The Brooklyn Rail

Steven Pollock: I just saw you in Venice, where you not only opened the Austrian Pavilion, but staged an “Étude” in the middle of the lagoon on a small barge, when you fished out the now infamous bell, inaugurating SEAWORLD VENICE. Three days from now, you have a nine-hour, two-venue performance: first taking place at Vienna Ice-Skating Club, immediately followed by a Pentecost performance at Hermann Nitsch’s castle in Prinzendorf. A day later, I hear you are flying to Australia to open A Year Without Summer. How do you keep going?

Florentina Holzinger: Actually, tonight I am kind of tired.

Pollock: You are staying in Prinzendorf?

Holzinger: Yeah, it’s super funny. I mean, we actually have a bunk-bed situation. We call it “the mental asylum,” because we are packed like sardines next to each other.

Pollock: Because you haven’t had enough communal situations.

Holzinger: [Laughs]

Pollock: You didn’t want to stay in a motel down the road?

Holzinger: There are none. And also, honestly, it’s nice for us too. We are hanging out there. It’s beautiful, the castle.

Pollock: Venice went mad, as you know—in terms of it going viral and having this second online life.

Holzinger: Totally, which is what I said during tonight’s artist’s talk. I didn’t expect that, to be honest.

Pollock: About tonight’s talk—I don’t speak German, so I missed everything except what you said about Pentecost Play: “There will be orgasms, but sometimes we fake it.”

Holzinger: [Laughs]

Pollock: Returning to SEAWORLD, its viral success has created all sorts of reactions, but without much information, there is a risk of it being reduced to a meme. What should people understand about SEAWORLD?

Holzinger: Obviously the focal point is the piss tank and what it means, amongst other things, because that’s also the power of the work, the plurality of interpretations—that is, that inside of this deep tank is actually somebody who is in a constant practice of living in the wastewater of other people.

Pollock: Is there more than one person doing it?

Holzinger: We are in rotation, between five and eight hours daily, which is a living situation—living in the piss of the people who visit. What does it mean? It’s about somebody existing not only in the waste of others, but also in the footprint of the masses visiting Venice. Of course, the curators point towards the ecological aspects, but it’s also simply the reality.

It is about this residue—the waste of the past, mixing with the waste of the present. For example, the jet ski, which, as an object—at least on Instagram, or whatever—a white-trash, Jackass thing, somehow. Still, for me, it’s a fucking complex image that points to a lot of things. It is this strong symbol, an intrusion and symbol of exploitation, of nature. Jet skis are forbidden in most of Italy, and in Venice.

Pollock: Who is so crazy to ride a jet ski in the Austrian Pavilion?

Holzinger: Yeah, what a bad idea. A bad idea. That was also part of the feeling of entering the context of the Biennale: there is a lot of baggage to contend with—national representation, the sense of art as competition, and many old-school structures for which, as an artist, you are somehow held responsible. So yes, it is literally a piss-take, and we wanted to undermine that framework in some way. We even considered putting the pavilion on a boat, submerging it, and bringing people into the underwater pavilion and the lagoon.

Pollock: Which you also said wasn’t entirely popular, and from your side evaluated as unfeasible, considering the one-to-one care for visitors required. You said this led you to the decision to bring the water of Venice into the pavilion.

Pollock: The theme of the Biennale was “In Minor Keys,” which was promoted as being not just for the eyes, but also for listening to, expanding the discourse to everything “minor” as well. For me, I found your piece remarkably musical: from the conical ringing of the bell to the full band I heard on the platform, including singer and guitarist, who climbed up the crane as it lifted the bell from the lagoon, revealing you swinging as the “clapper” and sounding the call.

Could you talk about the bell as a musical instrument, as well as a symbol?

Holzinger: The bell is something that we first used in our opera, SANCTA, to ring in the Mass. For SEAWORLD, we always had the entire city of Venice in mind as the script. The Austrian Pavilion was designed as a sacred building (by Josef Hoffmann), connecting the pavilion to the history of Venice, including the prevailing role of Catholicism for the city, and ultimately, our underwater amusement park. It’s a connection by the culture of spectacle, and the continual exploitation of nature, simulated in our tank—the final factor being that both are sewage treatment plants. We have made a water upcycling station; everything in the pavilion is constantly working in cycles—something like purification rituals. From a technical level, the process runs cyclically—a continuous loop from clean to dirty. There are so many dimensions to it, not just one thing.

Pollock: Do you play any instruments? Are you musical?

Holzinger: Yes, piano. I played piano a lot as a child, but not anymore.

Pollock: There is a musical way of thinking throughout.

Holzinger: Definitely. The bell is rung hourly. Also, around Venice, every hour, a bell announces the time. Take the San Marco bell, where you can find an old person depicted, ringing out the old time, while the young person brings in the new. For us, the whole pavilion almost functions like clockwork—a constant energy input is needed, or urine input is needed to keep the machine running.

Pollock: For the Étude, I arrived early because I was afraid of missing the ferry. I already needed to pee, but it wasn’t possible on the ferry or on the viewing barge. I then waited for the return ferry. I rushed to the pavilion, which involved another long wait—two and a half hours—with no chance to use a restroom.

Holzinger: Oh my. [Laughing]

Pollock: It was the perfect introduction to SEAWORLD. When I finally got inside, where two portable toilets standing like a shrine surrounding the performer inside the piss tank. Waiting in line for the loo, one of your team, whom I recognized from A Year Without Summer—dressed as a cleaning woman—approached me. She instructed me to sit while peeing; I tried to laugh that off, as men don’t do that in the US or the UK, but she insisted: “This is a self-sustaining ecosystem … and an autonomous independent state within the Biennale.” It was humbling to contribute to SEAWORLD.

Holzinger: [Laughs] You know, that is similar to the origin story: behind the Austrian Pavilion, it always smells like piss, as it’s at the end of the pavilions—somewhat hidden and in the back, so last time I also peed there, rather than join the ridiculous queues for the permanent toilets.

Pollock: Did you ever meet with Koyo Kouoh?

Holzinger: No, because by the time she was announced as the curator, we already knew what we were going to do. So, no—there was no context.

Pollock: SEAWORLD is a great fit for the concept of “In Minor Keys.” It’s been a year since we did our first interview, and you were revealing your Venice plans. Now that it has opened, how does it compare?

Holzinger: It’s still a work in progress, and it will change a lot. Of course, the pre-opening was absurd, and already by the second week, there was a different dynamic and flow. You remember the first week was like everybody with their phones? This is not the case anymore.

Pollock: I was in Venice, but I won’t be able to attend Prinzendorf. For the work in Venice, there seemed an issue of it not being processed by much of the public—just blindly posted online Later, social media has created this ravenous, and for whatever it’s worth, it’s not the work anymore. It’s quite dead, for a piece that is so alive.

Holzinger: Yes, it went everywhere, and it is dead; it makes everything super singular.

Pollock: We’re all forced into these in-between spaces—checking online, either reading or posting—essentially leaving us nowhere. What I admire in you, which comes from theater, is that you put the audience in the moment, the now.

Holzinger: For sure, it relates strongly to my theater background, being very experienced with that, so we always strongly consider the audience experience.

Pollock: Your piece has a reflexive function, and at times felt like being part of a great sociological experiment: however we behaved—watching the nude performers, queuing, the loos, filming—we were also being observed, like animals in a zoo.

It was also a stroke of genius that you had your team cleaning in uniforms. They were totally invisible to the crowd, just cleaners.

Holzinger: Totally, I love it.

Pollock: While the other performers are naked, they’re the only ones with clothes, identifiable as cleaners by their uniform. They’re interacting with the crowd, but they are not getting the respect they would have if people knew they were part of the company. I haven’t read a single mention of this, and of course, the fact that all of you are women.

Holzinger: This is also something we only realized much later in the process—how important the role of this toilet woman is, and what a rich figure she is—because in the first week, it was really like people would come in and treat the cleaning women like they are shit. I would also clean in uniform, and members of the public would ask me when Florentina Holzinger is performing. “Where is the artist?” And there I am on my knees.

It’s so funny—it brings all of the class dynamics into the light.

Pollock: Yes, the open-minded, left-leaning art world, at its best.

There was a question I asked during our last interview about whether you’d consider a collaboration with a fashion brand to finance something ambitious, and your answer stuck with me: “That would depend on our punk souls.”

One year later, with SEAWORLD open, and two more events just days away, my question is: how is your punk soul?

Holzinger: My punk soul is quite happy with Venice, because people have such big problems with it.

Pollock: Here in Austria as well.

Holzinger: Especially in Austria, crazy.

Pollock: Since Venice, the reporting has labelled you as a product of the progressive Austrian art scene, but you actually developed your work for twenty years abroad. Austria may have a wild reputation from the Actionists during the sixties, but things are way more conservative than that; now, it’s mostly a passive-aggressive position.

Also, a lot of the talk has been really bad, especially among women—even female curators.

Holzinger: Yeah, no, I know—people are so provoked. I’m like, “What the fuck?” Some are equating our choreography as using nudity as its selling point—a misogynistic prejudgment. Actually, the most misogynistic thing you can say to anybody. It seems that the consensus is that the only reason for a woman to get naked is financial.

For this piece, we were reflecting a lot on the history of Venice as an important place for sex workers—where sex workers could arrive at a certain emancipation, a chance for upward mobility, and to become part of an intellectual elite. What would even be bad about that?

Pollock: What is the most outrageous thing that will happen in Prinzendorf? Nitsch is buried in the grounds. Will he roll over in his grave?

Holzinger: That is a sensitive thing.

Pollock: Surprisingly, he had a Catholic funeral.

Holzinger: Really?

Pollock: Yes. I would have figured that he would have chosen a Dionysian death—sacrificed by frenzied Maenads, like Pentheus in Euripides.

Holzinger: [Laughs]