German artist Christoph Schlingensief is a reactionary performance/video/installation artist with mature content/explicit images/and overall radical artwork. His current retrospective at MoMA PS1 which runs through September 7th is a valiant attempt to capture an artist’s ouevre not mean to be caught. Born in 1960 he worked until his death in 2010 on experimental and feature film, theater, opera, performance, installation, literature, TV shows, radio plays. He directed plays by William Shakespeare and operas by Richard Wagner, and was profoundly influenced by Joseph Beuys, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and the Viennese Actionists.

His career is speckled with documentary vocational voyages around the world preaching the gospel of human rights and political indecency to the humanism of today. He continually engaged the audience in his art—in “The Stairlift to Heaven” (2007) (above) viewers are invited to ride a chairlift to a small video projection on view, all while becoming the star on stage as Schlingensief’s…