Horror Patriae

Günter Brus and Otto Muehl, Kunst und Revolution (Art and revolution), 1968, University of Vienna, Austria.

During this year’s Steirischer Herbst festival, the city of Graz was saturated with striking advertising designed by the Slovenian collective Grupa Ee. One banner featured a green, tapering rectangle on a yellow background—an abstract depiction of a rural idyll, with a “road” stretching toward the horizon. Two bold black words disrupted this pastoral scene: “Patriae” (homeland), closer to the viewer, appeared to “rest” on the road, while “Horror” loomed on the horizon, forming a foreboding gateway. The two modified o’s in “Horror” resembled ritualistic pagan pillars, flanking the road and supporting the menacing r’s. This visual composition suggested that “Patriae,” with its idyllic fields and sunshine, could also give rise to horror. It highlighted how the concept of homeland, seemingly inclusive, often operates through exclusion and demands ritualistic sacrifice. This unsettling dialectic served as the thematic backbone of the 2024 edition of Steirischer Herbst.

At the opening speech, the festival’s director, Ekaterina Degot, rephrased the motto of the Secessionist movement (“To every age its art, to every art its freedom”) as “To every place its art.” Then she declared: “Ours is a time when time has lost to space,” reflecting both the current state of art and theory and the global rise of far-right populism. This diagnosis hits the mark: the spatial turn is ongoing, deeply entwined with an identity that has become increasingly spatial. This process only intensifies, dialectically linked with globalization, or planetarization: “The longing for Heimat [homeland] will only be intensified instead of diminished; the dilemma of homecoming can only become more pathological.”1 While this longing for Heimat brings positive developments, such as a heightened sensitivity to the significance of the local, it also fosters dangerous tendencies. One such danger is that national or local identities often lead to exclusions and new forms of racism rooted in geo-cultural differences. The longing can horrify outcasts and ethnic minorities in various empires and nation-states. It can also scare individuals with hybrid, fractured, or cosmopolitan identities, such as “anti-Israeli Israelis, or anti-Russian Russian-speaking Ukrainians” in the emerging multipolar world, a mosaic of identitarian spatial closures where everyone has ostensibly found their home.2 Steirischer Herbst 2024 addressed this fear with art and theory, while remaining sensitive to local context and the festival’s historical mission.

Paragone, or the Battle of the Arts: Contemporary Art Versus Identitarian Spatial Closure

In the 1990s, post-Marxist theorist Ernesto Laclau proposed his theory of space in relation to identity formation and politics. He associated space with immobility, but also with “strategic closure,” an attempt to fix meaning and create identity: “Any representation—and thus any space—is an attempt to constitute society.”3 Simultaneously, political subjects are formed through their relation to their “constitutive outside”—everything excluded from closure—which subsequently acts as a force of dislocation or historicity. Therefore, any identity is inherently spatial: a mythical and metaphorical construct, an invariably incomplete “surface of inscription.” At the same time, any space, any patriae, tends to become too repressive and exclusive when the forces of historicity and dislocation are weak.

The curators of “Horror Patriae”—the title of this year’s Steirischer Herbst festival—appear to share this Laclauian fear of space. A recurring motif in the exhibition at the Neue Galerie Graz/Universalmuseum Joanneum—and the festival’s eponymous centerpiece—was the Tracht, the traditional folk costume. The curators recontextualized it as a symbol of identitarian closure. They recount that Victor Geramb, the founder of Graz’s Folk Life Museum, once praised this “anti-trend attire” for “its resistance to history, for being true and authentic, as opposed to changing with time. Evil time.”4 However, the issue is not any inherent anti-historical qualities of the Tracht, which is typically part of a specific rural culture that is dynamic and historical like any other. The problem arises with ideologues like Geramb, who, framing the Tracht as an “ahistorical costume,” transform it into a tool of closure and stasis in the service of identity formation.

What can art offer by way of resistance to such spatial identitarian closures? Steirischer Herbst 2024 proposed a paragone—a competition between the arts: the art which naturalizes spatial identity versus its dislocation by means of contemporary art. For the latter to succeed, it must demonstrate that every identity results from the naturalization of the artificial—that it is the product of a specific art that strives to be disguised as “eternal” nature, as something “spatial,” i.e., static, beyond the forces of historicity and dislocation. This battle is depicted as a rather strange and “magical” one in Wolf Gössler’s painting Wettkampf der Künste (1976), where 1970s cultural functionaries are shown as being engaged in a collective contest, reminiscent of a scene from Harry Potter. When “transubstantiation” is fulfilled and spatial identity shifts its status from artificial and historical to “natural” and spatial, then strategic closure threatens to become fascist. Alina Kleytman’s video The Tongue (2016) shows what follows: the mother tongue grows so oppressive that it swells to an overwhelming size, ultimately suffocating its bearer.

The centerpiece of the exhibition begins and ends with drapery. In the vestibule staircase, Thomas Hörl’s large prints feature a portrait gallery of Perchten—mythical figures from Alpine folklore—collaged with traditional patchwork. At first, this appears to be just a carnivalized montage on the themes of local fairytales. However, at the very end of the exhibition, we encounter Hannes Priesch’s Brown Flags, a directly anti-fascist work spanning from the 1970s to the 2010s. It serves as a reminder of the “unfinished work” of reckoning with Austria’s Nazi past and the recent rise of far-right populists. By this point, the curatorial message is clear, mirroring the artist’s intent: trample the brown flag into the ground! When we open the door to exit, we return to Hörl’s work, and the circle is complete. The patchwork in his collages now appears much more sinister.

The performativity of the work, almost physically moving the visitor to desire to trample the brown flag, aligns with the rich tradition of post-dramatic theater and progressive provocations at Steirischer Herbst. Eroding the fourth wall that traditionally separates the space of action from the space of observation, post-dramatic theater provokes the audience “by bringing about a diffusion of the distinguishability of categories such as ‘authorship,’ ‘direction,’ ‘staging,’ and ‘audience’—shakes up the politically, socially, and culturally self-evident and self-certain and thus creates disturbances.”5 This understanding of art’s agency aims to shake up habitual modes of perception, interrupting the “natural” flow of experience and thus triggering a redistribution of the sensible, to use Rancière’s formula.

In the durational performance Cleaning a Poster During the Election Period Until It Is No Longer Legible (2024) by Yoshinori Niwa, the artist washed a banner of a pseudo far-right political party every day, gradually erasing it into a blank field. With real political elections looming and the rise of the far-right FPÖ party in Austria—whose advertising the banner resembled—Niwa’s work provoked a police intervention before the opening. The obsessive act of washing the banner away echoed Priesch’s Brown Flags, extending the call to trample the brown flag into a provocative, performative, and post-dramatic gesture that ran throughout the festival. Artistic action, stretched over time, dislocates the spatial stasis of what strives to appear as a purely “natural” environment.

The Struggle for Political Comedy on the Surreal Historical “Bulwark”

The Styrian and Austrian context is rife with both identitarian closures and the strategies used to oppose them through art and culture: “A typically Styrian paradox [is] that Hanns Koren (1906–85), a Catholic patriot and conservative politician, became the most influential promoter—and often even founder—of several militantly modernist, internationally oriented initiatives in a grim postwar Graz (including the trigon biennial in 1963 and Steirischer Herbst in 1968).”6 Koren, a member of the Christian-democratic and liberal-conservative Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP), reportedly derived the festival’s title from a poem by Hans Kloepfer, a Styrian dialect poet and member of the National Socialist German Workers Party.7 As an Austrian counterpart to the German Documenta, the festival in Graz was a response, using art and culture, to the historical catastrophe of fascism. Like Documenta, some of its founders had conservative backgrounds, with connections to former adherents of Nazism.8

The Austrian and Styrian context was arguably even more complex and surreal than the German one. Historically part of the multicultural Austro-Hungarian Empire, Graz retains a distinct “Balkan vibe” compared to Kassel’s central German atmosphere. Due to the Anschluss and Austria’s “victim narrative,” the country did not undergo de-Nazification as thoroughly as Germany, a point previously noted by the curators of Steirischer Herbst 2024.9 Additionally, Austrian contemporary art has often explored fascist trauma in more expressive and provocative ways. In 1968, the same year Steirischer Herbst opened in Graz, Günter Brus performed Kunst und Revolution (Art and revolution) in Vienna, an infamous piece that involved excrement, the drinking of urine, vomit, and masturbation while Brus sang the Austrian National Anthem. Today, the Neue Galerie Graz houses the Bruseum, a permanent collection of Brus’s works. One drawing, National Day, shows a man defecating on the national flag. In the context of Priesch’s Brown Flags, which concludes “Horror Patriae” next door, Brus’s work highlights how the artistic and curatorial strategies on display at today’s Steirischer Herbst continue the festival’s tradition of confronting historical traumas through bold artistic expression.

This is not merely abstract loyalty to past neo-avant-garde traditions, as today’s sociopolitical challenges mirror those of fifty or ninety years ago. The resurgence of far-right populists raises urgent questions: How can progressive art, and Steirischer Herbst as an institution, continue to exist as a popular event? Pragmatic considerations of what is achievable become essential. The first directorship of Ekaterina Degot at Steirischer Herbst (2018–22) coincided with an ÖVP majority in the Styrian parliament. While the choice between so-called reasonable versus unreasonable populist conservatives can seem increasingly false—often hindering more radical leftist action—Degot in 2019 described the ÖVP as “the party of decent people, moderately progressive yet ultimately conservative, but not fascist.”10 This echoed the festival’s founding alliance between “reasonable conservatives” and leftist anti-fascist art. Festival founder Hanns Koren, though a conservative, was a cosmopolitan advocate of modernity and a “builder of bridges.” He embodied a moderate conservatism drawn to identitarian closure yet determined to prevent it from devolving into far-right extremism, where patriae turns into horror. However, in 2024, the far-right FPÖ (Freedom Party of Austria) won the Styrian parliamentary elections, a shift that will inevitably influence the festival’s board and curators, constraining their ability to pursue a progressive agenda.11

Put bluntly, much of the population does not experience the “horror clausurae” (horror of closure) as acutely as leftists and radical liberals. In this more populist environment, amidst a rising longing for “homecoming,” leftists may need to acknowledge this sense of rootedness and reclaim it on their own terms. Philosopher Oxana Timofeeva suggests one possibility: a post-Deleuzian performative (re)territorialization on a smaller homeland. “(Re)territorialize like an animal,” she writes, “but also take root as a plant.”12 This approach aligns with cultural and feminist geographers’ rethinking of spatiality as open, performative, fractured, and anti-essentialist—“a process, never an artefact”—and resonates with post-human speculative philosophies.13 However, the curators of Steirischer Herbst appear to lean toward a more Laclauian perspective: rather than rethinking spatiality, they insist on its dislocation through the forces of human historicity. Concretely and institutionally, this means continuing to struggle for popular art, particularly political comedy. The key question remains: Can popular democratic art be detached from far-right populism?

The Phantom of the Operetta, a performance by La Fleur during the opening week of Steirischer Herbst 2024, engaged directly with this dilemma, opening with the words of Austrian critic and political activist Günther Nenning: “Only those who love kitsch understand life.” Nenning further claimed: “The superiority of kitsch over art and operetta over other artforms lies in the simplest coexistence of happiness and tragedy. Life is the continuation of operetta by other means, which are the same, only worse. It is not kitsch that surpasses life; life surpasses kitsch.”14 As a researcher of contemporary political comedy aptly noted: “Nenning knew that the road to tragedy is littered with banana peels.”15

Nenning’s text is often seen as a polemical response to Adorno’s critique of operetta. However, Adorno’s complex and bitter analysis aligns closely with Nenning’s in recognizing operetta’s ability to reflect sociopolitical conditions. As Nenning noted, people believe in operetta-style tragedy but not in operetta-style happiness. They view operetta’s juxtaposition of the two as an ironic reflection of their lives. Adorno pointed out: “Since all middle-class art declined with the secure existence of the middle class, the German observer’s gaze is directed first to the extremes.”16 The contemporary resurgence of political comedy, seen for instance in Barrie Kosky’s work at the Komische Oper Berlin, responds to the rise of far-right and far-left populism. Yet there is also more to it: “The operetta sells out history: it presents the demons of the past as handy rag dolls that we play with while we are still afraid. They no longer have power over us. They only reach us with the shock that they have become so small we can take them home.”17

The emancipatory hope of popular political comedy, like operetta, lies in its ability to act as a perverse mirror of a perverse time—reflecting its language and contradictions. While dictators can be inherently ridiculous, they often exploit this, turning satire into part of their performative strategy. In this way, we live in a reality that surpasses even the most exaggerated kitsch. At the same time, “The operetta is the space of miniaturization par excellence; what it saves, it also makes disappear.”18 La Fleur’s performance, with its humor and concluding (post-)theatrical hymn to operetta, seeks, alongside “Horror Patriae” and Steirischer Herbst more broadly, to balance dislocating laughter at identitarian closure, provocative audience engagement, and the integration of popular genres into leftist territory. Art is thus affirmed as a force of human historicity, capable of dislocating spatial stasis and confronting the challenges of the present and unfinished past.