The famous and controversial Viennese actionists will have a foothold, decades after their sometimes unsustainable performances, thanks to the opening on Friday in Austria of a new private institution, which is entirely dedicated to them.
This Museum of Viennese Actionism (WAM) in the heart of the capital aims to rehabilitate a long-ostracized movement from the 1960s, whose essential contribution art historians highlight.
It rests primarily on the shoulders of four rebels who abhorred post-war bourgeois Austria which swept Nazi crimes under the rug and celebrated academicism.
Günter Brus, Otto Muehl, Hermann Nitsch and Rudolf Schwarzkogler revolted in their own way.
They push the limits, not hesitating to use sexuality, animal viscera, self-mutilation, urine and excrement to challenge the confines of artistic expression and provoke their contemporaries, to the point of censorship and condemnation criminal.
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With them,
“the body and the human psyche were explored intensively and without taboos
,” warns curator Eva Badura-Triska, who selected the hundred works created between 1957 and 1973 and exhibited on the occasion of the 'inauguration.
Some of them, mainly photos of performances, but also paintings and sketches, are difficult to watch, the artists seeking to confront the public.
All gone today, they pursued the same ideological goal but developed different artistic approaches, until later diverging to assert a personal style.
The collection includes 17,000 pieces and now constitutes the largest private collection of this artistic movement on 900 m² of exhibition space.
It results from the merger of several collections made available to form a vast representative whole, capable of reaching
“a large number of people”
, according to director Julia Moebus-Puck.
Recognition of the Viennese actionists first came from abroad in the 1980s with the interest of prestigious institutions, before Austria in turn appropriated this violent heritage.
Today he asks other questions.
This spotlight sparked controversy over the place of women in this exclusively male square and over the person of Otto Muehl, sentenced in particular for rape of minors in 1991 to seven years in prison.