- Vienna Actionism: Art and Upheaval in 1960s ViennaOur PickBy Eva Badura-Triska, Kerstin Barnick-Braun, Herbert Klocker
- Amor Psyche Aktion: The Feminine in Viennese ActionismBy Karl Goldblatt, Pilar Parcerisas, Reinhard Priessnitz, August Ruhs
- Rite of Passage: The Early Years of Vienna Actionism 1960-1966Our PickBy Hubert Klocker
- Viennese Actionism: Gunther Brus, Otto Muehl, Hermann Nitsch, Rudolf SchwarzkoglerBy Pilar Parcerisas
Important Art and Artists of Viennese Actionism
Ana (1964)
This 3-minute silent film is the first Aktion by Brus, in collaboration with his wife Anni, and filmed by Kurt Kren. Completed four years after he dropped out of his formal education at a time when he had become more interested in the act of the painting than in the finished product. In choppy, disorienting scenes, the viewer sees various shots of a female nude (his wife) and the face of a male figure (himself), scenes of an interior (possibly studio or house) that include a cluttered table and a bicycle. Paint is smeared and thrown in such a way as to suggest blood (though the film is black and white, so this is an impression as the color of the paint cannot be confirmed) and violence. Compared to some of their later work, this Aktion is fairly benign though the affect on the viewer would have been one of disorientation and shock because of the filming technique and the implied violence/chaos.
Piss Aktion (1969)
Muehl first performed his Piss Aktion, in which he stood naked and urinated into fellow actionist Gunter Brus's mouth live on stage, at the Hamburg Film Festival in 1969, and it is remembered for its intentional and extreme violation of society's norms. Piss Aktion is one of the most notorious demonstrations of art merging with life and breaking free of the walls of the art museum - a definition that was advocated by the Actionists and the other performance movements of the '60s and '70s (such as Happenings and Fluxus). In the obscene daring of Piss Aktion, Muehl was moving beyond what he referred to as the more 'bourgeois' Happenings into what he labeled 'direct art', in which he used bodily functions (such as urination) as tools for expressions of intense, pent-up energy and taboo-breaking.
Action Number Six: Vienna Walk (1965)
Vienna Walk was one of Brus's best-known aktions and his first completely public performance. It consisted of the artist walking through the center of Vienna dressed as what he called a 'living painting' with his body painted entirely white with crude black 'stitching' dividing it and his suit into two halves lengthways. It is particularly important to the history of performance art because the photographs that document it - taken by the artist's friends and collaborators - have created such a strong myth around what really happened on the day, and are considered some of the first records of performance art to have become artworks in their own right. Revealing the work to unsuspecting passers-by rather than to viewers who came intentionally to a gallery or performance space for a pre-advertised event also continued the Actionist ethic of liberating art from the traditional gallery or museum, as well as forcing ordinary members of the Austrian public to come face-to-face with highly controversial art they might otherwise have made an effort to avoid. The work paved the way for future artists to perform to an unsuspecting public on the street.