Blood and Soil: Vienna Actionism’s Dangerous Game

Its Wikipedia entry calls it “a short and violent movement,” and even compared with the aesthetic extremes of the 1960s, the unrelenting art of Vienna Actionism stands apart. After the passage of fifty years, the questions it raised about the limits and origins of art remain no less troubling or closer to resolution. The four […]

First major Actionist show comes to Britain

Violent and sexual precursor to performance art is dramatically laid bare in new exhibition. Brus and his fellow Actionists, Otto Muhl, Hermann Nitsch and Rudolf Schwarzkogler, have been explained away as the upshot of Austria’s failure to come to terms with Nazism, as an extreme manifestation of the sexual revolution, a logical extension of action […]