Give Doubt the Benefit of the Doubt

Michael Fliri is the protagonist of his own performances. They are experimental arrangements and test-runs of the subject against a refractory or indifferent outside world, which ultimately comes to the same thing. Travesty and masquerade transform the antiheroic "heroes" into broad-brush clichéd figures or beings of indefinite creatureliness.
Entirely without pathos, the cowboy, punk, footballer, or suicide attacker is entangled in somewhat helpless forms of failure as if painstaking repetition and demonstration of that very failure were the only real act of heroism. Slightly surprised, yet cheerful, the protagonist seems to be kept forever busy by the revolt of things that appear to be animated, even to have a life of their own, but in fact only get in the hero’s way as though by chance, because of an unfortunate chain of physical events.

Sometimes he is occupied with an inversion of logic: a castaway throwing a plastic anchor into the middle of the ocean to save himself; building a house under water he intends to inhabit against the laws of gravity; or casting an anchor into a tree in order to pull himself up and "drown" in the air. He courageously exposes himself to, and stoically faces, atmospheric resistances such as snow and water. Yet he also probes the limits of feasibility as well as a sudden creativity and ease that allow him to change his world in accordance with his wishes with the sleight of hand of the bricoleur. Accompanied by simple and monotonous music, he effortlessly makes changes to his house at one-minute intervals by nimbly shifting its parts around.

For the Generali Foundation, Michael Fliri performs his solitary and focused act amid the opening-night crowd. He allows us a glimpse, as it were, behind the scenes or the "fourth wall," showing us the "work in its making." First, a make-up artist turns the protagonist into someone else, a hybrid being with anthropoid features which then does some falling practice: testing, for instance, how a murder victim may have dropped—the body outline on the floor marks out the possibility of an envisaged event. The last scene, finally, completely kills the illusion, as the protagonist reveals
the trick that makes blood gush when heroes fall …
Fliri’s mute comic heroes recall Buster Keaton’s or Jacques Tati’s imperturbable laconism; their tiny gestures of everyday failure and the poetry of their simple actions illuminate the way our world works, its paradoxes and contingencies, and yet reveal how easy it is, with devotion, to get a handle on things—if perhaps by the rules of a different type of efficiency and under a different order of things.
 

Curator: Sabine Folie