[TiM Recap] “Make Art Great Again: Undisciplinary Approaches to Doing Art Politically” – Julian Hetzel

On Julian Hetzel in Conversation with Maaike Bleeker

by Ani Encheva

Transmission in Motion Seminar “Make Art Great Again: Undisciplinary Approaches to Doing Art Politically” with Julian Hetzel at Muntstraat 2A (Utrecht University), 5th February 2025.

“No moral, individual and personal, standards of conduct will ever be able to excuse us from collective responsibility. This vicarious responsibility for things we have not done, this taking upon ourselves the consequences for things we are entirely innocent of, is the price we pay for the fact that we live our lives not by ourselves but among our fellowmen.”
– Hannah Arendt (1986, 50)

How does an artist’s critical self-awareness of their implicatedness inform their creative praxis, and in what ways does the medium of performance act as a vessel for thinking with and through that implicatedness to engage with what Hannah Arendt describes as “the vicarious responsibility for things we have not done”? This inquiry was central to the fourth seminar of the 2024/2025 Transmission in Motion series, held on February 5, 2024, in the Grote Zaal of the Department of Media and Culture at Utrecht University. Under the title “Make Art Great Again: Undisciplinary Approaches to Doing Art Politically,” this seminar unfolded as a dialogical exploration of implicatedness between artist and performance maker Julian Hetzel, Professor of Performance, Science, and Technology Maaike Bleeker, and the participating audience.

The seminar opened with Hetzel situating himself as an un-disciplinary artist whose creative praxis emerges at the intersection of Western cultural contradictions and what he refers to as “the big behinds” – a lens through which he dissects manifestations of neoliberalism by interrogating power structures, ethical dilemmas, and economic mechanisms. As Hetzel elaborated, his work seeks to unravel the governing principles in which we are implicated, questioning the subjectivities we embody as individuals and collectives, the pasts that we carry in our backpacks, and how near and distant entanglements shape our perceptions of reality. By unearthing and making these intertwinements visible through artistic and performative interventions, Hetzel not only reflects on his own implicatedness but also compels audiences to confront their entanglement in the conditions that shape our collective existence.

Schuldfabrik (2017): Wash the Pain Away!

The first waypoint of the seminar’s dialogical journey was Hetzel’s Schuldfabrik (2017), a performance-installation that delved into the tensions between guilt as a moral duty and debt as an economic obligation, questioning how we navigate our implication in these structures – whether as victims, perpetrators, part of the problem, part of the solution, or something in between. At the core of this performance-installation was “SELF – Human Soap” – a soap produced from human fat sourced from liposuctions, which Hetzel developed in collaboration with plastic surgeons and their clients. This unsettling artifact grounded Schuldfabrik in a central question, namely the collective obligation to remember versus the individual right to forget, situated within the broader intersection of corporate social responsibility and the commodification of guilt.

In the discussion that followed, Hetzel, Bleeker, and the audience collectively delved into what Schuldfabrik reveals about implicatedness, including Hetzel’s reflections on his positionality within this landscape and the burden of guilt he carries. The conversation further expanded on the idea that implicatedness is not merely an abstract condition but an ethical imperative – one that urges us to excavate history from beneath the surface, re-contextualize it by shifting from past scars to open wounds, and, in the process, come to recognize our complicity in the conditions that sustain pain.

All Inclusive (2018): The Aestheticization of Violence and the Economy of Empathy

The second stop of the seminar’s dialogical journey was Hetzel’s All Inclusive (2018), a performance that explored the aestheticization of violence, the commodification of destruction, and the economy of empathy. Working from the principle of “creation through destruction,” Hetzel imported several kilos of debris from a conflict zone in Syria, transformed them into art, and invited the audience into the temporary exhibition space of All Inclusive, where they were confronted with their own role – whether as spectators, witnesses, or participants – in an unfolding interplay of art and war, tourism and refuge, reality and imagination.

In the following discussion, Hetzel, Bleeker, and the audience expanded on the notion of double implicatedness reflected in All Inclusive, probing how affective resonances and empathetic responses shift depending on the spectator’s positionality. The conversation also explored friction in creative praxis as a generative catalyst for creating shape and a provocation for stirring emotions, sparking imagination, and activating independent thinking. Further questions emerged regarding the challenge of breaking the fourth wall, the potency of scale in rendering distant suffering immediate, and the dissonance between thought and action when confronted with the remnants of violence.

Three Times Left is Right (2025): Navigating Polarization through Performance

The seminar concluded with the third and final stop of the dialogical journey, namely Three Times Left is Right (2025), Hetzel’s latest performance, which is scheduled to tour in May 2025 across Austria, Germany, and the Netherlands. In an era of intensifying polarization and the global resurgence of far-right nationalist political movements, this performance constructs a family portrait in which a populist right-wing and a progressive left-wing individual coexist under the same roof. Through this microcosm, Three Times Left is Right delves into the proximity of love and hate, the economy of polarization, and the complexities of sharing space with radically opposing political ideologies.

As the seminar drew to a close, Hetzel underscored with heightened urgency the necessity of fostering dialogue around implicatedness through artistic and performative interventions – an endeavor that has always been critical but has become even more pressing in the current climate of division. By engaging with such un-disciplinary approaches to doing art politically, Hetzel concluded, we are afforded a creative opening to momentarily step inside ourselves, become aware of our vicarious responsibility, and engage in a collective reckoning with how we are implicated, corrupted, and instrumentalized by the very structures we seek to critique.