Gut gemacht!, by and with Antonia Baehr, Jule Flierl, Hermann Heisig, and Claire Vivianne Sobottke, is a comedy of judgment staged as a trial. This complex joke on the making and evaluation of art in the past and present was shown at HAU2 on 5 and 6 February 2026.
The audience sits on three sides of an enormous electric-green billiards table, with a screen opposite each seating bank projecting English subtitles for the (almost) entirely German-spoken performance. At one point, Antonia Baehr instructs the technician to turn the subtitles off and delivers a brief critique of Claire Vivianne Sobottke’s performance. Sobottke launches into a seemingly endless, high-speed rant, ricocheting between English and German. It‘s a breathtaking spectacle of virtuosity, as she repeatedly drops to her knees, springs to her feet, accelerates, collapses, overexplains, and justifies her performance with her multifarious lived experience in wild excess.
This scene is one of many that play with the courtroom setting: art and artists on trial, criticism exposed as performance, and judgment as the object of scrutiny, all running jokes. Authored by the four artists who perform it, it asks, through wit and nuance, how we view art from our present position. With absurdist humour, the work carries serious questions about judgment in criticism.
The ‘trial’ structuring the show is guided by Robert Filliou’s “Principle of Equivalence,” often associated with the Fluxus movement, in which what is well made, badly made, or not made at all is of equal value. This tongue-in-cheek dive through paradigms of rules in art knocks skill, craft, virtuosity, and conceptual gesture into one another. Time refolds as historical reference, personal biography, and present performance collide. One scene places Heisig on trial as he reenacts Gabriele Stötzer’s Veitstanz/Feixtanz, performed in public space in the GDR city of Erfurt before reunification. Does Heisig’s East German ancestry, the court wants to know, grant him a legitimate claim to embody this work’s historical struggle? His response, acknowledging his relative privilege, education abroad, and distance from the material conditions under which the work was made, complicates the artworld’s often easy identity politics logic. What really constitutes responsibility toward cultural heritage? How do we practice identity across time and change? What does appropriation mean when history never sits neatly in our bodies?
©Mayra Wallraff
Art and politics, always entangled, today hold one another in strangleholds. Conservative austerity politics dismiss art as useless or indulgent, while liberal left-identifying positions often prescribe what is deemed politically or ethically ‘correct’ in production, curation, and discourse. In both cases, judgment hardens into rules of authority, tacit or explicit. Didactic pedagogies rehearse moral frameworks as though ontologically settled, foreclosing art’s capacity for multiplicity, aesthetic experience, and wonder.
Gut gemacht! sidesteps this reduction, cleverly rekindling a space for trickery, mess, contradiction, and pleasure through inefficiency and the production of subjectivity rather than reconfirming objective messages. It confronts the defensiveness of the present with precision, imagination, and cheek. The performers play exaggerated “genius dilettantes,” teasing one another and the audience as they poke fun at recurring cycles of cultural valuation. Now the joke’s on me. I judge, of a work that gleefully dismantles the authority of judgement itself, that Gut gemacht! is extremely gut gemacht.
Gut gemacht!, by Antonia Baehr, Jule Flierl, Hermann Heisig, and Claire Vivianne Sobottke, was shown at HAU2 on 5 and 6 February 2026.
