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Vienna showcases city’s shock art movement

As artists, they pushed the limits, bathing in blood, mud and urine. Vienna's famed "Actionists", whose avant garde movement may be the most radical in contemporary art, are the focus of a new exhibition in their home city.

Vienna showcases city's shock art movement
Hermann Nitsch, at a museum in Naples dedicated to his work. Photo: APA/HOCHMUTH

The movement emerged in the 1960s as part of the new performance-based art, which broke with the confines of traditional painting and used the body as both surface and site of art-making.

Vienna Actionism shied away from little – and sometimes landed the artists in jail.

"They sought a direct confrontation with reality, both physical and psychological, to limits that were very difficult to tolerate," said Eva Badura-Triska, curator of My Body is the Event at Vienna's Museum of Modern Art (Mumok).

The movement's main members were Otto Muehl, Hermann Nitsch, Günter Brus and Rudolf Schwarzkogler, who skinned animal carcasses, tied up human bodies or mixed them up with gore or mud.

Muehl, in particular, created a series of "still lifes" with body parts sticking out through planks, giving the impression of a dismembered corpse.

Brus once crisscrossed Vienna with his body painted white and bisected by a jagged black line before being arrested by the police. His other performances involved scatology or verged on pornography.

Artists also suffered

"Actionism broke away from traditional values. But it remains art. It is well-thought out, has a precise form and references," said Badura-Triska. "It's an extension of the field of painting, even though it is one of the most radical."

"They overturned the rules by considering as aesthetic things which were deemed ugly according to social norms," the curator added, conceding that the exhibition would be difficult to hold in certain countries.

The city of Sigmund Freud and other radical thinkers, Vienna already saw taboos broken in the early 20th century when artists like Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele shocked the world with sexually explicit artworks.

If the Vienna "Actionists" follow this spirit, a source for their non-conformity was also World War II, said Badura-Triska.

They lived "in a country where, unlike Germany, the Nazi past was pushed away, literally hidden in bourgeois normality, which helps explain their extreme reaction. 

"In this respect, 'Actionism' had a cathartic effect. It allowed suppressed drives to be released in controlled fashion, in the context of artistic experience," the curator said.

The exhibition compares the Vienna movement with other developments in performance-based and action art, featuring a wide range of international artists from Yoko Ono to Marina Abramovic.

The movement at times took a heavy toll. During a filmed performance which also featured her husband, a nude and bound Ana Brus had a nervous breakdown.

Günter Brus, who publicly urinated, defecated and cut himself with a razor blade, held his last live performance in 1970 in which he appeared nude and drank his own urine.

But Hermann Nitsch, 76, is still performing and has at least three museums devoted to his work in Austria and in Naples, Italy.

Otto Muehl died in 2013 at the age of 87 after being sentenced to seven years in jail on charges of sexual offences with minors and rapes committed in a commune he had founded.

The movement, which was little known in the 1960s, received a boost two decades later with a series of exhibitions in Cologne, Vienna, Paris and Los Angeles.

The exhibition at the Mumok runs until August 23rd.

By Philippe Schwab

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ART

African-born director’s new vision for Berlin cultural magnet

One of the rare African-born figures to head a German cultural institution, Bonaventure Ndikung is aiming to highlight post-colonial multiculturalism at a Berlin arts centre with its roots in Western hegemony.

African-born director's new vision for Berlin cultural magnet

The “Haus der Kulturen der Welt” (House of World Cultures), or HKW, was built by the Americans in 1956 during the Cold War for propaganda purposes, at a time when Germany was still divided.

New director Ndikung said it had been located “strategically” so that people on the other side of the Berlin Wall, in the then-communist East, could see it.

This was “representing freedom” but “from the Western perspective”, the 46-year-old toldĀ AFP.

Now Ndikung, born in Cameroon before coming to study in Germany 26 years ago, wants to transform it into a place filled with “different cultures of the world”.

The centre, by the river Spree, is known locally as the “pregnant oyster” due to its sweeping, curved roof. It does not have its own collections but is home to exhibition rooms and a 1,000-seat auditorium.

It reopened in June after renovations, and Ndikung’s first project “Quilombismo” fits in with his aims of expanding the centre’s offerings.

The exhibition takes its name from the Brazilian term “Quilombo”, referring to the communities formed in the 17th century by African slaves, who fled to remote parts of the South American country.

Throughout the summer, there will also be performances, concerts, films, discussions and an exhibition of contemporary art from post-colonial societies across Africa, the Americas, Asia and Oceania.

‘Rethink the space’

“We have been trying to… rethink the space. We invited artists to paint walls… even the floor,” Ndikung said.

And part of the “Quilombismo” exhibition can be found glued to the floor -African braids laced together, a symbol of liberation for black people, which was created by Zimbabwean artist Nontsikelelo Mutiti.

According to Ndikung, African slaves on plantations sometimes plaited their hair in certain ways as a kind of coded message to those seeking to escape, showing them which direction to head.

READ ALSO: Germany hands back looted artefacts to Nigeria

His quest for aestheticism is reflected in his appearance: with a colourful suit and headgear, as well as huge rings on his fingers, he rarely goes unnoticed.

During his interview with AFP, Ndikung was wearing a green scarf and cap, a blue-ish jacket and big, sky-blue shoes.

With a doctorate in medical biology, he used to work as an engineer before devoting himself to art.

In 2010, he founded the Savvy Gallery in Berlin, bringing together art from the West and elsewhere, and in 2017 was one of the curators of Documenta, a prestigious contemporary art event in the German city of Kassel.

Convinced of the belief that history “has been written by a particular type of people, mostly white and men,” Ndikung has had all the rooms in the HKW renamed after women.

These are figures who have “done something important in the advancement of the world” but were “erased” from history, he added. Among them is Frenchwoman Paulette Nardal, born in Martinique in 1896.

She helped inspire the creation of the “negritude” movement, which aimed to develop black literary consciousness, and was the first black woman to study at the Sorbonne in Paris.

Reassessing history

Ndikung’s appointment at the HKW comes as awareness grows in Germany about its colonial past, which has long been overshadowed by the atrocities committed during the era of Adolf Hitler’s Nazis.

Berlin has in recent years started returning looted objects to African countries which it occupied in the early 20th century — Burundi, Rwanda, Tanzania, Namibia and Cameroon.

“It’s long overdue,” said Ndikung.

He was born in Cameroon’s capital, Yaounde, into an anglophone family.

The country is majority francophone but also home to an anglophone minority and has faced deadly unrest in English-speaking areas, where armed insurgents are fighting to establish an independent homeland.

One of his dreams is to open a museum in Cameroon “bringing together historical and contemporary objects” from different countries, he said.

He would love to locate it in Bamenda, the capital of Cameroon’s restive Northwest region.

“But there is a war in Bamenda, so I can’t,” he says.

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