Hermann Nitsch(1938-2022) | Falling, Landed
Hermann Nitsch, Das 6-Tage-Spiel 1998 (100. Aktion). Photo: Archiv Cibulka-Frey.
Hermann Nitsch, Das Orgien Mysterien Theater, 6-Tage-Spiel 2022, Tag 2 Bild 3. © Hermann Nitsch GmbH, Photo: Daniel Feyerl.
“We feel his absence and we miss him very much. Also, he would have mastered this interview brilliantly as well. He was very good at that.”
“Nitsch loved long walks in nature, our animals (he wanted them close to him all the time), music (he always listened to music very loud, even when he was composing himself), and good food and wine (preferably with friends). Our interests have overlapped on many of these points, but I don’t listen to music all the time like he did. I love the silence and I don’t like evening parties much either.”
“He was always bored with the lukewarm, ordinary life and its superficial day to day issues.” (And hence strove for intense sensorial experiences)
“Nitsch was more of a religious than spiritual person. All religions fascinated him, although he did not believe in any particular one. He felt secure in the cosmos and believed in nature; every plant, every insect was a great miracle of nature for him.”
Rita Nitsch, the Austrian artist’s wife and manager designs a picture of how he lived, his interests and the person he was beyond his artistic practice.
Nitsch was best known for his Orgies Mysteries Theatre, under which the 6-Day Play was a major component. First staged in its entirety only in 1998, its iteration in 2022 was performed after the artist’s death. In both images, red blood paint falls in a whooshing rush. In the first, Nitsch performs himself, and the paint and performance lands, we know, just as he would have designed it. In the second posthumously performed work, the paint remains suspended. Nitsch made detailed notes for the work, but always improvised on stage. The red then seems suspended, never to quite land, given that his direction and improvisations would no longer complete the work.
Rita Nitsch again: “Blood and the colour red can create shock at first sight. They signal pain, injury, and death. With his 6-Day Play, Nitsch wanted to show, represent, and stage all aspects of human existence and the universe–from birth to death, through joy, suffering, excitement, and meditation.”
The existentialism that was present in all his works led to a blurring of lines between his artistic life and the couple’s personal lives, she said, recalling that the idea of ‘being’ was “an intense experience of the present (the now) with all senses.”
Hermann Nitsch, action painting from the 20th painting action, 18.2.1987, Secession, Vienna, dispersion paint on canvas, 200 x 177.5 cm, 1987 © Hermann Nitsch Foundation.
Art is provocation (as against art being deliberately provocative).
To create it, to engage with it, to consume it as discourse is to, ideally, be affected by it – either by way of iterative feelings or in a change of thought processes over a period of time.
What does it mean then to be confronted by gore, by violence, by what is seemingly the dark side that each of us harbour? That too, especially in these today-times when strife, emergency, horror, partisanship and the Other seem not like dystopian happenings but as the world’s new humdrum?
Perhaps, along with his later works that are in many colours and are almost….pretty, an engagement with the Austrian avant garde artist Hermann Nitsch’s more famous riot red works is how one could mull over the inner traumatic. Influenced by the two World Wars that directly impacted his life – the First that his grandparents, parents lived through, the Second during which he grew up, experiencing bombing raids – Nitsch’s art condensed the performances and paintings that he termed ‘actions’ to direct sensorial experiences that he, the audiences participated in. Theatre and drama as lived experiences and therefore action as art. In an interview elsewhere, Nitsch had said, “…there were traumatic incidents that nurtured my expressive disposition, but I don’t feel like a damaged man.”
Nitsch was, alongside Günter Brus, Otto Mühl and Rudolf Schwarzkogler, part of the Viennese Actionism art movement that spanned the 1960s and 1970s. The Actionists, as they were called, were involved in early efforts to develop performance art, using the body as material, doing actions as paintings and so on, themes that both performance artists like Marina Abramovich and painters like Jackson Pollock would become famous for.
Hermann Nitsch, action painting, 2010, oil on canvas and cotton, 200 x 300 cm © Hermann Nitsch Foundation.
Gudrun Marecek, Managing Director of Nitsch Foundation that was founded in 2009 “to support and promote the position of the artist Hermann Nitsch and his total body of art,” on the artist’s location in the Viennese art world and how it has changed from earlier to now:
“Nitsch, like the other Actionists, began to create their earliest important actions around 1960. None of them attended one of the art academies for long. As artists, they were all basically autodidacts. The first drafts of the 6 Day-Play were created in 1957, and from then on Nitsch worked constantly on his overall project. The most important early works of Nitsch can be dated 1960/61; they were already connected conceptually to the initial idea of his epic and nonverbal synesthetic drama (the OM Theatre).
In 1961, he began to exhibit his actionist paintings and from around 1962 he started integrating blood into his paintings. From 1964, the presence of the Actionists in Vienna’s extremely conservative cultural life intensified, with diverse exhibitions and semi-public performances, which led to scandals and convictions due to the radical subject matter and aesthetics.
Two invitations were important for Viennese Actionism gaining acceptance in these early years, both in Austria and internationally. One was in 1966 to take part in the Destruction in Art Festival in London, organized by Gustav Metzger. The other was when the curator Harald Szeemann invited them to participate in Documenta V in 1972. Both events gave the artists the opportunity to establish contacts with others in the Happening and Fluxus movements and opened the door for their international success, allowing them to be recognized as an important contribution of Austrian contemporary art to the media and performative turn.
In Austrian public life, Viennese Actionism–and along with it Nitsch’s work–is today seen as a key contribution to the country’s critical debate and reflection on the traumata triggered by the collapse of Austria-Hungary and then the Nazi era, and with the respective catastrophes both these historical epochs left behind as their legacies. Viennese Actionism is therefore also fundamental to Austria’s development into an open and tolerant democratic society, and since the 1990s above all Hermann Nitsch attracted enormous interest and gained recognition.”
The earliest available documentation of what was loosely organised as Viennese Actionism goes back to 1962. Even as the idea of the theatrical as a means of provoking or enabling sensorial experiences were being strengthened, there alongside in art history was the Happenings, predecessors of performance art again, which involved a production within a certain environment involving light, sound and some measure of audience participation. It was, too, a period of the Fluxus movement, when creative practitioners engaged with experimental art performances, focusing more on the processes involved than in a finished object. Set alongside such a geography of art, Viennese Actionism, said Marecek, “was dominated to a far greater degree by its critical engagement with the action painting of the New York school than by its connections with the American Happening movement and Fluxus positions. More or less concurrently with post avant-gardist developments like Nouveau Realism and Arte Povera, a new concrete art began to emerge in Vienna, seeking its own unique vocabulary in materials. The difference to the international positions was the emphasis placed on the body, above all the artist’s own body and thus the role and position played by the artist, the body in its very materiality.”
Hermann Nitsch, 130. Aktion Quelle Datenbank, 2010, photo: Daniel Feyerl.
Hermann Nitsch, 122. Aktion, 2005, photo: Georg Soulek.
Nitsch made over 160 actions over his five decades+ long career. A large part of it has been controversial for its use of blood, animals, flesh, bodily fluids, nudity and for its tones of ritualistic practices that reference religionism. Perhaps he is best known for Orgies Mysteries Theatre (OM Theatre) which got him arrested three times for its supposed blasphemous and pornographic undertones.
Marecek described the development of OM Theatre this way:
“The beginnings of Nitsch’s Orgies Mysteries Theatre lie in his interest in the theory of catharsis, which he got to know in his youth through his reading of the philosophies of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and the direct experience of performances of Greek tragedies at the Burgtheater in Vienna. Nitsch felt dissatisfied with the stage productions in German theatres (such as Burgtheater), which for him were “cleansed” under the influence of the Enlightenment. He sought an alternative, an event in which the text, the dramatic language, was superseded by directly experienceable, archaic, and ritualized communal structures.”
On the essence of OM Theatre, she added:
“The OM Theatre is a communal event lasting six days. Nitsch speaks of a “festival,” festivities celebrating our life and existence as humans. It is a kind of nonverbal theatre; the viewer or participant are to train their senses through synesthetic experience, and in turn this shall enable a more intensive, conscious awareness of our experience in general. Nitsch proceeds from a psycho-dramatic process, during which not only a broad spectrum of sensitizing, consciousness-expanding experiences are possible, but also therapeutic effects.
Nitsch wished that the OM Theatre would be a consciousness-expanding experience. He wanted the participants to become aware of the positive possibilities inherent to direct experience and considered that this could be achieved by immersing in the tragic dimensions of life. With the OM Theatre, he wanted to affirmatively celebrate all dimensions of our existence and make them adoptable for the participants.”
Over the years Nitsch made his actions across the world, he has faced the wrath of animal activists and religious groups for his work. The fascination for blood and flesh, the immediate Christian associations apart, perhaps come from the early decades of performance art when the body was treated as the medium of the practice of art.
Marecek explained:
“The positioning of the body as a surface and element for expression is at the heart of Hermann Nitsch’s art. The body is not only to be brought into action representatively but also utilized in its full physical materiality. Having experienced the air raids on Vienna as a child and losing his father in the war, Nitsch believed that art had therapeutic powers, and the wish to exploit its opportunities inspired him to immerse in the Aristotelian catharsis theory of Greek tragedy and from this develop (ed) his epic-synesthetic work of the Orgies Mysteries Theatre.”
Hermann Nitsch, 1. Aktion, 1962, photo: Nieder Bacher.
Hermann Nitsch, 55. Aktion, 1977, photo: Fondazione Morra.
While the body and experiencing the sensorial through the material of the body was the heart of Nitsch’s body of work, he was also interdisciplinarian in the sense of bringing in elements of poetry, of drama, of music into his work. He was a music composer, a set designer – facets that again fed into the integrated processes that went into this theatrical performance work. Every action went into the elaboration of the OM Theatre, although, as Marecek notes here, it had begun to change with the turn of the century:
“Since 1960, he had thought of this (OM Theatre) in terms of a nonverbal communal event with a distinct synesthetic structure. All the perceptual possibilities of humans are to be addressed, activated, and acquired. Basically, the event-centered work that is the OM Theatre dominates Nitsch’s oeuvre. Although, in the broader public appeal, any recognition of this always takes a backseat to the sheer presence exuded by his painting. Nitsch always emphasized how much his painting related to the OM Theatre, or in other words, that his painting cannot be understood without the action performance. In the 2000s and up to his death, Nitsch sought to give his music a more prominent position in his oeuvre. Whereas originally music was closely connected with the action, he now began – similarly to the position of his painting – to accept and develop it as a form of expression detached from the action.”
The actions that come under the umbrella of the OM Theatre have often been called religious, or rather as indicative of religious ritualistic practices. A lot of these actions under the Six-Day Play, one of the works, involve participants dressed in all-white clothes performing various events, from joining in to pierce open a carcass and feeling the entrails and blood on them to splashing paint across the canvas as per Nitsch’s instructions to walking on paint-soaked floors until they are covered in red themselves. The Six-Day Play, first staged only in 1998, is an artwork that is, according to Marecek, “open and democratic in its structure.”
Further adding , Marecek said, “The psychodynamic, for many visitors shocking “tragic” actions performed in these six days are counterbalanced by the long dramaturgical intervals and in-between spaces, when music can be heard, nature experienced on walks, starry night skies observed meditatively, a heightening and expanding of consciousness, and where communal interactions like eating and drinking create a sense of connection.”
Hermann Nitsch, Das 6-Tage-Spiel 1998 (100. Aktion), photo: Archiv Cibulka-Frey.
Nitsch had signed up with Pace Gallery only a few months before he passed away due to a serious illness in April 2022. This piece is something of a memorial to the artist. His works might have brought him both fame and infamy over the years, but his contribution to what is today celebrated as the body as material and the personal as political in performance art is significant.
Words by Deepa Bhasthi. Interview by Carrie Xu.
This story was published in noisé 02 A Falling Leaf Heralds Autumn, 2022.