are the todays bourgeois, working in jobs, running families and far from any goals he was expressing. Conventional, politically correct in there daily live, and many of them embraced him as an excuse, basically they became the lame, hand-clapping couch potatoes, siting in row x. Not much change on the side in the audience. Vice versa, on the stage all known rules broke down and that was good. The second format he was using have been the public performances detached from the theater house. There he never pushed it, so that society had to react seriously. The slap into the establishment's face stopped just 2cm before touch down.

The hippies and the greens, his major customer base misused him for revanche, for there miserable, frustrated live, clapping fanatically in there hands, but good old Schlingensief was loosing energy, burned out. It reminds me a bit on the Mikel Jackson dearth, but Mikel died on drugs while Schligensief on cancer, both have burned out. No doubt he did enough, he has my full respect, but I think the "society" failed him, to supply him with enough money to live on. Sorry folks he should have been put on a higher payroll than economy class. I do avoid to embark here in a conspiracy theory, that his payroll was fine-tuned by the theater society, in such a way that he needed to do more and more, again and again, which was money for a short moment.

Many processes in conceptional art cant reach the peak if they remain rational/logic, they have to embark into the emotional world. And the emotional world cant be exchanged by a more political one, I think Schlingensief did not managed to slip away from the rational world. Theater is concept and planing, independent from content, the professional actor pretends, just for the amateurs, for them what they play this is serious, they identify themselves. I have seen only John Cage in his "Radioplay" where he motivated the actors to step out of the rational timeline and improvise. Schlingensief in all his work was German and remained German even in the brake out to Africa, similar to Andre Heller also he has no internationality, Heller remains an Austrian hokus pokus - gschisti gschasti. What I was missing was the attack on the audiences, Peter Handke did this with "Publikumsbeschimpfungen", even that Schlingensief's plays have been radical formally, they missed to upset the audience, to upset the audience of young bourgeoise, in a way he was what Heller newer achieved to become.
Mr. Heller is the hero for the old social democrats, Schlingensief the one of the green party.

And yes, I know from people who ones worked with Schlingensief, how paranoid and control freaky he was, selfish, vain, egocentric, a typical person formed by the theater community. Chinese have a say, if you find only fulfilling in the others agenda and this overwhelms you, you may get dissolved also by others agenda. I hope I get here not misunderstood, artist agenda is not to fix the world, it is on one hand to show the world what is going on, to fix it, it is the job of politicians and scientist, the people who are paid for. On the other hand artist are creating there own language, form, sound, rhythm which are routed in the non conceptional world, irrational and senseless, maybe animalistic or archaic.

Here some errata of art history: to fail is not a chance, no future is no future and not everyone is an artist.

Much to late, he was invited, to design the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale for 2011. He died in his half- live, at age 49, when you reach such much years, you may rethink, to reboot, to redirect, to reshuffle. I wonder if his wife, Aino Laberenz, they married in 2009, will speak out, she should.