Institution as landscape. Heiner Goebbels’ „distant relatives“ in artistic cooperation and education

Abstract

When we talk about the current theatre or opera landscape, we usually mean the audience's choice from a wide spectrum of distinct, but expectable institutional offerings. Only singular artists have attempted to understand institutions of aesthetic production as a landscape, in which surprising and dynamic associations become possible without a defining centre. Among them is Heiner Goebbels, who in his work realizes complex compilations of genres, styles, and traditions, organizing the unlikely collaboration of the most diverse sources, producers, and promoters. By that, he built an extensive network of production houses, artists and ensembles, colleagues and disciples, presenting it in his projects as an alternative to conventional institutions.

Starting from the diverse voices of this network, together with Goebbels’ own texts on artistic education and production, this essay explores the dimension of institutional critique in his work, which can be found less in his polemic speech against artistic institutions and more in his productive engagement in and with them. Institutional theory (Berger/Luckmann, Walgenbach) is employed in order to denominate some strategies of this praxis and to carve out their utopian potential in the intersection of the modes of existence of technology, fiction and science (Latour). As a conclusion, the aesthetic concept of landscape (G. Stein, G. Simmel, H. Böhme) is transposed to this new institutional formation, in which artistic experiment and institution paradoxically presuppose and make impossible one another (Menke).