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An Actionist Begins to Sing
An Interview with Otto Mühl
Your early filmed actions — such as Mama and Papa — must be very different from your live performances, as they are necessarily abstracted through Kurt Kren's radicalized editing techniques. How do you think Kren's formalistic editing changes the content of the action and the way it is understood?
Kurt Kren's editing technique was totally new. To a certain extent I liked it. I was pleased that someone filmed the actions at all. I wanted to document the actions. Kurt Kren's intention was not to allow the action to dominate; rather, he wanted to maintain and preserve his method. He showed the films in Berlin, and the public asked whether this filming of the Mühl-action did not constitute a break in his work. I didn´t see this as a break at all. He never shot screen-played films; rather, he worked with existing material. He used my actions in this way for his ideas. He is a concept artist.
Did you also have input into how these early actions with Kren were filmed and edited?
Once Kurt became angry. He came and said he would no longer film for me. I told him that in that case I intended to film the works myself. Then Kurt said, "What, you think that it´s so easy! You want to film, now that really is a joke."
To edit the filmed action using Kren's method was wrong in the sense that the action had its own movement. This whole course of movement was carved up — he edited it to bits. From the outset, he always filmed only individual settings, which he then cut quickly so that it looked like movement. A film consists of many separate frames, so it's a fraud to say that one can capture movement on film.
With the film O Tannenbaum, edited by Kren, I saw that a strange effect had been produced. In the film, it all went briskly and the themes were rapidly cut together. That was not bad. I have always worked by quick editing. What I liked best of Kurt Kren´s was his "Szondi-test," photos of a number of mental patients. You´re supposed to choose the one who most appeals to you. Based on this, it is determined whether you are schizophrenic, very aggressive, or autistic. The idea to make a film out of a test was very appealing to me. It is an alienation. That is one of his best works.
I'm not this kind of concept
artist. I stage situations. No editing technique. I do not want to simulate.
My "actions" in the basement were made for still photography. I planned
every shot. The action is divided into various phases. First comes the
still life. It begins very economically. You start with warm water on
the bodies of the models, which runs — it doesn´t do any damage.
Then comes oil, various soups with dumplings, meat and vegetables, perhaps
even a bunch of grapes. Than comes color: ketchup, marmalade, red beet
juice flows down. The skin is still visible. Then it gets going and
the heavy artillery is brought out. I often made dough, which stretched
down ponderously, or an egg, flour, or cabbage. Finally I poured on
bed feathers. There was a certain structure there, how the materials
were used one after the other. It was almost like cooking. I also once
made, "The Breading of the Buttocks."12
First milk, then flour, egg, and breadcrumbs. I didn't take the entire
body — only the ass, very provocative. The woman knelt in an armchair,
her ass turned to the audience. First I sprayed the buttocks with milk.
Then I dusted it with flour, as if breading a Wienerschnitzel. The flour
stuck. Then I spread the egg yolk over that and at last the breadcrumbs.
That looked really great! Once Schwarzkogler dropped by and I asked
him, "How did you like it?" He said, "very dirty!"
To my knowledge, your actions — and thus your films — were screen-played far in advance, though they may have the appearance of a spontaneous performance. Did you ever perform any actions spontaneously?
I have also made spontaneous actions, the public performances. I had an idea first, but what actually took place was spontaneous, as in Cologne, for example — the action with the rolling pin. It is true that we had used the pin when staging this action earlier. But it was not planned that I offered the rolling pin to the mother and daughter out of the audience, and allowed them to put it between the legs of the model. I made another spontaneous action in London during "DIAS," where I decided on the spur of the moment to do something in Conway Hall. Jean-Jacques Lebel and Julien Blaine made actions with voices. One of them intensified his heartbeats with a microphone. I saw that and thought, "Wow!" "Hey Brus, get this, we're going to make a breath concert." Actually this was a forerunner of actions analysis. We sat outside. I planned it quickly: breathing, stronger breathing, voice, "hhhhööööööhhhh," loud breathing, hoarse groaning to the point of vomiting, holding one's breath so that one almost becomes giddy. Finally staggering, knocking over the chairs and going around on all fours. Brus became slightly faint. He breathed too much and got an oxygen rush. It was a great success.
Through the 1970s and ‘80s, one of the only commonly available books in English that discussed your films was Amos Vogel's 1974 Film as a Subversive Art. Vogel says your films are suffused with, ". . . a stench of concentration camps, collective guilt, unbridled aggression, hallucinatory violence that . . . has the dimensions of an atavistic generalized myth of evil." Do you demand that your works be understood within a particularly Austro-German (or other historical) framework?
I know that they cannot be understood because people aren`t interested in art. They don`t care about the medium, are too uneducated, and superficially see only the repulsive. Art is an attack, an accusation. It is something critical.
It is not my fault that my films are suffused with the stench of concentration camps. I can only subscribe to this: that the stench which I experienced in the Nazi period and during the war was the most horrible thing imaginable. In 1945 I experienced something grotesque. The war was just over. Ceasefire. We were quartered in a school in Czechoslovakia when I heard an extraordinary report over the radio: the Führer had fallen in battle while spearheading his troops against the Bolshevik menace. Then Wagner's music was played. The most astonishing thing about this is that everyone who heard this believed the lie. This announcement showed that these people were criminals.
I fling the stench of the concentration camps into their faces with pleasure. In 1970, German television approached me to film an "action." The action was called "SS and the Star of David." A playpen for small children was set up. Lisl Nürnberger joined in and played the Jewish girl. She was familiar with the Nazi theme and understood our criticism. Herbert Stumpfl, Otmar Bauer, and I made the action. We wore pants and our upper bodies were bare. I think we even had armbands with some kind of insignia on them. We danced homoerotically with one another. We had leather straps, with which we beat the mesh of the playpen. Lisl slipped back into her childhood in such a panic that she fled out of the door on all fours. The cameraman said he wouldn't go along with it anymore, that it wasn´t true, that the SS were certainly not such queers, and weren´t as malicious as we had represented them.
I have good memories of Amos Vogel. He thought I was one of the most radical filmmakers. At that time I got to know him personally. I had a very good relationship with him.
In his edition of your and other actionists' writings, Malcolm Green implicitly criticizes those who have recontextualized actionism to fit their own political ends. However, in your Material Action Manifesto of 1965, you emphasize the importance of the "associative" meanings of your work. Does the insistence on understanding your work within the context of postwar Germany and Austria limit these associative meanings?
Art contains everything that one has experienced since childhood. The artist creates from the unconscious. He makes it visible. The musician makes it audible, and the writer makes it readable.
Returning to Amos Vogel, he goes on to say that your films "captur[e] society's essence by means of harrowing violence and perverse sexuality . . ." Do you think that critics have dwelt excessively on the "shocking" qualities of your films, to the exclusion of everything else? In a live performance, an act such as shitting may repulse because of its immediacy. In a film, however, we are alienated from the action, not only because it is framed and edited, but because we can use only two of our five senses to experience it. So, for example, when I see the shitting close-up in your film Sodoma, rendered in extreme slow-motion, it strikes me as oddly beautiful rather than repellent. It is a liberation.
You must mean the film Scheißkerl.
Yes, that's the one. Did you intend to aestheticize or romanticize the action through slow-motion?
I wanted longer scenes because they´re wonderful. In reality everything happened very quickly; all at once it went "brrrrrrrrrrr" and splashing, it fell down and was over. It was too short. I used slow-motion. I wanted to make it visible. That is a means of communication. Art makes the invisible visible. If you don't see something in a film, it doesn't exist. One should also see the repulsive.
I wanted to film this movie, and everything was agreed upon. Suddenly the people who were meant to be the models said that they wouldn´t do it because they were afraid that the film would be shown somewhere. It was understandable. Then I said, "I´ll do it." I didn't really do that voluntarily, but the film couldn't be cancelled as I´d gone there with a bunch of people, and besides, I believed it was important.
Let's turn to the film Oh Sensibility, one of your most taboo-breaking works. The killing of the goose — and its subsequent use as a sexual tool — in this film is not merely shocking, however, but somehow transcendent, because the act of swan-love that precedes it seems so remarkably tender. We have seen many animal killings on film, but this is a rare instance in which the animal has first been made love to; would you define the intercourse with the swan as an act of love?
"Would you define the intercourse with the
swan as an act of love?" Leda and the Swan
For the action O Sensibility I did not use a plastic blow-up doll or a dummy for the swan, but a real goose. It was a transgression of boundaries in the direction of reality. The goose was already destined for slaughter — it would have been eaten anyway. It was shortly before St. Martini. During the Martini festival, more than 2,000 geese are killed in Burgenland. In this country, there is a genuine goose massacre every year.
The goose was no aesthetic object. It was not a tender play, but a trance. At first it was restless. If one looks at the goose, speaks with it and sways it gently, in a short time it falls into a trance. I held it in my hand. When I performed dance-like movements with it, it became calm. It no longer fluttered, and went about with me willingly. It sat quietly on my shoulder. Its tranquility affected me in return, and put me in a trance as well. With this, I became Jupiter, and it became the symbol of woman. I became the priest who would not kill it in order to devour it, but rather to carry out a kind of magic ritual with it. I placed the throat of the goose between its legs; with one sharp cut, the head was neatly severed. It was not my intention to torture either myself or the animal. I did it according to the proper method, just as I had learned from my grandmother. Once, when I was younger, my mother asked me to slaughter a chicken for Sunday dinner, and at that time I couldn´t. In the action many things became possible for me that I would not have been able to do in everyday life, because art is ecstasy for me. The process of artistic creation is a stepping out from the day-to-day. In the last shot of this performance, I hold the goose over me and the blood drops onto my face. I feel guilt-ridden, like a murderer. I had no sexual experience with the goose. In another action with a goose, I used it as a dildo after I cut off the head. I stage myself pornographically in order to show truths. I provoke the moralists who do the same thing on a daily basis. I hold the mirror before them. They have marriage laws, morals, and at the same time, the brothel. I make no accusation, but I demonstrate the two-sidedness, the split in which human beings live. The public was appalled by my intentions. The spectators rejected the slaughter of the goose. If I think of the killing of human beings in the prisons of the USA, that is a crime. I do not condone animal murders. I show the sentimentality and hypocrisy. With tears in their eyes they gobble up their geese! Actionism is provocation and performance, the representation of moral double standards. Lately I have avoided meat from mammals. For the last five years, I have lived in the Algarve in a commune, and we live mainly on vegetables, fish, tofu, and soy products.
NEXT: "The avant garde is not shocked by my films."
Notes
12. Mühl's informal script and a photo of this earlier, 1964 action can be found on page 83 of Green's edition.
