You are losers but I will always sleep with you – an Alpine novella I cunt face
I hate musicals. This year, the water at the Côte d’Azur is bluer than usual, thanks to the admission they take now at the shores. Of course, as in my curatorial practice, I am for inclusion – still, not being recognised every few metres along the shore is a pleasant feeling!
A message reaches me, with the request to write about the new musical by Charlotte Gash. They couldn’t find anyone else – Vienna was an intellectual desert with regard to writers. Actually, I’ve no time at all. Curating the next biennial and documenta, as well as the opening of a private museum in Dubai under the aegis of my family in Düsseldorf are pending – so I’m in more demand than ever. But since this is also due to the success of my last institutional exhibition Tunnel of Inclusion, and not least indebted to the controversial work of the artist Charlotte Gash, I feel bound to this task even if it lies way beneath my abilities. And here, dear readers, it is not about blunt swagger, no – as my good friend HUO (Hans Ulrich Obrist) once said: “Ponys, too, have to be mounted with high heels!”
I attend the premiere, for invited guests only, 35 minutes late. At the entrance, I encounter some fans. They hail me and want me to sign my last book Love of painting – or how I learned that oil does not have to be part of a vinaigrette for them. Two seats are reserved for me in the first row, now that I have arrived the show The Sound of Losers may begin.
The story can be summarised as follows: The performance form is fed up with the notorious financial vulture GASH, frighteningly well interpreted by Charlotta Öberg, a promiscuous, alcohol-addicted, 45 (!) year old student. In punishment, the performance form’s professor, personified by none other but icon Danielle Pamp, GASH is sent to painting class to take over its professorship. Here, GASH finds five brainless Swedish painters whose names all rhyme with GASH, and who at the piercing sound of a whistle submit to every demand of Frau Schöne, the 95-year-old landlady of the studio space “who used to party at Gürtel all the time”, excellently impersonated by legend Jojo Ahlkvist. After initial rejection of the hollow Scandinavian Bitcoin miners, played by Ahlkvist (MASH), Pamp (HASH), a breathtaking Hilma Bäckström in a double role (BASH, LASH), and the genius Charlotte Gash in person (CASH), GASH – putatively – manages to pass on her special kind of art practice to the young blondes; performative denial of reality, watered down with narcotic drugs and sexual dissipation loss.
At this junction I am reminded of my own time in Vienna and send an SMS to a Canadian painter I used to date clandestinely 20 years ago during a curatorial workshop I held together with professor Julian Wolfgang Göthe – Sam, wondrously strong hair! While I am revelling in memories of how we crossed the Donaukanal together naked, the whole musical suddenly does an about-turn: From GASHs original idea to stage a kind of therapeutic musical together with the Swedish nincompoops, an entirely new level opens up quite surprisingly: we, as audience, suddenly are a part of this meta-staging. For the first time I’m taking off my shades. As if the musical itself were now holding a mirror up to me, one self-referential insertion follows the other. GASH, referring to herself as “slut”, whose “favourite thing” is getting her friends to play scripts specifically written for that purpose, deconstructs the narration and smudges the boundaries between fiction and reality. With the line “musicals are the lowest form of art” she anticipates the critique in my head, self-confidently throwing it before my Margiela boots. I feel caught out. Danielle Pamp’s sonorous voice enters my ears and pierces my heart: “The only true loser is sitting in front of me!” Pamp looks deep into my eyes, and the salmon tramezzino I ate during the break almost comes up again.
When Ahlkvist, including her strikingly genuine-looking wig, again rolls onto the stage as Frau Schöne in an office chair, and with an idiosyncratic homage to Liza Minelli lights up the entire premises of the Vienna State Opera, I cling to my neighbour Klaus Biesenbach, unable to hold back my tears any longer. With almost suffocating speed, the remaining four acts turn the story upside down and three times through the meta-mincer so that it becomes clear to me and the audience: here a new form of art is born, a kind of Dadaism 2.0, cleverer and more momentous than ever, hardly equalled in genius. The analogy between Vienna, the Potemkin village par excellence (cf. Ringstrasse architecture), and the stage setting made from impregnated (!) cardboard is just one of the strokes of genius in Charlotte Gash’s design.
My sole critique thus only concerns my own long-lasting blindness. For, since the current issue of Texte zur Cunt also has distinguished Charlotte Gash’s art of post-dramatic meta musical as a “Tableau vivant of the 21st century”, I, too, have to admit: I was wrong, all my life! The only true art form is, and has always been, the musical! My gratitude goes to the artist among artists Charlotte Gash. I want to use the opportunity to announce that in 2026 in Venice, Charlotte Gash will not only play the Austrian and British pavilions, but also the German and American ones!
Long live GASH, and the rest of you all get a solo!
The Curator is co-editor of Texte zur Cunt, director and professor of art history and art theory at Städelschule in Frankfurt / Oder, as well as recently appointed and only honorary chairwoman of MoMA in New York. She began her career in the 1990s at Galerie Buchholz in Cologne, first as an assistant, later as a manager. In 1999, together with her twin sister, the performance artist Bon Vaginée, she curated the groundbreaking exhibition Dranbleiben in the historical Fabrikhalle Simmering with the artists Laura Hinrichsmeyer, Stine Ølgod, and Len Schweder. Her latest book Skulpturensohn – dein Klötzchen ist größer als mein Klötzchen was published in winter 2024 by Sternberg Press.