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An Actionist Begins to Sing
An Interview with Otto Mühl
PART TWO: AN INTERVIEW WITH OTTO MÜHL
Translated from the German by Robert M. Grossman
Andrew Grossman: In Germany in the late 1980s, and then in the United States in the late 1990s, there was a revived interest in your art, which prompted a number of museum showings and publications about your work. What caused this resurgence of interest?
Otto Mühl: It's really simple. If something appears too bold or outrageous to the public, it needs its time. Regis Michel, who prepared my exhibitions in the Louvre, said that four or five years ago, it would have been impossible to exhibit Mühl either in the Louvre or at the Pompidou Center. Now the time is ripe. I had two exhibitions in the Louvre: the first was in April 2000, with the provocative title "Possess and Destroy: Sexual Strategies of the Art of the Occident."9 I was exhibited alongside Freud, Michelangelo, Genet, Poussin, David, Géricault, Delacroix, Ingres, Degas, Picasso, Duchamp, Artaud, and Yves Klein.
The title is sensationalistic. Sexual strategies are strategies used to gain attention. I don´t relate the title to art but to society. Criticism in art appears as destruction. But art is a long way from murder. Modern art directs itself against old values.
"The artist clears away taboos.
What really shocks is being confronted."
Muhl's painting 11 September 2001
The second exhibition, "Painting as Crime"10 — the title comes from a manifesto by Rudolf Schwarzkogler — was in the Fall of 2001. This concept has its roots in surrealism. Breton writes in his surrealist manifesto that it would be a surrealistic act to go out on the street and shoot passersby at random. The Dadaists tried to eliminate art. But I cannot recall that the Dadaists were criminal, although it was very dangerous to be around them — they actually shot at the public in their plays. I don't identify that with my actionism. After the First World War, people expressed outrage against society, because millions of human beings were killed. No one was making art. The artists turned to destruction. Everything was possible.
After the Second World War, Tachism came on strong. Marcel Duchamp played an important role, just as he did in object art. He simply exhibited a bicycle or a urinal and wrote underneath it: "Fountain." In art, the rules are broken — I'm all for that.
An important event for actionism occurred in 1966: "DIAS," the "Destruction in Art Symposium" in London. Destruction within art, but not outside it. Hitler wanted to become an artist, but he destroyed in real life. He was never an artist. If something is too potent, it is rejected vehemently, as with Van Gogh and Cezanne. At first they were placed ad acta. No one was interested in them. Marcel Duchamp needed time, and I have also taken a very long time.
It is probably a cliché to say that there is a tension in, or irony about, the idea of Actionist art being "legitimized" by bourgeois institutions such as museums, etc. Have you long since reconciled this tension, or do you still have misgivings about your work becoming part of the canonical politics of the museum?
This assertion is a total misrepresentation of reality. I make art because I enjoy it, and naturally, I also want to get something from it. I must live from it. I am no idealist. After ten years of actionism I gave it up and continued it in reality as social transformation. By that I mean making life into a work of art. After the dissolution of my marriage, I founded the commune. Not to save the world, but rather out of "self-interest" (Max Stirner).11 I am an egoist who is not materially, but idealistically oriented. My life should be perfect, have direction, be an artwork.
I have nothing against earning money through art. It is a fallacy that someone starves to death willingly. But I say, whoever works for a salary turns himself into a slave, just as anyone who accepts employment in the state apparatus sells himself. Here Marx's comment is valid: "Being (existence) defines consciousness." What you do for a living, that is who you are.
Bodybuilding (1965)
I need art for myself. It is my spiritual and ethical bodybuilding. I have been making art for 50 years and have never allowed myself to be corrupted. Quite the opposite, I was locked up. That would no longer be possible today after two exhibitions at the Louvre.
You had written that in 1961, as a young painter, you realized that the act of "daubing a canvas is itself half-witted," whereupon you "fetched a kitchen knife, slashed the canvas, tore it apart with both hands," and then "set [your] sights on the human body." Can you explain how this epiphany came about? Was the idea of focusing on sculptural forms a personal, spiritual transformation, or did this idea come about through the influence of other artists?
It was not completely my invention. There was already Tachism. Picasso and Matisse joked that every ape could perform this style of painting. But here it is not a question of formal criteria, but energy. I would view the destruction of the canvas in 1961 as my big bang. That´s when I started to exist as an artist. There are forerunners like Lucio Fontana, Pol Bury, Milares. Their works are too aesthetic for me. I worked a lot with material — with plaster, cement, ashes, and cigarette butts. At that time I went into the artist's café Hawelka in Vienna, where cigarette butts were collected in milk cans to be taken to the garbage tip. I fetched two of these buckets and worked them into a picture. That work actually still exists, but doesn't belong to me. While I worked, I felt "IT" build up inside me and the emotions exploded. I had opened the gates of the unconscious. It streamed out. I knew it was good, but I didn´t know how to continue. Sometime later, I painted again tachistically, with insane energy. What was left afterwards looked rather like a pattern. I see something similar in Jackson Pollock when he drips. It is decorative, and doesn´t reflect intentions. I went into the kitchen, took a knife and thought: "Now I will try it and go a step further." I slit the canvas open, tore it to shreds, and knotted it together; but that was not enough for me. I lay the picture on the floor, trampled the wedge frame underfoot, and hacked and smashed it to pieces with an axe. Nothing was left of the picture. It was a shattered frame, little more than wooden sticks wrapped up in the canvas. I put more material on it. That could have remained without consequences. But the most important thing was the evolution in my thinking. I had neither destroyed a picture nor art itself. No trace. I was merely going in another direction — and arrived at sculpture.
On the next day, I was riding on my bicycle. A piece of barbed wire lay on the ground. I picked it up, took it home with me, and added it to the sculpture, twisted it around so that it held together, and hung it on the wall. I began a picture again. But I didn't paint. I started by putting material onto the canvas and demolishing it. A frame shattered, but not completely. I left the torn-up section where it was, so that it would be more visible. I began the next picture, no longer as a picture at all; rather, I took an already shattered frame and added new materials to it. The first materials were wood and canvas. The next was wire. I stretched the torn-up bits of cloth tightly, pulled the pieces together, and once more tore them apart. By this means, forms came into being, completely unconscious forms, and I entwined the whole thing with wire. And thus once again, I destroyed it. I have often experienced this destructive action in painting, whenever I was dissatisfied with a completed picture. If I attempted to improve it, the changing of one part made it necessary to form the entire picture anew. The destruction progressed until finally the old picture was destroyed and a new picture came into being.
Now one may ask, is destruction a crime? On the contrary. I produced a kind of psychological analysis. Many new possibilities came to me in a blinding flash. I was enthralled. Every day meant a new step forward. Why should a picture always hang on the wall like a hunting trophy? I already had the structure in my head: I could lay it on the floor or hang it up in the middle of the room; soon the sculpture filled the entire space. Moving away from the wall was an important step. I could no longer work in my studio. I actually lived there as well. I rented a cellar, the so-called "Perinetkeller." All kinds of other materials were added, at first sheet metal and cans, to be precise. With an old handcart I went down to a second-hand dealer on the upper Augartenstraße. There were even old roller blinds there. I took all the interesting items with me, old bicycles. Naturally I smashed the pots to pieces. It was in this act of destruction, where the spokes of the bicycle splintered off, that I came to know the material. I trampled it to pieces, bent the bicycle as it might appear after an accident. I deformed the objects, unlike Marcel Duchamp, who left the object unadulterated. I consider him to be a philosopher, who makes use of artistic media and museums in order to make a statement. That's okay too.
NEXT: Early actions
Notes
9. Posséder et détruire. Stratégies sexuelles dans l'art d'Occident.
10. La peinture comme crime.
11. The 19th-century philosopher Max Stirner championed egoism and individualism as a means of subverting oppressive social institutions (including religion), and maintained that self-interest was the motivating factor in human actions. His best-known work is Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum (The Individual and His Property), written in 1844.
