what's that smell?

March 16, 2006 10:45 AM

Blood & Bacchanalia: Hermann Nitsch and the Viennese Aktionists (links are NSFW). High weirdness and ritual debauchery, 1960s Austrian style.
posted by visit beautiful mount weather! (18 comments total)

Nitsch has a website.
posted by unmake at 10:54 AM on March 16, 2006

thanks unmake, I was going to use that site but translating it to English didn't seem to work so well.
posted by visit beautiful mount weather! at 11:01 AM on March 16, 2006

Looks like someone was working out their "my daddy was a nazi" issues to me.
posted by tula at 11:15 AM on March 16, 2006

They made punk look like Impressionism. Nice post vbmw.
posted by bardic at 11:24 AM on March 16, 2006

Looks like a big waste of what good have been a perfectly good barbecue to me.
posted by stenseng at 11:33 AM on March 16, 2006

Fantastic post. Thanks.
posted by loquacious at 11:39 AM on March 16, 2006

Nice post.

These guys really do make most performance art look pretty pedestrian by comparison. You used to be able to buy a great two DVD(R) set of Vienna Actionist movies at 5 Minutes To Live, but it seems to be absent from their catalogue now. I see that it is still available at Pimpadelic Wonderland however.

Not recommended for people eating food or those put off by swan damage (I can't look at these links at work so I'm going to assume by the URLs that this wasn't covered).
posted by stinkycheese at 12:21 PM on March 16, 2006

I have the 5tml dvd-r and though the quality is pretty low, the material is outstanding. If you're interested in more of this stuff, Kurt Kren was the unofficial documentarian of the Actionists. A number of his films have recently been released on what looks to be a very nice DVD, which I haven't seen yet but I'm really looking forward to.

Chris Burden was a New Yorker who performed some pretty extreme actions several years later. More contemporary was Bob Flanagan [very NSFW quicktime]. Sick is a great documentary, if you haven't seen it (and it's widely available, as opposed to all this other stuff).
posted by peptide at 1:34 PM on March 16, 2006

oh, and there's also this absolutely phenomenal book.
posted by peptide at 1:37 PM on March 16, 2006

Watching a Günter Brus video in a museum was one of the more powerful art experiences I had in 2005. Here's a picture of him in a flickr-stream that seems to have a lot of Aktionisten.
posted by jann at 1:40 PM on March 16, 2006

or maybe just a few.
posted by jann at 1:43 PM on March 16, 2006

Thanks for mentioning Bob Flanagan, peptide. "Sick" is actually a quite touching film despite the 'nail-through-penis' shot that came OUT OF NOWHERE to be permanently ingrained in my psyche . . . ouch.
posted by visit beautiful mount weather! at 2:19 PM on March 16, 2006

anyone know the title of the dvd set?? i got the chance to see an exhibit of some of these films at a gallery in atlanta a few years ago and would love to revisit them.
posted by visit beautiful mount weather! at 2:23 PM on March 16, 2006

never mind - just found them!
posted by visit beautiful mount weather! at 2:27 PM on March 16, 2006

Along with Burden, some other artists who I think owe a fair amount to these guys:

Bruce Nauman
Vito Acconci (who has a great site--no idea)
Carolee Schneemann (slightly NSFW)
posted by bardic at 2:50 PM on March 16, 2006

those links are great, thanks bardic. Meat Joy indeed . . .
posted by visit beautiful mount weather! at 3:20 PM on March 16, 2006

Jean Louis Costes and his crew did a US tour in 2003. It was memorable. [all links NSFW]

It's probably not exactly the same thing, but it smelled the same to me.
posted by intermod at 4:25 AM on March 17, 2006

Intermod: I know a guy who toured the US with Costes - in the same van.... *sniff* uggghhhhh.
posted by visit beautiful mount weather! at 5:15 PM on March 17, 2006