Günter Brus

A performance in which Gunter Brus writhed on a floor covered in a viscous white paint. Though Brus did not harm himself, violence and damage are everywhere suggested the black painted line dividing his body seems to split him open, sludge-like paint covers his eyes and seeps into his mouth, and a corkscrew ominously points toward his face.

The first six images of Wiener Spaziergang (Viennese Stroll, 1965), for example, are ghoulishly amusing. Painted white, with a jagged slash painted through the middle of his body, Brus takes a walk through Vienna’s historical centre. He is documented walking past smart storefronts and tourist hotspots, is gawped at by fussy locals, and finally booked and firmly rebuked by a stern-faced police officer. The later images are much more troubling. Lying prone, corpselike, on a table surrounded by scalpels, Brus claws at his sludge-covered face and appears to stab himself in the thigh. He eventually falls and drags himself, agonized, across the floor.

In “Körperanalyse” (Body Analysis) in 1968, the artist (Günter Brus) urinated in front of an audience, cut his skin with a razor blade, and masturbated to the accompaniment of the Austrian national anthem.

A portrait of the Austrian avant-garde artist Otto Mühl/Muehl (1925-2013), whose work combined sex, violence, gastronomy and bodily effluence with unbridled abandon.

Four men, one woman and a cat in a room. The men drink and discuss. Things get a bit violent. The masochist acts out his desires by himself. Random fuss and sex occurs. Suddenly the woman gets her baby to change diapers. Odd things around the child. The cat gets abused. This is Otto Muehl going Fassbinder.

About a group of graduates from Cambridge University who go back to their college to visit a friend who has stayed on there. Otto Muehl founded a community of artists in Vienna in 1970 with the aim of exploring a completely free life practice. Since 1972, this society experiment at the Friedrichshof in Burgenland, 60 kilometers from Vienna, further developed. From the mid-1970s, other municipalities were founded in 30 European cities. At Friedrichshof itself lived at times up to 240 members and visitors.

‘Kunst & Revolution is a documentation on the famous action known as the “filthy uni mess”, which led to a jury court trial. I only had a few metres of film with me and they were quickly spent, but still the film gives one a rough impression of the events. As a whole mythology quickly arose around the event, I altered the material to counteract this effect (through repetition, and adding other material, for instance from a film about keeping dogs, and my own leftover footage from the Muehl action number 54 ‘Im Freudenauer Wasser’).’ In film 16 of his anthology Ernst Schmidt Jr. documented the actions of Günter Brus, Otto Muehl, Peter Weibel and Oswald Wiener.

An experimental and bizarre shooting of an association between the sexes.