Werner Schwab

Hermann has done it: he is a much sought after “Graz artist”, his “slime figurines” are selling like hot cakes. Since then, his relationships have changed: he has banished his mother into a small room and she shouts her pronouncements from a crib. Hermann’s muse is Anna Rottweiler. She lets him humiliate and mishandle her as often and for as long as he wants.
But when the gallerist Axel Dingo or the patron Cosima Grollfeuer show up, Hermann switches from brutal monster to a meek underdog in an instant. He is thoroughly subservient: he follows any suggestion either of the two makes, even when it comes to separating from Anna Rottweiler. In the end, he takes it just like his mother or quasi wife Anna: his assistants 99, 100 and 101 hit and kick him at his own request, for “self destruction is the chief rule of the purity requirements of creatively active artists”. To establish himself as an artist, he reconstructs Spitzweg’s “The Poor Poet”, Michelangelo’s “Pieta” and van Gogh’s self portrait – self exaltation through the appropriation of art. But the art scene lets him down and the relationships are inverted again: in the end, Hermann is left alone with his mother, without muse or recognition, back in the misery of family.
In the sequel to Volksvernichtung oder Meine Leber ist sinnlos, “Schwab combines his family inferno with the satire of the art industry – expressed in orgiastic contortions of language and excessive images that are increasingly strained, and increasingly sought after for their shock value.” (Schauspielführer der Gegenwart)