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An Actionist Begins to Sing
An Interview with Otto Mühl
page 1 of 6
PART ONE: INTRODUCTION
As I tremulously reflect on what a lifetime of canonical film-watching has taught me, I must accept that what I have learned is, though not totally worthless, probably useless. A certain director knows how to emphatically move the camera in a self-conscious way, one employs moody colors, another (such as Truffaut) employs self-reflexive sentimentalism to win acclaim, another trades in allegedly transcendental minimalism to prompt discussion about how narrative is being excitingly restructured, and so forth. Cinephiles, apologists, pedants, and, worst of all, journalists, insist that I should care about such things, though it's unclear why I should care, as if all aesthetic values were self-evident. I am tempted to half-jokingly agree with the Maoists — the only ones, I think, who have claimed commercial cinema is inherently harmful — and assent that the enterprise of the cinema, which can now only be repaired with most radical consciousness-raising, should be totally abandoned.
Logically, then, I turn my head away from the narrow parameters of the cineaste toward a new art, not a projected frame controlled by commerce and critics, but one that strives for a new, autonomous way of being. Nothing better represents such a new praxis than the 1960s Austrian actionist movement, whose principal members, Otto Mühl (or Muehl), Rudolph Schwarzkogler, Günter Brus, and Hermann Nitsch, scandalized the public with staged performances of materialistic body art, saturnalia, and polymorphous perversity under the banners of the "Vienna Action Group" and the "Institute for Direct Art." Sometimes the actionists would be jailed for weeks or months on public obscenity and lewdness charges, and actionist art became the subject of several momentous German and Austrian censorship trials. In the early 1990s, Mühl became the subject of a highly politicized trial once again, this time on trumped-up, vindictive accusations of rape and molestation, resulting in a seven-year imprisonment. In a grand irony, however, Mühl's legal martyrdom also cemented his artistic legitimacy, for it was only after his release from prison that Mühl, now well into his seventies, could enjoy two painting exhibitions at the Louvre.
"The artist does not stand in front
of
the picture, but he is in the picture."
From the action "Can Anyone
Explain?" (Otto Mühl, right)
For our discussion here, I am most interested in Mühl's "removal of the frame," his jump from being a painter, sculptor, filmmaker, and actionist to the founding of his Viennese "actions-analytical" commune, where actionistic art and performance were transferred from the imagined spaces of fiction and recontextualized as "practical actionism...extended into everyday life."1 The members of the commune collectively owned property, practiced exogamy, and used psychophysical aesthetics to expand the idea of the body-as-text into the realm of naturalistic autotherapy.
For over four decades, Mühl's work has been the subject of agitated, often venomous debate in Germany, Austria, and France, but has become in North America — to use Mühl's own word — a "vortex" of speculation, misinformation, and tenebrific rumor, to which I have fallen victim as much as anyone else. I am no expert in actionism — if I were, I would have little to discover here, and little interest in this encounter. Not having been privy to the politico-artistic throes of 1960s Austria, my first impressions of Mühl came mostly from Amos Vogel's seminal picture-book cum leftist primer Film As A Subversive Art (1974), and from Mühl's autobiographical appearance in Dusan Makavejev's Sweet Movie (1975). Yet Vogel unintentionally subverts his own intentions at subversion by insisting all art conform to the narrow assumptions of humanism, and Mühl is quick to distance himself from Sweet Movie, whose sensationalism he dismisses as "downright kitsch."
More recently, and invaluably, Malcolm Green's English-language anthology Brus, Muehl, Nitsch, Schwarzkogler: Writings of the Vienna Actionists (1999), has granted us access to Mühl's performance art action scripts ("I spread artificial honey on an old grandmother...and then allow her to be attacked by 5 kg of flies that I had previously starved for 7 days in a box...I then kill the flies on her wrinkled skin with a fly-swatter"2), and the absurdist manifestos and pamphlets intended to accompany actionist happenings and festivals. Of the greatest literary value is Mühl's manifesto written to accompany the 1967 "Zock" festival, a stream-of-consciousness satire that, though clearly a parody of the very idea of revolutionary manifestos, is refreshingly fearless and still socially relevant: "ZOCK [mandates] general prohibition of sexual intercourse between people of the same color...the color of future ZOCK people will be grey..." But actionist satire is generally less mystifying than it may at first seem. For example, Herman Nitsch's remark, "I love my mutilated lamb more than the Minister for Education,"3 may initially seem like a pure perversity, but it states with perfect pith the alienation existing between nature and the State, between the unorganized individual and over-organized corruption (at least it is my mutilated lamb).
Integral to Mühl's idea of communal action-analysis is the work of Wilhelm Reich, and particularly Character Analysis, which outlines Reich's theories of a quantitative sex-economy and the egoistic "character armor" that socializes, alienates, blocks, and represses healthy libidinal energies. While Reich borrows heavily from Freud and Marx, he was beholden to neither, repudiating the mechanized, bureaucratic, and nationalistic tendencies of traditional Marxism and trading Freud's cycles of inescapable neurosis for an optimistic model of non-neurotic, hygienic sexuality and tension release derived from his own orgasmic therapies. More importantly, Reich, unlike Freud and Marx, breaks with the traditional linguistic understanding of alienation and anxiety and turns to biophysics, the polar drives of productive sexuality and consuming hunger, to address the workings of psychopathology. It is thus no accident that Mühl's early films not only are body centered (and without dialog), but are filled with literal, ritualistic representations of food consumption and ecstatic-orgasmic release (including vomiting). Just as Buñuel mocks hypocritical anxieties about consumption and biological function in The Phantom of Liberty (1973), in whose most famous scene the privacy of fecal discharge and the publicity of food consumption are inverted, so too must we reconcile what in Reichian-Mühlian terms are the polarized spheres of egoistic production and the consumption of the outer world.
Detritus of a Mühl action
Many of Mühl's most famous actions of the 1960s were documented by the Austrian experimental filmmaker Kurt Kren, whose patented "flash-editing" technique mathematically fractures images into multiple cuts per second, creating a stroboscopic effect wherein the number of cuts within each frame is determined by the number of cuts in the last.4 We are therefore left with the paradox of Mühl's real-time, "materialistic" performances being discontinuously flash-edited and temporally reconstituted through the anti-real machinations of Kren's avant-gardism. The effect of Kren's stroboscopic editing is at once futuristic and primitively daguerreotypic, recalling everything from the revolutionarily flashing machine guns of Eisenstein's October (1928) to the animated stop-motion anatomies of Jan Svankmajer. If anything, this paradox of a real-time performance represented within a restructured frame only reminds us further of the limitations of temporal representation, and the eventual necessity of moving from representational art into the realm of Mühl's action-analysis, or living "self-representation."
In Mühl and Kren's early collaborations, the human body is just as much an object to be manipulated by Kren's editing as it is an organic canvas to be slathered with Mühl's paint and trademark foodstuffs. In O Tannenbaum (1964), a red-painted woman orally services Mühl, while human bodies alternate their sexual positions not through moving about the mise-en-scene but through Kren's omnipotent, scene-jumping cuts, as if the pulsating sexuality of the models were being displaced to the technology representing them. Libi (1968), whose title is perhaps a punning conflation of "love" ("liebe" in German) and "libido," begins with an onscreen title: "DIESER FILM ZEIGT WIE DAS LEBEN EBEN SO IST" ("This film shows how life actually is"). We are treated to a blowjob, an umbrella indiscreetly protruding from a man's ass as he reads the newspaper, anonymous people contorting their asses before each other, and scenes of priests performing sacraments whose moldering ritualism stands in contrast to Mühl's liberated sexual display. A sign reading "Direct Art" is then pulled away to reveal a close-up penis lurking beneath — yet again, it is Kren's editing that actually "performs" or mobilizes these actions, as if the materiality of the temporal-material action rests in the mechanical apparatus of the cinema.
Mühl and Kren's Amore (1968) bluntly satirizes bourgeois normativity, as a naked woman and man whip, in slow motion, a second man covered in the drear of daily newspapers. When the newspapers have been totally whipped away, the man is painted with the foodstuffs, as if being anointed by natural, life-giving juices. Yet much of Mühl's work avoids overt satire or allegory,5 drawing instead abstract inspiration from Dadaism, Duchamp, and Tachism, the painterly equivalent of the trance-like automatic writing once practiced by the Surrealists. In O Sensibility (1970), Mühl rises up, spirit-like, behind a woman as she makes love to a goose, passionately kissing it on the beak with questionable consent from the animal. Mühl then licks the goose, thrusts it onto his pelvis, embraces it like a child, lashes it with a strap, and gives it over to a communal group where it is finally decapitated and its stump bloodily utilized to masturbate the woman. Though suggestive of mystic, pagan rites of purification and primitivism, the film, like all true surrealism, outrageously defies attempts at pigeonholing analysis and close reading. Unlike the simplistic, mock-Christian allegory of Thierry Zeno's pig-fucking Vase de noces (1974), Mühl's zoophilic act is tautegorical, not allegorical, restating selfhood in different, non-linguistic terms whose only offense is unapologetic naturalness.
As Mühl says in his "Material Action Manifesto" of 1964, "the material action works with symbols (its difference from theater), which in themselves constitute the storyline, a consecutive series and mingling of symbols as self-existing realities...they do not aim to explain anything, they are what they appear to be."6 Nothing better represents this paradoxical "transcendental literalism" than Mühl‘s coprophilic-urolagnic films Scheisskerl (1969) and Sodoma (1969), which likewise thumb their noses at interpretation. But their flash-edited imageries of enemas, urolagnia, and coprophagia — sometimes rendered in extreme slow-motion — are not simply an affront to the denial of bodily realities. The ass is not always a black vacuum or the gaping unknown but, contrarily, can be that which is known all too well, and the shit issuing forth frightens for its transparent universalism and incorruptible democracy. And if we garland, either resignedly or with idiotic glee, the figurative shit that clogs our cinemas — and here I mean the supposed art houses more than the popular cinema, which at least has fewer illusions — are we not hypocrites to be repelled by the genuine article?
Mühl's painting Vulkan (Volcano)
Malcolm Green concludes the introduction to his edition of the actionists' writings with a warning: "To portray the actionists simply as (auto-) therapists would be to miss the point entirely...they had too much destructive glee, too much verve and downright humor, or too much aesthetic power to be passed off as mere social workers."7 With all due respect, I disagree enthusiastically with this unwittingly conservative view, whose covert romanticism cannot progress beyond caricaturing social change as the territory of banal policymaking and uncreative bureaucracy — in fact, this caricature is itself the greatest of all banalities. There is nothing "mere" about social transformation, nor is it clear why humor, destruction, or aesthetic power should be at logical odds with the restructuring of social orders. Utilitarianism needn't be lifeless, nor is it opposed to art. For me, Mühl is no "mere" controversialist or provocateur, but a pragmatist whose radicalisms are entirely rational responses to both moral hypocrisies and the limitations of representational objectivity. Admittedly, in this interview — conducted entirely by written correspondence8 — Mühl acknowledges there were limitations to this pragmatism: "I was of the erroneous opinion that the group as a social, sexual experiment would itself be a kind of remedy for people with great difficulties." Nevertheless, I look undeterred to this experiment, where aesthetics, sociology, biophysics, and psychology intertwine, where "art" is not understood as representation but as life, as self-representation, regulated neither by commerce nor the State.
NEXT: The interview
Notes
1. See the excerpts from Mühl's text Catastrophe Measurement on pages 122-23 of Malcolm Green's Brus, Muehl, Nitsch, Schwarzkogler: Writings of the Vienna Actionists.
2. See page 83 of Green.
3. The comment is from the 1963 "Festival of Psycho-Physical Naturalism."
4. For a brief discussion of Kren's editing technique, see Peter Tscherkassky's article "Kurt Kren: Lord of the Frames," at www.hi-beam.net/mkr/kk/kk-bio.html.
5. Other Actionist films are — arguably — more transparently allegorical than Mühl's works. Gunter Brus's 10/65, filmed by Kren, calls to mind the forcible removal of concentration camp victims' gold teeth with its tableaux of human statues, silently screaming a la Edward Munch, being prodded with needles and scissors about the mouth.
6. See page 87 of Green.
7. See Green, page 20.
8. The written correspondence on which this interview is based dates from July through October of 2002.
