Alice Creischer's piece starts in unusually, at the permanently closed side entrance in the basement of the Secession. Only from there do markings on the floor indicate the march route. The route for the visitors, on the other hand, starts in the middle of the work. In a video projection, a balloon coming from the mouth of a young woman confronts us with a mystery: »Is she lost? ... Has she lost her way like a child, or is she just hiding?« Other balloons proclaim: »We have killed her. How did we do that?« The solution to the mystery becomes apparent from various reactions: it concerns the figure of »work.« And it concerns a discourse about work that takes place in another era, in which the self-image of the workers was still young, as was the related awareness of subtle forms of resistance to injustice and exploitation by machines and capital. The discourse in the video »Generalization of Non-Work« takes place between two paradigms: capitalistic gainful employment as a social quantity, and the figure of work as being something inessential for survival and happiness.

In this »performance with guests, frozen into an exhibition,« two paths branch off from this central point: one leads to a hall in which »The Greatest Happiness Principle Party« is being held, a party thrown by the Austrian Credit Institute for its shareholders on the occasion of the extraordinary shareholders meeting in the year 1931; and the other, on the right, to the cloakroom. Artists' parties at the Vienna Secession had always been notorious. And the party held by the Austrian Credit Institute before its unhappy demise, before its bankruptcy in 1931, which is said to have triggered the second world economic crisis, was doubtless no different. At that time, this company was the nerve center for international investments in south-eastern Europe. And the way one imagines parties of the financial and administrational in-crowd in traditional artistic locations is a tradition, and has lost none of its force even today.

»The Greatest Happiness Principle Party« deals with the theme of massive social inequalities. The choreography's starting point is the 18th century, during which, with the French Revolution, a new form of government and of giving the people a voice had evolved that had the welfare of the whole population as its aim - as was, for example, laid down in the revolutionary phrase in the human rights; and in which an opposition had formed that vehemently demanded these rights in the »Manifeste des enrages«, the »Manifesto of the Angry.«

The first guests have already arrived, marionette-like figures. Among them is Jeremy Bentham, the English positivist dressed as a shimmering avant-garde figure from around 1930. A magician who represents the public-spirited notion of utilitarianism stands for the measure of the people's potential for happiness. A growing population is the best sign of the happiness and welfare of a state, the existing population, on the other hand, can also be a sign of past happiness. A decline in the size of the population is seen as the greatest evil that can befall a nation. The socioeconomist Bentham represents the traditions of English thought in those days. »The present day contains an extraordinary continuity of emotional power, the love of truth, noblest transparency, prosaic sobriety that is free of sentimentality and metaphysics, extraordinary selflessness and a concern for public welfare.« His opponent, the romantic, sometimes reactionary, author and social reformer Thomas Carlyle, appears in the guise of Miss Sourdough from the novel »Gospels against Mammonism.« Miss Sourdough, alias Alice Creischer, is present in the observant gesture that denounces social evils, as well as in real life as an intellectual figure: as »The Critic as Artist.«

The other people are also situated in periods that were decisively influenced by the concept of renewal in a social, technical or economic sense. Art Nouveau is an esthetic answer to the industrial reproducibility of many of the objects from the stylistic inventory of historicism, in which handcrafts, which had been marginalized by the extensive industrialization and mechanization of labor, are once more allocated an almost Romantic value with regard to organizational structure and quality of work. The emphasis on the imagery of nature in Art Nouveau can of course also be seen as a compensation for the urbanization and changes to the countryside at the end of the 19th century.

The elegantly dressed Countess of Glaxo Wellcome, whose portrait comes from the Secession's archives, from a photograph documenting an artists' party in the thirties, is a paradigm for this. She is endeavoring to get an international patent on medicinal plants which can be identified by exploiting the knowledge of indigenous peoples. Alice Creischer has dressed this figure with a remarkable eye for detail. The concept of handcraft is embodied in the design of the dress, a carving completely covered by leaf motifs that has its counterpart in the dome of the Secession building. In a series of large drawings serving as a background, the artist runs through a range of floral elements with a subtle feel for line.

In the cloakroom hangs an unusual garment belonging to the Countess: a silk coat with pressed flowers stuck all over it. There is a wide variety of species of medicinal plants; exclusive rights are held by Glaxo Wellcome, one of the present sponsors of the Secession. Even the label in the coat, »produced in Chiapas,« is a reference to the history of worker exploitation in Mexico. Another figure, Gustav Schlotterer, presents the Countess with a thick, succulent plant with the name »Terminator.«

Schlotterer, the powerful finance expert of the Nazi regime, is the one in charge of the deals in south-eastern Europe here. Schlotterer is talking with Sir Leon Brittan, known as Lobbyist, the EU commission's former vice-president, one of the most influential people today in international financial and monetary business working for market liberalization.

One of the hypotheses in Alice Creischer's piece is that the consequences which Nazi finance technology drew from the world economic crisis of 1931 directly benefited the organization of the International Monetary Fund. »In the history of exploitation, the continental states Germany and Austria saw south-eastern Europe – even before the Second World War – as a projection surface that was to compensate for their lack of colonial power.«

Detailed information about this scenario is given by the personnel in the cloakroom: through the presence of two representatives from the temporary work agencies »ManPower« and »FiRe.« ManPower's »scarf«, – something between a frieze and a demo banner – which extends through the whole room, sets out the complex structure of the piece in four chapters, and tells the story of the Austrian Credit Institute's bankruptcy and its consequences. Formally, the ornamentation on the scarf draws a parallel to Gustav Klimt's Beethoven frieze one story lower, which is a magnet for all tourists staying in Vienna. In the design of this banner, Alice Creischer remembered the vegetable elements of Klimt's Art Nouveau style and translated the latter into a present-day formal repertoire. According to the artist, the ornaments are a symbol of resources, stand for the conversion of existence into value, the shareholder value, and also for the »implantation of the capitalist system in all its brutality«. In a more reduce, more fragmented way than in the work she took as a model, and with a trenchant use of color, the artist records in image and word the raising of the rates of interest for the debtor countries between 1924 and 1928. At the same time, she reminds us that the Depression is a word, and one people associate with acute fear. »FiRe« appears in pensive half-profile, as a picture of a child with a big bow in her hair. Above this, sketched figures recalling a mixture of antique goddesses of revenge and androgynous youths frame this first chapter of the story. In the third chapter, the artist turns her attention to a plan devised by Gustav Schlotterer for a reformed Europe in 1940. »It was meant to become the most modern thing the economic and monetary organization had to offer«. Creischer's banner somewhat recalls the sketches of the Situationist International: rhizomatic graphic compression between the concepts »metropolis« and »Clearing Union« and, from there, via twisted paths, to that of the »payment desk«; then an arrangement of amaryllises that produces an effect of threatening charm through its hugeness; and in their shadows little groups of historical personages who philosophize in balloons about covetousness in capitalism. Opera glasses edge this frieze.

On the back of the banner, Creischer refers to present-day events, to the Stability Pact devised at the conference of EU foreign ministers in Cologne from 10 June 1999. The organizational structure of the agenda, the working tables and organigrams reflect clearly the status given to economy and control systems in comparison with that of human rights and democracy.

Individual pieces of clothing lying casually about in the cloakroom emphasize the social status of their wearers in accordance with the phrase »clothes maketh the man«: Schlotter's Gestapo coat, Bentham's top hat, a dinner suit.

In this performance, Alice Creischer acts as a mistress of ceremonies and enjoys herself in the process. Not only does she choreograph the party of the CA and precisely reproduce the way such events run in drawings: the arrival of each representative is exactly noted, the involvement of the people, the clapping of the children. As mistress of ceremonies, Creischer takes up the idea of the theatrical spatial artwork, a construct of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, brings the form up to date, and radicalizes it through its content. She overcomes themes and attributions considered to be feminine, as if these traps for female artists had never existed, as if all female artists were allowed to sew, knit, do handicrafts, without running the slightest risk of being classed among the former perverted women's art. From the script, the furnishings and the choreography, to the discourses on political economy and clear historical observations, she produces an atmosphere in which our monitor-trained eyes greedily take in the detail and variety of esthetic designs, reversions and realizations as well as following the totality of what is being narrated.

It is of no matter how much of the narration is true or invented. It is much more important to make the structures and connections of power visible, in art and with artistic means as well. Then it can happen that every so often a hypothesis is used for the sake of beauty.

 

Translated by Tim Jones

 

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