In this essay, Philip Wincolmlee Barnes peers into the artifacts and records of the artist Rudolf Schwarzkogler, of the notorious Vienna Actionists. While Schwarzkogler's peers have enjoyed longer, more prominent careers, Schwarzkogler's life is shrouded in mystery and obscurity, fueling rumors about his suicide, and creating a powerful discourse circulating around his lack of recorded history. Barnes' intimate biography of this legendary performance artist is an attempt to reconstruct Schwarzkolger from the absence and obscurity that are his defining features.

The Mind Museum: Rudolf Schwarzkogler and the Vienna Actionists [printable version]

Philip Wincolmlee Barnes

Four years later his flat had been exploited to the full. Apart from a cooker, a fridge, a bed, a coffee table and a wooden chair there was no furniture; no ornaments. The rooms were divided with hundreds of partitions, and the passages were so narrow that Ptk had to walk sidelong (very carefully) when he wanted to remind himself of an important cutting or add a new note. Working hours apart (Ptk was an accountant), he spent all his time in his historical archives. He neglected friends and relatives, and when he met one of them in the street (going to or from his office) he found it hard to carry on a sensible conversation. He grew more and more appalled at how little people knew of the 1st of September 1973. In the end he cut himself off completely, ignored invitations, had the telephone removed and made detours. [1]

<1> The above paragraph is taken from a story by Norwegian writer Tor Age Bringsvaerd, called "The Man Who Collected the First of September 1973." The story deals with just that -- an obsessive accountant who, in order to get some kind of grip on reality, assembles an archive of worldwide newspapers from a single date in history. The project overwhelms him: he learns several new languages in order to translate the thousands of articles, turns his flat into a "museum" for their storage, and becomes a social misfit unable to relate to anything other than September 1st, 1973. His task is absurd, yet initially well-intentioned; the accountant comes to believe that by understanding a single day in world history he will master important facts about "reality." His personality, his biography, is lost in a swirl of newspaper clippings, and he becomes a victim of his unrelenting work.

<2> I have often become fascinated by individuals -- either in real life, or in fiction -- who take on such absurd roles for themselves; whose "work" is meticulous and time-consuming yet, to the casual observer, is apparently useless. Bringsvaerd's character has no sensible part to play in life by becoming a manic archivist. And in an earlier essay I looked at another piece -- taken, like this one, from an anthology of science fiction stories -- in which an American Vietnam deserter attempts to convince himself and those around him that he is a "Recycling & Recovery Engineer." This drifter invents an entire jargon around his activitiy, in order to make it sound prestigious, or at least socially acceptable. It transpires, however, that being a Recycling & Recovery Engineer simply means scouring the sidewalks for loose change. His family and friends disown him as a wastrel and a bum [2].

<3> There are similar predicaments in Samuel Beckett's prose -- of wandering tramps and wayward individuals attempting to reconcile their activities to the humdrum flow of normal life, and who generally fail to do so. These types of stories interest me as they echo a question that has often arisen in my own mind: namely, what constitutes valid "work"? Like many publishers of zines, performance artists, and other such creative dilettante, I often find it more convenient to describe my "day job" -- when I have one -- than I do to convince casual acquaintances that my creative work is the keystone to my affairs. In essence, I think, many people merely want to know what one does for a living, and not why one makes the effort to live in the first place. Art represents, for me, that latter issue -- of what drives one's life in general; I have yet to meet or hear of an artist who actually retires from his or her work.

<4> Like Bringsvaerd's archivist, or the American drifter, one's work becomes all-consuming (I write this at a time when I ought to be sleeping), although much of it might strike the "uninitiated" as being rather feckless. This brings me to the brief, intense career of Austrian artist Rudolf Schwarzkogler. Heinz Cibulka, one of Rudolf's key models, later said of him: "He saw his life as a priesthood with an artistic articulation" [3].

<5> I believe that there exists a species of human being for whom this is certainly true. For whom life is not merely an accumulation of material wealth and social prestige, nor a witless and frustrated struggle for these things, but is more akin to a pilgrim-like journey of a cerebral, somewhat "esoteric" kind. What attracts me to figures such as Schwarzkogler is this tireless persistence for leading a visionary kind of existence. In some instances, of course, such people do attain the conventional symbols of success, but their lives remain somehow larger or outside of mere "prestige."

<6> In the following essay I discuss the Austrian artist Rudolf Schwarzkogler. I have enjoyed the process of ferreting out articles and references to him, although these are seemingly as scarce as his own artistic output. Schwarzkogler spent just 2 years staging "performance-actions" in his apartment in the 1960s. These methodically photographed scenes involved sliced fish, bandages, light bulbs, razor blades, foodstuffs and surgical apparatus, all manipulated by anonymous figures. The photographs, works of art in their own right, have since toured internationally. Schwarzkogler was the least outgoing of a group called the Viennese Actionists, whose orgiastic, bloody Happenings have become legendary. Rather than trace the history of the group in general, or alight upon single works in particular, this is more of a personal homage to an intriguing individual. Schwarzkogler, however, was not a success in his own lifetime. He was very much overshadowed by close colleagues whose work had a more attention-grabbing manner. Rudolf took his life in 1969 after creating only six private "performance actions" and leaving a fragmentary collection of notes and sketches.

<7> This scarcity of material, and his death at the age of 29 or 30 (approximately my own age), has compounded to create a heady mystique around his life and his art. Hermann Nitsch, one of his friends and a fellow artist, talked about a "febrile erotic sweetness" around the issues of creativity and death in Vienna, where both artists had worked [4]. Nitsch quoted, as attendant intoxicants to this state of mind, the late works of a dying and diseased Schubert, and Mahler's "Kindertotenlieder" ("the songs of dead children"). Both are examples of a heady, romanticised relationship between works of art and mortality.

<8> Sometimes an artist's sheer longevity can seem to diminish his or her creative reputation (although this is both irrational and unfair), whereas Rudolf's taut career -- between 1965 and 1969 -- has grown into an organic, perpetuating mythology. Since the late 1990s, for example, I have been looking at whatever material I can find on Schwarzkogler, Nitsch, and other associated "Viennese Actionists" (a notorious grouping of several performance artists around Vienna in the 1960s). Quite recently, on a Channel 4 documentary, The Anatomy of Disgust, I saw contemporary footage of Nitsch padding about in his large studio, a prestigious man, and now a canonised Professor of Art. To watch him espouse his pagan-ish theories of orgiastic art, whilst pouring buckets of blood over neatly-prepared canvasses, did something to undermine the more esoteric and clandestine information I'd gathered from old art journals and from microfilm archives. It would be unthinkable, and obviously impossible, to watch Schwarzkogler demonstrating his fasting cures or his technique of inserting colour crystals into dead fish on primetime television.

<9> Much of the fascination Schwarzkogler holds is due to the sheer lack of available information, and to the tragic brevity of his adult life. As is perhaps understandable in such a case -- at least in terms of journalism -- rumours about him abound. Most notable is that of his death itself. "Everyone seems to know by now that Rudolf Schwarzkogler did not actually kill himself by cutting off his penis in slices during an Action," Keith Seward wrote in Artforum in 1994 [5]. In fact, Rudolf either leapt or fell (most assume the former) from his apartment window after a long period of extreme depression. Yet the penis-slicing mutilation is a recurrent myth, reported as the apex of his creative oeuvre. Ironically, it was in previous issues of Artforum that I had first found the erroneous story. First in October 1972, and again in January 1978: "We must not forget that Rudolf Schwarzkogler went further than any other masochist body worker, for he proceeded inch by inch to amputate his penis whilst a photographer recorded this art event" [6]. The root of this myth is a rather wilful misinterpretation of Schwarzkogler's photographs, shown posthumously at Documenta in the 1970s.

<10> In every retrospective review of his work -- photographs of his Actions now tour internationally -- it is this story that is returned to over and over again, repeatedly to be debunked. Nonetheless this tale seems to satisfy a certain expectation towards supposedly "extremist" and sadomasochistic Body Artists. Although I have only done a handful of pieces with violent or destructive elements, a spectator once concluded that my Art School finale (which took place two years ago) might well have been a suicidal climax. Another artist from the same School has since been awarded the dubious mantle of being likely to end his career fatally. These misinterpretations, or dogged exaggerations, appear with some frequency in the Performance Art field. Nitsch has said of himself and his colleagues that "People always project us into their unmastered thoughts...but we have never been cruel" [7].

<11> Dawn Perlmutter, writing in Blood Rituals from Art to Murder [8], partially interprets this public hunger for artists to either annihilate themselves or to exercise cruelty by tracing the gradual marriage (or blurring) between avant-garde Performance Art with subsequent subculture movements, such as fetish clubs and vampire impersonators. Schwarzkogler's photographs from the 1960s, of the human body bandaged, gagged and seemingly bleeding, are easily assimilated into this "subcultural" lineage, although I think his intentions are much different. The fastidious, ascetic, and even rather shy Austrian would, I think, regard night clubs decorated in chains and petulant adolescents wearing vampire fangs as merely juvenile, as something rather crass and distasteful. For example, his use of bandages in particular, aside from their visual power, evolved from a more prosaic need -- to disguise the model's identity, who would have risked losing his job had he been recognised.

<12> Ever the proselytiser of the group, Nitsch once claimed for his own work that he would "take it upon myself all that appears negative, unsavoury, perverse and obscene...in order to spare you the defilement and shame entailed by the descent into the extreme" [9].

<13> This would seem to partly address a public fascination for tales of artists who mutilate themselves. In the same way some rock stars feed a vicarious thirst for excess in their fans (was it Ozzy Osbourne or Alice Cooper -- or both -- who reputedly bit off a bat's head and killed a chicken on stage?) Yet whilst the other Vienesse Actionists revelled in the outrage their happenings inspired, Schwarzkogler was of a much more retiring temperament. Cilbulka reflects that Rudolf introduced a methodical discipline into his staged works, in contrast to the orgiastic chaos espoused by Nitsch, or by Gunter Brus and Otto Muehl. The Artforum article from 1994 states that whilst the penis cutting is untrue, it nonetheless embodies "the automutilative forces generally rampant in his work into a picture of the ultimate act of self-damage" [10]. The same author concurs, however, that Rudolf's photographs are the epitome of considered control, the opposite of the messy, manic, public Happening.

<14> Within the canon of Vienesse Actionism Rudolf's aloofness troubled his contemporaries. "He observed the contemporary art scene in Vienna with wry but attentive interest," Nitsch conceded a year after Schwarkogler's death [11]. Peter Weibel, who participated in actions with Nitsch, Muehl and Brus, was later much more disparaging towards Rudolf, the least publicity-hungry of the scene. "Everything was simulated. He walked around in a black suit, an aesthete. He visited horse races and never got dirty, not even with colour" [12]. In this interview, which took place in 1985, Weibel refers to Schwarzkogler as a "dandy," a term he applies with a mixture of exasperation and denunciation. "Schwarkzkogler was a very problematic character," he reflected, referring to his work as a "step back into illusionism." Here Weibel's position is that taking photographs of Actions within the privacy of an apartment, without an unpredictable audience, is somewhat cowardly. "It's important to go into the public, into the audience...which Schwarzkogler neglected."

<15> Nitsch, in a more generous spirit, agrees that Rudolf's work was only ever presented before a small circle of "initiates," and that he eschewed any press or public attention; at the same time, this lack of critical recognition contributed to Schwarzkogler's mounting despondency. After the six actions, photographed between 1965 and 1966, he confined his work to notes for unrealised projects, compulsive lists (based on his visits to the horse races) and suggestions for dietary regimes. Weibel described him as someone who "wants to clean his body, wants to make it receptive of new sensation" [13].

<16> Looking at his later fragmentary notes and sketches, one does clearly see this desire to organise all aspects of life around somewhat strict, rather monastic principles. One of his proposed "environments" was to create a small room dominated by a transparent plastic mattress and surrounded by ultra-violet lamps. This drawing in particular echoes the idea of the monk's cell, a space carefully reduced to vital components, and it also relates in my mind to Wilhelm Reich's "Orgone Accumulators" (chambers built of wood and metal, and intended to rejuvenate the body).

<17> Whereas the photographed actions from the mid-sixties can easily be discussed within the context of Performance Art and Conceptual Photography, his later proposals, whilst still artistic creations, speak more of an all-encompassing model for living in themselves. They include short, semi-coherent statements about internal sensations, simple architectural plans (including one for a child's playground), and lists of ritualised dietary needs.

<18> In a way it is reasonable to see how a graduate of Graphic Art, who then works for a company who produce office supplies, comes to stage carefully-controlled photographic vignettes, and at the same time avoids the "glare" of public outrage being seized upon by fellow Viennese colleagues. The later developments -- in the direction of fasting cures and "total environments" -- is, perhaps, an unexpected yet fascinating one. I think it is easy to assess in retrospect that Schwarzkogler would have been uncomfortable with the kind of press scandals that, ironically, contributed to Nitsch's later acceptance into the Art Establishment. Nor would he have tolerated the journalistic hounding and criminal sentences subsequently given to Muehl and to Brus (Brus was fined for degrading State symbols, and Muehl imprisoned for rape and for having sexual intercourse with minors).

<19> A statement that seems to echo the kind of artist that Rudolf Schwarzkogler was, is this line of Erich Fromm's: "No radical idea can survive unless it is embodied in individuals whose lives are the message" [14]. Earlier I wrote about a species of human being whose life is dominated by a pilgrim-like urge, rather than by a mere careerist drive, and that everything they do is infected by a cerebral, spiritual kind of aura. Although many things interest me about Schwarzkogler's work -- such as the "academic" debate between performance art and its attendant documentation -- it is, above all, his approach to all aspects of life that intrigues me. One can well imagine him to have been rather a morose and rarely communicating figure, particularly towards the end of his brief life. But still, the 30 or so pages worth of photographs, sketches and notes he left behind point to a sincere attempt to harmonise and appreciate life in its complex totality.

<20> To reiterate Fromm's sentiment, it is Schwarzkogler's individuality that stands out strongly amid the notebooks and existent documents, and it was his desire to harmonise his lifestyle that was his creative and radical message.

<21> In contemporary language we have accepted a derogatory term, the "control freak," for individuals who have a tendency towards over-organising aspects of their work and life. Such a tendency might be seen as a contradiction to ideas of creativity and radicality: one imagines creativity to be free-flowing and unregulated, and to be radical one is assumed to throw off bourgeois and bureaucratic shackles. The "control freak," as Schwarzkogler might be called, is seen as having an "uptight" personality. When Peter Weibel derides him as being a dandy -- a "poseur" in other words -- he is accusing Schwarzkogler of being conservative.

<22> Schwarzkogler's methods do appear in contrast to those of the other Viennese Actionists, with their confrontational public displays. In restricting his audience to private gatherings in his flat Rudolf does not (in Weibel's view) go "far enough." He is constructing falsified situations, away from the glare of journalists, critics and authority figures, and his work lacks risk as a result.

<23> Personally, I feel it is unfair to pitch Schwarzkogler's "system" against that of other performance-happenings, especially if the intention in doing so is to condemn a fascinating body of work -- indeed, all the more fascinating for not clamouring for the media attention and notoriety that so obsesses other artists. There can be nothing duller than watching newsprint-hungry artists throwing copycat "anarchist" poses, particularly when they measure their success by magazine column inches. It can be much braver, in such circumstances, to eschew the publicity machine and devote oneself instead to an inner creative path.

<24> The risk an artist such as Schwarzkogler does run is having his work forgotten. During his life he appears ill equipped to have advocated his activity, preferring privacy instead (and anonymity for his models). Subsequently it has only been through the reminiscences of his colleagues and through curators selecting his photographs posthumously for exhibitions, that Rudolf's work has reached any kind of public platform. His unwillingness or his inability to "market" himself -- as artists are so often pressured to do -- may well have been due to an aesthetic reserve, to an unfashionable ideal of "purity." Or perhaps it was because he simply lacked the verve and confidence of his more-brazen contemporaries.

<25> Perhaps what I find refreshing about Schwarzkogler is this very reticence. Many artists skillfully navigate themselves through the world by playing numerous games -- by coaxing funding grants, by straining to meet pre-set agendas, and by learning the latest buzzwords. Such artists may navigate themselves well enough through their chosen market, but they do so in accordance with current social mores, and perhaps without altering the dominant perceptions of their times.

<26> Although it is a romanticised image, the idea of a somewhat lonely, unremitting figure working in a monk-like fashion -- who is not attempting to "sell" himself -- has a quiet, studied dignity about it. The work becomes all, the work is bound up with everything that is human: intellectual pursuit, physical endurance, eating, breathing, drinking, exercise, and sleeping.

Notes

[1] Bringsaerd, Tor Age. "The Man Who Collected the First of September 1973". The Year's Best Science Fiction, no.7. Sphere Books, 1975. pg. 141 [^]

[2] see "existence, vital. resistance, vital." An essay published in Discreet Media issue 1, June 2001. [^]

[3] Interview with Heinz Cibulka, 1985. Reproduced on the web site http://www.brainwashed.com/axis/schwarzkogler/rudolf.htm [^]

[4] Hermann Nitsch, quoted in Malcolm Green's anthology Writings of the Vienna Actionists. Atlas Press 1999. Page 182 [^]

[5] Artform, September 1994. Page 104. [^]

[6] Artforum, January 1978. Page 36. [^]

[7] Hermann Nitsch interviewed in 1985. Reproduced on the web site http://www.brainwashed.com/axis/schwarzkogler/rudolf.htm [^]

[8] Perlmutter, Dawn. The Sacrificial Aesthetic: Blood Rituals from Art to Murder. Published in Anthropoetics Volume V, number 2 (Winter 2000). See http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ [^]

[9] Nitsch, quoted in Malcolm Green's introduction to the Atlas Press anthology, page 11. [^]

[10] Artforum, September 1994. Page 105. [^]

[11] Writings of the Vienna Actionists, page 181. [^]

[12] Weibel, Peter. Interview reproduced at http://www.brainwashed.com/axis/schwarzkogler/rudolf.htm [^]

[13] ibid. [^]

[14] Quoted from Suzi Gablik's Has Modernism Failed? Thames & Hudson 1984. Page 86. [^]

Works Cited