Seite - 111 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

111 Hardly Homemad(e) shouts, “[t]hose Piefkes [an offensive term comparable to ‘Krauts’] always start these things!” She demands that the container be taken down, “otherwise there is going to be a war between us! We want to have our peace,” she shrieks, again without any apparent awareness of irony, as she smashes her hand violently against the fence surrounding the container. Soon she is marching through the crowd, chanting “Kick out the Piefkes! Foreigners in!” (Schmidt 2011, 5–6) The presence of Germans and their condescending attitude towards Austria continues to be cause for some consternation in Austria, a problematic noted in Chapter 2 in the reading of Planet Ottakring. Schlingensief’s practice reveals the contempt in which he held traditional activism, and the need he saw to operate “on the level of appearance, of spectacle, of the representational re- gime of images.” In his view, “[t]he whole container-thing was a machinery to disrupt images!” (ibid., 7). He also confessed at another point that one of the central concerns was “to put public spaces to the test” (Gade 2010, 91). The public space in front of Vienna’s State Opera turned out to be highly charged and al- lowed for much conflictual contestation. As Claire Bishop notes, “[a]lthough in retrospect — and particularly in Poet’s film — it is evident that the work is a critique of xenophobia and its institu- tions, in Vienna the event (and Schlingensief’s charismatic role as circus-master) was ambiguous enough to receive approval and condemnation from all sides of the political spectrum” (Bishop 2012, 282). If Schlingensief designed the event, as was his wont, to interrogate the exclusionary mechanisms inherent in a particular public space, then from the fact that the square in front of the State Opera made space for all to enter, it would seem that it passed Schlingensief’s test with flying colors. The “disturbing lesson” that we have to take away from the test, how- ever, is, as Claire Bishop underscores, “that an artistic represen- tation of detention has more power to attract dissensus than an actual institution of detention” (ibid., 283; italics in original).