Page - 116 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

116 siting futurity dissident of the mainstream was chosen. I would describe her as the Cassandra of contemporary literature and the Ger- man-language stage, that Cassandra who sees what’s terrible coming, calamity, the abyss, death, and no one believes her.] (Schlingensief 2010) In the “Jelinek and Schlingensief” section of Pia Janke and Te- resa Kovacs’s Der Gesamtkünstler Christoph Schlingensief [The Total Artist Christoph Schlingensief], which is devoted to a con- sideration of their relationship, Jelinek in turn calls him “mein Assistent der [sic] Verschwindens” [“my assistant of disappear- ance”]. The depth of Schlingensief and Jelinek’s mutual admira- tion paved the way for two further experimental installation- performances at the Burg: Area7 Matthäusexpedition [St. Mat- thew’s Expedition], which opened on January 20, 2006, and Mea Culpa, which played from March 20–25, 2009. Unlike his earlier incendiary outdoor actions, which awakened the histories of the sites on which they took place and were very much in the tra- dition of what Claire Bishop has called the “expanded field of post-studio practices” (Bishop 2012, 1), these final works modu- late that understanding of “expanded” to bring it into line with Joseph Beuys’s expanded art (Vogel 2006) by returning indoors, into renowned theatrical spaces such as the Burg in Vienna, and pushing at the limits of what they will allow as though he were seeking to explode them from within. Sabine Vogel conveys the post-theatricality of Area7 very well: As in all Schlingensief’s works, whether tv talk shows, theater pieces, or films, Area7 evinces a deep antipathy to narrative, going so far as to destroy the normal course of a theater visit. Once arriving on a set evening, visitors must structure their own time, without seating, intermission, or most other conventions of the theater. The stage and a por- tion of the auditorium and the orchestra level are changed into a giant installation guests may walk through, albeit only in small groups. Cobbled together in a self-consciously slop-