The last days of mankind : a visual guide to Karl Kraus' great war epic /
With critical success over the past four years, artist Deborah Sengl has exhibited taxidermied rats, drawings and paintings in order to restage Karl Kraus' nearly-unperformable play The Last Days of Mankind (Die Letzten Tage der Menschheit, 1915-22). Featuring Sengl's entire installation,...
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
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Los Angeles :
DoppelHouse Press,
[2018]
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| Summary: | With critical success over the past four years, artist Deborah Sengl has exhibited taxidermied rats, drawings and paintings in order to restage Karl Kraus' nearly-unperformable play The Last Days of Mankind (Die Letzten Tage der Menschheit, 1915-22). Featuring Sengl's entire installation, the DoppelHouse Press edition also includes essays that examine her ambitious dramaturgy, which condenses Kraus' ten-to-fifteen hour drama into an abridged reading of its themes of human barbarism, the role of journalism in war, the sway of popular opinion and the absurdities of nationalism. Select translations of Kraus' original provide a window to see his other "war," a war on the misuses of language itself. Published in conjunction with the centenary anniversary of the Armistice, which ended The Great War but bred another soon to come, this edition of The Last Days of Mankind offers an agit-prop protest crossing the boundaries of art and spanning the knowledge of the century that has passed since Kraus penned his play. Deborah Sengl offers her stylistic model for envisioning human folly through animal actors, who become more than human, while confronting a violence particular to humankind, laced with selfishness and greed. |
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| Item Description: | Feature of an exhibition held at the Essl Museum-Kunst der Gegenwart, Klosterneuburg, January 31-May 25, 2014. |
| Physical Description: | 175 pages : chiefly color illustrations ; 22 cm. |
| ISBN: | 9780999754412 0999754416 |