Page - 102 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

102 siting futurity interviews with Schlingensief and contemporaneous reactions from many different commentators (artists, philosophers and collaborators, as well as television news contributors)” (Fiddler 2018, 39) in Ausländer raus! Schlingensiefs Container [Foreign- ers Out! Schlingensief’s Container] (2002, dir. Paul Poet), the documentary controversial German film and theater direc- tor Christoph Schlingensief had made of the millennial me- dia spectacle he was commissioned to perform as part of the same Wiener Festwochen that had twenty-four years previ- ously hosted the Proletenpassion.2 As Allyson Fiddler has noted, “[t]he artwork or site-specific installation is internationally known and has generated a sizeable secondary literature” (Fid- dler 2018, 39). However, as far as I have been able to ascertain, none have yet to analyze Schlingensief’s work locationally, as I do here. In outlining Schlingsief’s considerable dealings with Vi- enna and Austria and then contrasting his container action with Viennese documentarist Ruth Beckermann’s response to the controversial 2000 coalition government, namely, Homemad(e), the artistic rendering of her neighborhood — Vienna’s old tex- tile quarter in the first district at the opposite end of Vienna’s inner city from the Staatsoper, this chapter demonstrates the considerable cultural distance between these two documenta- ries’ locations, one at the southern and the other at the northern edge of the Ringstrasse that encircles Vienna’s first district. My reading goes beyond identifying the works as merely site-specif- ic to demonstrate the historical forces of these central Viennese locations that, whether unwittingly or cannily, were brought to bear in their respective artworks and generated the politicized responses they did. In doing so, Schlingensief’s final work in the city, a staging of Mea Culpa — eine ReadyMadeOper at the Burg- theater in 2009, a year before his death on August 21, 2010 after a lengthy battle with lung cancer, reads like a sign of the lessons 2 Schlingensief’s projects are notoriously boundary-breaking. As Alexan- der Kluge asked, “[i]s a work by Schlingensief an installation, an opera, a series of number, a total work of art, a working through of reality, a piece of theater, an intermission or backstage activity? They are all interventions, transcriptions, transliterations, continuations” (Kluge 2010, 2).