Art and business, sculpture and language, politics and poetry, analysis and activism: these are some of the central tensions that Karin Kasböck and Christoph Maria Leitner, working under the shared moniker “bankleer,” have tapped into since 1998; they want to wrestle not primarily with themselves but with a state of global affairs increasingly defined by polycrises, and that necessitates a polyaesthetic team-based approach. Their—often spectacular—works, typically developed for public settings, accordingly undercut the boundaries of classic genres as well as the traditional division of roles between artists and audience in favor of an amalgam: a “performative sculpture” that unites elements of plastic art and set design, agitprop and street theater, video and media art as well as pop art and intertwines strategies of avant-garde movements such as Situationism or the Theater of the Oppressed with traditional religious practices like the sermon or the procession.

A no less complex amalgam of theology and politics, art and craftsmanship, sacred symbolism and profane propaganda is the marble Plague Column on the Graben. The first of its kind in the Habsburg monarchy, it commemorates the great plague epidemic, which killed one in three residents of Vienna, and was erected in the center of the capital between 1687 and 1692 by a team of Baroque masters led by Bernhard Fischer von Erlach.

Over three centuries later and about seventy-five yards away, bankleer stage a temporary intervention into the urban fabric: for six weeks, their contemporary version of the “cloud pyramid,” one main component of this highly prominent type of “Trinity Column,” touches down amid what has since become Vienna’s busiest and most expensive commercial real estate. Surrounded by banks and luxury stores with the prestigious wares they impeccably showcase, the work is a lumpy polymer-concrete body rising to a height of about thirteen feet. Painted gray and white, it reveals a series of small round openings that complement its amorphous-abstract aspect with a creaturely complexion. Most of the time, the object rests on a low pedestal, but several times per week it becomes the point of departure for a performance with a running time of twenty minutes: two young actors, one woman and one man, dressed in costumes somewhere between knight’s armor and sportswear, start scaling the sculpture and clambering over it—a wooden door and a roof hatch also allow access to its interior—while interacting with each other and with passersby and the audience around them.

In this improvisational dialogue for two, which turns the entire public space surrounding the sculpture into a stage, the two protagonists rely on a script that bankleer partly wrote from scratch, partly compiled from various literary and philosophical sources, including numerous passages in John Milton’s epic poem “Paradise Lost,” first published in 1667, and that combines a scathing critique of capitalism and contemporary society with melancholy reflections and emotional appeals. Not coincidentally, the evolving scene brings to mind the “madman” from Nietzsche’s famous aphorism 125 in “The Gay Science,” who “in the bright morning lit a lantern and ran around the marketplace crying incessantly, ‘I’m looking for God! I’m looking for God!’” As the performers act out their roles, the Graben time and again resounds with the battle call “Nothing needs to stay as it is!”, an urgent summons to harness the forces of traditional religion, whose irrelevance was noted by, again, Nietzsche in his epoch-making observation that “God is dead,” for an effort to find communal and creative ways of dealing with today’s crises before it is irrevocably too late.

(Christian Muhr)