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The battles for social ideals have always been hard won, and that is if you deem them to have been won at all. Whatever stage you consider the society around you to be at, these are not wars that have solely been waged on battlefields but given a voice through art, none more so than in the 1950s Actionist movement in Vienna, as a new exhibition is seeking to prove at the Richard Saltoun gallery in London.
Aspiring to give a clearer understanding of the importance and validity of six oft-forgotten and undervalued individuals and their impact on the current generation of artists, Viennese Season: Actionism, consists of two exhibitions. The first showcases vintage photographs of work by Günter Brus, Otto Mühl, Hermann Nitsch, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler, all of whom used controversial performances or aktions, to challenge the question “what is art?” The second, Feminism, presents the work of Valie EXPORT and Friedl Kubelka‐Bondy, two artists using their bodies and the action of documentary photograph to subvert the traditional notion of the great male artist.
Potent messages that still raise a few eyebrows today, the exhibition gives an insight into an aggressive, full-frontal attack on the status quo, which includes the likes of Nitsch’s crucifixions and Schwarzkogler’s private performances of bodily mutilation, casting aside the traditional canvas in favour of items such as blood, animal carcasses, razor blades, and ropes.
Curator, Niamh Coghlan, explains that the movement was meant as a physical extension of painting, arising from the Abstract-Expressionist movement, but importantly that it is supremely relevant to today’s audience because the work “prefigures body art and performance art as we know it now. Each artist focused on their own or collaborators’ physical bodies as a material.” She goes on however to explain that the works extends beyond the materials and performances themselves and into the spaces in which they were created, “The site of artistic production, traditionally the studio, was no longer. The home, a hotel, the street corner – all of these became the studio.”
On the second exhibition, where the ongoing question of feminism is seen from one of its earliest, and perhaps still, most potent standpoints, Coghlan explains that Kubelka and EXPORT use their own bodies as the subject of their work, empowering themselves by re-appropriating the female body rather than being portrayed through the male lens and being the subject of the male gaze.
Following a major exhibition at the Museum Moderner Kunst Siftung Ludwig, entitled Viennese Actionism: Art and Upheaval in 1960s Vienna, this is an intriguing albeit rather uncomfortable spotlight on a radical change in performance art that grew from the culture, social, and political environments in Vienna; a place that was at once experimental and, as Coghlan puts it “incredibly conventional.”
While she is right when she asserts that the messages are still relevant simply because “they persist” in universal conversation, perhaps the marker of its importance is in our own reactions as an audience. After all, you may cringe, you may be intrigued, you may be fascinated, or you may be repulsed, but if they were around today, it is unlikely that any of the artists would suffer the backlash they experienced from their contemporary audiences (Gunter Brus was stopped by police and fined after one aktion in 1965), thus proving Coghlan’s ultimate point, these artists are important because thanks to them and their ilk, today art is so much more than a canvas.
by Bonnie Friend
Viennese Season: Actionism is on until April 4, 2014 at Richard Saltoun, 111 Great Titchfield Street, London W1W 6RY