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An Actionist Begins to Sing
An Interview with Otto Mühl
How many children were in the commune? How did you educate them about sexuality — did you treat child sexuality differently from adolescent and adult sexuality?
There were no sexual secrets. Everything was talked about. Whenever children asked questions, we informed them. I remember my mother and my father. I was 4 or 5 years old. When I saw a stork, they told me a story that it would bring small children. We did not tell our children such absurd nonsense. We told them no fairy tales. The information should be normal, nothing special. One can talk about sexuality just as one speaks of food. Coming to terms with sexuality is not perverse. The perversion comes from the denial of sexuality. I believe that sexuality is energy that binds society. When sexuality is embalmed in marriage, it is wasted. One cannot functionally avoid marriage in the state. Whoever does not marry is not nourished. In marriage, someone is always there when something happens to you. The problems of old age are the worst, suddenly finding yourself alone, a consequence of unsolved sexuality. I knew people where the wife died and soon thereafter the husband. He was totally alone and old. Nobody cared about him. In this respect the group is a thing of the future. The group is the ideal accommodation for the aged, not only financially, but also in the communication. One is never alone. No one wants to be alone. Aristotle once said that man is a social creature. That is a function of sexuality. It brings us together by its power. It is an extremely positive energy. It is no original sin, nor does it soil; one should not damn it as the church does.
The Art & Life Sahara Baby Jazzband
Human beings are exogamous. Marriage contradicts this exogamy. People search for variety and go outwards. Marriage is thus no solution for sexuality.
Our youngsters formed a band two years ago. They call themselves "Art & Life Sahara Baby Jazzband." There are 9 children. The oldest is 19 years old and the youngest is 12. They practice incessantly, except when someone nags them to stop. They often practice 8 hours a day, alone, then together, and every night at our evening session.
They made a great leap to the Bebop of Charlie Parker in a very short time. No artist can surpass this musical giant. Charlie Parker is Cezanne, Van Gogh, and Picasso in one: wild rhythm, powerful expression mixed with objective mathematics. In the meantime, the band has become well known in the Algarve. I have taught them actionistic interludes. The public is very enthusiastic about this, especially when they lay down the "Baby Rap," for which I did the text and choreography. It is music, actionistically expressed, without instruments (only voice, noises, and movement). Jazz musicians who have had public jam sessions with our Baby-Band asked where they would be headed next. They considered them to be more than an ordinary show. One even said: If you take it further, then you will become world famous.
Can you tell me how you applied the principles of Wilhelm Reich in the actions-analytical commune? In his Character Analysis, Reich suggests that the key to therapy lies "not [in] the use of human language, but by getting the patient to express himself biologically." This seems like a core idea in your approach to Reich.
With respect to body therapy, I moved farther in the direction of self-representation. I expanded Reich in the direction of actionism. The patient was no longer a passive object, but became the subject, becoming active himself. The actions-analysis had the aim of awakening creativity. One becomes an expressive artist. The development of artistic creativity applies to life as well as art, using ideas to realize your own way. The artist does not have a picture before him, he himself is part of the picture and makes himself the object of creation. But I can no longer make sense of Reich's late period in which he worked with orgone.
When did you begin to study Reich's work?
I began to study Wilhelm Reich's work at the beginning of the 1960s. I worked in Vienna in a therapeutic home which was founded by some American Quakers after the war. It was under the psychoanalytic leadership of Frau Rosenfeld, a friend of Anna Freud. There I came into contact with psychoanalysis. Frau Rosenfeld gave lectures, carried out dream interpretations, and conducted a kind of group therapy. A friend who wanted to become an analyst asked me if I would like to be a patient for a training analysis supervised by his teacher. I gladly participated for a very humble compensation. It lasted two years. I grappled with the literature of Reich, Freud, and Ferenczi, but also Jung and Adler, whom I did not value because they denied sexuality.
The psychoanalysts make a living from the health insurance companies. They completely conform with the State. Freud fought against this, as one gleans from Freud's so-called Wednesday evening psychoanalytic sessions.
Mühl in prison
I used the work of Wilhelm Reich as a stimulus. One should never hold on to a theory. Otherwise one might remain an eternal student, an idolater and a parrot. I would be an epigone and no artist if I only used the experiences of others without developing them any further. I went beyond normal psychoanalysis. I used the psychomotoric action in actionism. The essential idea was that by breathing to the point of regurgitation and by body movements, one could enter the state of ecstasy. That brought me to Reich, and the ecstasy brought me beyond him.
Some filmgoers in North America — who may have not had a chance to see your avant-garde short films — are perhaps most familiar with you from your appearance in Dusan Makavejev's Sweet Movie (1975). Is the commune sequence in Sweet Movie an accurate representation of life in the actions-analytical commune?
No, not at all. The film is downright kitsch. I don't like this film at all. Today I would prefer that the film hadn`t been made. There was not much to do. To a large extent, it was all prescribed.
Was there anything you were not able to show in the film? Was anything cut from the film because of censorship problems?
Nothing was cut out of the film on account of censorship problems.
Naturally, people tend to focus on the literally and figuratively "sensational" aspects of your commune. But can you tell me something about your actual communal life?
In 1970, I took a decisive step from making art into shaping reality, and founded a living community. This developed very rapidly into a commune with the new lifestyle of the extended family group. Children and art stood at the center of this social project, which lasted twenty years, and at its peak totaled 700 members. The majority came from Germany and France, a few from Norway and Sweden, several from Holland, England, Austria, Denmark, and the USA. It was a social experiment with collective property, free sexuality, and collective children's education, and involved the private instruction and higher-level education of children and adults in the fine and performing arts, including: music, dance, theater, film, self-expression, painting, actionist art, and work in our own workshops and business enterprises. This time the actions were not carried out by me alone, but by all of the members: it was a commune of actionist life-praxis. Actionist art is distinguished by not aiming at an end result, but seeking to become a practice where all the developmental possibilities of a conceptualized project can be acted out. At that time, I had the hope that a new work of art could come into being in precisely this way, one that renewed and rejuvenated itself in an evolutionary way. As later became apparent, this project was infected with its own demise from the very outset. The idea was not able to sustain itself and to develop farther into the future. On the contrary, starting in the 1980s, the participants began to show signs of fatigue. Disagreements over collective property and private property, and over monogamy and free sexuality, which we could not resolve at that time, precipitated the dissolution of the group. I know today that monogamy and free sexuality are needs of equal value. The extremes of monogamy and free sexuality, private and collective, can only be solved by the synthesis of the "as well as" principle. I hold pure collective property to be an unsuitable form of social organization. Collective property belongs to no one. The individual owners of collective property own nothing; rather, the collective property owns them. They work not for themselves but for the collective property. Collective property led to self-exploitation.
To return to Dusan Makavejev — his surrealism is largely satirical, and certainly his film WR: Mysteries of the Organism (1971) presents Wilhelm Reich in a satirical, absurdist light. Did you also approach Reich with a sense of humor, and incorporate humor into your communal therapy? Or, on the contrary, do you find that elements of Reich that might at first appear absurd become quite normal and rational when practiced normatively? Is it necessary to view Reich with a sense of humor, or is humor a conventional defense mechanism that cheapens and trivializes Reich's work?
I cannot approach Reich with humor. I cannot joke. Humor is a characterization of the turn of the century: "That guy has humor" — apparently things are going very badly with him and he is nonetheless merry. Maybe I would treat Reich with humor if I met him personally. Maybe I would make jokes.
In achieving a communal sexual life, did you go about destroying the conventional distinctions between heterosexual and homosexual relationships?
Not at all, certainly not! I must unfortunately confess that I had avoided homosexuality. That is different today. I have homosexual friends with whom I get along very well. The artist has a large feminine component. His feelings are as strong as those of a woman. He is a contrast to the tough world of heterosexual men. I think homosexuality is a product of education. Greece was an example of a homosexually constructed State, and the culture that was produced at the time would never have been possible without homosexuality — similarly our western culture.
In the 1960s, you were employed as an art therapist for children — in the therapeutic home you mentioned before. Were you able to use any particular therapeutic techniques you learned as an art therapist that were you able to translate into the therapies practiced into your life in the commune?
In the commune I invented action-analysis. The patient becomes an actor in front of the public and takes his therapy into his own hands. Instead of dialogues, actions are carried out. This was the origin of our so-called "self-expression actions." The material action is a group therapy, also in front of an audience. These material actions had a festive character. The material action could also be performed as individual therapy. The therapist had the task of encouraging the individual under analysis to continue and firing him on to dive deeper. In music it is Duke Ellington who fires on his soloists. He stands in front of them, and drives them to a frenzy with his shouts. This frenzy is creativity. The jazz musician is in a trance, experiences ecstasy when he improvises. He is suddenly "there." He becomes an "actionist." This ecstasy is not only a "being-outside-of-oneself," but also has form and reality. It is a kind of psychic discharge. That is pure art. I see it as a total therapy. Van Gogh would have surely killed himself much earlier without art. I learned to synthesize visionary and rational thinking, and to coolly and formally translate perception, ecstasy, and trance into pictures.
In the early 1990s, you were subject to another trial, this time on charges of child abuse. How did this trial of the ‘90s differ from the morality trials you endured in the 1960s?
In the 1960s, I was publicly denounced for pornography. I made an action in Braunschweig, Germany — the Christmas action "O Tannenbaum." I lay naked in bed with a woman under a Christmas tree. I had hired a butcher. He killed a pig with a slaughtering-gun. He tore the heart out and hurled it onto us. The heart was still twitching. Blood spattered. Breathless silence reigned in the room.
I slowly climbed up a ladder and urinated on the woman and the pig's heart in the bed below. At that point, a women's libber lost control. She rushed the ladder on which I stood and screamed: "You pig, you filthy swine!" I had 1 kg. of flour and dusted her down with it. A white fog. She screamed again, "You swine!" and she was gone, vanished. In the meantime, someone attempted to pelt me with potatoes. He came closer and closer and it was dangerous. I had another 1 kg. of flour and dashed it against him. The flour dusted his face and his suit. He stood there white as a snowman. The public laughed, even applauded. That was the end of him and his potatoes. Some days later there was a big political discussion. The butcher had been expelled from the butcher's guild. The director of the academy where our action had been staged was fired, though he was later reinstated. Today both are very proud of their courage. An association for the salvation of human dignity had been formed, which filed a complaint against us. The Mühl affair was discussed in the German Parliament. That time I was acquitted by the state prosecution, who said it was a matter of art. If it had been in Austria I surely would have been locked up for months, because I was naked, and on charges of desecration, violation of religious symbols, and insulting behavior toward animals.
Did the Austrian and German arts communities support you in your 1990s legal battle more now than they did in the 1960s?
My trial in 1991 was the settling of old scores with Actionism. "Art and revolution 1968" in the auditorium of the University Vienna was the greatest art scandal of the three. Republic! The press used terms such as the "university pigs." Günter Brus, Oswald Wiener, and I were in jail for two months pending trial. Everyone knows that the judicial system in Austria is reactionary, so it is easy to imagine the satisfaction of the judges at my trial in 1991. If Bruno Kreisky, who always supported the commune, had still been alive, this trial would probably never have taken place. After my trial, letters of appeal to the Austrian President arrived from American artists, and from others from all over the world. No reaction. The politicians were afraid of the fanatical Haider, who today sits in the government. It would have taken a lot of courage to pull me out after I had been labeled a child molester and a rapist. When the court in Austria pronounces the word "child molester," it amounts to character assassination. They wanted to completely finish me off. Seven years: they thought I wouldn't survive at my age. I was in jail from 1991 to 1997. I was 73 when I came out. Now I am 77 years old.
NEXT: Prison
