STUDIES ON ENTERTAINMENT UND OVERSTIMULATION (TEIL 19 + 20)

1984, Performance
STUDIES ON ENTERTAINMENT UND OVERSTIMULATION (TEIL 19 + 20)
M.Raskin Stichting ens.

It is said that there is a situation of overstimulation here. There is much too much stimuli in our society.

12.4.84 Erste Performance der M. Raskin Stichting ens. live in "The Kitchen", New York, im Rahmen des vom Goethe Institut mitorganisierten Festival: G.T.O. (Germans Together Outrageously: Die Tödliche Doris, Die Zwei, Frieder Butzmann, Thomas Kapielsky, Florian Langenscheidt u.a. 8.-15.4.84)
mit: Andreas Coerper, Elisabeth Fiege, Oliver Hirschbiegel, Rotraut Pape, Kai Schirmer und special guest: Mark Boone jr.

Village Voice, May 15, 1984
Art in Order
By Sally Banes

STUDIES ON ENTERTAINMENT, PARTS 19-27. A performance by M. Raskin Stichting Ens. Part of the "Germans Together Outrageously" Festival at the Kitchen, 59 Wooster Street, 925-3615. Co-sponsored by Goethe House (April 12-15).

M. Raskin Stichting Ens., a group of five performance artists from Hamburg, parodies institutions of every kind—the corporate media, political parties, academic conferences, music groups, construction crews, and even love and courtship—in a highly structured format that contains, within its discipline and synchronization, the seeds of its own sabotage.

In Studies on Entertainment, of which I saw Parts 19 & 20, M. Raskin Stichting Ens. presents itself as a cadre, disdaining individual identification in program notes or performance. The group sits at a long table as if at a press conference. A white banner is lettered with the name of the group, microphones are placed in front of every seat, and the two women in their red tunics and black belts are flanked on each side by the men in their white shirts and black ties. They carry out short actions of various sorts, reading mock art-political manifestos', shouting, honking horns, spraying cans of hairspray, getting knocked from their seat by mechanical swinging fists, playing music, noise, and speeches on cassette recorders—all in a solemnly pedantic, tightly measured fashion.

The live actions alternate with recorded performances, on video monitors, of actions that fan out in time and space. The women sit, dressed in their red tunics, in an asphalt lot and sing (in French becoming German) a flat, dour, repetitive song. The men appear on the scene and douse them with buckets of water. The singers carry on without even blinking. It is nighttime and the group rushes into a car and drives around a field crowded with people, carrying on a kind of Chinese fire drill that, seen on the TV monitors with alternating long shots and closeups, emulates a newscast of some kind of unidentifiable pandemonium. It is nighttime again and the group enters an abandoned building and begins demolition work.

The tension between regimentation and anarchy, order and destruction, urgency and nonsense generates both humor and a healthy sense of subversion. For there is something pleasurable in the pattern and dicipline, something perhaps too seductive. When that orderliness is violated, we too are disturbed, but also relieved. M. Raskin Stichting Ens. shows us both the attractions and the dangers of organization, as well as its antidotes.

"SPLENDID... MIGHT MAKE YOU STAND UP AND CHEER"