“I threw the urinal in their faces as a challenge and they now admire it for its aesthetic beauty,” said the leading French artist Marcel Duchamp in 1917. His work entitled “Fountain” is the idea that raised the fundamental question of what is a work of art and what is not. Duchamp’s “Urinal”, as it is more widely known, was even declared in 2004 by 500 people in British art, as the most influential work of the 20th century. It was admired and questioned in equal measure. Some fellow artists of Dussan even, many years later, did not hesitate to urinate and defecate on copies that the artist himself had made available after 1964, after the original had mysteriously disappeared.

Since then a lot of water has flowed down the drain and the concept of the work of art has expanded a lot. So much so that I think no one is now able to say with certainty what art really is and what its limits are. In painting, theater, cinema, violence and sex were often used to provoke. One would even think that nothing could shock the modern Western European viewer anymore.

Discomfort and first aid

And yet the performance of the Austrian choreographer and director Florentina Holzinger at the Stuttgart Opera was the occasion to provide first aid to 18 people who attended her first two performances. Some viewers felt discomfort and some vomited. However, only in three cases did a doctor have to intervene. Spectators could not stand the sexual encounters between women, excrement, human and artificial blood, violence and loud sounds in the show.

However, no one can accuse the Stuttgart Opera of imprudence. The performance was allowed for people over 18 years of age, while the authorities had warned in time on the website of the Opera about scenes of violence.

The show, entitled Sancta, is a critical voice against the Catholic Church and the oppression it has exerted over time on women and their sexuality. 38-year-old artist Florentina Holzinger, who studied choreography in Amsterdam, is known for her sharpness. The Swiss star of the show, Anina Massaj plays Jesus and Adam and appears completely naked like many of her 23 co-stars. Jesus is portrayed as a homeless drug addict signing autographs.

All tickets are sold out

The play “Sancta Susanna” is an opera based on the one-act play by the German composer Paul Hindemith. It refers to the religious and love ecstasy of the nun Susanna when she sees in the garden a couple of two women in hot wraps. Lust makes her desire Jesus and tear her clothes. The interesting thing is that the premiere of the play was planned to take place in Stuttgart about a hundred years ago. But because the authorities at the time were afraid of the scandal, it was played out in Frankfurt.

The show, which lasts 2 hours and 45 minutes without an intermission, after the buzz that broke out in the media sold out 7,000 tickets for the five more shows in Stuttgart and also for the two scheduled in November in Berlin. Many of those who bought a ticket are young, while the trailer of the show in just a few hours recorded 90,000 views on YouTube.

Christian Hermes, a representative of the Catholic Church in Stuttgart spoke of a kitsch show that “plays with the mental health of the spectators”. At the same time, however, he expressed his respect for the creator, saying that he does not hesitate to touch the wound of a religious and patriarchal rule by admitting a long history of guilt of the Catholic Church.

The performance, from what was written in the press, seems to have divided audiences and critics, but one goal of art it fulfilled. He had a problem and even strongly.