Essay by Éric Alliez from Verksted #8: ISMS: Recuperating Political Radicality in Contemporary Art
1. Constructing the Political in Contemporary Art.

The book reflects the seminar, ISMS 1. which, organized by OCA, took place at the School of Architecture and Design in Oslo in April, 2006. This article cannot be reproduced without permission of OCA and the author.

On (Non-)Painting Considered as a Communist (Non-)Art ...: The Otto Muehl Case

Just look at the revolutions in History, how the wildest revolutionaries, as soon as their enemies were blown away, immediately ... put on their comfy slippers. Or just look at the proletarian revolution, once the resistance is eliminated, they are already bourgeois-ified. The painter may not take such a route, he must constantly struggle, and above all against him/herself, against his/her desire for something beautiful (kitschy, cheap, decorative), against his/her exhaustion that makes him/her satisfied with systems defined once and for all ...

Otto Muehl, Letter to Erika Stocker, 25 April, 1961

Noever: How would you describe your painting?

Muehl: Als aktionistische Konzeptmalerei.

—"Über den Urknall hinaus [Beyond the Big Bang]" (1998)

I. — Problem

There is a Muehl-problem which is not simply the hysterical concern of the Austrian 'authorities', past and present (as one could judge on the basis of the MAK retrospective that was arduously exhibited and curated by Peter Noever three years ago in Vienna¹: Otto Muehl remains the scapegoat of an entire nation). A Muehl-problem because, with regard to the Actionist Cause with which his name and work have been associated for the most widely held opinion, the contemporary Muehl of a 'return to painting' seems particularly ... regressive. We could even invoke a kind of precocious senility, since things have been turning over and 'returning' (in painting) since ... the beginning of the 70s — that is, at the very moment when the notion of Performance Art acquired, as if through its own dynamic, the status of a speech act for the new Happenings-Activities that were carried out in the name of a becoming-life of art and its becoming-non-art. Would Actionism have thus turned into Reactionism?

(We must remark, from the get go, that this 'problem' is not devoid of an analogy with the trajectory of Gunther Brus, who carried out his last performance in 1970, under the — multivalent — title of Attempt at a Break or Resistance / Endurance Test (Zerreißprobe). As proof — if proof be needed — that every break must be evaluated according to its displacement, Brus will conceive of an 'illustrated book', Auf dem Balkon Europas, and of the whole of his Bild-Dichtungen as 'a new kind of actionism'.² With regard to the first genre, Brus tried to explain: "Action is reaction. The actionist shits on an empty palette [Aktion ist Reaktion. Der Aktionist scheißt auf eine leere Palette]." But is the palette itself ever 'empty'?)

One thing could help to explain the other Reaction: Actions are not Happenings, as Muehl argues, after the scandal of Kunst und Revolution at the Vienna University (June 1968), in his Manopsychotic Institute Manifesto, read out during the 'festival' Happening and Fluxus organised by Harald Szeemann at Köln's Kunsthalle in November 1970. In this select setting, Muehl launched into what was perhaps the first 'fundamental' critique (or its critical anticipation) of Happening as Entertainment. In effect — the Father of Actionism seems to ask — what is our claim to introduce life into art and art into life worth, if it is there merely in order to remain on stage? What's the point of producing events, of proclaiming that Action is everywhere and everything is Action under the "unconditional surrender to the whirl of life (lebenßtrudel)"(Hermann Nitsch), if it is not in order to subject the very principle of organisation in our lives to a Politics of Experience ³ that is capable of destroying — within these lives — the "purulent truth"⁴ of the Culture of the present State-of-affairs, so as to radically dismantle the dyad of Art and Culture? Now, one is not going to attack the administrative State of the control over minds and bodies — the State in charge of a '2000-year old mental illness' — with the gender/sexuality that constitutes the pivot of bio-power, by showing (for fun) the Theatre of normal fucking ...That is the reason why: 'We from the Institute for Manopsychoticism view the Happening as totally middle-class art, as simply art. We want to overcome this imbecilic art ...'⁵ Because Action could initially be translated into Happening — according to an anecdote that put forward a painter('s) woman⁶ — and develop publicly, totally as such (thus receiving the name Totalaktionen after 1966) already beyond Happening⁷, this declaration will not be without its consequences for Action, now become ... parodic Ballet (Manopsychotisches Ballett I and II are the last important Actions by Muehl in 1970): the Institute will effectively transform itself into a Commune to realise the becoming-common/communist-life of the forces of liberation and experimentation. As Muehl will explain in 1975,⁸ hitherto Theoretical, Actionism thus becomes Practical, in order to truly make Art and Reality coincide (according to the declared finality of the Totalaktionen qua Totalrevolution). The nominalist ('bourgeois') risk of the avant-gardist dialectic of Art and Non-Art is dissolved in a new Life that, under Reichian influence, becomes Art — on condition of enucleating the Little Family of the Little Man⁹ (the framework of 'everyday life' of the "society of gnomes [Wichtelgesellschaft]") in a communitarian-actionist life-practice. A communist art in which community and singularity are no longer opposed to one another in the destruction of the existent. Let us leave to one side here the fact that 'it ends badly' (like every revolution, etc.) — the Actionist Analytic Commune (Aktions-Analytische Commune) broke up in the late 1980s — in order to return to our 'problem' (the return of painting, etc.), for it is indeed in this 'revolutionary' context, after agitprop collages and placards, after the détournement of Pop Art counter-culture in the series Persönlichkeiten 1967¹⁰, that the question poses itself in a 'wholly different way'.

Muehl, in a letter to Oswald Wiener from 1971:

...of course I don't have any fun anymore making art. I don't want to do any actions anymore either. I simply find it just too stupid to present something for people. Where do you think we are? I don't want to stop, but rather let everything spill into life. And I must say, it works, it works. I want to become a magician. That's more important to me. In the winter I want to work on the portfolio again; I look at everything much differently than a year ago. I had something against making pictures as something inferior. Now I know it is also a medium, a good occupation to get something out of, if it doesn't become the aim in life or even replace life. My actions were in danger of doing this.¹¹

To put it in other words: the first effect of the communist integration-disintegration of art in a liberated life is to free life from the (theoretical) fetishism of a medium for the sake of practices — whilst Actions tended instead (or were supposed to do so) to a forced fetishisation (and therefore to a theatricalisation) of the means of transgression with regard to the dominant Form of Art, which is to say the Painting-Form that modernism elevated to the standing of a pure formalism in its obstinate teleological endeavour of ... purifying painting. In this light, the material / materialist liberation of painting could even constitute a priority for (the new) Communism in its use value qua expressive-constructive archive of an 'intensivem Leben'... Isn't there a need, in any case, for a Copernican revolution of this kind in order to (re-)make (something like) Painting with Aktions — or How to Do Paintings with / from Aktions — as Muehl proposes to do, under the title of Aktionen-Mappe, for his portfolio of 12 silk-screen prints? In their unbridled paroxysm, these 12 Aktionen are in effect surrealised and rematerialised in a gore of psychophysical expressionism whose violence is anything but 'abstract' ... For struggle will not be figured within painting and restored to its native hysteria without a hyperrealism of deformation, breaking with/reversing [re(n)versant] its claim to opticality in a hallucinated voyeurism of bodies-drives — and consequently reducing the tradition of the 'informal' to the idealism of the transformation of the Painting-Form, in the gesturalised real of a pure surface (the sensational realism of deformation against the theatrical idealism of transformation à la Mathieu, Klein, etc ...). One will therefore refrain from translating into an Action Painting of the second type these ... Paintings out of Aktions, which reinvest the frenetic monstrosity of the darkest Picasso to unleash, already, an actively retrospective 'history of painting'. (In such a history, Gauguin's angel wields the devil's pitchfork.)

Having left prison with this dirty gallery of paintings [Fig. 1] which were to 'retroject' on the painting rails of the MAK (in 1998) the delirious effigies of an intimate Austro-fascism, Muehl declares in his interview with Peter Noever: 'aktionistische Konzeptmalerei'.¹²

II. — Regressus. Or How to Do Aktions with / from (Action) Paintings

Supposing that one can still perceive an interrogation in what today figures as the heading [banc-titre] for a 'period' (From Action Painting to Actionism), the reply inevitably brings back not just any painting whatever but the trance of Jackson Pollock in the film and photographs of Hans Namuth (1951). The performative dimension of the act of painting by means of these accessories 'dripping' onto the canvas stretched out on the ground could no longer be (re)integrated into any aesthetics of pure painting: in its gestural violence, this act incorporates an energetics that can only be articulated in terms of action painting, according to the concept made to (mis)measure by Harold Rosenberg to express the rapture of the eye and hand of the painter in a danced 'hand-to-hand' [corps-á-corps] combat with the canvas, which undoes the pictoriality of the picture to make an event¹³ of itself. In spite of what Clement Greenberg maintained, the canvas is no longer the concern of a play of forms that tend to increase the aesthetic possibilities of the medium in order to produce an ever stronger 'plenitude of presence'¹⁴ in the presentation of bi-dimensionality — rather, it is 'an arena in which to act'¹⁵, an 'arena' (the term is Pollock's) into which we're thrown by Namuth's black and white photos of Pollock, photos marked by strong contrasts and (almost) out of focus (blurred, as the Americans say). Pollock, who is less dancing his 'canvas' whilst painting it, than he is tracing what is no longer a form (even a form in movement) but the ('dripping') archive of his dance ... The activist consequence of this dispositif, with its paradoxical visibility, will be formulated, as we know, two years after the death of the painter, in 1956, by Allan Kaprow, as an acting out calling for the pure and simple abandonment of painting ('I mean the single, flat rectangle or oval as we know it') in favour of happenings and events capable of integrating the space and objects of our everyday life ('found in garbage cans, police files, hotel lobbies, seen in store windows and on the streets, and sensed in dreams and horrible accidents') in a catharsis of Art and the Artist.¹⁶ Everything happens, in the end, as though the myth of Pollock were fuelled by the conditions of his death: through the exhaustion and petrification of his magic gesture refusing repetition with/in painting, as much as in this 'horrible accident' that keeps him, dancing, on the threshold ... of Action. An Action which will always already be re-presented, discursively announced and machinically taken (the photo is 'taken': a photographic action) for it is the trace that contributes to make the work in this art of life whose performative authenticity is supposed to count as the interruption of that optic of pure seeing which bears, or which would bear, the name of 'painting'.

(How one 'problem' can hide another. For it should be patently evident that the definition which is thus used in order to set Painting aside is in turn ferociously ... formalist, i.e. caricaturally Greenbergian ... So that the 'painting' of Pollock would be disqualified because of this very mediumatic opticality that Greenberg never stopped forcing onto the Dripper, in order to 'cloister him in form', as Régis Michel pointedly reminds us.¹⁷ To rid ourselves of this effect of double bind we could, on the contrary, pose: (1) that Pollock's '?-paintings' are strangely environmental — as Kaprow had grasped — by reason of the mad identity of movement that they impose over-all, from the ground up, between the Expressionism of the Body and the Constructivism of the Brain: that is, a Body-Brain whose psycho-motive regime is absolutely non-optical; (2) that one touches here on what remains unthinkable for Greenberg, who 'made' do with the notion of Abstract Expressionism rather than appropriating it for himself — and for a good reason: Greenberg needs an Abstract Impressionism in order to complete his History, which is that of the purification of painting, a purification that inevitably begins as Impressionistic in its search for a 'purely' pictorial opticality, thereby reducing the materials of painting to a formal play; (3) inversely, that we confront here the first necessity of the violently materialist chaosmosis that Muehl will force 'modern' painting to undergo in order to extract it from the very-modernist, and always idealist, Painting-Form: to extirpate from it any optical impression — which will be turned over beyond all recognition in the most convulsive emphasis of voyeurism — in order to deliver painting over to a logic of sensation acting directly on the nervous system — this is the genesis of the Material-Bilder [Fig. 2], after one has placed the painting on the ground and buried one's hands in a paint that gets thicker and thicker — and thus to be directly connected to the vital power that disorganises the Eye in its ideality qua 'pictorial' formation in favour of a "pure manual space" which puts sensation (once again) into the body. 'Every smooth surface provokes me to defile it with intensive life,' Muehl declared: 'The surface of the painting is not some prison of formal, compulsive ideas, but rather the platter for intremistic orgies ...'¹⁸ Far from the impressionistic fogs and their 'mirage-like transcendence' rediscovered by the late Greenberg in the quasi-monochromes of Louis and Olitski, the obscene 'crossing' of the most ballsy [couillard] Cézanne with the least romantic Van Gogh imaginable will serve as the viaticum for a catastrophe-painting plunging any principle of visual sovereignty into its chaos [Vincent und Paul, 1984]. The Initiation [Fig. 3] is the crowning of the Magician ("I want to become a magician [Ich will Zauberer werden]... ").

Now, this Pollockian primal scene, as mediatised as it has been ritualised (and ceaselessly commented upon in its double détente), cannot fail to evoke the prehistory of Actionism in the account of it proposed by Otto Muehl. This account is centred on Muehl's discovery of 'psychomotoric expressionism (psychomotorischen Expressionismus)', which was practiced at the time in black and white by a twenty year-old 'living genius (lebende Genie)', Günther Brus, first met by Muehl in December 1960 and who was right away to become his 'master'. 'A wild overlapping of lines projected onto the canvas', paintings which 'were often five meters wide and three meters tall', manifesting an 'excess of creation' so 'total' that 'the walls of the apartment were covered in spatters and a mess of dried paint several centimetres thick covered the floor'. And the bombastic genius mixed word and gesture to attain — with his friend Alfons Schilling — ever more intense states of ecstasy: 'one must absolutely stop painting on the canvas, [...] and he showed everything in gestures (korperlich), but beside the canvas, far out, in the air'.¹⁹ So far out that it will no longer be possible to think this process 'in the sense of Pollock (nicht im Sinne von Pollock)', because the latter's idea of the painting cut out of the world — as Brus notes in his journal in the autumn of 1960 — must be radicalised such that 'this world should contain [...] not just marks, I've made, but rhythms, screams, sleep, bean, soup, long-haired dachshunds, typhoons, ceaseless melodies, etc. etc. etc.'. And to put forward the need for 'a more spontaneous medium' which will lead him 'perhaps' to sublate [aufgehoben] painting [Vielleicht werde ich einmal das Malen aufgehoben...]... That one must understand by this — aufhebung oblige — a harsh and painful dialectic founded on the traces of the brush and on what it makes one see is manifest in the will 'to transform the physical process of feeling into a physical process of seeing (ich versuche den physisch fülbaren Prozeß in einen physisch sichtbaren Prozeß)'.²⁰ That this 'physical process' is destined to carry into its visibility the Self-Painting (Selbstbemalung : Kopfbemalung and Handbemalung) of Brus is less important for us than the new departure planned by Muehl at the end of 1961²¹ — the 'great upheaval (umsturz in meine leben), as he puts it in his autobiography — with the reversal of the formula, immediately projected into a 'beyond Brus', which will only count (Muehl writes in 1977) as a 'beyond painting' to the extent that what is at stake is a 'new life-practice (einer neuen lebenspraxis)': it is necessary, inverting Brus's procedure, to take the risk of transforming the inevitably meta/physical process of the visible into a physical process of sensation. There is no other way to understand this 'decisive event' without which, he states, 'everything that happened to me afterwards would have been impossible'. It is articulated as follows: 'I put a canvas on the ground and dug my hands in an entirely emotional manner into the paint, which got thicker and thicker'. It is this physics of sensation that breaks the optical impetus of the Painting-Form by laying it on the ground, giving rise as an effect to the material-unconscious repetition of the Pollockian gesture (Ich legte ein bild auf die erde [Muehl] / Unconscious, I let it come through [Pollock])²² through which painting is now, in the prohibited sense, led to the Direct Action of the drive in its most volcanic excremental origin ... 'I had given up on producing a respectable artwork. [...] Thus I called these works material-pictures (materialbilder)'.²³ That these are nevertheless not 'simple' shits (even though, according to Artaud's verdict, "wherever it smells of shit, it smells of being"), that (to call things by their name) the most contemporary history of art (in 1961) is physically, energetically implicated (Pollock) and sensationally revivified-rematerialised by a Brain that passes through the Ass in order to subject every surface to the intensive life that it retains²⁴ — all of this can be easily verified: see-feel (and smell?) a certain Dispersion auf Hartfaserplatte, dated 1962 [see Fig. 2], whose Ohne Titel amounts to the most beautiful homage to Pollock. And, beginning from there, all the material canvases of the end of 1961/1962. This takes place at the same time as the action of the painter is no longer led back to the visibility of the expressionist-tachiste destruction of the surface and its 'glorious whiteness',²⁵ but rather to the sensible gesture in Matter = Painting, without brush or canvas, cutting the Gordian knot of the Painting-Form ('Unser Leitsatz ist : Materie = Farbe')²⁶ in a more effective manner than these 'destroyed' paintings (shown for the first time in June 1961 at the Wiener Secession) which precede it and invoke it as their sensational affective complement.²⁷ The most physical — i.e. the least metaphysical — destruction of the painting possible: reduced, with bare hands, to a packet of wood and canvas that will be tied up with string, or some barbed wire found in the street, before pouring over the whole thing whatever paint is at hand ...²⁸ This hand, these hands which will discover the vital emotion of pure sensation and thus realise, in a different way, Brus's wish (to paint with both hands) by plunging into the body-without-organs of painting (painting as matter) according to a hand-to-hand combat [corps-á-corps] so intense, so intensive, that one will soon have to free bodies (materially, actively or actionistically) from their representative 'economic' organisation.

Because Muehl tells us that the rest follows, in a creative process that for him has gone on uninterrupted ever since; because with him we know how to connect very quickly material paintings to material actions 'in which the human body becomes the painting itself',²⁹ in the manner of tableaux vivants buried beneath the flux-matters of painting — whose entire iconography is revisited through this savage materialism (Kreuzigung eines männlichen Körpers, Versumpfung einer Venus, Leda mit dem Schwan, Body Building ...); because we are also familiar with the entirely political stakes of this frenzied will to carry the image to its 'intremities' (according to the neologism coined by Muehl) in the white-obscure Austria of the Sixties, and to do so by destroying every form of lawful subject, any kind of interior life, recognising sub specie actionis only bodies and 'everything that can be realised by bodies', according to the leitmotiv of the Manifestos of material action, which could not fail to lead Direct Art (Direkte Kunst) into the 'document' pages of the tabloid press (and its promoters into prison — or exile) ... We find ourselves at the crossroads of two interpretations of Actionism:

— either Actionism, in its radicality, is a movement that must be evaluated under the aegis of the end of painting, and then one will indeed have to acknowledge that Muehl is from the start so paradoxical that his precocious return to painting qua support amounts to a final contradiction — and a final demonstration: by rejecting painting through materially pictorial means one continues to entertain its optical mythologies, so much so that the rupture amounts to a sublation (Aufhebung) whose dialectic inevitably leads back to the Same (easel painting). It should be no surprise then if Muehl's place is ... the first (that is to say, the last) — in accordance with a teleology which is so caricaturally anti-modernist that it inexorably leads, by way of self-torture as the 'last dramaturgy of the pictorial body, the sad body of the West' (Régis Michel, on Brus), to elect Schwarzkogler as the most radical of all the actionists because he knows how to project himself into a beyond of painting, above all without matter: 'He changes painting into photography. And this change of medium changes everything', our picturophobe concludes (the emphasis is his), not without regretting that 'in his work photography is still too aesthetic not to be pictorial'.³⁰ But would we thus touch upon the limits of Mediology — rather than of Actionism? (This is the position caricatured by Muehl in his You see Baby painting is out [Fig. 4].)

— or Actionism is de facto, amongst other things, one of the most radical contestations of Modernism, inasmuch as the latter never stopped idealising Art in a formalism and a fetishisation of the medium, culminating in its paradoxical optic / plastic demateri alisation in a paradigmatic pictorial aesthetics. Then it could be a question not of the End of Painting, but of the destruction of the Painting-Form and the disorganisation of its Images to free, in and from painting, the materials of drive [matières pulsionnelles] in an energetics of bodies that restores to them the fundamental hysteria of painting. That is what we could call, better than the concept of actionist painting, the actionist concept of painting, in order to underline that Viennese Actionism never ceased to develop itself in a cross/trans-media practice (including the fundamental role, for the Aktions, of photography and films³¹) over-investing what Deleuze called 'the special relationship of painting with hysteria".³²

III. — Aktionistische Konzeptmalerei

Let me propose here some practical notions capable of accounting for this material-vitalist (re)activa(c)tion of painting aimed at by Muehl in his 'actionist concept of painting'.

Desublimation. — 'Painting did not sublimate, but radicalised me', Muehl explains when he wants to communicate the intensive confrontation with painting that his imprisonment gave rise to.³³ Painting will no longer be a sublimating idealisation (formalism), it will provide matter for desublimation (materialism). Knowing that the actionist desublimation of its practice, which was there from the get-go (with the "aesthetic of the amateur" of the Illustration zum Zock-Manifest [1967], Uniferkl [1968]), will reach its zenith, and a zenith tout court according to Muehl — who perceives this period of the Aktionistische Konzeptmalerei as the 'most important' — when he was able to paint Austrian Justice from the inside because it took him for a ... medium ('[the] most important [is] the phase of actionist concept painting, in which Austrian justice itself becomes depicted by taking me as a medium]').³⁴ Through this mediumatic short-circuit which invests the entire practical philosophy of Viennese Actionism by radicalising its exercise, the desublimation of the painting becomes the reality condition for a self-painting of the disciplinary underside of the society of social control.

Eggs. — "The subject does not appear as a person or sexual being but as a body with certain properties. He is broken like an egg to reveal the yolk".³⁵ To destroy the Subject of the bio-power of the State-Form like one breaks eggs (Sex-Eier [2002], 13 Eier[2002]): for the yolk (30 Eier [1988]), to undo the organism qua 'economic' organisation of the labour of organs for the sake of a non-organic life, of a body-without-organs. Because 'the organism is not life, it imprisons it'. But doesn't the egg present precisely 'this state of the body "before" organic representation: axes and vectors, gradients, zones, kinetic movements and dynamic tendencies, in relation to which forms are contingent or accessory'?³⁶ The Material-Bilder are charged with this germinal life, relating it back to the terrestrial forces that vulcanise its rhizome. As for the paintings of the so-called 'SD Phase' (SD stands for Selbstdarstellung), with the obligatory (photographic) staging, they necessarily serve the egg ... au plat, fried, flat on the plate — and it is broken (and spills) differently (for example the glass of red wine poured over the white pages of a book: Inszeniertes Stilleben [1986]). Anyway: "Mein Napalm ist der Eidotter".

Sex (I). — It (re)commences as a hecatomb once the knife is buried in the vagina of the animal (this is perhaps the most murderous of the Aktionen-Mappe — ). The sacrifice sets out an archaeology of sexuality so monstrous that one finds oneself invoking a Gilles de Rais of painting [Fig. 5] recognising no law save for ... his own diabolical bestiality (Muehl's self-portrait as Antichrist of painting: Jesus kommt wieder [Jesus Comes Again]). Is Muehl trying to say that material-total actions were, all in all, a joyous overflowing and a street pantomime in comparison to what could be re-presented (in terms of danger) by an actionist painting set on showing for real the bestial virility buried in the 'healthy body of the people' and its genital sexuality? The ferocious rites of a patriarchal society that knows nothing of love but possession and destruction [Fig. 6] ... A kind of solemn warning summoning the 'insatiable and rutting Eye' of a Savage called Gauguin, delivered over to the crimson of the Great Fire. Because the acting out on live animal bodies (O Tannenbaum [O Christmas Tree], 1969; Oh Sensibility, 1970, parody of "Leda and the Swan"), as well as the hyperbolic performative film-project of the "slaughter of people" [...] on a voluntary basis"³⁷ (a post-conceptual speech act ...) returns to painting as its point of maximal application.

Détournment (of History). — The History of painting is the institutional calamity we are all familiar with: we will not return to it since it is indeed finished, save to remark how it has so often been ignorant of the Knowledge supposed to sustain its exercise. It is thus that one speaks of a Post-Impressionism, scholastically linking the names of Cézanne, Van Gogh and Gauguin — when one would instead have to see, three times, the singular manifestation of an Anti-Impressionism of sensation: sensation ceases to be representative (an 'impression'), it becomes real at the same time as hallucinatory, the reality of a body-without-organs which is the body of painting delivered over to its vital hysteria ... Duly em-ball-dened [couillardis/eacute;s], Cézanne, Van Gogh and Gauguin will be the first actors of the impastoed work [en 'pleine pâte'] of sensation on sensation through which Muehl seeks to unsettle [dérégler] this entire history. And this story comes from far away ...

Sex (2). — The fact that it fucks (fast) at any chance and in every corner with everything that nature can present in terms of 'genres' (but with a distinct preference for the little goats of Mister Vincent cannot let us forget what is essential: this is the body of painting given over to its libidinal machinery and its genital panic. And thus to subject the 'image of the body' to a 'polymorphous' perversity which attacks the social economy of representation ("I describe myself as polymorphously perverse [Ich bin Darsteller der polymorphen Perversität der Gesellschaft]. As an actor of polymorphous perversities. I do this quite deliberately [...] as an assault. My vocabulary is shit, urine, sperm, sexuality, sodomy ..."). To subject to the last outrages the Little Man who loves Painting.

Style(s). — Because the history of painting and the pictorial phenomenology that accompanies it equate the artist's novel to the formal singularity of a style sheet, the actionist-painter is obliged to incorporate (almost) all the styles (minus One: the Impressionist — bête comme un peintre, Duchamp says). In order to deform them in a retroactive effect [un effet d'après-coup] which amounts to the hysteresis of (the old) painting, thus projected — actionism oblige — into new (and scandalously polymorphous) conditions of life. Whence also the fact that the work does not evolve but displaces (itself) with the acts which it suggests and the libidinal communism that it claims to promote, so much so that the visitor to a Muehl retrospective (such as the recent one at the MAK in Vienna) could reasonably think that he is dealing with an insane group show.

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Notes

1. Otto Muehl. Leben / Kunst / Werk. Aktion, Utopie, Malerei 1960–2004. A first version of this paper has been published in German in the exhibition catalogue (Walther König, Köln, 2004), with the title "You see Baby painting is out ...".
2. G. Brus, "Statement" (1999), in Brus Muehl Nitsch Shwarzkogler, Writings of the Vienna Actionnists, ed. and transl. by M. Green, London, Atlas Press, 1999, p. 75 (one can also think of the previous Irrwich [Will o' the wisp] – 1970). In this text, written for the collection of documents by the Atlas Arkhive, Brus does not lose the opportunity to recall that the ex-Public Enemy Number 1 that he was too had to bear for a time the title of 'Reactionary of the month' ...
3. Politik der Erfahrung — according to the expression of Oswald Wiener in his introduction to H. Nitsch, Orgien Mysterien Theater, Darmstadt, 1969, p. 21. From Oswald Wiener, see his own "Manifesto": Die Verbesserung von Mitteleuropa, Roman [The Improvement of Central Europe, Novel], Reibek, Rowohlt, 1969. The Austrian writer and philosopher's leitmotiv is: "a revolt against language is a revolt against society [...] in cybernetic societies".
4. Text sheet, Destruktivismus, c. 1962–1963.
5. Manopsychotic Institute Manifesto, in Brus Muehl Nitsch Shwarzkogler, Writings of the Vienna Actionnists, op. cit., p. 121.
6. The Austrian artist Kiki Kogelnik, who lived with Sam Francis in New York and visited the studio at Perinetgasse in 1963, would have reacted with a loud 'Da ist ja ein Happening!' to the explanations given her by Otto Muehl of what was to be his first Aktion, entitled: Versumpfung einer Venus (Materialaktion Nr 1). According to the chronology established by Dieter Schwartz, it was on the basis of this meeting that Muehl and Nitsch would have begun to make use of the term Happening in order to qualify their Aktions. See Von der Aktionsmalerei zum Aktionismus, Wien 1960–1965, Klagenfurt, Ritter Verlag, 1988, p. 249.
7. See for example Muehl's commentary to the Zock Party in Paris on April 67: "the litterary crowd got drunk and started to brawl. They thought it was a happening. This regressive mob is hopeless" (Letter to Erika Stocker, May 30, 1967).
8. Text published in G. Brus's journal Die Schastrommel, n° 13. It is in 1973, date of creation of the Aktions-Analytische Commune (AA-Kommune am Friedrichsof), that FREE SEXUALITY and COLLECTIVE PROPERTY are promulgated. The first Kommune (in Praterstraße, Vienna) had emerged three years before, in 1970.
9. The Reichian reference is properly constitutive for the 'communist' Muehl. See again the Manifesto from the end of 1997 published in the catalogue of the exhibition Otto Muehl 7, Wien, Mak — Cantz, 1998, p. 81–3. There is no Self-Criticism forthcoming from the Reichian Communist.
10. See Christian Höller, "Popping Up and Zocking Off. The relationship between Agitprop and Pop in Otto Muehl's Works of the Late 1960s", in E. Badura-Triska, H. Klocker (eds), Otto Muehl. Aspekte einer Totalrevolution, Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Walther König, Köln, 2004, p. 74–83.
11. This extract is quoted in Wiener Aktionismus, Wien 1960–1971. H. Klocker (ed.), Klagenfurt, Ritter Verlag, 1989, p. 214–5. Oswald Wiener had written a parodic description of a Muehl Action in Die Verbesserung von Mitteleuropa, Roman ("gleichnis mit mike hammer. mit otto mühl", p. LXII-LXIII).
12. Muehl had introduced this formula in the exchange, already quoted in our epigraph, via these words of explanation: 'There [in jail] I transposed actionist ideas in paintings, painting became an actionist concept of art. He thereby answered Noever's inevitable 'you have returned to the easel painting ...’. See Otto Muehl 7, op. cit., p. 10–1.
13. This is the renowned declaration of Harold Rosenberg in his article from 1952, according to which 'What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event' (H. Rosenberg, 'The American Action Painters' in Tradition of the New, New York, Horizon Press, 1959, p. 59).
14. C. Greenberg, 'Symposium: Is the French Avant-Garde Overrated?' (1953), reprinted in Id., The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 3, Chicago-London, The University of Chicago Press, 1993, p. 156–7. It is in the name of this "plenitude of presence" that Greenberg rediscovers 'mutatis mutandis, in successful art of the past', that the critic argues in favour of the superiority of American abstract expressionism.
15. H. Rosenberg, ibid.
16. A. Kaprow, "The Legacy of Jackson Pollock", Art News 57, n° 6, October 1958.
17. R. Michel, La peinture comme crime, ou la part maudite de la modernité, Exhibition catalogue, Paris, Editions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 2001, p. 284.
18. The Intreme [booklet for the Festival of Psycho-physical naturalism, Vienna, 28 June 1963], in Brus Muehl Nitsch Schwarzkogler, Writings of the Vienna Actionists, op. cit., p. 81.
19. See O. Muehl, Weg aus dem Sumpf, Nuremberg, AA Verlag, 1977, "Aktionismus", p. 148–9.
20. G. Brus, Wiener Tagebüchern, 24 octobre 1960 quoted from Von der Aktionsmalerei zum Aktionismus, Wien 1960–1965, op. cit., p. 126–7.
21. This date was communicated to me by Otto Muehl himself. See note 27 below. In a letter to Erika Stocker from April 25, 1961, Muehl was criticizing Brus (and Schilling) for remaking constantly an image as a composition despite their constant preoccupation about the "elimination of the image and of the surface".
22. 'Bei Pollock kam es schließlich zur radikalsten Befreiung', one can read in a letter to Erika Stocker from January 14, 1962. In another letter to Erika dated January 8, 1961, Muehl described the realisation of 'his first tachiste painting (mein erstes tachistisches Bild)': 'Malte es, indem ich es auf dem Fußboden legte ...'.
23. O. Muehl, Weg aus dem Sumpf, op. cit., p. 150.
24. Note that first Versumpfung is a surface: Versumpfung einer Fläche; it is — according to the invitation card — the first part of the Fest des psycho-physischen Naturalismus concocted by Muehl and Nitsch in the autumn of '63, in which will be presented, as a third 'part', the Versumpfung einer Venus.
25. 'Ich vernichte die fläche, die herrlich weiße, und damit die alte ordnung, etc.', as Muehl writes in a letter to Erika Stocker from Spring 1961 in which the metaphor of the 'flugzeugmotor' ('ich tobe wie ein flugzeugmotor') recalls the description of 'Psychomotor Expressionism' by Brus (in Weg aus dem Sumpf): 'Die Farbe war beim Aufschlag aufs Bild manchmal wie ein Bombe explodiert'.
26. O. Muehl, letter to Erika Stocker, January 14, 1962.
27. I follow here the new chronology — different from the one offered in Weg aus dem Sumpf — that Otto Muehl proposed in response to my questions.
28. See O. Muehl, Weg aus dem Sumpf, op. cit., p. 151.
29. O. Muehl, Weg aus dem Sumpf, op. cit., p. 153. In a recent interview Muehl sums up as follows: 'I defined "material actionism" as painting developing itself beyond space', see V. Luc, Art à mort, Paris, Ed. Léo Scheer, 2002, p. 79.
30. R. Michel, La peinture comme crime, op. cit., p. 398 (on Brus); Id., Posséder et détruire. Stratégies sexuelles dans l'art d'Occident, Exhibition catalogue, Paris, Editions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 2000, p. 250 (on Schwarzkogler).
31. Many informations in H. Klocker, "Der zertr¨mmerte Spiegel", Wiener Aktionismus, Wien 1960–1971, op. cit., p. 89-112.
32. G. Deleuze, Francis Bacon. Logique de la sensation, Paris, Ed. de la Différence, 1981, p. 37.
33. See for example the interview with Virginie Luc in Art ´ mort, op. cit., p. 82–4.
34. See 'Über den Urknall hinaus. Otto Mühl im Interview mit Peter Noever', in Otto Muehl 7, op. cit., p. 12.
35. See O. Muehl, Ausgewählte Arbeiten 1963–1986, catalogue edited by Archiv des Wiener Aktionismus, Friedrichshof, 1986; quoted in Wiener Aktionismus, Wien 1960–1971, op. cit., p. 190.
36. G. Deleuze, Francis Bacon. Logique de la sensation, op. cit., p. 33 (my emphasis).
37. Otto Muehl, Supervisuell, 6 (1970). Explanation: "the slaughter of people *cannot remain a state monopoly. Only in one point does this differ from the state's machinery of slaughter: it's all on a voluntary basis."