CategoriesStyles and Movements
Viennese Actionism
Radical performance art in 1960s Vienna, in which Nitsch, Muehl, Brus and Schwarzkogler used bodies, blood and ritual to attack social taboos.
No works indexed yet · 9 related artists
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About
In early-1960s Vienna, a conservative, Catholic city reluctant to confront its Nazi past, a few artists pushed gestural painting off the canvas and onto bodies. Hermann Nitsch, Otto Muehl, Günter Brus and Rudolf Schwarzkogler staged actions with paint, blood, food, carcasses and bodies, often recorded on film, deliberately provoking taboos around religion, sexuality and violence.
Nitsch developed his Orgies Mysteries Theatre, long ceremonial performances with slaughtered animals, crucifixion imagery and music, restaged over decades. Brus walked through the city centre in 1965 painted white and divided by a black line, and was stopped by police. Schwarzkogler staged clinical photographic tableaux of a bandaged figure with wires. The joint action Art and Revolution at the University of Vienna in 1968 led to arrests and a prison sentence for Brus, who fled to West Berlin. Muehl later ran a commune and in 1991 was convicted of sexual offences against minors there.
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