Oh Vienna

It was perhaps one of the greatest moments of Austrian television: a live broadcast from the infamous annual Vienna Opera Ball, which had a rather special note to it this year. On the parquet floor, conservative Austria was doing the Kaiser-waltz, and amongst them Richard 'Mortar' Lugner, the nouveau riche construction entrepreneur - who famously offers celebrities large sums of money to be seen with him - had managed to find a substitute for Catherine Deneuve (who had cancelled) in the form of a popular German porn show presenter. The programme was summarised the next morning in Electro-Frühstück (electro-breakfast), an informal daily email newsletter that emerged from the strong protest movement against Austria's far-right government. They helpfully transcribed the following exchange between theatre director Helmut Lohner and his loved one, Elisabeth Guertler, head of the famous Sacher Hotel and unofficial 'Mother of the Ball':

Lohner: 'This feels to me like Karl Kraus in his Last Days of Mankind, look at this, the dance on the volcano...'

Guertler: 'Now shut up! Nobody here thinks like you!'

Meanwhile, as over 15,000 demonstrators blew horns and whistles outside, a white Rolls Royce came to a halt and out stepped Adolf Hitler. Striding up the stairs towards the Opera Ball in a hail of camera flash, he rasped out: 'Mein Volk, I'm back in Austria!' The Hitler-impersonator was actor Hubsi Kramar, who, along with his lawyer, was arrested for alleged 'National Socialist re-activity'.

It sounds like the plot of a Mel Brooks film, and to some extent that's exactly what it is. But Marx' claim that tragedy only repeats itself as a farce doesn't necessarily mean that the repetition is harmless. When the Freedom Party repeatedly used the term Überfremdung ('over-foreignisation') originally coined by Goebbels, they weren't joking. And when one of the party's leading members, Hans Jörg Schimanek, said in an interview during last year's smear campaign against Vienna Actionist veteran Hermann Nitsch: 'we want these things, er, removed', he pretty much summed up the attitude of de-facto leader Jörg Haider and his cohorts towards contemporary art. 'Cultural anarchists', 'cultural mafiosi', 'social parasites', 'left-wing cultural fascists', the list of Freedom Party insults to artists is long. 1

The joke is that many of the leading figures in Austria's right-wing coalition are would-be artists themselves. The teenage Jörg Haider's greatest dream, his sister reported, was to become an actor. Chancellor Wolfgang Schüssel loves to play the piano. Thomas Prinzhorn, rejected by President Klestil as Minister of Finance because of his remark last year that the Socialists were giving hormones to immigrants to encourage them to breed, reads his poetry to a small circle of admiring friends. Andreas Mölzer, Haider's cultural spin doctor and chief ideologist, has published novels. Peter Sichrovsky, Euro MP for the Freedom Party, writes plays. Franz Westenthaler, the Freedom Party faction leader who, two years ago, slapped a lawsuit on the Vienna Secession for exhibiting an Otto Mühl collage depicting him in a group sex scene with Mother Teresa, exhibits his watercolours in a small-town gallery. And the new State Secretary for Art, Franz Morak, directly subordinate to the Chancellor, is a former actor and New Wave singer. 2

Historical parallels inevitably come to mind (Hitler's rejected application to the Vienna art school, Goebbels' unsuccessful novel Michael), and it becomes obvious that the worst thing you can have in politics are failed artists whose talents never lived up to their thirst for power. Imagine the moment in their lives at which they realised their art was hopeless; imagine their desire for revenge on those who made them aware of it - agents of conspiracy to be defeated in the Kulturkampf (cultural battle).

Franz Morak came closest to achieving some success in his artistic endeavours, so his attempt to come across as a rational pragmatist, putting into practice the new government's programme on art and culture (including promises to foster Volkskultur and 'the cultural expressions of the regions'), seems the most comically tragic. In the 80s, he was an aspiring pop star, the self-declared 'Anarchist of Rock'n'Roll'. A cross between Falco and an imbecilic Ian Dury, he sang lyrics such as: 'Feminists, cops, Stalinists, Nihilists, exorcists, fatalists, fasten seatbelts, hold tight! Now you'll be for it, now you'll be finished. We'll scour your brains to a shining blank, with snow-white, New Wave, Schizo-Punk!' 3 Later, he played the leading role, ironically, in a production of Bertold Brecht's play about Hitler The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui (1941), before being ejected from the cast by left-wing director Claus Peymann because his acting was so bad. In 1995, already an active member in the People's Party, he still proclaimed 'Let's kick Haider out of Austria!' He must have felt a secret satisfaction when Peymann, together with Austria's most respected living writer, Elfriede Jelinek, were targeted by a Freedom Party poster campaign that asked whether the public wanted 'Socialist State Artists' like Peymann and Jelinek or 'Art and Culture', as symbolised by the image of a violin.

Finally, to complete the farce, some of the initial reactions from the artworld towards the new government looked like attempts to live up to the 'State Artist' pose - a completely overblown sense of their level of political power and artistic authority. Robert Fleck, former State Curator of Austria, now heading the art school at Nantes, was quick on the draw: on the eve of the government's inauguration, he single-handedly sent out hundreds of emails and faxes demanding 'a complete boycott of the local art life' in Austria, while saying he would abandon his Austrian citizenship. This was followed by numerous other declarations: Jelinek banned her plays from being performed in Austria; Valie Export considered turning down the Kokoschka Prize; gallerist Thaddeus Ropac declared he would move to Paris for good. Resistance suddenly looked like a deadlock, a choice between staying or going, evacuation or collaboration. Hans Jörg Schimanek's 'we want these things, er, removed' was about to be realised by the artists themselves.

Yet, the dark clouds have a silver lining: resistance, especially among the younger Austrian artists and critics, had already become proactive back in October 1999 when the Freedom Party won 27% of the vote. At the time of Fleck's appeal, networks with names like 'Get to Attack!' had already started to politicise the coffee-house lethargy of Austria's art institutions, joining forces with other groups in organising daily demonstrations in Vienna and creating a climate of debate that went beyond the Hamlet-like musing of 'to boycott or not to boycott'. Export eventually accepted the Kokoschka prize on condition that no members of the government would be invited, and that the prize money would be used to finance an anti-fascist media project. 'Resistance is the Art of Now', reads a banner outside Vienna's College for Applied Arts, and what, in a different place and time, would have been a lame gesture, suddenly makes a lot of sense - other institutions, such as the Secession and the Vienna Kunsthalle, have followed in a similar vein, aware that there can't be business-as-usual with a government like this.