Rights Information

World; L

Reviews

Sengl’s art itself plays with the tensions of life and death in her use of taxidermied rats. These once living animals are now turned into frozen props for a play that is all about death. Unlike purely biological or zoological taxidermy dioramas, these rats are anthropomorphized, mimicking human activities in miniature. […] The initial reaction to seeing the white rats wearing the tiny corsets and holding rat-sized guns results in deeply conflicted emotions. Cuteness and horror collide in these miniature scenes. […] Sengl continues the legacy of acid-tongued Austrian artists from Kraus and Kafka to more contemporary voices like Thomas Bernhard and Elfriede Jelinek. Her adaptation of Kraus’ war epic, The Last Days of Mankind, makes it more accessible to audiences and helps to render the experimental play into a more comprehensible whole.
– New York Journal of Books

[Deborah Sengl’s] stunning display of 176 taxidermied rats as actors presenting forty-four scenes from The Last Days of Mankind deliver[s] a bracing test of [the play’s] potential. […] The preparation, costuming and posing of the rats as well as the meticulous attention to miniature props – facsimiles of period newspapers, a factory owner’s top hat and bow tie, the sample cases of traveling salesmen, infantry rifles – reflect a deep knowledge of Kraus’ text and disciplined commitment to an unconventional representation of its meaning.
The powerful effect of this large assemblage of monochromatic tableaux is heightened by juxtaposition with the preparatory drawings, which were exhibited next to them. […] These delicate line drawings all use color, sparingly but pointedly, so that the viewer is inevitably drawn to a comparison with the corresponding tableaux. Seen up close, as they are in the catalogue photographs, which include some unsettling enlargements, every white rat’s cocked head, gaping mouth, or crooked claw points back to the linguistic physiognomy of the speakers of a war-contaminated language who people Kraus’s drama.
– Leo Lensing, Times Literary Supplement

Sengl expressly states that she is not in a position to offer a quick solution for all the injustices of our times. But her works urge us to cast a more open and more empathic view of our environment, and that would already be a very commendable first step.
– Acid Rain

Author Biography

Deborah Sengl (b. 1974, Vienna) is an Austrian artist whose paintings, drawings and sculptures pose questions about the role of individual identity in modern society. She uses taxidermied animal actors staged in tableaux and two-dimensional works of human-animal chimera that suggest a cathartic release of violence and trauma associated with institutions, culture, politics, consumerism, poverty, and leisure. Recent solo exhibitions include the Essl Museum of Contemporary Art; IFK, Linz; Museum of Modern Art, Carinthia; Galerie Geschler (Berlin); Galerie Hilger (Vienna); and the National Gallery in Tirana, Albania. She studied art at both the University of Applied Arts in Vienna and the University of Art in Berlin, and has made a secondary career in costume design.

Marjorie Perloff is among America’s leading critics of poetry and the author of over a dozen books of literary criticism. She teaches courses, lectures around the world and writes on twentieth and now twenty-first century poetry and poetics, both Anglo-American and from a Comparatist perspective, as well as on intermedia and the visual arts. She is Professor Emerita of English at Stanford University and Florence R. Scott Professor of English Emerita at the University of Southern California as well as being an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. Perloff’s titles include Wittgenstein’s Ladder, The Futurist Moment and Frank O’Hara: Poet Among Painters. Several recent books take up the subject of her Viennese heritage, her exile, and Vienna’s cultural milieu. Her most recent book The Edge of Irony: Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire (University of Chicago Press, 2015) was praised by Adam Kirsch in The New York Review of Books and features the seed of the analysis that blooms in her writing on Deborah Sengl’s The Last Days of Mankind.

Paul Reitter is Professor in German Languages and Literatures and Director of the Humanities Institute at Ohio State University. He is the author of three books: The Anti-Journalist: Karl Kraus and Jewish Self-Fashioning in Fin-de-Siecle Europe (University of Chicago press, 2008), On the Origins of Jewish Self-Hatred (Princeton University Press, 2012), and Bambi’s Jewish Roots: Essays on German-Jewish Culture (Bloomsbury, 2015). He has also worked on multiple collaborative editions including Jonathan Franzen’s The Kraus Project (Harper, 2013) and he has contributed essays and reviews to Harper’s, TLS, Los Angeles Review of Books, Bookforum, The Nation, and others. He recently co-edited Anti-Education, a new translation of Nietzsche’s lectures on the German educational system, and The Rise of the Modern University, an anthology of sources having to do with the mission of the research university.

Copyright Information

©2018 DoppelHouse Press

Karl Kraus quotes in translation ©2015 Fred Bridgham and Edward Timms, used with permission from Yale University Press