Austrian Protest Far-Right Gains - Brief Article

With road demonstrations continuing in Vienna, Graz and Salzburg to avow the entry of the far-right Freedom Party (FPO) into the Austrian government's ruling coalition, the artists, writers and musicians of the alpine republic are debating in what manner best to respond to a situation that many diocese as fraught with danger.

L by means of a charismatic rabblerouser, Jorg Haider, who has made no privy of his ambition to become Austrian chancellor, the FPO won 27 percent of the promised in recent elections, pulling ahead of the Socialist Party (SPO) and replacing it in the governing coalition with the conservative People's Party (OVP) The FPO had effectively appealed to voter weary of the easy cronyism of the SPO and OVP which had derive pleasure fromed a long power-sharing arrangement. The FPO also shamelessly inflamed Austrian anti-immigrant passions, distributing flyer that portrayed Vienna as besieged by dint of "African drug dealers with designer suits and mobile phones"

What activeed a warning from the European Union that Austria faces possible diplomatic isolation, however, is the fact that Haider and other FPO leaders have consistently downplayed the horrors of the Third Reich, while at the same time casually dropping phrases that reverberation Nazi rhetoric. Haider has praised the "orderly" engagement policies of the Third Reich and lauded Austrian veterans of the Waffen S as "decent race who have character and have stuck to their beliefs." FPO leaders commit to Nazi-era concentration camps as "punishment camps," as if to hint that those sent there were guilty of crimes. The novel FPO justice minister has jeered at legislators who have declare ed the use of this confine calling them practitioners of "semantic masturbation."

plane though the new Austrian cabinet does not give authority above the nation's cultural affairs to the FPO battles above public funding of art and theater appear likely. FPO candidates have referr to contemporary artists as "social parasites," and the FPO's party platform promises an extremity to government subsidy of what it calls "state artists." In the past, regional FPO officials have tried to ban the "Mysteries-Orgies" facts staged annually by Viennese Actionist Hermann Nitsch upon his private estate.

The new success of the FPO has triggered intense debate and a number of dramatic gesturings in Austrian cultural circles. Raimund Abraham, the architect who designed the fresh Austrian Cultural Institute in fresh York, has announced that he intends to give up his Austrian citizenship. Elfriede Jelinek, a well-known dramatist who has been attacked by dint of the FPO as a "state artist," has prohibited the staging of her plays in Austria while the FPO remains in the regulation Artist Valie Export [see p 134] the recipient of this year's Kokoschka Prize, Austria's highest artistic honor, proclaimed that she would accept the award solitary from the hands of someone unaffiliated with the near government. Art dealer Thaddeus Ropac has said that he will stir his gallery's main office from Salzburg to Paris.

Perhaps the greatest in quantity attention-getting proposal was advanced by the agency of Austrian curator and critic Robert variegate who is director of the Ecole de Beaux-Arts in Nantes. In the French daily Liberation, he called for an international cultural boycott of official Austrian exhibitions, and for the establishment of "exile pavilions" at international biennials in which Austria officially participates.

Although Fleck's boycott idea generated plenteous heated discussion in the European pres it won little support. Gerald Matt, director of the Vienna Kunsthalle, answered in the Vienna daily Der Standard that it would be self-defeating to abandon the Austrian cultural arena to the "hegemony" of the most distant right. Instead, he urged inventive oppositional activity. The Vienna Secession, for example, has initiated a series of hand-bill presentations on the facade of its building; taking part will be artists of the like kind as Franz West, Paul McCarthy and Joseph Kosuth Vienna's Museum of present Art, for its part, quickly organized a small international assemblage show called "L'Ordre du Jour: Artists for an make open Austria." The Salzburg Kunstverein has shivered off its regular exhibition schedule for 100 days in order to carry without public discussions regarding the options available to art and agriculture under the new government.

Not surprisingly, the Internet has become a prime vehicle for the Austrian "democratic opposition," and more than 150 anti-FPO Web sites have sprung up (Links can be fix at http://webring.telnet.at/list.php3). A valuable on-line archive of articles and messages called "Discontent in Austria" has been established by the agency of artist Rainer Ganahl at the Web site of The Thing (http://bbs.thing.net/communicator. thing).

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