The Informative Public of Performance

The Informative Public of Performance A Study of Viennese Actionism, 1965–1970 Mechtild Widrich The role of the audience in performance art has excited considerable discussion in recent years, particularly the question of whether and how the direct encounter between artist and audience might be “constitutive” of performance.1 The work of the Viennese Actionists illuminates a neglected but pivotal facet of this debate: the role of a performance audience once it is an audience of the past. What relationship does the live event have to its afterlife and to time? While recent emphasis on the mediation and careful orchestration of re-presented classic performance art works contributes to this discussion, I want to challenge a growing skepticism among schol- ars of performance about the possibility of singular live events.2 My interest here is not merely 1. The new book edited by Amelia Jones and Adrian Heathfield (2012) moves forward this discussion and reprints now classic essays such as Philip Auslander’s “The Performativity of Performance Documentation” (2006). 2. About Gina Pane’s and Chris Burden’s work, Auslander writes, “Rather, the events were staged to be documented at least as much as to be seen by an audience” (2006:3). TDR: The Drama Review 57:1 (T217) Spring 2013. ©2013 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 137 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_a_00239 by guest on 01 October 2021 the oft-noted tension between action and document, but very particularly, the fate of the “initial” audience, the audience that experiences live action and often themselves end up being documented. Performance theory has questioned the possibility of “presence” or even of any “original” performance, but — and this might be characteristic — it has so far been little con- cerned with the issue of audience. As Philip Auslander has argued, artists “assume responsibil- ity” to “the audience for the documentation, not for the live event [...],” and further, “I submit that the presence of this initial audience [for the live event] has no real importance to the performance as an entity whose continued life is through its documentation” (2006:6).3 There is no doubt that it is difficult to place “initial” audiences in the history of performance, nor that performance documents address later audiences. But if the first audience is inessential, we would have to assume the same for later ones. Does the “initial” audience simply disappear from view because they are outside the frame of the performance documents, or because their interpretive place is taken by new audiences who gain access to the past performance through photographs, films, relics, or most recently, re-performance? Or is there a particular role this first audience plays in the historicity of the event? Viennese Actionism and its four main protagonists — Günter Brus, Otto Muehl, Rudolf Schwarzkogler, and Hermann Nitsch — make a particularly interesting case, as their stated aim was to achieve “direct art” (a term used by Muehl and Brus), understood as the merging of life and art.4 They became known in the 1960s through spectacular and often aggressive actions that used their own and collaborators’ bodies as “material,” along with excrement (their own) and other bodily fluids, animal blood and body parts, paint, and sharp objects.5 The insistence 3. This crucial sentence concludes, rather obscurely, by insisting that viewers are interested in “the artist’s work, not the total interaction.” 4. The name “Wiener Aktionisten” (Viennese Actionists) came into existence with a book edited by Peter Weibel in collaboration with VALIE EXPORT (Weibel and Export 1970), the title of which was Wiener Aktionismus. Weibel claims the term as his own, and in an interview published in 1995, Brus speaks of “Viennese Actionism, as Peter Weibel called it,” confirming Weibel’s claim (my translation; Roussel 1995:23). In their first joint publication in the journal Le Marais in 1965, Muehl and Brus called themselves Wiener Aktionsgruppe (Vienna Action Group). The classic publication remains Klocker’s anthology Viennese Actionism 1960–71 (1989). A new anthology came out while I was finishing this article (Badura-Triska and Klocker 2012). The emphasis on the Actionists as “expanded painters” only partially confirms my view, as the relation to the action remains to be dis- cussed. See my review in Art Journal (2012a). 5. There are international artistic precedents for the Actionists, from action painting and Nouveau Réalisme to Fluxus, a group that the Actionists considered too theoretical. Fluxus was, however, crucial to the conceptual poetry-oriented “literary cabarets” of the Wiener Gruppe (Friedrich Achleitner, Konrad Bayer, Gerhard Rühm, Oswald Wiener), which had a significant influence on the Viennese Actionists. Al Hansen, Wolf Vostell, and other Fluxus artists were present at the Destruction in Art symposium in London in September 1966, in which some of the Actionists participated; also, Emmett Williams and Daniel Spoerri visited the Wiener Gruppe (in Figure 1. (previous page) Günter Brus in Wiener Spaziergang (Vienna Walk), 1965. (Photo by Ludwig Hoffenreich; courtesy of mumok, museum moderner kunst stiftung ludwig wien) Mechtild Widrich is postdoctoral fellow in the Architecture Department, ETH Zurich. Her recent publications are Ugliness: A Reconsideration (Tauris, 2013; coeditor Andrei Pop); “Can Photographs Make It So? Repeated Outbreaks of VALIE EXPORT’s Genital Panic since 1969,” in Perform, Repeat, Record, eds. Amelia Jones and Adrian Heathfield (Intellect, 2012); “Process and Authority: Marina Abramović’s Freeing the Horizon” in Grey Room (2012); “EXPORT’s Media Performances” in PAJ (2011); and Krzysztof Wodiczko: City of Refuge (Black Dog, 2009; coeditor Mark Jarzombek). She has received fellowships from the Fulbright Commission, the Max Planck Institute, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. [email protected] Mechtild Widrich 138 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_a_00239 by guest on 01 October 2021 on shock value and the emphasis on smell, taste, and touch make the case for a kind of performance that cannot be transmitted by documentation. Actionist photographs and films, however, are numerous and frequently shown; on examining the footage, it becomes obvious that the actions were imaginatively and professionally documented, usually with the cooperation of the performers themselves. For example, in the 1965 Wiener Spaziergang or Vienna Walk by Günter Brus (fig. 1), the artist is dressed in formal attire and soaked in white paint, with a black stripe running down the vertical axis of his body. Brus meant to walk through the Vienna tourist center posing as a “liv- ing picture.” The Vienna Walk was his first performance in public space, after a series of actions in private and semi-private locations. It was thus his first chance to address what we might call an uninformed audience, people who come to constitute the audience of a performance simply by being in a given location at a given time. Of course there were complications. As a recent news- paper article on the occasion of the artist’s 70th birthday retold the event, “after a few meters, he was stopped by the police and ordered to pay a fine” (Schurian 2008).6 The police intervention is connected so intimately with Vienna Walk and its mythology that it became an explicit part of the work itself. In fact, it is one of the most iconic images of Viennese Actionism, merged in our minds, perhaps, with detailed shots of genitals battered in paint and animals with bellies sliced open. Blood, slaughter, arrest: These brute physical components seem to require social reprisal in order to prove their force. The documentation of Vienna Walk reveals how the police intervention became incorpo- rated into the work. The event was documented by friends, collaborators, and a profes- sional documentary photog- rapher, Ludwig Hoffenreich, who had been working for the Actionists for several years. mumok, the Museum of Modern Art in Vienna, owns Figure 2. Günter Brus in Wiener Spaziergang (Vienna Walk), 1965, print 34 of Hoffenreich’s prints, pur- number 1. (Photo by Ludwig Hoffenreich; courtesy of mumok, museum moderner chased directly from Brus, who kunst stiftung ludwig wien) particular Gerhard Rühm) in Vienna in 1963. See the photograph in the garden of Schönbrunn palace (Weibel 1997:733). Otto Muehl’s last action was presented at the Happening und Fluxus event in Cologne in 1971 (Roussel 1995:36). Action painting was first shown in Vienna in July 1961 at the Galerie Würthle (Schwarz 1988:29). While Nitsch acknowledges the importance of the Vienna Group, particularly the poetry of Oswald Wiener, Muehl and Brus insist that “direct art and happenings developed directly from painting” (Nitsch Actionism Viennese 1990:162; Braun 1999:101). 6. “Völlig weiß bemalt und nur durch einen schwarzen Strich quasi zweigeteilt, so wollte er, einem lebenden Bild gleich, vom Heldenplatz zum Stephansplatz gehen, wurde allerdings nach wenigen Metern von einem Polizisten wegen Störung der öffentlichen Ordnung zu einer Geldbuße verdonnert.” All translations, unless otherwise indi- cated, are my own. 139 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_a_00239 by guest on 01 October 2021 Figure 3. Günter Brus in Wiener Spaziergang (Vienna Figure 4. Günter Brus in Wiener Spaziergang (Vienna

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