1993

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“After 25 yearly programmes steirischer herbst ’93 orientates itself on the threatening loss of the intellectual olfactory sense, and tries to bring down the emotional facades of a stimulation society. It concerns itself with sharpening of the senses and opposition to the diversionary tactics of festive gaiety and retrospectiveness of middle-class ideology.
Has producing art become dangerous again? Does art endanger the untouched world of its own values? The vocabulary of verbal persecution, which was believed to be lost, is, in any case, audibly increasing. And the surface acrobatics of flamboyant cultural clubs is quite obvious.
Looking for and making marks, transcending limits: these are the concerns of an avant-garde of the nineties, for which steirischer herbst opens its cultural workshop once again this year.”
—Horst Gerhard Haberl (original booklet translation)

“After twenty-five years of programs, steirischer herbst ’93 is oriented toward the impending loss of an intellectual sense of smell and attempts to expose the emotional façades of our society of simulation,” proclaimed Horst Gerhard Haberl in the foreword to the program booklet. Titled Große Gefühle (Great Emotions), what was supposed to take place was an “emotional rearming” that extends “from the cynical behavioral training of a feel-good generation to the monstrous politics of excluding the other.”

For the opening, Lili Fischer’s Scheusalgesänge (Monster Songs) was performed as an “inaugural performance” at the church Unterkirche Herz-Jesu. The Grazer Combustion offered a “programmatically quite controversial cycle at, in, and around the Schlossberg in Graz (with various smoldering clusters in the city center) in the form of an exhibition staging and a concentrated series of performances” (conception: Gottfried Hattinger). The exhibition in the tunnels of the Schlossberg, entitled Feuerzeichen (Fire Signals), included installations by twelve artists of various genres such as Anne Bean, VALIE EXPORT, Flatz, Mona Hatoum, and Roman Signer, “with fire and sparks, heat and light, electricity and chemistry, coal and gas, explosives, sound, and smell,” as proclaimed in the program.

Works commissioned by steirischer herbst included Urs Widmer’s play Sommernachtswut (Rage of a Summer Night) premiered at the Schauspielhaus under the direction of Peter Schweiger and Werner Schwab’s Pornogeographie (Pornogeography)—“not a regional geography on the topic of sexual acrobatics, but instead an ironic and vital sweeping blow against moral conventions” (program booklet)—at the Thalia theater. The Symposium on Photography addressed the topic of “war,” and there was a two-part revue of pop songs (concept: Fritz Ostermayer) along with a dance evening entitled Je t’aime—The Love Song. In addition, there was a continuation of Kunst Heimat Kunst (Art Homeland Art; concept: Paolo Bianchi and Werner Fenz) and trigon 93: Kontext Kunst: Eine Position der Kunst der 90er Jahre (The Context of Art: A Stance on the Art of the 1990s) took place under the direction of Peter Weibel for the second to last time.

Program