Action! Performances und aktionistische Kunstformen. Wenn Besucher zu Akteuren …

In 2017 the Kunsthaus Zurich was transformed into a space for actions, where the audience was given a special role: They were changed from consumers into participants who could insert themselves into the works. About thirty artists were represented in the show, curated by Mirjam Varadinis, which was explicitly not intended to be a reworking of the history of performance, happenings, or action art. The spectrum ranged from old stars of the international art scene, such as Yoko Ono (b. 1933) and Valie Export (b. 1940), to promising future talents like Florence Jung (b. 1980). Special emphasis was laid on works which could be experienced by the physical senses. Even at the entrance to the exhibition it was possible to immerse oneself in the work of the Lebanese artist Mounira Al Solh (b. 1978) by putting on wooden zoccoli from Syria and thus walking in the footsteps of Syrian refugees. But there were also reinterpretations or reactivations of historical performances known only from photographs, films or stories. For example, Sam Keller (b. 1971) translated the work ‘Yard’ by Allan Kaprow (1927–2006) into a work with forty-eight car tires, which were laid out with Swiss neatness and made available for any kind of use, while in Kaprow’s case they were still in chaotic confusion. In terms of themes, questions of gender were addressed (more than two thirds of the artists were female, and they included the famous Guerrilla Girls), as were the immigration crisis (in Al Solh’s work and Francis Alÿs’s performance video) and the unconditional basic income (Ahmet Ögut). But in retrospect one might have wished that the association with ‘urgent social questions’ had been more prominent and immediate. Merely making a ‘Protest Bike’ available (a work by Marinella Senatore), with which one could ride through Zurich chanting slogans through a megaphone, was not enough for that purpose. As press comments demonstrate, the exhibition was very well received. ‘A bit of liveliness has come into this rather stuffy institution, and that suits it surprisingly well,’ Paulina Szczesniak rejoiced in the Tages-Anzeiger. And Philipp Meier euphorically acclaimed what this exhibition especially well revealed: ‘Performance artists are the big kids among the creative folk. This means that they extend and enrich the idea of art tremendously.’ (NZZ) That just a few weeks before the exhibition opened the German artist Anna Imhof with her four-hour performance of Faust had won the Golden Lion and the US performer Carolee Schneemann the Lifetime Award at the Venice Biennale speaks for the Kunsthaus’s sensitivity to the zeitgeist.