The performance is a combination of a sadomasochistic performance, artsploitation and carnography.
A typical scene from Herman Nitsch’s happenings featured cruelty, sexuality, blood and violence.
In the “Maria-Conception-Action: Hermann Nitsch” a young women is crucified and defiled with a disemboweled lamb carcass.
That film is not featured on YouTube but it can be faintly seen on footage of a concert by the band Concrete Flesh.
The closest I ever came to witnessing a spectacle like this is, is seeing Tier Mon (1988) by La Fura dels Baus in Antwerp when I was 23. And then there was Abattoir Fermé, the Belgian theater group whose aesthetics sometimes flirt somewhat with that of Nitsch.
Peter Fischli & David Weiss’s work is unclassifiable. Which is a good thing. Yet despite this quality of being genre-defying, their work is defined by playfulness and humor absent from 90% of contemporary art.
I rather enjoy wit and humor in art.
The absence thereof, seriousness, is, in my view, one of the faultlines in 20th century art. Modernism, for example, was reigned by a detrimental “cult of seriousness”.
As I said in the title of this post, The Way Things Go is ‘World Art Classic’ #463. Its alphabetical neighbors are The Unswept Floor, a second century AD mosaic and The Witch by Salvator Rosa.
I’ve always had mixed feelings about the work and person of Marina Abramović, but yesterday, while leafing through a book titled Love I stumbled upon a photo of Rest Energy, a 1980 performance piece by Marina and Ulay.
I was immediately taken by it.
I’d seen it before, but had forgotten about it.
I do think it works better as a photo than as a film.