Description
This paper serves as a bi-national interrogation of the representational practice of celebrity across two continents via the persona, performativity, politics, and corporeal presence of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Our paper explores the Austrian-American bodybuilder, actor, and politician’s eponymous museum in Thal, Austria as a spatial-textual-visual-affective space that invokes his ‘worldwide’ fame, ‘bears his name’, and is ‘supported by the man himself’. In this intervention, we address the museological construction of ‘Arnie’ from two different positionalities: an American abroad, recovering, reflecting on, and re-negotiating his 80s-era man-crush on a political figure who embodies an array of positions he stands against; and a Viennese, born two generations after WWII, whose Habsburg-heritage combines and complicates the notion of (Central) European/Austrian situatedness vis-à-vis his Heimat’s unintended ‘superhero’, which has been strongly contested via his actions as an ‘Ami’ from his signing of death warrants for Californian convicts to his affiliation with the neo-con presidency of George W. Bush and his 'War on Terror'. Via an interactive, interrogative engagement, we aim to unpack what it means to be ‘Arnie’ through history and time in the current geopolitical milieu.
