Eat

Dietmar Schwärzler: In Eat (1996) you have breakfast with your feet up on the table, wearing only a bra and panties. After eating, you take your teeth out, lick the dentures, and put them back in. While doing so, you’re looking straight into the camera, as if asking an imaginary viewer to respond. It’s playing with how you are personally perceived, how you perceive yourself, forms of social behavior, and the roles you like to subvert. “Against conformity,” “against rules”—two of your credos. “Let’s misbehave,” so to speak.

Friedl Kubelka / vom Gröller: Yes. At the same time, there was tremendous sorrow and shame there. I never intended for anyone else to see that film—I made it to get something off my chest. Peter Kubelka’s “cyclical program” What Is Film at the Austrian Film Museum showed so many subversive films. I’d just watched four hours of avant-garde cinema, including Andy Warhol’s Eat. I remember feeling totally wiped out. I drank a lot that night, and the next morning, with Louise at school and me alone at home, I thought: Okay, now I have the guts to do this! My version is a caricature of the Andy Warhol film I so admired.

From: Let´s Misbehave! Sometimes Rules Are Made to Never Be Learned. Conversation between Friedl Kubelka / vom Gröller. Stefanie Reisinger, Dietmar Schwärzler. In: Friedl Kubelka / vom Gröller. Home but Not at Home. Exhibition catalogue Belvedere 21, Verlag Buchhandlung Walther and Franz König, 2026.