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An Actionist Begins to Sing

An Interview with Otto Mühl

page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

I have read a number of conflicting accounts of the arrest and seven-year prison sentence. At least one source I've read implies that your arrest was the result of some sort of conspiracy, perhaps from within one of the cliques in the commune. Is there any truth to this?

As the prosecution of religious cults became popular at the beginning of the 1980s, anything was named a "sect" that did not correspond to the worldview of church and state. At that point we had to give up the public lectures and the promotion of our social model. We ceased working with guests in our therapy, and creative, painting, and dancing courses, whereby the creative elite of the group had earned the gross social product. Instead of that, we founded corporations and worked together with large insurance companies. We found ourselves in the quagmire of a professional trap. Understandably, the sellers of insurance, capital investment projects and real estate had control over the assets themselves. Collective property got in the way of the desire for one's own apartment, one's own vacation, and one's own family. The salesmen suffered most under collective property, and they wished to introduce private property as quickly as possible without regard for the continuity of the group. At the end of the 1980s, the climate in the group deteriorated. They repudiated collective property and free sexuality, dressing themselves in the postmodern clothes of the old conservative values: private property, marriage, and public schools for their children. They summoned meetings called "overcoming the past," where they propagated the abolition of free sexuality and private property. The women of the commune, economically independent, had been decisively superior to the men as pedagogues, artists, organizers, and leaders. After the dissolution of the commune, they fell back into the old household roles of the nuclear family once again.

In prison

In the first group experiment of the Friedrichshof commune, it was shown that many theoretical suppositions were false. I was of the erroneous opinion that the group as a social, sexual experiment would itself be a kind of remedy for people with great difficulties. It was demonstrated, however, that precisely those people who urgently needed help became especially active participants in breaking up the group.

The hierarchy, initially a simple structure of respect and a measure of artistic ability, served later as an organizational structure and finally solidified into formalistic affectations of a social ranking, which no longer had anything to do with reality and impeded the natural contact between individuals.

I am against organizations. Bakunin said: "Every central organization leads necessarily toward oppression of the individual."

In 1991, it then came to a trial against me in Eisenstadt. Now nothing more stood in the way of the dissolution of the group. I escaped the state "waste disposal" center still alive at 72 years of age, with Parkinson's disease and blind in one eye. The blinding of my eye was the fault of a doctor in the Stein detention center, who, as a member of the Haider party, acted out his aggressions against me as a Freudian slip.

Now in 2002, I have been living in the Algarve in Portugal for the last four years. Fifteen adults and 12 children make up a new communal effort. We have learned from the large commune experiment that the group should acquire a familiar framework in which each person knows the other and in which personal relationships are the basis of collective life.

In the future "state" I imagine an interlinking connection of small autonomous family groups, and everything that they do with one another will be voluntary. Nothing superfluous will be financed — no officials, no justice ministry, no police. Family groups are autonomous and regulate their affairs themselves. It is clear to me that it's a matter of theory. Research and praxis will show where the path shall lead.

Although you now seem comfortable in Portugal, do you have any desire to return to Austria?

I have no love for my fatherland. I was always against that idea. My home is with the group, wherever it is. If the climate is to some extent tolerable, that's great. The most important thing is that the group is there.

Portugal landscape

Will you ever make any more films?

I have never stopped making films.

Now I make photo actions. I revived the "grimuid" theme from Actionism. What´s important is not the execution of a program but above all the free associative communication between the actors through grimaces. I probably never would have discovered this new approach to actionism if my German dentist in Portugal had not given me a set of dentures. It was this detachable dental prosthesis that inspired me towards new "self-expression actions." I had been amusing myself in front of the mirror with my toothless mouth in a childlike way already for more than a year. I played the crazy, toothless, old man. I took the artificial teeth out, put them back upside-down in my mouth and played Mr. Hyde.

At a high school reunion in 2001, all my classmates became indignant about my prosthetic playfulness during a photo session. My colleagues, all over 70 years of age, also had such a device in their mouths and placed great value in hiding this fact. They felt violated and said, "Otto, please stop, it is so terrible, it is so unpleasant. Please stop it!"

The human being is not a predator. He does not need incisors to realize his potency. His potency lies not in his teeth but in his head. He replaces his incisors with the corresponding tool (knife, sword, hoe, hammer, lance, bow and arrow). The new self-expression action is about self-deformation, self-irony, and self-destruction. I'm clearing away all beliefs in illusion. I'm unmasking myself. I make myself ludicrous and expose that which everyone seeks to hide: his age. The collapse of my body and the toothless mouth are powerful means of expression. I transform myself into Dracula. I become "Rumpelstilschen." I lament, scream, frolic, and smile stupidly and with senility at all those around me.

Nuit Cosmique

The feeling of happiness that these grimacing "jaw actions" produces in me is overwhelming. In my earliest photo-actions, which are presently showing in Paris, I represent myself as a geezer, as a revolting old man. Artists are enthusiastic about "De-monumentalizing actions," where the monument of oneself is shown as a broken junk sculpture. The woman is cynically eager to help, like a disparaging nurse. Young, somehow very arousing. The French, my gallery owner, and all those who see the photos compare Violaine to Marlene Dietrich. Violaine is a great woman. My discovery. I cherish her. Of course we perform without language. One can invent a text, but I think it should be representation. It is dancelike, with gesture. What we do, the way we look at each other, requires no words. It reminds one of a silent film.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

la peinture comme crime edition de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 2001. 49. rue Etienne-Marcel, 75001 Paris. © ADAGP; Paris, 2001

Posséder et détruire ISBN 2-7118-4045-X.

49, rue Etienne- Marcel, 75001 Paris. © Editions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 2000.

OMMÜhl: Aus dem Gefängnis 1991-1997. Brief/ Gespräche/Bilder. ISBN 3-85415-214-0. © 1997, Ritter Verlag Klagenfurt

Der Wiener Aktionismus und die Österreicher. Daniele Roussel Gespräche mit OMMühl. ISBN 3-85415-162-4. © 1995 Verlag Ritter Klagenfurt

OMMÜhl 7. Herausgeber/ Editor: Peter Noever, MAK. MAK- Österreichisches Museum für angewandte Kunst/. Austrian Museum of Applied Arts. Ausstellung 18.Febr. – 5. April 1998. Exhibition February 18th- April 5 th 1998

la part de l` autre. ISBN 2- 7427-3829-0. © ACTES SUD / CARRE D ` ART, 2002

OUT OF ACTIONS. between performance and the object. New York: Thames and Hudson.

1950-1970. Cinquanta opere dalla Collezione Lanfranchi e dall ` Archivio Conz. Regione dell'Umbria. © 1998 by Commune di Todi.

OMMuehl sortir du bourbier. © OMMuehl, Weg aus dem Sumpf, AA Verlag, Nuremberg, 1977. © les presses du reel, 2001. achevé imprimer sur rotative par l`imprimerie darantiere á dijon-quetigny en octobre 2001. dépó légal: 4 trimestre 2001. n d` impression. 21-1106

FILMOGRAPHY

c = camera; e = editor

Films During the Commune Period, 1971-1990

d = director; s = screenplay

November 2002 | Issue 38
Copyright © 2002 by Andrew Grossman for this edition; Copyright © 2002 by Otto Mühl for all future republications, printings, and retranslations worldwide.

Author and interviewer Andrew Grossman's bio and other articles in Bright Lights can be found here. Translator Robert M. Grossman holds Master's degrees in German and British language and literature and is currently writing his doctoral thesis at the University of Virginia on the social function of literary genre in representations of public and private discourse in the 18th century. While overseas he translated essays on media and education and maintains an interest in academic disciplines ranging from social theory and intellectual history to drama and media studies and comparative literature.

ALSO: More experimental and avant-garde cinema

page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

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