glitterballshooting
Christmas as a Private Arena?
The scene is not unfamiliar: It is Christmas. An elegantly dressed man lays bored on a sofa with a high percentage drink in his hand. He starts to amuse himself by shooting at the Christmas glitter balls hanging on the fir tree directly opposite him with an air pistol. Alone in the room, he falls into a state of almost complete elation.
The scene is from the American comic detective film Another Thin Man starring William Powell and Myrna Loy in the principle roles. They play the crime-solving couple Nora and Nick Charles who hunt down criminals in a total of six films. That what amused movie audiences in 1939 often meets up with incomprehension today. Hannes Malte Mahler had to discover this for himself recently in conjunction with his annual glitter ball shooting performance. While Nick Charles’ “attack" on the Christmas tree glitter balls in the movie was spontaneous, the Hannover artist organizes these air gun shooting events for everyone. “Are they Crazy in the Museum?" was the headline of the German tabloid newspaper "Bild" after the performance in the Museum Weserburg in Bremen on December 22, 2006. They invited a minister of the Church to speak his mind and he got het up wondering how it was possible to treat Christian values in such a fashion.
The clergyman in question however forgot that the Christmas tree including all its decorations has absolutely nothing to do with the original attributes of the Christmas celebration. Even the Santa Claus - popularized by Coca Cola -, who stood on the floor during the event also rose to the rank of a target, was incorporated into Christmas for purely commercial reasons.
So Why All the Fuss?
The opponents say that shooting with a weapon has something intrinsically menacing or military about it. But the performances were carried out with an air gun that is even recognized as a piece of sports equipment at the Olympic Games, the genesis of which goes back to an initiative promoting understanding among nations. Glitter ball shooting has rather a linear connection to shooting galleries at funfairs which therefore results in proximity to Christmas fairs and carnivals that can indeed be seen critically. This vehement criticism also came from the ilk of artists in advance of the glitter ball shooting that took place at the Künstlerverein Malkasten in Düsseldorf on December 4, 2007.
The event was to be boycotted because it would place unreasonable demands on children and would rob them of any and all illusions; Christmas is surely something very private and intimate. This and similar statements come from putative "U-boat" Christians who only emerge at certain times of the year in order to remind themselves: "There was something, wasn't there ...?" They make clear that the market-driven and commercial manipulation of the Christmas celebration has had an impact; that Christmas serves as a welcome diversion to forget all one’s woes in addition to encouraging a withdrawal to a non-existent ideal world.
The hope of attaining this is however destroyed in the annual family feuds during and after Christmas Eve. After a days-long factitious peace there follows the sudden end. According to the contextual criticism offered by artist colleagues, Mahler lacks originality. Such socially critical actions especially regarding Christmas have already been staged by countless Fluxus artists. One could counter this argument by replying that all eras (and there are countless examples not only in art history) bring their own prerequisites and facts that are never identical with occurrences from the past.
Criticism must be renewed inasmuch as the facts and circumstances have remained the same over the decades because the reflection of the criticized objects changes at all times. As far as the rebuke regarding a lack of originality is concerned, one must note that this term can be understood twofold: It means originality and authenticity in the act of creation as well as a unique and uncommon occurrence. The aspect of originality, should it play an important role at all in contemporary art, is therefore certainly warranted regarding glitter ball shooting.
But what real reasons could there be that a performance such as Mahler’s glitter ball shooting should provoke such condemnation? One reason could be that the successive retreat to familial value patterns and traditional role attributions which the rigorous medialization of everyday life brought in its wake instrumentalized the private as a political category. As such it creates functional areas which correspond pan-socially to those of production and consumption. Completely in the sense of early bourgeois fantasies, this fact is accompanied by the refusal to additionally reflect on one's own historical conditions. The actual control of the private through market-driven production and control capacities are therefore opposed by the hegemonic and thus the controlling demands of the private on the public. The private cannot be described as a form that is entirely reserved for the protection of the family, the shaping of sensitive subjects, and the reaction to hard economic life, but rather as a political fiction that offers itself as a projection for various ideological options, constructive as well as antithetic. The family as the central structure is object, starting point, and venue of these projects.
Mahler's glitter ball shooting is an interactive project that is very amusing and communicative on the one hand and which opens a discursive framework on the other. With the public’s participation it presents an open system in which several parameters are fixed, but no binding perceptive guidelines are set. To be sure, Hannes Malte Mahler transmits something to the active participants as well as the passive observers of the glitter ball shooting: “The industrially perfect beauty of the bullets thrives on their latent fragility - a perfectly decorated Christmas tree already speaks to the brief period for which it sheds its brilliance."
Oliver Zybok
feinkunstraum Hannover
Kronenstrasse 41 Hinterhof
30161 Hannover
www.feinkunstraum.de