Title:
Florentina Holzinger, A Year Without Summer
Author:
Anador Walsh
Date:
24.09.26

In defence of spectacle

“The spectacle, grasped in its totality, is both the result and the project of the existing mode of production. It is not a supplement to the real world, an additional decoration. It is the heart of the unrealism of the real society. In all its specific forms, as information or propaganda, as advertisement or direct entertainment consumption, the spectacle is the present model of socially dominant life.” – Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (1967).1

“Spectacular, spectacular
No words in the vernacular
Can describe this great event
You'll be dumb with wonderment.”- Baz Lurmann, Moulin Rouge (2002)

In the last two years, Florentina Holzinger has reached the zenith of art-world success that few performance artists before her have achieved; firmly cementing herself within the milieu of Marina Abramović and Anne Imhof, who arguably have paved the way for her ascension. Whilst Holzinger differs from these artists in terms of her lineage (Holzinger has emerged from the theatre, whilst Abramović and Imhof both got their start in the visual arts) and there are different historical framings that can be applied thus. What situates these artists within the same frame is their mastery of spectacle and an almost blanket evocation of their works’ success/critical validity by those in the know. Her dissenters, I note, are often conservatives or cynics. If we accept that we live in the age of the image and that spectacle is inherent of this, the lack of interrogation of what makes Holzinger’s work ‘good’ (or if it is in fact ‘good’) can be said to be symptomatic of a broader numbness to or acceptance of spectacle. Humour me here.

I wasn’t planning to see much of Naarm Melbourne’s annual winter festival RISING this year, largely because I was unmoved by the lineup. I wouldn’t be the first to point out that RISING seems to have lost its programmatic voice and with it, its identity as an institution. I could unpack that further in the context of the broader defanging of the arts in Victoria and its unique impact on performance, but that feels like another piece. I was however, drawn to seeing Lil Kim (an act so bad I wondered if she was programmed based on her historical work, rather than any recent performances) and (Berlin-based, Melbourne expat) Martin Hansen’s Frankie (an incredible one person show that evoked Frankenstein and the image of the monster to trouble the profundity of grief). Having liked TANZ (2020) when I saw it at Rising three years prior and given my online overexposure to Holzinger’s Austrian Pavilion, SEAWORLD VENICE at the Biennale, I also decided to see A Year Without Summer.

Florentina Holzinger, A Year Without Summer, 2025, promotional image. Photo and ©: Nicole Marianna Wytyczak.

I heard that Holzinger was a genius from the VCA student sat next to me at the Arts Centre, before the show had even begun; in the foyer afterward from two dancers and a performance artist I admire; at a bar later, from of an art gallery Director and in yet another foyer two weeks later from a friend who loves dance but didn’t see the show. No one could seem to articulate for me exactly why. Incredulous of the use of the ‘G’ word at the best of times, it occurred to me that this seemingly blind reverence for Holzinger, is the thing that makes her work so interesting in that it points to our broader societal relationship to spectacle. And A Year Without Summer being not my first Holzinger rodeo, I can confidently say that what this artist traffics in most effectively is spectacle. Her works are visually arresting, technically impressive and they attract a great deal of attention. A simple Google search will reveal this.

Art world audiences are generally too critical or not critical enough of spectacle, depending on where they sit on the continuum of performance theory to visual art theory.2 Visual art ‘purists,’ who lack sufficient understanding of performance theory (usually by choice), often evoke spectacle to write off or delegitimise performance’s place in the white cube. Whereas ‘performance heads’ are drawn to spectacle as a core theatrical convention and know that spectacle and critical rigour are not mutually exclusive. You can in fact have one with the other. However, the reception of Holzinger’s work presents a counter to this point, in that most people are enamoured by it. The question is why?

Florentina Holzinger, A Year Without Summer, 2025, promotional image. Photo and ©: Nicole Marianna Wytyczak.

Like Abramović’s The Artist is Present (2010), a public, star-studded moment of encounter with the artist—by then a celebrity in her own right—that evoked a tidal wave of digital images and videos and Imhof’s FAUST (2017), a series of carefully cultivated, fashion magazine-like, provocative images designed to encourage the capture and dissemination of yet further images, A Year Without Summer (created in 2025 and touring since) is less a linear narrative that the creation of a succession or glut of images, many of them shocking. Its main point of distinction is that whilst, like these gallery works, it mimics the ‘social’ media feeds through which we now experience the world, being situated in a theatre, it implicitly prohibits you from documenting it. Faced with a series of spectacles you are unable to proliferate images of, you are thus forced to reckon with how these spectacles affect you. As Jeanette Bisschops has pointed out, “Holzinger uses spectacle as an access point, utilising shock as a vehicle to by-pass the viewer’s logical mind, a tactic informed by Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, a theatre conceit that rejects traditional theatre’s reliance on the rationality of text-based performance in favour of raw sensation...”3 before contending with what these spectacles mean. Through your exposure to shock, you feel Holzinger’s work before you intellectualise it. This is arguably the function of spectacle, to wholly captivate you. But in the theatre, unable to capture, post and disseminate Holzinger’s spectacles, you instead have to sit with and consider them.

Florentina Holzinger, A Year Without Summer, 2025, promotional image. Photo and ©: Nicole Marianna Wytyczak.

In this work, this shock manifests, as is an established trope of Holzinger’s oeuvre, through what could be described as the ‘desecration’ of a canonical cultural work and through it, the European theatrical tradition. In A Year Without Summer’s case, Holzinger takes as its starting point the context—the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815—during which Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein (1818) and uses it, as Claire Bishop has suggested, to upend “aesthetic hierarchies of performance.”4 In this piece, a cast of non-cis male bodies of varied ages, abilities and specialisations, perform a mix of high and low brow entertainment that includes dance, circus, acting, vaudeville, musical, sideshow, stunt and live body modification (piercing and ‘light’ surgery). This hybridisation renders the ballet (high) to pole dancing (low) hierarchy meaningless in much the same way that Tiktok has, through its ‘democratisation’ of what kinds of performance and performers are recognised and granted an audience.

The spectacles cycled through in the two hours and fifteen minutes of A Year Without Summer include: a slow waltz to Skeeter Davis’ The End of the World (1963) in front of a giant inflatable of Gustave Corbet’s L’Origine du monde (1866) that disintegrates into an orgy of real fucking (complete with the application of condoms and lube to dildos and strap-ons); the deflation of this giant, splayed vagina to reveal a medical facility where a musical about preferred prescription drugs unfolds and during which both Freud and Mengele are invoked; a sustained scene of trampolining by two elderly people, on either side of a glass enclosure prowled by drone dogs; and the birth of a small glass baby from an incision in Holzinger’s leg, magnified on two gigantic screens. The work reaches its climax during a scene called ‘The Ultimate Facelift’ during which a cast member is pierced through either cheek, then hoisted up into the rafters by their face while the word ‘Immortality’ flashes on screen in a font I can only describe as ‘Brat-coded.’ This is followed by a return to the medical facility, where aged and disability care workers are unable to contain the torrent of piss, shit and vomit spewing from every orifice of their clients. The work ends with a single, nude (I note that all cast members are nude throughout) figure ice skating on top of the dog’s enclosure, while back of house staff emerge and attempt to scrub the stage clean while snow rains down upon them.

Florentina Holzinger, A Year Without Summer, 2025, promotional image. Photo and ©: Nicole Marianna Wytyczak.

Whilst A Year Without Summer’s intertextual reference, to quote Caroline Lillian Schopp, belies a context of “environmental catastrophe on the one hand, rampant misogyny on the other,” that directly mirrors our own.5 And whilst this work points to very contemporary concerns that beg acknowledgement: the fact we know more medically about making women ‘hotter’ than their reproductive systems, our cultural obsession with youth and longevity, our fear of bodies and minds that do not fit the medical ‘norm’ and the gaping, classist divide between the cared for and cared by, across the mental and physical health and wellness industries, which is set to grow wider as the economic divide does. It is not this mirror that I am most interested in. If anything, Holzinger’s approach to getting these points across is laboured. You don’t need to splash the front four rows with bodily fluids to drive home how fucked the medical industry is. This is because the spectacle itself is not what makes the work ‘good.’ Instead, it is Holzinger’s mimicking of our primary way of engaging with the world through spectacle and her mirroring back to us how blindly we accept this experiential mediation that does. Unlike Abramović and Imhof, whose use of spectacle recapitulates the prosumerism of contemporary existence, Holzinger’s resist it, both in A Year Without Summer and in other works.6 I note that in SEAWORLD VENICE, contrary to online behaviour, you are explicitly asked not to film this work. Instead, Holzinger’s spectacles demand your undivided attention and contemplation.

Florentina Holzinger, A Year Without Summer, 2025, promotional image. Photo and ©: Nicole Marianna Wytyczak.

Holzinger’s A Year Without Summer and her oeuvre at large, reemphasises Guy Debord’s seminal claim in Society of the Spectacle (1967), that “the spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.”7 It is ‘good,’ because it uses spectacle to comment on and make us cognisant of this relation. I have invoked both Baz Lurhmann’s Moulin Rogue (a work by a director who similarly traffics in spectacle) and Debord at the top of this piece for this reason. Our tacit relation to and acceptance of spectacle, much exacerbated since Society of the Spectacle was published by technological development, specifically the iPhone (2007) (hello the 2010s resurgence and rampant documentation of dance in the gallery), has anaesthetised us. That is its purpose, to lull us into a stupor while the world burns and people die en masse. To return to the question that underwrites this piece, is Holzinger’s A Year Without Summer any ‘good’? The answer, I suggest, lies in whether you can still critically engage with its spectacle or if you’re so brain rotted that you’re blindly entertained by it. I believe it is ‘good’ because it opens a conversation about what the role of spectacle in performance actually is, which as a ‘performance head,’ I feel goes a long way to defending its validity. Spectacle should only be viewed as vapid entertainment when it does not cause you to think deeper, but instead evokes a knee jerk ‘share to story’ without further contemplation. This is not only true of performance spectatorship, but of engagement with all art.

  1. Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Black & Red 1983).

  2. Here I paraphrase the sentiments of Dance Historian Anna Leon. Anna Leon, “Sirens Take the Stage,” in HOLZINGER, ed. Nora Swantje Almes (Bierke Verlag, 2026), 17.

  3. Jeanette Bisschops, “In the Waste of Others. Florentina Holzinger,” Flash Art, 25 June 2026,

    ⬈

  4. Claire Bishop, “Theatre of the Obsessed,” in HOLZINGER, ed. Nora Swantje Almes (Bierke Verlag, 2026), 85.

  5. Caroline Lillian Schopp, “The Nymph with the Broken Back: Florentina Holzinger’s Feminist Iconographies of Misogyny,” in HOLZINGER, ed. Nora Swantje Almes (Bierke Verlag, 2026), 130.

  6. In Performing Image, art historian Isobel Harbison, interested in the ways that images simultaneously produce and are produced by us, builds on the thinking of Alvin Toffler and Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams to describe contemporary spectatorship as prosumerism. Harbison says prosumerism “describes online activity where people produce and consume information on easily modifiable platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram” and suggests prosumerism imbues the experience of viewing art with the impetus to be productive. Isobel Harbison, Performing Image (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2019).

  7. Debord, Society of the Spectacle.

Florentina Holzinger’s A Year Without Summer (2025) ran from 28-31 May 2026 at the Art Centre Naarm Melbourne’s Playhouse Theatre as part of RISING.

Anador Walsh is a Naarm-based curator, writer and the founding director of Performance Review.

Performance Review acknowledges the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the traditional custodians of the land on which we operate. We pay our respects to their Elders; past, present and emerging and recognise that sovereignty was never ceded.