Gunter Brus: Selbstverstümmelungs (1965) and Wiener Spaziergang (1965)
1965: A year of transition marked by two seminal performances
Gunter Brus (b.1938) was a member of the Viennese Actionists, a group of artists active principally in Vienna in the 1960s, including Adolf Frohner (1934-2007), Otto Muehl (1925-2013), Hermann Nitsch (b.1938), Alfons Schilling (1934-2013), and Rudolf Schwarzkogler (1940-1969). In Spring 1965, Günter Brus (b. 1938) performed a number of actions grouped under the title Selbstverstümmelungs (Self-Mutilations) (Badura-Triska and Millautz 362 n.16).
In the spring of 1965 Kren filmed Brus’ action Selbstverstümmelung: [Self-Mutilation] (1965) [ill. 212-217], which dealt with the suffering, maltreated human body brought into relation with drawing pins, scissors, razor blades, forks, hooks and other instruments. The film is built up unusually slowly for Kren in that it lingers on the details such as the head and face of the actor, thus distinguishing it from his other Actionist films. What can be seen is a “face packed in bandages and white slush that graphically engraves itself into the canvas, adheres to it and becomes a canvas itself [n.28].” (Jutz 149)
Brus’ head is covered with white liquid plaster on a white sheeted floor an irregular scar smeared with black liquid runs down from the temple over his right eye to his cheek. On the white sheet moves slowly towards a pair of open scissors one handle smeared with white plaster and razor blade placed to his left. Brus lies on his front face down coated in white plaster wearing white plastic overalls black liquid stain runs from temple down head across back to waist across white cloth in irregular line to and past his right arm bent his right hand holding nearest of four knives laid on floor parallel to right hand. Brus lying face down head to the side two black sharp pointed clamp irons rest between fingers of his right hand and against his neck on line of black liquid stain. Points of two clamp irons are pulled across Brus’ cheek as he raises his head. Swiss army knife corkscrew open lies between Brus’ raised right arm and face. He grimaces as struggles to pull of plaster bandages from face smears white liquid plaster over his head face opens mouth silent screaming slowly pulls white liquid plaster over open mouth feeds it into his mouth pulls across face head runs finger nails down face claws up plaster from cloth and puts into mouth lies back. Across Brus’ upturned face and mouth gaping open runs a black liquid line onto above his head a horizontally placed white plaster cast foot and white painted shoe in line with his head. To the right of his head is the open Swiss knife corkscrew to left of Brus’ plaster encrusted head. Brus opens closes mouth dripping wet plaster breathing uneasily turns head gasping towards Swiss penknife. Repeatedly Brus raises lowers plastered head from floor. On the floor surrounding Brus’ upturned head are mason’s clamps wall clamps scissors on a white plate the Swiss penknife with corkscrew open a board holding components electrical machinery and wires coated in white plaster. Brus coated in white liquid plaster his face divided by the black line lies amid electrical machinery eyes open eyelids coated with white plaster. A white plate is filled with black hair scissors alongside. Brus caresses black hair nestled under his armpit. Brus is lying on his back white paint covering his body drawing pins facing up form a punctuated line from his midriff to his neck splotches of black paint on his face black clamp irons radiate from his head. Balls of black hair lie under left and right armpits separated by line of drawing pins placed along his breastbone. Brus covered in white lies face down on his side his white painted right hand next to a white model hand next to a set of scissors. He raises his head. Images of scissors hands repeat. He silently screams. A row of razor blades lies alongside his right hand. Brus’ white painted face upwards is transfixed by a razor blade attached to the white plaster above his left eye indented black paint across his mouth razor attached to his right temple three metal wall fixings protrude from his right cheek. He slowly turns his face a pair of open scissors alongside his right ear opens his mouth slowly closes stares ahead screams silently. Brus’ white painted head has a gash of black paint running from right temple to side of cheek razor blade and open scissors lie on his left side. Brus runs knife in left hand from forehead down syringe in right hand held against left eye places scissors in mouth clamping knife twisted against right temple black gash on right side of face coated in wet plaster. Brus applies knife point to center of forehead presses scissors against upper teeth knife to right temple knife pressed into mouth open closes scissors on right side of face cuts away plaster bandages puffs out smoke from cigarette opens mouth in scream cuts around right eye mouth faces forwards cigarette rests in left eye socket. Brus runs knife down side of nose face tilted up in white luminous paint interspersed with disfigured head. Cigarette butt in right ear screams silently cuts side of right eye puffs cigarette head eyes closed gashes of black on right of face white face with jagged stitched black line of paint down center of face opens eyes. Film cuts to black.[1]
Bulzan explores the dynamic tension between Brus’ performance and Kren’s editing:
The way that Brus’ Actions are portrayed allows them to have more of a documentary feel, particularly 10/65 Selbstverstümmelung, Brus’ self-mutilation. The process of self-mutilation is rendered painfully accurate by Kren, closely and slowly following the self-destructive gestures of the artist, his tools and his head and face, whose expression is that of utter agony. The artist’s body is covered in a sort of white mud which allows it to blend into the surroundings, ending up being indistinguishable from the screen. Also, if for Brus the Action of self-mutilation was a process, Kren dismembers its very continuity. So for the viewer, the action will not be progressive, it will have no before or after, being something more like a standstill of agony.
On 5 July 1965, Günter Brus performed Wiener Spaziergang (Vienna Walk), filmed by Rudolph Schwarzkogler and Otto Muehl and photographed by Ludwig Hoffenreich.
One summer day in 1965, a small car stopped on Vienna’s central Heldenplatz or “Heroes Square.” Out climbed a slender man of average height, his suited figure covered from head to toe in white paint. A black line ran up his body, as if splitting him in two. But his grinning face gave an air of mischief as he walked with a spring in his step right in front of the balcony of the Hofburg imperial palace, where, in 1938, Hitler was greeted by cheering crowds after the Third Reich’s annexation of Austria. (Karasz)
Günter Brus drives up the road in a Citroen 2CV his face and hair whitened. He sets off walking down the street wearing a white linen suit with buttoned up single-breasted jacket white trousers open-necked beige shirt white shoes with a continuous black zig-zagging line painted continuously from the bottom of his left trouser leg continuing up the center of the back of his jacket up across his whitened hair down his face along his nose his chin his throat the front of his shirt the buttoned up suit veers down the side of the suit’s right flap down the right trouser leg to the shoes. A police office approaches him. After a brief discussion, Brus follows the police officer back down the street followed by passers-by and enters the police station. Brus leaves the police station and climbs into the back seat of a taxi with Austrian number plates waves and is driven away.[2]
The Action may have been planned to draw a reaction from the police.
In a perceptive analysis of the Vienna Walk, Philip Ursprung, perhaps the first art historian to voice the question of whether the real significance of the Actionists lies in their reception (by which he mainly means press reports), regards the police as their “ideal audience,” which “’saw’” and ‘reacted’ to the transgression (1999:146). The arrest, Ursprung argues, is “compensation” for not being recognized by the art world. This is a convincing point, turning on its head the complaint of a contemporary critic that the Actionists’ fame was based solely on scandal devoid of substantive politics, and confirming a view of the actionists as skilled conceptualists. The hypothesis is supported by Brus’s self-conscious declaration that he was making “art history” and by Ursprung’s account of the artists looking like “actors enjoying the applause” (147). (Widrich 143-44)
The Vienna Walk took place the day before the opening of the exhibition of Brus’s work at the Galerie Junge Generation in Vienna entitled Painting ― Self-painting ― Self-mutilation, which included, against Brus’s wishes, paintings from his pre-actionist period and a performance which included element of the actions entitled Selbstbemalung (I and II) Brus had performed at John Sailer’s Studio at the end of 1964 and Muehl’s Perinetgasse cellar in January 1965 with Silber and Selbstverstümmelung (Schwarz 297-99). Schwarz draws out the connection between the two events: “In order to forestall the element of compromise in the undertaking and to make his artistic intentions clearer, Brus carries out his first public action, the Vienna Walk, on 5 July, the day before the opening of the exhibition” (300). A year after The Vienna Walk and Selbstverstümmelung, Brus and Otto Muehl founded in 1966 the Vienna Institute for Direct Art, the name under which the Viennese Actionists participated in the Destruction in Art Festivals (DIAS) in London in September 1966 (Badura-Triska and Höller 180). “Direct Art sought to confront what Brus would later call the ‘frozen authoritarian structures in politics and art’ by combining Mühl’s material actions with Brus’s self-mutilations in order to create a ‘total’ or ‘direct’ art in which they would perform actions intended to resemble those of a ‘madman’ or ‘fool’” (Hinderliter 81).
The Vienna Walk and Selbstverstümmelung marks transition in Brus’s performances towards a more radical and confrontational approach culminating in Kunst und Revolution on 7 June 1968, which resulted in his enforced exile to Berlin in early 1969 (Kandutsch 184-85 ). In the Selbstverstümmelung performances, Brus began the process of testing the limits of the mutilation of his own body) which ended with his final and “most radical” (Klocker 376) action Zerreißprobe in Munich on 19 June 1970. In The Vienna Walk, Brus took his performance out of the setting of the artist’s studio or gallery and invited reaction from casual passers-by and a policeman on duty (Widrich 139), which can be seen as an influence notably on the subsequent performances of the Lebanese artist Mona Hatoum (b. 1952), notably Roadworks (1985) (Brett 48-52).
Works Cited
Badura-Triska and Christian Höller. “DirekteKunst/Direct Art.” Vienna Actionism, mumok, 2012, pp.181-82.
Badura-Triska, Eva, and Manuel Millautz. “Action Chronology: 1960-1975. Brus, Muehl, Nitsch, and Schwarzkogler.” Vienna Actionism, mumok, 2012, pp. 273-368.
Brett, Guy. “Survey.” Mona Hatoum, edited by Michael Archer et al., Phaidon, 1997, pp. 34-87.
Brus, Günter. Selbstverstümmelung. 1965. Günter Brus: Bodyanlaysis 1964-1970, Kröthenhayn, 2010.
---. Wiener Spaziergang. Günter Brus: Bodyanlaysis 1964-1970, filmed by Otto Muehl and Rudolf Schwarzkogler, 5 July 1965, Kröthenhayn, 2010.
Bulzan, Diana. “Kurt Kren. Action Films. A DVD Review.” Index DVD Series, anti-utopias. anti-utopias.com/editorial/kurt-kren-action-films/.
Hinderliter, Beth. “Citizen Brus Examines His Body: Actionism and Activism in Vienna, 1968.” October, vol. 147, 2014, pp. 78–94. www.jstor.org/stable/24586638.
Jutz, Gabriel. “Vienna Actionism and Film.” Vienna Actionism, edited by Eva Badura-Triska and Hubert Klocker, mumok, 2012, pp. 136-57.
Kandutsch, Kazuo. “The Event Kunst und Revolution.” Vienna Actionism, pp. 184-85.
Karasz, Palko. “Taking On Austria’s Nazi Legacy With His Own Blood and Tears.” New York Times, 15 February 2018.
Klocker, Hubert. “Gunter Brüs: Biography.” Vienna Actionism, pp. 370-75.
Scharz, Digter. “Chronology.” Von der Aktions Malerie zum Aktionismus: Wien 1960-1965. Edited by Museum Fridericianum/Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Ritter Verlag, 1988.
Widrich, Mechtild. “The Informative Public of Performance: A Study of Viennese Actionism, 1965-1970.” TDR (1988-), vol. 57, no. 1, 2013, pp. 137-51. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23362799.
[1] The following is my own description of Brus’s Action, Selbstverstümmelung, filmed and edited by Kurt Kren on 16mm, silent/BW, with a running time of seven minutes. Otto Muehl and Rudolf Schwarzkogler also filmed Brus’s action Selbstverstümmelung (1965) on 8mm, BW/silent.
[2] The following is my own description of Brus’s action Wiener Spaziergang performed on 5 July 1965, filmed on 8mm, silent B/W, by Otto Muehl and Rudolph Schwarzkogler with a running time of 1:05 minutes: “Spaziergang”, DVD, Günter Brus: Bodyanalysis 1964-1970, Kröthenhayn, 2010.