Actionism - I
Performanse art
Body art

Joseph Beuys 1921 – 1986
Otto Muehl 1925 – 2013
Yves Klein 1928 –1962
Yoko Ono b.1933
Charlotte Moorman 1933 – 1991
Hermann Nitsch 1938 – 2022
Gunter Brus b.1938
Carolee Schneemann 1939 – 2019

Actionism

Viennese Actionism was a short and violent movement in 20th-century art. It can be regarded as part of the many independent efforts of the 1960s to develop "performance art" (Fluxus, happening, action painting, body art, etc.). Its main participants were Günter Brus, Otto Mühl, Hermann Nitsch, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler. As "actionists", they were active between 1960 and 1971. Most have continued their artistic work independently from the early 1970s onwards.

Documentation of the work of these four artists suggests that there was no consciously developed sense of a movement or any cultivation of membership status in an "actionist" group. Rather, this name was one applied to various collaborative configurations among these four artists. Malcolm Green has quoted Hermann Nitsch's comment, "Vienna Actionism never was a group. A number of artists reacted to particular situations that they all encountered, within a particular time period, and with similar means and results."

The work of the Actionists developed concurrently with—but largely independently from—other avant garde movements of the era that shared an interest in rejecting object-based or otherwise commodifiable art practices. The practice of staging precisely scored "Actions" in controlled environments or before audiences bears similarities to the Fluxus concept of enacting an "event score" and is a forerunner to performance art.

The work of the Viennese Actionists is probably best remembered for the wilful transgressiveness of its naked bodies, destructiveness and violence. Often, brief jail terms were served by participants for violations of decency laws, and their works were targets of moral outrage. In June 1968 Günter Brus began serving a six-month prison sentence for the crime of "degrading symbols of the state" after an action in Vienna at which he simultaneously masturbated, covered his body with his own faeces and sang the Austrian national anthem, and later fled the country to avoid a second arrest. Otto Mühl served a one-month prison term after his participation in a public event, "Art and Revolution" in 1968. After his "Piss Action" before a Munich audience, Mühl became a fugitive from the West German police. Hermann Nitsch served a two-week prison term in 1965 after his participation with Rudolph Schwarzkogler in the Festival of Psycho-Physical Naturalism. The "Destruction in Art Symposium", held in London in 1966, marked the first encounter between members of Fluxus and Actionists. It was a landmark of international recognition for the work of Brus, Mühl and Nitsch.

While the nature and content of each artist's work differed, there are distinct aesthetic and thematic threads connecting the Actions of Brus, Mühl, Nitsch, and Schwarzkogler. Use of the body as both surface and site of art-making seems to have been a common point of origin for the Actionists in their earliest departures from conventional art practices in the late '50s and early '60s. Brus' "Hand Painting Head Painting" action of 1964, Mühl and Nitsch's "Degradation of a Female Body, Degradation of A Venus" of 1963 are characterized by their efforts to reconceive human bodies as surfaces for the production of art. The trajectories of the Actionists' work suggests more than just a precedent to later performance art and body art, rather, a drive toward a totalizing art-practice is inherent in their refusing to be confined within conventional ideas of painting, theatre and sculpture.

Performance art

Performance art is an artwork or art exhibition created through actions executed by the artist or other participants. It may be witnessed live or through documentation, spontaneously developed or written, and is traditionally presented to a public in a fine art context in an interdisciplinary mode. Also known as artistic action, it has been developed through the years as a genre of its own in which art is presented live. It had an important and fundamental role in 20th century avant-garde art.

It involves five basic elements: time, space, body, and presence of the artist, and the relation between the creator and the public. The actions, generally developed in art galleries and museums, can take place in the street, any kind of setting or space and during any time period. Its goal is to generate a reaction, sometimes with the support of improvisation and a sense of aesthetics. The themes are commonly linked to life experiences of the artist themselves, the need for denunciation or social criticism and with a spirit of transformation.

The term "performance art" and "performance" became widely used in the 1970s, even though the history of performance in visual arts dates back to futurist productions and cabarets from the 1910s. Art critic and performance artist John Perreault credits Marjorie Strider with the invention of the term in 1969. The main pioneers of performance art include Carolee Schneemann, Marina Abramović, Ana Mendieta, Chris Burden, Hermann Nitsch, Joseph Beuys, Nam June Paik, Tehching Hsieh, Yves Klein and Vito Acconci. Some of the main exponents more recently are Tania Bruguera, Abel Azcona, Regina José Galindo, Marta Minujín, Melati Suryodarmo and Petr Pavlensky. The discipline is linked to the happenings and "events" of the Fluxus movement, Viennese Actionism, body art and conceptual art.

Body art

Body art is art in which the artist uses their human body as the primary medium. Emerging from the context of Conceptual Art during the 1970s, Body art may include performance art. Body art is likewise utilized for investigations of the body in an assortment of different media including painting, casting, photography, film and video. More extreme body art can involve mutilation or pushing the body to its physical limits.

In more recent times, the body has become a subject of much broader discussion and treatment than can be reduced to body art in its common understanding. Important strategies that question the human body are: implants, body in symbiosis with the new technologies, virtual avatar bodies, among others.
Body art has been expanded into the popular culture and now covers a wide spectrum of usage, including tattoos, body piercings, scarification, and body painting. Photographer Spencer Tunick is well known for conducting photo shoots which gather large numbers of naked people at public locations around the world.

Body art often deals with issues of gender and personal identity and common topics include the relationship between body and psyche.
The Vienna Action Group was formed in 1965 by Hermann Nitsch, Otto Mühl, Günter Brus, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler. They performed several body art actions. In the United States Carolee Schneemann, Chris Burden and Vito Acconci were very active participants. Acconci once documented, through photos and text, his daily exercise routine of stepping on and off a chair for as long as possible over several months. Acconci also performed Following Piece, in which he followed randomly chosen New Yorkers.
In France, body art was termed art corporel and practiced by such artists as Michel Journiac, Orlan and Gina Pane while in Italy in the 1980s, one of the famous artists in the movement was Ketty La Rocca.

Marina Abramović performed Rhythm 0 in 1974. In the piece, the audience was given instructions to use on Abramović's body an array of 72 provided instruments of pain and pleasure, including knives, feathers, and a loaded pistol. Audience members cut her, pressed thorns into her belly, applied lipstick to her, removed her clothes, and held a loaded pistol to her head. Accounts vary as to how the performance concluded, some stating it ended after a scuffle broke out in the audience over their conduct, while Abramović retells that the artwork simply came to an end after the intended six hours, at which time she stood and walked towards the audience, which fled.

Artists whose works have evolved with more directed personal mythologies include Rebecca Horn, Youri Messen-Jaschin, Javier Perez, and Jana Sterbak.[10] Body art can also be expressed via writing rather than painting.

Joseph Beuys
1921 – 1986

Joseph Heinrich Beuys

(12 May 1921 – 23 January 1986) was a German artist, teacher, performance artist, and art theorist whose work reflected concepts of humanism, sociology, and anthroposophy. He was a founder of a provocative art movement known as Fluxus and was a key figure in the development of Happenings.

Beuys is known for his "extended definition of art" in which the ideas of social sculpture could potentially reshape society and politics. He frequently held open public debates on a wide range of subjects, including political, environmental, social, and long-term cultural issues.

Beuys was professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 1961 until 1972. He was a founding member and life-long supporter of the German Green Party.

Joseph Heinrich Beuys

BEUYS, THE OVERCOAT AND THE COYOTE

To beat the Americans at their own game! It isn’t easy, but Joseph Beuys succeeds. At the age of fifty-three, with a hat tucked over a sad clown face, he is the only living European artist who Americans think has international status.

At the beginning of May, Beuys flies from Düsseldorf to Kennedy Airport, where an ambulance is waiting to whisk him away. Lying on a stretcher and wrapped in felt, he arrives at the Block Gallery. Under the title Coyote: I Like America and America Likes Me he carries off a three-day performance with a coyote, leaving far behind the most daring Happenings of the likes of Claes Oldenburg and Allan Kaprow.

A pilot in the Luftwaffe in the Second World War, Beuys was welcomed by farmers in the Ukraine after his Stuka was shot down by Soviet planes. He survived thanks to a litter of felt that protected him against the humidity and the cold. Ever since, he views felt as an energy
catalyzer. To him ambulances are symbolic of modern civilization, which produces only sick people.

The coyote is chosen because it was the favorite animal of the American Indian, who was all but exterminated. Protected by his felt overcoat and equipped with a cane, Beuys keeps a watchful eye on the wolflike mammal until little by little man and beast begin to live together. The coyote spent much of the time soiling copies of The Wall Street Journal, a symbol of American capitalism, which were on the ground for that purpose. The coyote eventually renounces its natural ferocity and ends up lying down with Beuys.The significance of the performance lies in the reconciliation of nature and culture. How much credit should be given to the taming talents of Joseph Beuys? A film of the event seems to reveal marks of a collar on the neck of the supposedly wild animal. As soon as the performance is over, the artist returns to Düsseldorf the way he arrived.

Beuys’ Coyote:

I Like America and America Likes Me, “performed” at the René Block Galler

Beuys’ Coyote:

I Like America and America Likes Me, “performed” at the René Block Galler

Beuys’ Coyote:

I Like America and America Likes Me, “performed” at the René Block Galler

Beuys’ Coyote:

I Like America and America Likes Me, “performed” at the René Block Galler

Beuys’ Coyote:

I Like America and America Likes Me, “performed” at the René Block Galler

Beuys’ Coyote:

I Like America and America Likes Me, “performed” at the René Block Galler

Beuys’ Coyote:

I Like America and America Likes Me, “performed” at the René Block Galler

Beuys’ Coyote:

I Like America and America Likes Me, “performed” at the René Block Galler

Joseph Beuys.
Hasengrab, 1964/1979.

Joseph Beuys.
The Pack (1969) is permanently installed at the Neue Galerie in Kassel since 1976. The moth-eaten suit hangs in the far end. Photo Arno Hensmanns, courtesy Neue Galerie.

How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (performance, 1965)
The work of Joseph Beuys was a permanent questioning of themes such as humanism, ecology, sociology, and especially anthroposophy. A disciple of Steiner, Beuys thought, like his master, that the spiritual phenomena could be studied with the same precision with which modern science explains the physical world.

How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare
The work of Joseph Beuys was a permanent questioning of themes such as humanism, ecology, sociology, and especially anthroposophy. A disciple of Steiner, Beuys thought, like his master, that the spiritual phenomena could be studied with the same precision with which modern science explains the physical world.

Joseph Beuys - ‘Homogenous infiltration for grand piano‘, 1966

This work is part of the act of ‘Infiltration Homogen für Konzertflügel action, the größte Komponist der Gegenwart ist das Contergankind’ (Homogeneous infiltration for grand piano concert, the greatest contemporary composer is the Contergan child).

Joseph Beuys.
7000 Oaks — City Forestation Instead of City Administration (German: 7000 Eichen — Stadtverwaldung statt Stadtverwaltung), one of German artist Joseph Beuys’ most famous and ambitious pieces of “Social Sculpture”, a public art project designed to heal the deep psychic scars of World War II as well as the ensuing industrial damage, engage citizens in urban regeneration over the life of the oak tree. 7000 basalt stones represented thousands of bodies piled after bombing of the city of Kessel. Planted next to each stone, which would remain static and gradually crumble, symbolizing death, was a tiny sapling, which would grow into a mighty oak, symbolizing life. Lasting between 1982 and 1987, the project has since inspired similar works throughout the world for environmental and social change.

Otto Muehl
1925 – 2013

Otto Muehl

(16 June 1925 – 26 May 2013) was an Austrian artist, who was known as one of the co-founders as well as a main participant of Viennese Actionism and for founding the Friedrichshof Commune.

In 1943, Muehl had to serve in the German Wehrmacht. There he registered for officer training. He was promoted to lieutenant, and in 1944 he took part on infantry battles in the course of the Ardennes Offensive.

After the war, he studied teaching German and History, and Pedagogy of Art at the Wiener Akademie der bildenden Künste.

In 1972 he founded the Friedrichshof Commune, which has been viewed by some as an authoritarian sect, and that existed for several years before falling apart in the 1990s. In 1991, Muehl was convicted of sexual offences with minors and drugs offences and sentenced to 7 years imprisonment. He was released in 1997, after serving six and a half years, and set up a smaller commune in Portugal. After his release, he also published his memoirs from the prison (Aus dem Gefängnis).

Otto Muehl

Yves Klein
1928 –1962

Yves Klein hurling himself into space.

Yves Klein 1928–1962
French artist chiefly noted for his blue monochrome paintings and for his audacious experiments with new techniques and new attitudes to art. Born in Nice; both his parents were painters. Began to paint in the late 1940s and formulated his first monochrome theories. Lived in Japan 1952–3. Became expert at judo, which he later taught in Spain and in Paris, where he lived from 1955. First public one-man exhibition at the Galerie des Solitaires, Paris, 1955. Early monochrome pictures in orange, yellow, pink, red and green, but from 1957 worked mainly in blue; also made from 1960 a number of monogolds, with gold leaf. Murals for the opera house at Gelsenkirchen 1957–9. Began in 1957 to experiment with fire paintings and ‘immaterial zones of sensibility’, and in 1958 with ‘Anthropométries’ made by a nude model pressing herself against the canvas under his direction. Member of the group Nouveaux Réalistes with Arman, Raysse, Spoerri, Tinguely, Pierre Restany and others 1960. Died in Paris of a heart attack, at the age of 34.”

Yves Klein.
Peinture de feu sans titre (F82), 1961

Yves Klein.
Imprint, 1961

Yves Klein.

PHOTOGRAPHER: PHIL POYNTER.
MODELS: BOBBY NICHOLAS, EMILY SENKO, ERIC WATTS, JULIA DUNSTALL, PETEY WRIGHT.

* * *

* * *

* * *

* * *

* * *

* * *

* * *

* * *

* * *

* * *

* * *

* * *

* * *

* * *

* * *

* * *

* * *

* * *

* * *

* * *

* * *

* * *

Yoko Ono
b.1933

Yoko Ono

(/ˈjoʊkoʊ ˈoʊnoʊ/ YOH-koh OH-noh; Japanese: 小野洋子, romanized: Ono Yōko, usually spelled in katakana オノ・ヨーコ; born February 18, 1933) is a Japanese multimedia artist, singer, songwriter, and peace activist. Her work also encompasses performance art and filmmaking.

Ono grew up in Tokyo and moved to New York City in 1952 to join her family. She became involved with New York City's downtown artists scene in the early 1960s, which included the Fluxus group, and became well known in 1969 when she married English musician John Lennon of the Beatles, with whom she would subsequently record as a duo in the Plastic Ono Band. The couple used their honeymoon as a stage for public protests against the Vietnam War. She and Lennon remained married until he was murdered in front of the couple's apartment building, the Dakota, on 8 December 1980. Together they had one son, Sean, who later also became a musician.

Ono began a career in popular music in 1969, forming the Plastic Ono Band with Lennon and producing a number of avant-garde music albums in the 1970s. She achieved commercial and critical success in 1980 with the chart-topping album Double Fantasy, a collaboration with Lennon that was released three weeks before his murder, winning the Grammy Award for Album of the Year. To date, she has had twelve number one singles on the US Dance charts, and in 2016 was named the 11th most successful dance club artist of all time by Billboard magazine. Many musicians have paid tribute to Ono as an artist in her own right and as a muse and icon, including Elvis Costello, the B-52's, Sonic Youth and Meredith Monk.

As Lennon's widow, Ono works to preserve his legacy. She funded the Strawberry Fields memorial in Manhattan's Central Park, the Imagine Peace Tower in Iceland,[8] and the John Lennon Museum in Saitama, Japan (which closed in 2010).[9] She has made significant philanthropic contributions to the arts, peace, disaster relief in Japan and the Philippines, and other such causes. In 2002, she inaugurated a biennial $50,000 LennonOno Grant for Peace. In 2012, she received the Dr. Rainer Hildebrandt Human Rights Award and co-founded the group Artists Against Fracking.

Ono Yōko

John Lennon and Yoko Ono standing in front of Maciunas' USA Surpasses all the Genocide Records!

Annie Leibovitz
John Lennon and Yoko Ono, The Dakota, New York

Lennon and Ono in 1980, shortly before his murder

Yoko Ono: Between the Sky and My Head: Touch Me III

Yoko Ono, touch me III (detail). Marble, wood, ceramic bowl, water, cloth.

Yoko Ono, touch me III (detail). Marble, wood, ceramic bowl, water, cloth.

Yoko Ono, touch me III (detail). Marble, wood, ceramic bowl, water, cloth.

Yoko Ono, touch me III (detail). Marble, wood, ceramic bowl, water, cloth.

Yoko Ono at Touch Me

Yoko Ono's Wish Trees for London at the "Yoko Ono To The Light"

Contributions to Yoko Ono's Wish Tree at MoMA, New York City

Yoko Ono
Painting to Be Stepped On

Yoko Ono, Eyeblink fluxusfilm no.15 (still), 1966. 16 mm film, black and white, silent. 0:35 minutes. Performed by Yoko Ono, 1966.
Image courtesy and © the artist

Yoko Ono, ENDANGERED SPECIES 2319–2322

Yoko Ono, MORNING BEAMS and Cleaning Piece – Riverbed

Yoko Ono, Play It By Trust, 1966. Wooden chess sets, tables, chairs. Installation view, MCA Australia

Yoko Ono, Play It By Trust, 1966. Wooden chess sets, tables, chairs. Installation view, MCA Australia

Yoko Ono, BALANCE PIECE, Installation view, War is Over! (if you want it): Yoko Ono, MCA

Yoko Ono, HELMETS - Pieces of Sky

Yoko Ono, touch me II

Yoko Ono: Between the Sky and My Head: Three Mounds and Skyladders

Yoko Ono
Painting To Shake Hands

Cut Piece, a Fluxus performance piece by Yoko Ono

On July 20, 1964, Yoko Ono performed her most famous performance art piece for the first time at the Yamaichi Concert Hall in Kyoto, Japan A few randomly selected audience members were asked to cut her clothes with scissors into pieces until Ono was completely naked. Ono sat alone cross-legged on the stage in her best clothes, her long hair draped over her shoulders. The audience took turns walking up to her on stage and joining her performance, cutting off pieces of her clothing with scissors. Her expression was kept poised and silenced while her body remained motionless. For the final stage of the performance, her body was fully exposed. The audience walked down the steps clutching the remnants of her clothes and they were allowed to keep these pieces with them. As a pioneering work, Ono certainly places the viewer in a very important position and is an important element of Cut Piece..