Viennese Actionism
Started: Early 1960s
Ended: 1971
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KEY ARTISTS
 | Gunter Brus Quick View Further External Info  |
| Gunter Brus |  |
| Gunter Brus is an Austrian painter, performance artist, graphic artist and writer. He was the co-founder in 1964 of Vienese Actionism. Through his art, including his performances, Brus hoped to reveal the still fascist essence of Austria. Brus was awarded the Grand Austrian State Prize in 1997. Further External Info | ||
 | Otto Muehl Quick View Further External Info |
| Otto Muehl | |
| Otto Muehl was an Austrian artist who is best known as a key player in the Viennese Actionism movement of the 1960s, Austria's equivalent to Happenings. Later in his career Muehl became known for his radical ideas regarding the so-called "transition from art to life," resulting in his founding the Friedrichshof commune and several others since. Muehl was also briefly imprisoned in the 1990s for having sexual encounters with adolescent girls who lived in his communes. Further External Info | ||
 | VALIE EXPORT Quick View Artist Page |
| VALIE EXPORT | |
| Austrian performance artist VALIE EXPORT is known for her guerilla performance pieces, as well as her video and sculptural work, much of which focuses on the female body and feminist ideals. Art Story: VALIE EXPORT Artist Page | ||
 | Rudolf Schwarzkogler Quick View Further External Info |
| Rudolf Schwarzkogler | |
| Rudolf Schwarzkogler was an Austrian artist whose provocative photographs are associated with Viennese Actionism. Schwarzkogler's aktions, performances meant to shock the viewer into seeing the flaws in their society, were performed in private and then photographed. There were many recurrent themes in his work, including pain and mutilation, which can be seen in 3rd Aktion where the artist has contorted his body into unnatural positions. Further External Info | ||
 | Hermann Nitsch Quick View Further External Info |
| Hermann Nitsch | |
| Hermann Nitsch is an Austrian artist known for his controversial multimedia art. Nitsch was a founding member of Viennese Actionism, contributing to the seminal piece, Blood Organ in 1962, along with Otto Muehl and Adolf Frohner. One of Nitsch's most recognizable works is Poured Painting: Nitsch turned the canvas into the aftermath of a violent killing by throwing red paint onto the material. Further External Info | ||
 | Adolf Frohner Quick View Further External Info |
| Adolf Frohner | |
| Adolf Frohner was an abstract painter, graphic designer, and co-founder of Viennese Actionism. Inspired by the Nouveaux Realistes, a group of French artists he was exposed to while living in Paris on a grant, Frohner's works were innovative, and shocked his conservative Austrian society. In one such work he explored the theme of isolation by enclosing himself in brick for three days. The artist's works are in the collections of many museums; there is even a museum dedicated to his works, Forum Frohner, in Austria. Further External Info | ||
"I don't attempt to create a beautiful, aesthetic image of people... I accept reality, which is still beautiful and true even when it is ugly."
Summary of Viennese Actionism
The term Viennese Actionism refers to a violent, radical, and explicit form of performance art that developed in the Austrian capital during the 1960s. Mainly consisting of four members, the group collaboratively staged, filmed, and photographed graphic performances - or aktions as they called them. They used their work to make taboo-breaking, often illegal, and sometimes repellent statements that expressed violent dissatisfaction with what they saw as the uptight, bourgeois government and society of post-World War II Austria. The Actionists thought Austrians were suppressing memories of the unspeakable atrocities committed by the Nazis in their country, and were trying to force people to face these traumas head-on through their art.
Key Ideas
Beginnings:
At the dawn of the 1960s, Vienna was in a broken state after being ravaged by two world wars, and the city's art scene was not a very large one. Its heyday as a center for the artistic avant-garde before the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 was long over, and artists who had been active during that period such as Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, and the artists and designers of the Wiener Werkstatte were long dead. Some of the Actionists, however, would later cite these early-20th-century artists as direct influences in part because they had also rebelled against the status quo and were not afraid to offend. Rudolf Schwarzkogler, for example, was inspired by Schiele's distorted paintings of figures to make his morbid, staged photographs featuring corpse-like bodies.
Important Art and Artists of Viennese Actionism | |
 Artwork Images | Ana (1964)Artist: Gunter Brus Artwork description & Analysis: 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. |
 Artwork Images | Piss Aktion (1969)Artist: Otto Muehl Artwork description & Analysis: 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. |
 Artwork Images | Action Number Six: Vienna Walk (1965)Artist: Gunter Brus Artwork description & Analysis: 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. Black and white photographs - Museum of Modern Art Ludwig Foundation Vienna |
More Viennese Actionism Artwork and Analysis:
Content compiled and written by The Art Story Contributors
Edited and published by The Art Story Contributors
" Movement Overview and Analysis". [Internet]. . TheArtStory.org
Content compiled and written by The Art Story Contributors
Edited and published by The Art Story Contributors
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First published on 13 Oct 2015. Updated and modified regularly. 
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