Viennese Actionism | Otto Muehl: The limits of art

Viennese Actionism emerged in Austria in the 1960s. An art movement that attacked the state and church because they glossed over the Nazi dictatorship, war and the Holocaust in a post-fascist manner. It should be an art that you notice, that shakes you up and that you cannot escape. It was about creating scandals and breaking taboos. The actionists let themselves be walled in, slaughtered animals and rolled around on stage in paint, blood and self-made rubbish. They acted in a messianic and authoritarian manner and often with unbroken male sexism that presented women as objects.

Their performances attracted a lot of attention in the media; at first they were opposed by the state, but in the long term they were declared national heritage. In particular, the “Austrian heavy metal painter Hermann Nitsch, who sprinkled paint on the walls until he was old and usually made a somewhat sadly resigned impression afterwards” (“Die Welt”) was proclaimed a great artist. Even if his monotonously performed “orgy mystery theater” with real or fake blood was stupid kitsch.

However, integration into the art market and the representation industry does not work automatically. The private Viennese Actionism Museum has now announced that it will cease its exhibition operations from January. The reason given is the protests against the current exhibition about the actionist's early work by Otto Muehl, which bears the telling title "Art on the Abyss." They wanted to separate his pictures from the 1960s as being of artistic value; about his dictatorial work as head of a psycho cult he founded in the 1970s. But his victims from that time didn't want to put up with that and demonstrated against it.

In Muehl's earlier "Action Analytical Organization" the nuclear family and couple relationships were to be abolished in order to break through the "character armor" of the somehow unfree people in late capitalism. There was a wide range of sexual violence, including against children, which is why Muehl was sentenced to seven years in prison in 1991. He served the entire sentence and painted hundreds of pictures in prison, which were also intended to be sold: in 1998 they were exhibited in the Vienna Museum of Applied Arts.

After his release from prison, Muehl gradually worked on his rehabilitation as a potentially great artist. Until his death in 2013, he was about as ignorant of his past as Albert Speer or Leni Riefenstahl were after the end of fascism. They were doing well again after 1945.

But the Vienna Actionism Museum, which was only founded in 2024, apparently did not pay off, as you can read in the “Standard”. This is the real limit of art. Maybe Viennese Actionism will soon be available on a streaming service as a horror series? Madness, humiliation and violence don't need to be acted out, they just need to be documented.

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