1973

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“This program booklet for steirischer herbst ’73 offers a new layout, including the temporal and thematic demarcation of the individual groups of events: those that form the true core, and the others that surround and frame it. … In addition to extending the dates, the intentional inclusion of cultural endeavors in individual districts of Styria also reflects our desire—in accordance with the title, as has always been the case—to enable the entire state of Styria to participate in steirischer herbst. … The intellectual life of the state is to be expressed and presented in a festival. This self-presentation has never solely included what scholars, poets, and artists of all genres themselves conceive and create in the state. It has also always been—and continues to be—about bringing in the new things that move the whole world and taking them as a standard. For it is also an intellectual self-presentation of the state to reveal what the state is willing to incorporate from the world, what it is free and able to do. … It is only by declaring a commitment to the ‘province,’ a commitment to the locally forsaken and feasible, that the ‘provincial’ can be transcended.”
—Hanns Koren

The focus of the sixth edition of musikprotokoll, in 1973, was futurism in music, which was also the topic of the accompanying Music Symposium. The Literature Symposium addressed “doubts concerning language,” and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s play Affabulazione oder der Königsmord (Storytelling, or Regicide), which had previously been a flop in Zurich, was premiered at the Schauspielhaus.

trigon 73 was dedicated entirely to the emerging genre of video art under the motto “audiovisual messages,” while, in a 336-square-meter-large tent in the Volksgarten, Horst Gerhard Haberl curated the exhibition Körpersprache—Bodylanguage, which examined photographic, filmic, and video documentation as well as live performances of body art, ranging from the American avant-garde (Vito Acconci, Trisha Brown, and Bruce Nauman) and artists such as VALIE EXPORT and Friederike Pezold to the Viennese Actionists and activities including yoga or travesty. This exhibition also turned into a public scandal: there were reports concerning pornography and destruction of the environment, and the Kronenzeitung, Austria’s largest daily newspaper, successfully touted Körpersprache as “smut in a colorful tent.”1

The Grazer Filmtage (Graz Film Festival) and the Grazer Fernsehtage (Graz Television Festival) at the Forum Stadtpark were new in steirischer herbst’s program for 1973.

Program