Commentary on the world premiere of "cut up or shut up" by Bernd Künzig

After the American writer William S. Burroughs published his novel "Naked lunch" in 1959, modern literature experienced one of its most important shocks. The usual theories of the novel and the associated aesthetic ideas of a holistic individual who forms himself in the sense of the developmental and Bildungsroman were no match for this radical text. To attribute its dream-like, even nightmarish structures and scenarios solely to Burroughs' intensive drug use at the time leads to passages that are all too narrow. The previous novel "Junkie", published six years earlier, showed the fatal cycle of intoxication, dependence and decay of a drug addict in a documentary style of the highest precision. This nightmare of a subject helplessly stranded in the modern world of the 20th century is answered in "Naked lunch" by a text that has expanded into a general American nightmare, entangled in a web of media manipulation and mental and physical dependencies. What is revolutionary about Burroughs' novel is not only this socio-political insight, which has already been formulated in a similar way by Tom Wolfe, but also its formal intensification, which does not respond to the fragmentation of perception, the disruption of inside and outside and a general manipulation of everything real with a text corpus that falls behind these facts, but turns this reality, which can no longer be described or grasped, into an aesthetic strategy. The randomly assembled text structures from text particles of an apparent description of reality, this method of cut-up, this conscious parallelism of editing and montage, corresponds more to a reality contaminated by the media than the attempt to counter this mental atomic disaster with an external view.Not only media aesthetes and critics have taken note of Burroughs' writing method with great admiration, but also generations of readers who have sought identity in an underground beyond the mainstream of mass media. The American Jeff Kowalkowski also seems to belong to the musical underground of contemporary music. With "Cut up or shut up", he has not only transferred the method and aesthetics of Burroughs' highly productive cut-up process to musical structures, but also seeks to stage an image of the American nightmare. The notated source material is so fragmentary that it gives the impression of material for an imaginary sampler. The essential basis of "Cut up or shut up" is no longer the composition, but the cooperation between material and performer. The work platform Interzone perceptible, which has now premiered Kowalkowski's quirky hippie and punk ode, can itself be seen as a component of the work.The form of the performance, the duo's acting interludes are largely their own invention, as is the multimedia expansion through a video projection in which performances by heavy metal bands are combined with cartoon sequences of daily media garbage. A strange quartet of show girls performs on the forestage, their frozen smiles as technoid, sterile and perfect as their singing and acting qualities fall short of the requirements of a school play. On the one hand, these children of the future, with their literally burgeoning sexual drives, which are made abundantly clear by their extremely tight clothing, are confronted with the failure of a concept of happiness and material wealth that is rooted in the trivial world of cartoon series and the short-lived stardom of pop stars. This is an evil eye on the American nightmare that has long since become our own.We are no longer the children of Coca-Cola and Marx, but merely their hapless and jealous imitators. On the other hand, there are the moments of compositional and musical virtuosity, the rebirth of a beauty of melody, which is set as a cut and montage in the multimedia disaster. In this, Jeff Kowalkowski's musical composition asserts itself against the conceptually necessary, more radical and louder approach to interpretation, performance and direction of Interzone perceptible. They are all part of this "cut-up" process founded by Burroughs, which is highly effective but little realized. This can be seen in the documentary interview material that Jeff Kowalkowski has in turn made the basis of an electronic recording. He asked about reading experiences based on Burroughs' novel and received answers whose meaning lies more in the musical material of the respective voices than in their literary cognitive value. In this way, the composer also shows how much we ourselves have become the cut-up material of a media reality.What initially begins as a purely aestheticist multimedia spectacle proves to be a thoroughly political conception of a different kind of music theater, which no longer seeks to motivate action, but instead demonstrates actions within a media network. Strangely enough, behind the cut-up method as a way of writing that dissolves the concept of the individual, Jeff Kowalkowski's work once again raises the question of the existence of the subject. Is he now a machine, as the Enlightenment philosophers Descartes and Leibniz already believed, has he become the self-alienated media apparatus that Burroughs describes him as, or is he capable of free will, as the ostensibly unfinished project of modernism believes. In the tonal beauty that Kowalkowski entrusts to his accordion and electric bass soloists, as well as to a backing choir that dabbles in a thoroughly positive sense, there is also much that is comforting and touching, despite the ironic distance to the show character of the piece, which allows us to perceive a protective individual in the multimedia thunderstorm of images and sounds, who will perhaps still triumph over technology in the end. In this sense, the future belongs to the dilettante. He destroys technical perfection and functionality in order to create something that he and nobody else believes in with great passion: the artist's ego.

(Bernd Künzig on the premiere of "Cut up or shut up" on February 23rd, 2001 in the Kunstwerkstatt am Hellweg, Bochum; Baden-Baden, May 28th, 2001)