GÜNTER BRUS AND HERMANN NITSCH

In collaboration with Galerie Heike Curtze of Vienna

7 October – 18 December 1999

Since their “Viennese Actionism” days in the 1960s, these two figureheads of contemporary Austrian art have each continued to create an intense and provocative body of work.

This exhibition, “curated by the artists themselves, traces a remarkable history of their involvement and devotion to their distinctive artistic visions. Rarely is this work shown in the American scene and seldom acknowledged is the enormous influence they both have had on present day performance, body art, and post-conceptual thought.

The exhibition consists of Hermann Nitsch’s early work through his “poured paintings” and through films recorded during the Actions. Also, a large series of photographs documenting his six-day Orgies-Mysteries Theatre (1998) where the ritualistic and mythical “plays” have been taking place since 1971. This grand expression of pure excess captures the essence of Nitsch’s Gesamtkunstwerk, or “total work of art.”

On view are Günter Brus’s rare Informel works, Actionist sketches, and a series of drawings including Self-Painting I and II (1965) and Walk in Vienna (1965). Other intimate drawings and ImagePoems depict the more recent literary and visual elements of his complex and analytical world. “Words and images grow wild in one place,” writes Brus, “they exist as dreams, as calls to actions, in a world where the gap between idea, word and act no longer exists.”

We are left to consider how Brus and Nitsch’s desire to experience the artistic process remains so authentic, and with this work displayed side by side perhaps the highlight of the exhibition is the way in which it evolved so differently.

PRESS

Show: Günter Brus and Hermann Nitsch
Publication: The New York Times
Writer: Ken Johnson
Date: 11.26.99

Judging by the documentary photographs and videos and the altar-like painting installations here, it is difficult to imagine anyone being deeply moved by the bloody paganistic spectacles orchestrated by Hermann Nitsch, the Austrian performance guru.
The videos and grids of photographs present views of a six-day event held last year in Prinzendorf, the town where Mr. Nitsch lives in a castle. Members of his Orgies-Mysteries Theater are tied naked to crosses, paraded in public by others dresses in white and at certain points covered in the blood and guts of ritually slaughtered cows. In the videos Mr. Nitsch, a round, professional man with a bushy gray beard, stands around supervising the action.
The event is supposed to produce Dionysian ecstasy in its participants, though there is no way to tell whether any such thing actually happens. Mr. Nitsch’s large canvases, slathered with blood and red or purple paint and juxtaposed with Roman Catholic vestments and breakers of red or yellow liquid, seem not powerfully symbolic but inert theatrical backdrops.
Günter Brus, another Austrian, extremist performances in the 1960s involving bodily wastes and abjection, some of which are presented here by documentary photographs. Also on view are some of this early Abstract Expressionist drawings and more recent drawings combining Romantic imagery and verbal poetry. Perhaps because so much is lost in the translation to a New York Gallery, the level of transgressive or transcendentalleny (?) generated by these pioneering avant-gardists here is disappointing low.

Show: Günter Brus and Hermann Nitsch
Publication: Time Out
Writer: Martha Schwendener
Date: 12.09.99

What’s a little elephant dung on a portrait of the Virgin Mary when you can have paintings made with the offal of freshly slaughtered pigs, or performances in which people have sex underneath cow carcasses as bovine blood streams down upon them? Such is the case with this mini retrospective of Günter Brus and Hermann Nitsch, which surveys more than 30 years of work by these two original of members of the Viennese Actionist group. If you’re looking for a raw sensationalism, look no further; these guys make YBAs of “SENSATION” look tame.
The excess integral to certain strains of performance art in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s is well known (take Chris Burden’s infamous gunshot to the arm, for example), but the Actionists took body art to even greater extremes. Like Burden, they were interested in certain aspects of endurance as a basis for performing, but they were also enamored of rituals that recalled the mystery cults of Ancient Greece and Rome.
While Brus and Nitsch are the only Actionist represented, their milieu is clearly evoked in drawings and paintings, and especially in photos and videos that document various performances. Equally intriguing, though, are the art-historical lineages suggested by the work: Brus’s drawings resemble Egon Schiele’s, while Nitsch is obviously indebted to Beuys. But of the two artists, Nitsch steals the show.
Here, he contributes large-scale paintings made with blood and acrylic on canvas. There are also still images and taped segments of his Orgies-Mysteries Theater, a six-day “action” from 1998 in which naked people performed solemn-looking rituals with bloody animals, grapes or each other.
It’s surprising to find Nitsch has carried on with the “Mysteries Theater” series—and disappointing, too. His recent performance looks more like a sick parody of the Dionysian ‘60s and ‘70s than a substantive exploration of ritual; it’s a Renaissance Faire-gone-awry turned into a Ken Russell movie. (The only thing missing is a good burning at the stake). The Actionists’ importance to a specific period in recent art history is undeniable. But their orgiastic, ritualistic performances-which seemed so powerful three decades ago-work better today as historical curiosities than as art.

Show: Günter Brus and Hermann Nitsch
Publication: NYArts
Writer: Joyce Korot

Little known and rarely shown in America is the work of Günter Brus and Hermann Nitsch, whose enormous influence on performance, body art and post conceptual thought can hardly be calculated, and whose work anticipated that of such notables as Chris Burden, Bruce Nauman and Carolee Schneeman.
Since the heyday of their “Viennese Actionism” in the 1960’s, these two Austrian artists expanded the boundaries of art from being an object to make into being something that one becomes. Their actions delved into the deepest realms of extreme. Self-mutilation, Christian ritual, pagan sacrificial rites on animal carcasses, blood, entrails and bodily fluids—urine, feces, semen—all figured as mediums through which their art moved from canvas to the body as stage (and which, not surprisingly at times, moved the artists themselves from their public performances into jail).
Conceptually complex—steeped in philosophical, psychological and religious referenced—this exhibition is powerful stuff. Hard to look at, with its eviscerated carcasses and mutilations in the name of art, it is not for the squeamish. Inevitable comparison is to the Brooklyn Museum’s Sensation exhibition, which pales by contrast into a silly school yard prank.

Show: GÜNTER BRUS and HERMANN NITSCH
Publication: Austria Kultur
Writer: Gunter Vogl
Date: 05.99

“The exhibition “Günter Brus – Hermann Nitsch in the White Box” provides an insight into the works of two figureheads of contemporary Austrian art. It will be shown in New York starting on October 8, and will then travel to Philadelphia in early 2000.
Günter Brus and Hermann Nistsch share a common interest in Viennese Actionism. This avant-garde movement can be considered a more radical form of a happening, with specific requirements to its location and more pronounced allusions to religion and ritual. During the conception phase of this show, curators made clear how the parameters established by early Actionism informed the artists’ later work. It will be particularly interesting to present this show in New York, where Allan Kaprow, Al Hansen, Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, and Red Grooms staged important happenings in the early 1960s. Actionism and happenings are linked by the artists’ desire to experience the artistic process intensively and to simultaneously heighten their sensuality and increase their self-knowledge. The work of the international artistic community which strove to fuse art with life in the 1960s has borne fruit today. Happenings and Viennese Actionism laid the groundwork for achieving this goal.
The exhibition will document Hermann Nitsch’s early work through his “poured paintings,” which are partly on loan from private collections, and through films shot during the actions. Viewers will be able to better understand Günter Brus’s oeuvre through his rare informal works, actionist sketches, and series of drawings such as Ana (1964), Self-Painting I and II (1965) or Walk in Vienna (1965). With Actionism as a common denominator for the two artists, the exhibition highlights how Brus and Nitsch evolved in different ways. Photographs play a special role by both documenting ephemeral artistic expressions, and as works of art in their own right.
The Photographs of a six-day mystery play in Prinzendorf in 1998, the culmination of Hermann Nitsch’s work to date, perfectly wed ephemerality and art. With its interplay between visual art, poetry, music, and architecture, the open concept of the orgymystery theater (O.M. Theater) tries to achieve the ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk. Ever since Nitsch purchased the Prinzendorf Mansion in 1971, he has used this location to perform his O.M. Theater, which makes ample reference to drama, religion, myths, and ritual.
Individual artworks become relics in Hermann Nitsch’s oeuvre and constitute an integral part of the “Action” itself. They provide links to his cyclical work and serve as material components of a higher spiritual concept. The vehement expression and procession-like character of the poured paintings becomes apparent through color as a concrete and non-figurative substance.
Nitsch’s grand gestures stand in stark contrast to the fateful poetry which informs Günter Brus’s intimate drawing. In both cases, the artists’ work is marked by strong visual content and a desire to depict universal truths.
Günter Brus’s choice of themes reveals this two-fold aim: his engigmatic visual world revolves around the poles of life—birth and death—as well as individual iconography and mythology with references to literature and art history. All these elements assume a form which is partly dramatic and playful, but never ceases to surprise the viewer. The underlying presence of the abyss increases the complexity of a each drawing. In Brus’s work, writing becomes a hint, complementing and counteracting the drawings.
Throughout Günter Brus’s artistic career, the body has been used as a last resort, as a conditio sine qua non. Its lines carry energy, precise and analytical at one point, and free-flowing at another. In addition to single drawings in his preferred techniques of crayon and colored pencil he has also created multi-part visual poems, which are coherent both on form and content. They will also be shown at the exhibition. The dialectic relationship between the visual and the literary elements in Günter Brus and Hermann Nitsch in the White Box Gallery in New York and Philadelphia aims at increasing awareness about contemporary Austrian art. To this end, round table discussions with leading figures in the art and media world will also take place.

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