"Undoing Antuung"
“Antuung” is foremost a semiotic sequence with that “primitive grimoire” sensibility to it, one of the few things German still lends itself better to than its mutant derivative English. It also tags an event, of the artistic clade, that involves a population migrating into an urban center and thereupon carrying out the felling of a governmentally possessed tree. Beyond this, there is not much; the city of Siegen in Germany, and the date 30.07.2021 remain confused with a sense of authorial primacy, though scarcely due to anything more than as of yet still insufficient excavation of the “thing”.
The “Comedy of Terrors” involvement with “Antuung” is best flattened onto a conceptual affinity already pronounced in the name of the former. To speak of personal agency in these matters is wrong (in the original sense of “inaccurate”), and the ruthlessly convoluted coincidences of Grant Hadwin, Georges Bataille, Joseph Beuys, the neo-Paracelsian trinity Amphetamine / Ketamine / LSD, radical climate change (activists), and the cultural crash site of Christianity (already carrying a malnourished amalgamation of latent desert-idolatry concealed within it) colliding with Germanic paganism some several hundred years prior, […] is hard to order (to say the least). Most of it, in any case, rests on the perception of absurdity transmitted, and the affective intensities thus introduced: preferentially those of comedy, and those of terror, as two poles spanning a spectrum where personally allotted position shifts from the former towards the latter in proportion to general weakness of constitution.
Needless to say that the journalist organs in immediate vicinity reliably lived up to their nature (still courteously compressed by Lou Reed as “the lowest form of life”). To make like microbiologists, then, and give a brief report on how the tested culture reacted to the experimental stimulus: the preferred mode of operation is utilizing the quotation mark, a sigil first modified from Ancient Greek spellwork by Medieval European clergy. Inscription of this mark upon a textual body has several use cases, namely, and in descending order of respectability, while ascending in relevance: to name (ordering a complex process into the stratified logic of identity), to echo (a necessarily duplicitous function), or to banish (suspending the power of an utterance and, for the time being, disperse it into utter glossolalia).
In the present instance of this banishment spell (colloquially known as “scare quotes”), it is the “art” term that is suspended: “Antuung” is “art”. To do this – to suspend an artwork as such – is to perform a measurement of its teleological aberrancy: “Antuung” is “art”, because the end for the sake of which it exists is anomalous (its destiny is deviant). Of note is the complex entanglement with temporality that is inherent to this superficially trivial (or, at least: trivializing) judgement: what is discussed here is nothing less than a matter chronomantic cleanup, slotting into a larger context of cosmic warfare, “already“ suffered by Burroughs, where “[t]he objective is to exorcize all time anomalies”.