Hans (Ashley) Scheirl

later work both in film and in painting. Hans (Angela) Scheirl studied restoration at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and sought out opportunities to experiment artistically in various fields. The early 1980s saw him mounted public-space bodily interventions in the city of Salzburg such as lying down on the touristy Residenzplatz with a shaved head, or ostentatiously peering into a sewer grate. He made music with a group of individuals called “8 oder 9” [8 or 9], experimental sounds and noises, improvisations—an aspect of his work which plays an important role in films. Art consisted in trying things out, in dealing with things playfully. This also applied to his way of dealing with sexuality, as Scheirl ascertained in an interview. He answered the question of whether his “queer-lesbian referentiality” had manifested itself very early on by saying that it had been his experimental interest which was more in the foreground, with Viennese Actionism—as experienced not least via the films of Kurt Kren—having been an influence. It was not about a conscious “search for signs”; it was more about “the freedom to do something which one sees nowhere.¹ Also influential for Scheirl were the films by Peter Kubelka and VALIE EXPORT, as well as specific actions performed by the latter. It’s easy-to-work-with quality and low-cost were also factors which made Super 8 film an appropriate medium for Scheirl’s realization of his artistic goals. In part, these films also show specially filmed performances for which special staging, shooting schedules, costumes, objects and music were required. A further element consists in inserted fragments from television footage and from self-shot views of Paris or New York. “We called them ‘home movies,’ even though we were actually thinking more of Andy Warhol than of a nuclear family.” (Scheirl)² S.E.