Hermann Nitsch

For the Austrian artist Hermann Nitsch and his compatriots in Vienna Actionism, art is in no way a mere representation of life or reality but instead an intimate, often violent, part of it. He is best known for his many elaborate “Actions” since the late 1950s, extreme theatrical productions initiated that reached a climax in a six-day performance of the ongoing Orgies Mysteries Theater in 1998. Never passive observers, audience members participated in these events. American “Happenings” guru Allan Kaprow contextualized the purposeful excesses of Nitsch’s actions by describing the artist as “the Grünewald of Happenings,” a reference to the sixteenth century German master’s Isenheim Altarpiece (circa 1512 - 1516), which depicts Christ’s suffering during the Passion in grisly, naturalistic detail. Ritual and violence are, for Nitsch, a legacy of Christianity that can be explored in art. Art historian Susan Jarosi elaborates: “In the effort to illuminate and even reanimate the continuum of historical violence prosecuted in the name of institutional power, Nitsch restages and interweaves violent foundational narratives of Western myth and religion and destructive historical events with their successive iterative expressions in a multitude of symbolic forms.”