**100 copies** Die Tödliche Doris was born out of West Berlin’s lively post-punk community in the early ‘80s. Along with Einstürzende Neubauten, Malaria, Sprung Aus Den Wolken and Frieder Butzmann, Die Tödliche Doris ranks amongst the Geniale Dilletanten – which roughly translates as “ingenious dilettantes” – who sought to democratize cultural productions beyond the grip of both Western capitalism and GDR socialism. The Geniale Dilletanten became synonymous with a free-for-all approach to music, film, painting and performance where participants encouraged raw expression through provocation and experimentation. Wolfgang Müller and Nikolaus Utermöhlen founded Die Tödliche Doris in 1980, presenting the public persona of Doris as a constantly shifting entity that deliberately engaged the contradictions of the human condition. The band often referenced themselves in the third person singular, alluding to Doris as a fully-formed female character with explosive, colorful emotions.

For his 60th birthday Wolfgang Müller made himself a present. It’s called Die Tödliche Doris - Performance. In this artist edition Müller describes the background of the performative actions of the band Die Tödliche Doris, which he started together with Nikolaus Utermöhlen in 1980. The band dissolved in 1987. From 1980 onwards, other band members joined, such as Chris Dreier, Tabea Blumenschein, Dagmar Dimitroff and Käthe Kruse. From 1980 till 1987 Müller and Utermöhlen were students of the film class of Prof. Wolfgang Ramsbott at the University of Arts, Berlin. They made several super-8 movies, which are now to be found in collections of the Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum of Contemporary Art, Berlin, the Kunsthalle Hamburg, the Design University Kobe, Japan and Schloß Moritzburg, Halle. Because of financial reasons, video was a rare medium for most art students. Nevertheless, by borrowing cameras and the help of TV productions, a variety of videos came about. Die Tödliche Doris - Performance comprises 31 digitized, edited, and restored versions. From 2008 till 2016 the videos were edited by Wolfgang Müller with the help of Ming Wong and under the supervision of An Paenhuysen in the studio of Ulf Wrede. Special finds were made, like a recording of a performance at The Kitchen, New York, titled Hommage to Allan Jones, or the trilology Debüt during the NDR Video Night in the same year 1984. The video Chöre und Soli (1984) visualizes perfectly the transfer of the medium film into the medium of video: the faces of Die Tödliche Doris members were projected in super-8 film format. Topics such as deconstruction and reconstruction were implemented in both performance and technique. The concept performance was also extended to the medium itself: “Not only the performance visible on the tapes, but also the process of the editing of the videos itself is a performative procedure, and thus a performance,” says Wolfgang Müller: “For Die Tödliche Doris, the concept performance contains various processes of materialization, of metamorphose, and of interactions between individuals, media, and different time frames.” Die Tödliche Doris - Performance is published by Hybriden-Verlag as a bilingual artist edition, translated from German into English by Walter Crasshole. It appears in an edition of 100 copies and is illustrated with numerous photographs. Two DVDs and an original drawing of the Siebenköpfigen Informators by Wolfgang Müller accompany the edition.