The action artist, musician and composer Wolfgang Flatz, born in 1952 in Dornbirn, Vorarlberg, usually shortened to FLATZ in onomatopoeic terms, continued the performances of the Viennese actionists of the sixties during his active life as a provocateur.
However, many of his works are eerily topical, such as “Demontage IX” (1990/91) in the old synagogue of Tbilisi on a torture method popular in the Tsarist Empire, in which the delinquents were thrown upside down as a bell banger to the sound of a waltz between steel plates back and forth until they fainted , a barbarism pseudo-sacralized by the “bell ring” that Putin’s troops may be using again in Ukraine today.
Stefan Trinks
Editor in the Feuilleton.
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If he allowed himself to be slapped in the face for a few minutes, allowed himself to be walked on as carpeting or thrown at naked with darts, he auto-aggressively used his own body as material in order to sharpen his eyes and senses for the respective artistic concern in the disgust or fear provoked by it.
In the Catholic, masochistic milieu of Vienna and Munich (where he has lived and worked since 1975), critics have complained, this art may thrive, but not in sober Protestant areas.
Autoaggression as a sharpening of the senses
But even the Prussians in the capital, who felt that they were hardened or at least completely averse to any kind of catholic enthusiasm for pain, were able to shock Flatz in 2001 with the “Fleisch” campaign.
Long before his announcement, from a helicopter at a height of forty meters and within sight of Alexanderplatz - already dead!
– Throwing a cow into a construction pit of future investor architecture stirred up violent protests about the alleged lack of respect for the animal, but above all because of “mental cruelty” towards the viewers, although the artist had not forced anyone to watch and precisely pointed out this disproportion of people to wanted to point out meat every day, which is an elementary part of life, but is taboo and ignored.
On the one hand, Flatzen's meat show was reminiscent of the ancient tradition of animal sacrifices by Roman priests and haruspices, just as the artist had everyone by his side read the future from the organs and body of the smashed animal (future "Tönnies" meat scandals and the like), although it was in in this case of rising wokeness was more the present tense that you saw.
On the other hand, the staging with the biblical helicopter locust, which quoted the end-time rattling of rotors and valkyries from "Apocalypse Now", once again had a twist on the martial elements of the great war meat cemeteries.
although in this case of the rising wokeness it was more the present tense that was seen.
On the other hand, the staging with the biblical helicopter locust, which quoted the end-time rattling of rotors and valkyries from "Apocalypse Now", once again had a twist on the martial elements of the great war meat cemeteries.
although in this case of the rising wokeness it was more the present tense that was seen.
On the other hand, the staging with the biblical helicopter locust, which quoted the end-time rattling of rotors and valkyries from "Apocalypse Now", once again had a twist on the martial elements of the great war meat cemeteries.
On Sunday this always pain-seeking man of sorrows will be seventy years old.