Otto Mühl (1925 - )
Related: 1960s - Actionism - Vienna - performance art
Films: Sweet Movie (1974)
Biography
Otto Muehl, one of the co-founders of Viennese Actionism, was born on 16 June 1925 in Grodnau, Austria. He is a radical provocateur whose main stations include actionism and the Friedrichshof Commune, a new commune experiment in the Algarve, Portugal since 1997. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Muehl [Feb 2005]Profile
For over four decades, Mühl’s work has been the subject of agitated, often venomous debate in Germany, Austria, and France, but has become in North America — to use Mühl’s own word — a “vortex” of speculation, misinformation, and tenebrific rumor, to which I have fallen victim as much as anyone else. I am no expert in actionism — if I were, I would have little to discover here, and little interest in this encounter. Not having been privy to the politico-artistic throes of 1960s Austria, my first impressions of Mühl came mostly from Amos Vogel’s seminal picture-book cum leftist primer Film As A Subversive Art (1974), and from Mühl’s autobiographical appearance in Dusan Makavejev’s Sweet Movie (1975). Yet Vogel unintentionally subverts his own intentions at subversion by insisting all art conform to the narrow assumptions of humanism, and Mühl is quick to distance himself from Sweet Movie, whose sensationalism he dismisses as “downright kitsch.” -- Andrew Grossman http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/38/muhl1.htm [May 2004]
‘Aktionen’
In 1970 Otto Mühl founded a commune in Vienna. The experiment was an offshoot of the ‘Aktionismus’, a Viennese version of the happenings in New York, lead by meanwhile legendary artists such as Nitsch, Schwarzkogler, and Brus. The happenings – in German ‘Aktionen’ – were an effort to lift all kinds of taboo in art. Many an artist proceeded to complement the revolution in art with a revolution in life itself. Life as the ultimate work of art, so to speak. -- Stefan Beyst, http://d-sites.net/english/m%C3%BChl.htm [Aug 2004]
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