The opening exhibition of the WAM offers a profound insight into the complex and multifaceted developments of Vienna Actionism in its core period between the 1960s.
Seven chapters, which divide the exhibition into several sections, illuminate in detail the most important facets of what is still the most radical art movement of the 20th century.

The main representatives of this movement were Günter Brus, Otto Muehl, Hermann Nitsch and Rudolf Schwarzkogler. Their basic concern was a direct and taboo-free confrontation with sensual and psychological experiences in an artistically intensified manner. To this end, they worked with bodies, objects and substances in the form of actions in space and time. This placed them in the context of international developments such as Pop Art, Nouveau Realisme or the Fluxus and Happening movements, which once again made the concrete reality of life the subject of artistic
creation, after abstraction had previously dominated.

All four artists began as painters and transcended the panel painting through an increasingly sprawling use of materials and the inclusion of objects, before finally abandoning it in favor of actions. They did not see this as overcoming painting, but as a new, expanded form of it, in which they never abandoned their pictorial thinking. In terms of content, Vienna Actionism focused on the human body and psyche. This included physical functions that are socially tabooed or even ostracized, such as urination, defecation or sexuality, as well as unacknowledged or repressed psychological drives and (primal) fears, such as aggression, destruction, fear of injury or death. The artists understood this as an act of creating awareness, but also of rebellion against social restrictions and mechanisms of repression.

This had a basis in the theories of psychoanalysis, which the Actionists read intensively, particularly those of Sigmund Freud, C. G. Jung and, in Muehl’s case, Wilhelm Reich. The central concerns of abreaction and catharsis as ways of discharging, overcoming and eliminating pent-up drives also stemmed from psychoanalytical ideas. All four aimed for purifying and healing, i.e. therapeutic, effects with their art.

In this way, Vienna Actionism reacted to the socio-cultural situation in post-war Austria, which was characterized by a pronounced conservatism of values and also had long suppressed the need to come to terms with the country‘s role as part of National Socialist Germany.

Curators: Eva Badura-Triska, Julia Moebus-Puck