++++ If the rate of growth in the size of the audience remained constant from lecture to lecture, the head of Manifesta, Martin Fritz, said in his introductory remarks, in the end the Century Hall would have to be hired. The auditorium of the Städelschule was well-populated for the second lecture in the Manifesta 4 series. This may have had something to do with the speaker being very well-known. Hedwig Saxenhuber is co-editor of springerin, a Viennese periodical for contemporary art, and was curator at the Munich Kunstverein for four years. On the occasion of a retrospective there in 1992, her intensive critical engagement with the American conceptual artist, Adrian Piper, also began.
Hedwig Saxenhuber also took the title of her lecture, "Who's afraid of the bogey man?", from the New York artist whose work is concerned with racism and xenophobia in everyday life. The curator, who lives in Vienna, asks the question in the title of her lecture ironically. It is a question to which all those addressed usually cry Nobody! And, if one investigates more closely like Adrian Piper does, this answer turns out to be mostly a lie. Saxenhuber presented some of Piper's works which, in her performances since the early seventies, repeatedly pose extremely simple, but subliminally loaded questions such as, "Have you had a sexual relationship with a black person? And whom have you told this voluntarily?"
It is undisputed that the role of the artist as an agent for social responsibility has changed since that time, and this is related, among other things, to the changed qualities in the field of reception. In the sixties, the social space tended to be a passive surface to be played upon, whereas today the public sphere, in its various forms such as the internet and urban space with camera surveillance, itself has the qualities of an actor who is the subject of artistic contents.
Whether the expectations of art to deal with social power relations can become a stultifying obligation, and why art of all things should engage critically with subjects that have already been treated in the television news, were interesting questions posed by Hedwig Saxenhuber. These questions, which the speaker read from a prepared text, remained largely unanswered. Saxenhuber’s observation that contemporary art in the countries of the former Eastern bloc was strikingly lacking in political content was significant, also with regard to the Manifesta biennial starting at the end of May, which focuses on contemporary art in Eastern Europe. For, the encounter between art and politics which took place there in the past did not have so much to do with critical discourse, but more with incorporation and utilization. Thus for instance, for artists from Poland or the Czech Republic today, the lack of political content is nothing other than a conscious refusal which has a highly political dimension.