Painful Painting and Brutal Ecstasy: The Material Actions of Günter Brus and Otto Muehl

The Viennese Actionists were a group of artists who worked first and foremost in Austria (Vienna) until their "exile" to Germany. Otto Muehl, Hermann Nitsch, Günter Brus, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler were the most prominent members of this movement, which officially began with a programmatic manifesto and event in 1962, Die Blutorgel, followed by the first planned action in 1963, Fest des psycho-physischen Naturalismus. The movement dissolved in the early 1970s, though some artists remain in the art scene today. The Actionists disdained the repressive sexual and political atmosphere in which they were immersed. They detected an internalized violence in bourgeois Austrian society, which they intentionally provoked with aggressive and "pornographic" actions. They used and abused the human body, including the artists' own, as well as other noncanonical art materials such as bodily discharge and food. In the Perinetgasse Cellar, for example, Muehl and Nitsch staged profane liturgies where body organs, along with animals' carcasses and blood, were used to produce a crude and cruel "anti-art" that induced pathological reactions on the part of both Austrian public opinion – the press in particular – and the state (the police, the law).

The neo-avant-garde work of these artists developed in a complex context of Austrian politics and culture. The historical avant-garde was vanquished by Nazism and subsequently removed from the cultural and moral consciousness of the reconstruction and stabilization period. Between 1945 and the 1960s, the return to the Austrian cultural proscenium of the avant-garde and the influence of the international neo-avant-garde elicited strong negative reactions from the public. Gerhard Rühm elaborated on these reactions in his introduction to the groundbreaking anthology of his Vienna Group – active since the 1950s, it also included Friedrich Achleitner, Hans Carl Artmann, Konrad Bayer, and Oswald Wiener (see Braun; Fischer and Jäger; Jahrhaus; Landa). Rühm collected the concrete and visual poetry of this other neo-avant-garde movement with whom the Viennese Actionists collaborated and shared their anti-aesthetics (Rühm 7). Austria in these years was characterized by a "mastering" of the Nazi past which, as Theodor Adorno had also argued about Germany, was grounded in willful forgetting. Austria's "zero-hour" consisted, first, in misrepresenting its own history as a victim of the Nazis, who were viewed retrospectively as an occupying power, and, second, in the exhumation of a cultural tradition – the "Habsburg myth" in Claudio Magris's words – that would further distinguish Austria from Germany. To break with the Nazi past a distinct Austrian cultural identity was proclaimed. Yet cultural continuity accompanied this alleged break with the past and was implemented through the revival of monumental classical figures and historical landmarks, from Mozart to the Golden Age of Jugendstil. Major exhibitions of the Wiener Moderne took place, for example, in 1964, 1967 and 1971 (Heller 111).

The Grand Coalitions between the ÖVP (the Austrian People's Party) and the SPÖ (Socialist Party of Austria), which lasted from about 1947 to 1966, cultivated a sense of continuity, promoting internal stability through the cooperation of social forces (Sozialpartnerschaft). As in Germany, Austria actively provided means to boost the capitalist economy and consumer culture, including the development of the tourist industry. The politics of Austria at this time was conservative, founded on the disavowal of opposition and the consistent devaluation of parliament, which was not held to be an institution of confrontation. Hence, a strategy of maintenance of these parties' power replaced the conduct of politics. This strategy continued both throughout the period of ÖVP's majority government (1966–1970) and that of the SPÖ (1970–1983). Viktor Žmegač, Ernst Fischer, and Georg Jäger point out that the same conservative and traditionalist politics of social cooperation extended to the literary and artistic arena (cf. Fischer and Jäger 618–19.). A few dissenting voices, among them those of the Vienna Group poets, could be heard more distinctly after 1955 when Austria obtained its sovereignty with the Staatsvertrag and immediately after declared its "permanent neutrality." The state, however, was quick to declare that political independence...