Steirischer Herbst

Since 1968, it has taken place annually in Graz and Styria, Austria, combining the visual arts, performance, theater, opera, music, and literature to varying degrees.

Hanns Koren (Austrian People's Party, ÖVP), then State Cultural Advisor and the founder of Steirischer Herbst, was an admirer of Kloepfer, who was and is, however, controversial due to his support of Nazism.

From 1983 on, artistic directors were appointed:[4]: 52 Even before the actual founding, a series of events called "Steirischer Herbst" took place in 1967, which included many components of the later festival: the Styrian Academy, the Trigon Biennial, and the International Painting Weeks at Neue Galerie Graz.

In addition to Koren, for example, the conversative politician Paul Kaufmann and Erich Marckhl, who had been a member of the illegal Austrian Nazi party, were also on the founding committee.

[2] Early highlights included premieres of Ödön von Horváth, Peter Handke, and György Ligeti, as well as performances of operas by Krzysztof Penderecki and Ernst Krenek.

In addition, there were separate series for jazz (with concerts by Anthony Braxton and McCoy Tyner) and dance (including a commissioned work by Laura Dean) for the first time.

[14] Exhibitions during this period were curated primarily by Horst Gerhard Haberl and the Pool Group, as well as by Wilfried Skreiner, the director of Neue Galerie Graz.

In addition to premieres by composers such as Luna Alcalay, Olga Neuwirth and Friedrich Cerha, he also invited industrial and post-punk bands such as Laibach, Fad Gadget, The Fall, and Der Plan or artists such as Glenn Branca to Graz.

)[4]: 376 The theme for 1988 was Schuld und Unschuld der Kunst (Guilt and Innocence of Art) and led to what is probably the most famous edition of Steirischer Herbst, which tackled Austria's Nazi past on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Anschluss.

Haberl wanted to leave behind the notion of the avant-garde without resorting to that of postmodernism, and therefore proposed—in collaboration with philosopher Peter Strasser and inspired by Vilém Flusser as well as Deleuze and Guattari—"mobility" as a third option.

[29] Already from the late 1980s onward, there had been a lively exchange between the Graz and Cologne art scenes at Steirischer Herbst (with Cosima von Bonin, Martin Kippenberger, Jutta Koether, Jörg Schlick, and others),[30] which intensified in the course of the 1990s and also led to a collaboration with the Cologne-based music magazine Spex, whose editor-in-chief Christoph Gurk became a curator at the festival in 1998.

[31] Prior to this, Christine Frisinghelli replaced Haberl as artistic director, who, in his words, was unable to prevail against the "party political pragmatisms of the decision-making regional politicians" with a planned restructuring of the festival.

His directorship included Graz's year as European Capital of Culture and the opening of Helmut List Halle in 2003, which was to provide the "nomadic" festival with a permanent venue.

Beat Furrer's Begehren was chosen by Opernwelt as the premiere of the year 2002/03, while Rebecca Saunders contributed the music to a choreographic installation by Sasha Waltz.

In addition, playwright Händl Klaus celebrated his breakthrough with (wilde)—der mann mit den traurigen augen in 2003, which was invited both to the Mülheimer Theatertage and the Berliner Theatertreffen.

Thus, performances by Nature Theater of Oklahoma, Lola Arias, Tim Etchells and Forced Entertainment, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Young Jean Lee, Needcompany, Rimini Protokoll, Signa, Gisèle Vienne, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul could be seen in Graz.

[37] Guest curators were regularly engaged for exhibitions, such as Sabine Breitwieser for the two-year project Utopie und Monument (with Kader Attia, Nairy Baghramian, Ayşe Erkmen, Isa Genzken, John Knight, Andreas Siekmann, and others).

To mark the occasion, the performance collective Nature Theater of Oklahoma created a feature film adaptation of Elfriede Jelinek's novel The Children of the Dead.