Reevaluating Actionism: Austrian Performance, Then and Now

Since 2009, the prominent Swiss art gallery Hauser & Wirth has maintained an exhibition space in a smartly renovated townhouse on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. With its prewar Modernist façade and its minimalist white-cube interior, the gallery’s design has clearly been tailored to the tastes of the international elites who comprise its clientele—a pairing also reflected in its location, on a manicured block between the Italian Consulate and the uptown branch of Cartier. Such a setting would seem a strange place to encounter the work of the Vienna Actionists, who were without a doubt the most explicitly transgressive of the European postwar avant-gardes. Even people unfamiliar with the Actionists’ works, some of which were recently exhibited at Hauser & Wirth, are likely to have heard the legends surrounding them. Such tales, many of them true, feature animal sacrifice, serial law-breaking, and countless varieties of sexual perversion. These acts were often carried out in the claustrophobic confines of an unimproved basement, and typically climaxed in prodigiously chaotic messes of paint, meat, and bodily fluids, about the furthest contrast one can imagine from the fastidious luxury of a premier showroom for blue-chip art.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Hauser & Wirth’s Actionism show was how effectively it thwarted such expectations. The show, entitled “RITE OF PASSAGE: The Early Years of Vienna Actionism, 1960–1966,” managed to bring Actions into the gallery with a minimum of friction. Though many of the works shown were in predictably horrid taste, they ended up seeming quite comfortably at home in their posh new environs. This almost shocking lack of shock value was in part due to the acumen of the show’s curator Hubert Klocker, who has decades of experience supervising the collection and exhibition of Actionist art at leading Austrian institutions. During this time, the reputation of the Actionists has undergone a complete transformation. Artists like Günter Brus and Otto Mühl, who were demonized, routinely prosecuted, and in Mühl’s case imprisoned for years, now appear in state-funded travelling exhibitions. Hermann Nitsch, whose work successfully courted charges of blasphemy, has even been hailed as a modern religious artist by the Catholic Church.¹ Outside Austria, the Actionists have come to be seen as a crucial precursor for later developments in performance and body art, anticipating practices as varied as those of Marina Abramović, Paul McCarthy, or Tania Bruguera. It is not just that Actionism has been celebrated by these different institutions. Actionism has become an institution in itself, and a powerful and profitable one at that.

One might take this as evidence of the seemingly limitless recuperative powers of late capitalist culture, or the types of repressive tolerance exerted by Western liberal democracies. This would not necessarily be wrong, especially given the ever more extreme types of transgression on which Actionism staked its claim to fame. However, this reading would tell us little we don’t already know, while also failing to grasp the particular significance of exhibitions like “RITE OF PASSAGE,” which purport to present art history from the space of the commercial gallery. This relatively recent phenomenon, now common in New York, is widely seen as a boon for art-lovers, who can enjoy museum-quality shows for free and without throngs of tourists. It is less often asked how such shows, which commonly rely on the labor of art historians, instrumentalize an academic discipline in the interests of private enterprise, or how they are complicit with the neoliberal defunding of the cultural sector. This is not in any way to write off the potential of art-historical gallery exhibitions, but the issue remains that this format presents specific and often dimly grasped constraints to criticality, however we understand this term.

Certain of these compromises were evident in “RITE OF PASSAGE,” which presented seldom-seen materials from private collections and museum archives alongside artworks that were discreetly up for sale. In focusing on the first half of the 1960s, the period before the Actionists began to attract international attention, Klocker argued for a more comprehensive view of Actionism...