Otto Muehl – Oh Sensibility (1970)
My response to this was what the fuck is even going on here? (See also: is that a real live fucking goose?)
I
was intrigued enough to look into this a bit and my initial curiosity
now makes sense. It seems Muehl was–at least initially–a sculptor
preoccupied with “overcom[ing] easel painting by representing its destruction process.”
That was the early 60s, by the 70s, Muehl shifted his efforts so that they were more inline with NY style happenings–a
very particular flavor of performance art. (I won’t pretend that much
of it hasn’t dated poorly but I do think that young artists–especially
photographers/image makers–do themselves a service by becoming familiar
with the tradition.)
Muehl pursued what he called Viennese
Actionism–essentially happenings in and around Vienna. (The influence
of Fluxus on Viennese Actionsim should absolutely be noted–as the
action from which the above photo emerged was apparently filmed. You can
watch it here.
Full disclosure: I’ve tried to watch it twice and just can’t get beyond
the pantomine of a painfully self-conscious orgy aspect of it.)
A
decade later he renounced Viennese Actionism as painfully bourgeois (a
paraphrase) and began the Friedrichshof commune–where he behaved more
or less like a authoritarian David Koresh.
His behavior at the
commune landed him in jail in the 1990s. The commune he built fell apart
and by the time he was released from prison, he moved to another
commune in Portugal.
Acetylene Eyes 