Great Performance Art: Christoph Schlingensief’s FOREIGNER’S OUT! (2000)
Director: Paul Poet
Death is a sad and solemn business? Not always. Especially when it works as natural and just selection, it is a reason for absolute celebration. On October 11th in 2008, I met with friends at Bar Tabac in Cologne to celebrate the death of Austrian Neo-Nazi Jörg Haider by drinking, singing and dancing on his grave until 5 o’clock in the morning. Haider was speeding at 142 km/h or faster- more than twice the legal speed limit of 70 km/h, and with a blood alcohol level more than three times the legal limit when he crashed and died of his injuries. To our further delight, decades-old rumors about Haider’s homosexuality finally got confirmed in the aftermath of his death, making for a good and comical humiliation of right-extremists’ alleged hyper-masculinity. The married father of two who referred to Nazi SS-Veterans as “decent men“ and whose FPÖ was nick-named “Haider’s boy party” had a fight with one of his lovers in the night of his death, and his 27-year-old successor Stefan Petzner broke out in tears whenever he talked about Haider before eventually revealing their homosexual affair. It was a Gay Nazi Telenovela deluxe.
After the national elections in 1999, Austria’s conservatives (ÖVP) broke with a shaky taboo and built a coalition with the right-wing extremists of Haider’s FPÖ, although the Social Democratic Party had won the popular vote by over 6%. The governments of the other EU states temporarily sanctioned Austria by suspending diplomatic and political contacts with the country. However, current Austrian chancellor Sebastian “Baby-Hitler” Kurz was the second conservative of the same ÖVP who built a coalition with the FPÖ Nazis in 2018, with no sanctions whatsoever following. Things got normalized.
In the immediate aftermath of the elections, the great German director and performance artist Christoph Schlingensief picked up the events in his media-art project Ausländer raus! Schlingensief’s Container (“Foreigners out! Schlingensiefs Container“, 2000) via his hard-hitting brutalo-realism. It is one of the single most important art projects that were ever realized. Sadly, it also looks like a relic from ancient times today, when artists have completely withdrawn from necessary cultural terror and the reflection of socio-political reality in art and any other form of substantial commentary or activism.
In Foreigner’s Out! , Schlingensief established a container full of real asylum seekers in the middle of Vienna, all during the crowded Vienna Festival which attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors each year. The film and performance was made in a style which critically imitated the show Big Brother and worked out the concentration camp character of such surveillance and reality TV entertainment. On top of the container there is a big sign which says Ausländer Raus! („Foreigner’s out!“), a common primitive slogan frequently used by Austrian and German right-wing parties during elections- to this day. Schlingensief uses a megaphone to explain the rules to the many spectators on the square: Throughout the ‘competition’, inhabitants can be voted out via internet voting and by clicking ‘Deport’. They are not just being evicted from the container with these daily votes, but sent back to their countries.
It was not the first media critique by Schlingensief: in Freakstars 3000, he set up a talent cast show where all candidates were mentally handicapped, stating the blunt truth about the voyeuristic character of shows like American Idol. In Quiz 3000, he mocked Who wants to be a millionaire? by using questions like “Please sort the following concentration camps from north to south” or „What is the average cost of fitting a prosthetic leg for landmine victims?“ or „Who said it: ‘The whole world is our battlefield’? “ (A: James Bond B: Bush C: Bin Laden D: Attila ). But Schlingensief not only executes media critique by imitating the Big Brother format, but also points at the real living circumstances of asylum seekers and refugees. For his earlier project Terror 2000, he had visited some of their camps and containers and recalled: „For the first time, I realized that about 8,9… people were living in a container with just 18 square meters, in very precarious conditions.“
Every morning, the container gets woken up by the anti-immigrant speeches of Jörg Haider blasting through loud-speakers, with Haider’s rants about “criminal foreigners” and “the great replacement” being audible to both, the container’s inhabitants and the spectators outside. Imagine the most vile MAGA rally stripped of its cheering white target audiences who perceive even the nastiest things being said as appropriate and just another Monster Truck thrill. Imagine those thousands of seats being occupied by irritated and humiliated Afro-Americans, Mexicans, and Muslims instead- what happens is that your righteous indignation makes place for an irreconcilable feeling of shame. And that is the power of Schlingensief’s Container.
The asylum seekers are held like the colonial slaves that were displayed in Europe’s and Northern America’s human zoos: during a certain a time every day, it’s „peep-show“, a time where visitors can enter the camp and stare at the foreigners, or feed and pet them. They are wearing sexy wigs which emphasize the travesty of integration and assimilation. They have to booze up and dance to horrible, mind-numbing German Oompah music to point out the true nature of this ‘superior’ Leitkultur („Leading culture“). Around noon, the foreigners have a public German lesson on the roof of the camp. On one occasion, they are allowed for a short shopping spree, but only surrounded by a high security escort because of the threat that they are representing. At 9 pm, the ‘Evening Deportation’ takes place.
Then there are the spectators outside. An old man, empowered by the win of white supremacists and now wearing the uniforms of his youth again while waving the Austrian flag. He walks up to Schlingensief and is not only demanding the usual „Foreigner’s out!“, but also the public execution of the asylum seekers with a dirty and degenerate smile: „Cut off their heads! Cut off their heads!“ Schlingensief is in the relentless vocabulary of his role when he explains him the rules of the game again: „You can vote them out and send them back to their countries. Until one of these niggers is left and wins. He can then stay here and wins 7000 Austrian Kronen“. When the old man hears that money is involved, he asks if he can participate and move into the container, too.
A man with Southern-European looks is ranting about „Turks and Jugos, the worst of the worst“ who in his opinion are flooding Austria. When asked about his name, the man reveals that his surname is „Turkowitsch“, and that he is of Jugoslavian descent and even bears a distant Turkish ancestry in his name. Another highlight is the scene between a white man having his 15 minutes of fame as slave-master by lecturing a black man about his privileges in Austria. „No African anywhere has lives better than here, no African anywhere has a better life than here in Austria!“ The black man opposes him and asks the man to have a look at the prisons around the corner for a start. „That’s because you are stealing and dealing with drugs“ is the answer of the white patron, who in the course of the discussion cannot name one country on the African continent.
The atmosphere gets heated and after a couple of days things are on the verge of escalation. At night, men with knives, acid and incendiary bombs try to attack the container and force its closure. They, like most of the many angry passengers, are not ashamed by their nation’s election of Nazis. They are also not ashamed of their conservatives slipping the mask and building a government coalition with those Nazis. What they are ashamed of is that others are talking about it. They are ashamed that the racism is so open and sealed on paper now, that it has led to sanctions by the European Union and the world is talking about it. It cannot be swept under the carpet and marginalized anymore, and, similar to the reactions to BLM protesters in America in 2020, people are more humiliated by the evaluation of their racism than the original election of white supremacists, with the last refuge being the claim that white supremacy is simply “a hoax”. “In Paris they say ‘It’s true, the Austrian’s are Nazi’s!'” screams one infuriated man who wants to rip down the “Foreigner’s Out!“ sign from the top of the container- although that slogan graced the election posters of the FPÖ for months without him and most other Austrians being offended by it, but tolerating and supporting that message by voting for it. „Leave us alone!! Haider is no asshole!! You German pig! You… you… artist!!!!“ screams an older woman, completing losing it. „You are a hater of Austrians, you should be expelled from our country!“ is another frequent reaction that Schlingensief gets from spectators. The shame is vile and brute and real.
Schlingensief dedicated the last years of his short life to the tender and ambitious project of building an opera village complete with a theater, film school, and an infirmary in Burkina Faso in Africa. It was the beautiful conclusion to his method of screaming right into the silence and his preferred genre of ‘Cultural Terrorism’. His most poignant message on the dominant Western system of surveillance capitalism and racism might be the truism à la Jenny Holzer which he displayed above the gates of the iconic Volksbühne theatre in Berlin during his tenure there:
Erniedrigung Geniessen – Enjoy Humiliation.
by Saliha Enzenauer