A museum dedicated to Vienna Actionism that opened in March has met some criticism and controversy—not the primary time that Austria’s most necessary post-war artwork motion, famend for excessive performances, has triggered a disapproving response.
The brand new Vienna Actionism Museum was initiated by a bunch of personal collectors “who needed to offer Actionism the eye it deserves” and to convey it “out of its shadowy existence”, the opening press assertion mentioned. The museum focuses on the interval from 1957 to 1973 and boasts the world’s largest Actionism assortment—17,000 reveals—which it intends to increase.
These artists explored the human physique with out taboo
Considered one of Vienna Actionism’s 4 principal protagonists, Günter Brus, died in February, having outlived the opposite three: Hermann Nitsch died in 2022, Otto Muehl in 2013 and Rudolf Schwarzkogler in 1969 after a fall from a window. In a repressed Austrian society in denial about its then-recent Nazi guilt, these artists explored the human psyche and the human physique with out taboo.
‘Degrading’
Performances featured copious bodily fluids—most notoriously, in a 1968 present on the College of Vienna, when Brus lower himself, masturbated, vomited, urinated and defecated whereas singing the Austrian nationwide anthem. Even the sensationalist Viennese tabloids struggled to discover a becoming response. Brus was prosecuted for “degrading symbols of the state” and fled to West Berlin to flee imprisonment.
Criticism of the brand new Vienna Actionism Museum has targeted totally on its remedy of Muehl, who was convicted of kid sexual offences together with rape in 1991 and served seven years in jail. Individuals who lived as youngsters within the commune Muehl based within the Nineteen Seventies have protested in opposition to what they see because the museum’s glorification of a prison. Andy Simanowitz, who was certainly one of these youngsters, instructed the broadcaster ORF that the museum is “insensitive and hurtful”.
We should present this artwork to be taught from the previous
“These are individuals who grew up with trauma,” says Julia Moebus-Puck, the museum’s director. “I can utterly perceive them. What bothers me is that they’re demanding that Otto Muehl shouldn’t be proven in any respect. I’m of the opinion that we should present this artwork to be taught from the previous.”
Artwork critics reviewing the museum grappled with a well-known dilemma: how ought to posterity deal with lifeless, pioneering artists whose lifetime transgressions have been and stay past the pale?
Neither cancellation nor canonisation
“Clearly, cancel tradition shouldn’t be a useful response, however neither is art-historical canonisation,” wrote Paul Jandl in his overview within the Swiss day by day Neue Zürcher Zeitung. His colleague Hannes Hintermeier at Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung lamented the museum’s failure to offer ample context.
Moebus-Puck says the curators made a aware choice to keep away from labelling particular person works to offer guests area for an instantaneous sensory response. Audio and digital guides and a free booklet handed out on the museum present complete context, “however now we have seen individuals need direct explanations”, she says. “We’ll make some amendments.” These will embrace wall texts with the biographies of the artists, she provides.
The museum goals to mount one or two non permanent exhibitions per 12 months and to change into a hub for Actionism analysis and a lender to reveals worldwide.