Zock Exercises

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.

After the violent death of a prostitute, her father tries to find the people who are responsible for the fall of the young woman.

Based on a Muehl Happening. The almost convulsive use of juxtaposition reappears here, but the captured gesture assumes a more erotic sensitivity, though the "action" itself was primarily a gradual destruction of the erotic.

The winner of the Miss World Virginity contest marries, escapes from her masochistic husband and ends up involved in a world of debauchery.

Communal property, free sexuality, dissolution of the nuclear family - these were the basic principles of the Friedrichshof, the largest commune in Europe founded by the Viennese Actionist Otto Muehl in the 1970's. Because of these principles Paul-Julien Robert, who was born into this commune, for a long time didn't know who was his biological father.

Experimental film depicting military service in a grotesque way.

A subversive and experimental film by Otto Muehl.

Four young men affected by psychological motorcar reactions and effluents that get more excited, crazy and freaked out as times passes.

I set my sights on the human body and realized things, were moving at last, during my first material action, I soiled a female body with mud, paint, rubbish and paste, and tied it up in old rags and ropes dipped in mud. —Otto Mühl

Another try by the Viennese actionists around Otto Mühl, trying to shock the middle-class bourgeoisie with all sorts of explicit sexual and excretory processes.

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.

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.

Home movies shot on Super 8mm by W+B Hein over 10 years.

In May 1965, Ernst Schmidt Jr. films the Otto Muehl performances Rumpsti Pumsti and Body Building. In this period Muehl conceives his actionist works almost exclusively for photographic and film documentation. The necessity of a spontaneous confrontation with the public, which plays a major role in Muehl's later actions, does not apply to these works.

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.