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Meit’s a wet morning in Venice. In the middle of the lake, artists from around the world with dripping umbrellas board a reclining boat for a one-off performance. Opposite the ship is a boat with a small hole that hangs high above the water, and a heavy anchor chain falls into the deep water.
Women, naked but wearing tattoos and shoes, emerge from the top of the boat. Led by a rubber band supervisor, some pick up weapons and make loud noises. An electric guitarist hoists himself onto a slippery crane, climbs up to a curved platform and swings while walking on steel. He joins a singer who screams and shouts like Yoko Ono. After 20 minutes of heavy drone, the power rises, lifting the metal bell from the cold water. Standing upside down inside is a woman with long hair. As the bell rises above the sky of Venice, it begins to shake its body from side to side, sending a ringing sound across the water.
Welcome to the world of Florentina Holzinger: dancer, actress, singer, leader of Europe’s most successful girl group, and a woman who can rekindle her childhood dream of running away to join the circus. Austrian representative to Venice BiennaleHolzinger arrives with a reputation. Over the past decade, his performances in European theaters and opera houses have caused a frenzy, and have produced journalists of all sorts of manufactured outrage, whether provoked by nudity, profanity, sex, body piercing or human waste (fake or not).
On stage, Holzinger is otherworldly. Earlier this year, at the climax of Sancta’s play, I watched him fly through the air suspended by bolts piercing the skin of his back, slamming his body against the thundering metal screen like an angel of the apocalypse. Sancta has been touring opera houses in Europe for the past two years. The opening is a 30-minute rendition of Paul Hindemith’s 1921 short opera Sancta Susanna, with a large, high-rise wall as a backdrop, on which string performers pose as spiders, demons, and hanged bodies.
Most Sancta places take the form of a mass, which is dedicated to liberation and confession, and features a local magician performing miracles, an expectant pope lifted on a robot arm, and nuns performing magic. For Holzinger, the installation of half a flute on stage answered the question of how nuns – elevated, otherworldly figures – should walk on stage. “They will not walk on the ground at random, but they will float, they will slide: somehow this method made sense to us.”
It was Holzinger, too, who was lifted naked from the sea of Venice, hanging from a bell. During the exercise, they look Amazonian: muscular, resistant to cold and, very painful. In person, he’s charming and sinister, his conversation moving between a Vatican study, a late painting Valie Export and skate lessons in Barcelona. His small hood is covered with thick fur, as if to increase his warmth after hours.
Turning his work into a biennale installation has taken a turn. Far from the safety of theater, confusion is a constant threat. “We’re always on ‘brace, brace’ when it comes to success,” he says, speaking shortly after Seaworld Venice opened. “We don’t know, but we know what’s going to happen, but nothing could have prepared us for this because I wake up in the morning and ask myself, ‘What’s going to happen today?’
His company performs eight hours a day, in all seasons, their audience moving freely around the Austrian arena, many not prepared for a show in which complete nudity is only the beginning. Venice, Holzinger explains, “is really where the seated nude was born: the horizontal, dynamic image of women.”
Seaworld Venice is part temple, part gallery, part theme park, part toilet. Pavilion sections feature pools where Holzinger’s company performs jetskis, contortion acts, and is suspended from high ropes like a Renaissance altarpiece. In the center stage, a player wearing a scuba mask stands in a glass tank for four hours after stretching. The water around him is the filtered material of the two neighboring Portaloos.
At the biennale, August’s art-savvy visitors saw the site as a human zoo. I got in behind the director of the world famous museum, who apparently did not see the “No photography” sign, who took pictures of the whole jetski and posted it to Instagram. Holzinger said: “It’s not my behavior or my behavior towards the police. “But it’s still annoying that no one seems to be able to recognize art without a screen.” Because of the visitors who flooded the media and the theater, his Instagram account was temporarily suspended.
Holzinger players alternate roles. One day, he might be jetskiing, the next manning the restrooms and instructing guests on how to use them (please, no tights, people!). “I didn’t realize the importance of women’s work in the bathroom,” says Holzinger, “and the way people treat the performers – thinking they’re only ‘toilet’ women.” He thinks it speaks volumes about the value offered by different types of work. “Is it more difficult to spend eight hours underwater or to be a toilet woman?”
Why put these toilets in the Austrian Pavilion? Holzinger remembers his application form for Venice – a whole page about sustainability, but only a few places to describe the Pavilion. “This made it clear: for us, content is a sustainable concept.” And in fact, few things lead to a more complicated ecological relationship between water and waste than encountering a woman drowning in your own filtered urine. (Yes, readers, I did.)
Physical activity is what artists are forced to face in reality: often, and with difficulty, as it happens, in the inadequate space of the biennale. “The Austrian pavilion was always an unsanctioned toilet,” laments Holzinger. The pavilion is at the back of the site. By this point, you’ve gone through “two, three hours of art in the Giardini and you have a full bladder.
Holzinger’s work can feel dark and heavy. They do great things, including the control that the Catholic Church has had over women’s bodies. The associated actors have a history of acrobatics, stunts and body piercing and contemporary dance. Their dedication is literally written on their bodies. I know the singer was drowned in a tank for his performance Saintwhen he had a small wound that was taken from his stomach. He now has 25 such scars – one for each opera. One athlete, who specializes in body piercing, has done “probably 200 suspensions already in my shows”, says Holzinger. “His back carries this: he calls it a book.”
However, these shows are fun, and the most important thing is that they don’t make sense. Sancta featuring the stoning Jesus, Seaworld Venice has a fake toilet where “experts” struggle to stop exploding faeces. Holzinger said: “Comedy is an important part of creating art. ‘Of course, I want to answer important questions. But I can’t do it without also trying to laugh. There should always be a sense of hope: motivation to move forward and change things quickly.”
He paused and then added: “At the end of the day, I’m not an artist who takes himself too seriously.” And maybe I can believe that about him – he’s happy to be hurt, to be stupid. But the skill? This, I think, Holzinger takes very seriously.
