Viennese Actionism: Otto Muehl's art of the macabre

Talking about Viennese Actionism without mentioning Otto Muehl is like talking about Cubism without Picasso in the lead role. The Austrian was feared by many, hated by others and praised by five hundred individuals. Those 500 people were the artists who made up what came to be known as Viennese Actionism. This movement, which sprouted in the middle of the postwar years, fed on the frustrations of a broken people. Today this countercultural and artistic current has been forgotten by everyone with no connection to art, even though its impact on art and on society was such that it crossed borders.

Otto Muehl: a life of Nazism and Viennese Actionism

Although few media outlets mention it, Otto Muehl was a Nazi before he was an artist. Or maybe Viennese Actionism was nothing more than badly understood Nazism. Who knows? The fact is that this Viennese man was called up in 1943 and served as a lieutenant in the German forces in 1944. And in case there were any doubts about his earlier ideology, he studied German teaching once the war was over.

Muehl's utopia after Viennese Actionism, the Friedrichshof commune

Otto Muehl was an odd sort, with piggish features and a murky stare. As murky as the accusation that fell on him during the peak years of Viennese Actionism. It turned out the little angel was a paedophile, and for that he had to serve a seven year sentence. Still, you have to give him credit for something. Next to the Friedrichshof commune, Dadaism was a kindergarten. The timid cry for free love from the likes of Bretón became a full blown racket this time around.

With the aim of resurrecting that Viennese Actionism which survived for less than a decade, Muhler created a post-hippie bubble that stood for mutual aid, sexual and individual freedom, direct democracy and collective property. But as tends to happen when a society is created (all the more so when the person creating it is a former lieutenant of the unified forces of Nazi Germany), it turned authoritarian and hierarchical, alienating and suffocating. The decade of Cindy Lauper was also the decline of the actionist dream.

Günter Brus, "the other" actionist

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OXwwTvGMkc

If Otto Muehl was the great ideologue of Viennese Actionism, Günter Brus was the kamikaze of the union between Otto, Hermann Nitsch and Rudolf Schwarzkogler. Not even Muehl broke the rules as much in two decades of actionism and commune as Brus did in barely a couple of years. It was 1968 in particular that marked the end of the love affair between actionism and Günter. It happened at the action Kunst und Revolution.

Even though Muehl and all the rest played no less controversial roles, "Brus went so far they ended up throwing him out. He urinated and vomited, then drank both his vomit and his urine, cut his thighs and his chest, smeared his body with faeces, lay down and began masturbating, among many other lovely things". Günter Brus's career was not a short one, but his time with this collective was certainly the most intense.

So much so that he had to spend six months behind bars after one of the most impressive displays of art-revolution (if not the only one) in the history of art. Muehl's provocation was active, while Brus became an active-passive being who protested with his whole body and mind. Where the most notable side of Otto was sadism, Günter was the sadomasochist who inflicted on the audience what he suffered himself. Very probably that is why he decided to leave actionism, as it turned into a mere footnote seasoned with the post-hippie atmosphere designed by Muehl.

Viennese Actionism, the art of war?

Unlike other contemporary currents such as the Fluxus collective, Viennese Actionism still shocks insiders and outsiders alike. If you can keep your eyes on one of actionism's video art pieces, then you had already seen it all. In a way, there are few images more bleak and disturbing than the ones you find in the pieces by Otto Muehl and his entourage.

One figure who was hugely influential in the creation of the movement was, without a doubt, Wilhelm Reich. This many-sided character (because there is no other way to define him) was one of the gurus in favour of the sexual revolution in Europe. While people in the USA were walking around with candles next to the White House, Reich was trying to improve contraceptive methods and sex education, and the sexual protection of young people and children. His influence on Otto Muehl was decisive in Muehl's creation of the commune after the fall of the first Viennese Actionism.

Viennese Actionism still stirs up controversy today and, not without reason, it is one of the least studied collectives and artistic movements in non-specialised classrooms. In fact, for the vast majority of the population, Viennese Actionism never existed, because even though a large part of its artistic pieces were recorded on video, they have never been very popular in a society that prefers Van Gogh's Sunflowers to the image of Günter Brus defecating while singing the Austrian national anthem.