M27 Otto Mühl

Material Action Manifesto (1965)

Viennese Actionism (Wiener Aktionismus) is an extreme version of performance art in which the body is used as the canvas. It emerged in Austria in the early 1960s, when the artists Otto Mühl (1925–2013), Rudolf Schwarzkogler (1940–69), Hermann Nitsch (b. 1938) and Günter Brus (b. 1938) were inspired by the psychological theories of Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Reich to begin using their art as a form of therapy. Their transgressive actions featured elements of ritual, while often teetering on the edge of outright anarchy and violence. In these highly charged events, copious quantities of bodily fluids were used as a means to shock the audience out of its supposedly anaesthetized and alienated condition, as a kind of catharsis. Not all of these actions were executed in front of observers: Schwarzkogler created a series of actions privately in his apartment, the only evidence of their occurrence being a series of deeply unsettling black-and-white photographs.

Viennese Actionism’s visceral ideology was propounded in a series of inflammatory manifestos written by Mühl, some of which he printed in his own journal, Omo Super Material Action. This particular manifesto appeared early in 1965 in the magazine Le Marais, which was edited by Brus and promoted the artist’s work.

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material action is portrayed painting, auto-therapy made visible with food stuffs. it seems like a psychosis, produced by the mingling of human bodies, objects and material. everything is planned. everything can be used and worked as material.

everything is employed as substance.

paint is not a means of colouring, but as goo, liquid, dust. an egg is not an egg but a slimy substance.

the associations of certain materials – whether on account of their form, their customary usage or their meaning – are utilised.

real occurrences are reproduced and mixed with materials. real occurrences can be mixed with other occurrences, as well as with every kind of material, just as the time and place of the occurrence can be interchanged:

a symphony orchestra plays naked in a swimming pool which slowly fills up with jam.

paint and foodstuffs are sprayed, tipped over and thrown at an opera performance. the singers are instructed to stick it out till the end. interminglings, interchanges, transformations can be employed for state receptions, the trooping of the colour, parades and other ceremonies in everyday life.

real occurrences are reproduced: car accidents, floods, conflagrations, mixed with material and other events. mingling and mixing are performed according to the logic of dreams.

events with deeper significance come into being.

jam, corpses, road construction machines.

occurrences are remoulded, material penetrates reality, loses its normal validity, butter becomes pus, jam blood, they become symbols of other occurrences.

the associative assumes a large place in the delineated possibilities.

if the audience joins in it becomes either material or accomplice. in order to avoid instincts breaking out, the action will resemble a gym lesson.