VIENNESE ACTIONISM (trigger warning - not safe for lunch)

Viennese Actionism was a short and violent movement in 20th-century art. It can be regarded as part of the many independent efforts of the 1960s to develop "performance art" (Fluxus, happening, action painting, body art, etc.).

Its main participants were Günter Brus, Otto Mühl, Hermann Nitsch, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler. As "actionists", they were active between 1960 and 1971. Most have continued their artistic work independently from the early 1970s onwards.

Documentation of the work of these four artists suggests that there was no consciously developed sense of a movement or any cultivation of membership status in an "actionist" group. Rather, this name was one applied to various collaborative configurations among these four artists.

Malcolm Green has quoted Hermann Nitsch's comment, "Vienna Actionism never was a group. A number of artists reacted to particular situations that they all encountered, within a particular time period, and with similar means and results."[1]

Art and the politics of transgression

The work of the Actionists developed concurrently with—but largely independently from—other avant garde movements of the era that shared an interest in rejecting object-based or otherwise commodifiable art practices. The practice of staging precisely scored "Actions" in controlled environments or before audiences bears similarities to the Fluxus concept of enacting an "event score" and is a forerunner to performance art.

The work of the Viennese Actionists is probably best remembered for the wilful transgressiveness of its naked bodies, destructiveness and violence.

Often, brief jail terms were served by participants for violations of decency laws, and their works were targets of moral outrage.

In June 1968 Günter Brus began serving a six-month prison sentence for the crime of "degrading symbols of the state" after an action in Vienna at which he simultaneously masturbated, covered his body with his own faeces and sang the Austrian national anthem, and later fled the country to avoid a second arrest.

Hermann Nitsch served a two-week prison term in 1965 after his participation with Rudolph Schwarzkogler in the Festival of Psycho-Physical Naturalism.

The "Destruction in Art Symposium", held in London in 1966, marked the first encounter between members of Fluxus and Actionists. It was a landmark of international recognition for the work of Brus, Mühl and Nitsch.

While the nature and content of each artist's work differed, there are distinct aesthetic and thematic threads connecting the Actions of Brus, Mühl, Nitsch, and Schwarzkogler.

Use of the body as both surface and site of art-making seems to have been a common point of origin for the Actionists in their earliest departures from conventional art practices in the late '50s and early '60s.

Brus' "Hand Painting Head Painting" action of 1964, Mühl and Nitsch's "Degradation of a Female Body, Degradation of A Venus" of 1963 are characterized by their efforts to reconceive human bodies as surfaces for the production of art.

The trajectories of the Actionists' work suggests more than just a precedent to later performance art and body art, rather, a drive toward a totalizing art-practice is inherent in their refusing to be confined within conventional ideas of painting, theatre and sculpture. Mühl's 1964 "Material Action Manifesto" offers some theoretical framework for understanding this:

...material action is painting that has spread beyond the picture surface. **The human body, a laid table or a room becomes the picture surface.** Time is added to the dimension of the body and space.[2]

Sounds a lot like Abramovich, doesn't it?

Feminist actionism and video art

Amongst artists like Otto Muehl, Kurt Kren, Hermann Nitsch, and Otmar Bauer, female artist Valie Export experimented with video art in the context of Actionism. In response to the primacy of the male body, Export created her own version of Actionism: Feminist Actionism. In her manifesto, Export surveys a history of female artists within Surrealism, Kinetics, Tachism, Happenings, Art Informel and other contemporary movements. She finds the traces of feminine objectification within a phallocentric world.

As opposed to Viennese Actionism, which used materiality and the object to overcome subjecthood, Export’s Feminist Actionism removed women from their object status by "enacting," to gain subject-hood through "doing." The artist enables herself by mutilating her body and placing it in asexual and violently unfamiliar contexts.

Also reminds of Abramovich later work, where she isn't shy hurting her body, or let others hurt her.

In opposition to Muehl and Kren’s rapid montage-like films exhibiting shocking, violent and sexual images of the human body, Export’s videos are slower, focusing on the violence tearing within the female body. In her video Mann & Frau & Animal (1970–73), a nude female body lies in a bathtub.

very graphic content:

The camera slowly surveys the metallic knobs and snaking hoses of the tube, the water trickles on, and finally Export begins to masturbate with the shower hose. As the orgasmic peak approaches the female moans become animal shrieks or the grunts of a possible male spectator and the vagina is overtaken by blackness, slime, and blood.

The finale is the photograph of a vagina and the image of a bloody hand dripping onto the photo. The unadorned body is transformed into an image of a savage beast. Export explicitly comments on the cultural civilizing of female sexuality and, consequently, the construction of female representation.

Export’s work deviates from Muehl or Kren—she sees the body not as an extension of the canvas, but as something that must “resist masochistic devolutions into bloodly phallic tragedy.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viennese_Actionism