Page - 101 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

101 4 Hardly Homemad(e): #Schlingensief’s Container “Das theatralische Gefühl der Österreicher macht diese Stadt [Wien] einmalig.” [“Austrians’ theatrical sensibility makes this city [Vienna] unique.”] —Peymann (2018) “Ausländer rein, Piefkes raus!” [“Foreigners in, krauts out!”] —Poet (2002) A clean-cut young man in jeans and a short-sleeved black shirt carrying a red megaphone struts around a large crowd gathered around a fenced-in shipping container that has been set up in the square in front of Vienna’s Staatsoper [State Opera House].1 He shouts inflammatory statements into the megaphone, and incensed individuals in the crowd shout back, their remarks often laced with obscenities. One can see the scene, as well as “[t]he installation, its conception and construction, the pro- gression of the six-day duration of the artwork, together with 1 This chapter builds on material in Ingram (2012), which situates Schlingen- sief’s Container’s engagement with Austria in European identity-producing discourses.