RIP Peter Weibel (1944 – 2023)
Tag Archives: Austria
RIP Hermann Nitsch (1938 – 2022)
Hermann Nitsch was an Austrian artist who is known for his transgressive performance art.
His seven minute short “Maria-Conception-Action: Hermann Nitsch” (1969) illustrates how the past is a foreign country.
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.
RIP Arik Brauer (1929 – 2021)
Arik Brauer was an Austrian artist, co-founder of the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism.
The work of Brauer strikes me as uninteresting.
Maybe I’m too harsh on this whole school of Vienna, but the only artist of that school who really impresses me is Johfra Bosschart.