Eva Badura-Triska Libri

The central concepts of Body, Psyche, and Taboo is a presentation of both the intellectual and the formal links between Vienna Actionism and artistic developments in the early twentieth century. Works by Günter Brus, Otto Muehl, Hermann Nitsch, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler, the scandal artists of the 1960s, are compared and contrasted with pieces by their equally controversial colleagues working at the dawn of the twentieth century—from Gustav Klimt to Richard Gerstl, Oskar Kokoschka and Koloman Moser, to Anton Romako, Max Oppenheimer, and Egon Schiele.

Under the title Vertigo, mumok presents a deceptive game of the senses, presenting a wide spectrum ranging from panel paintings, reliefs, and objects to installations and experiential spaces, to film and computer-generated art. Op art works are by no means only directed at our sense of sight. With their powerful effects and optical illusions they lead to experiences of sensory overkill. In all of this, op art remains indebted to the anti-classical. In this sense, the catalogue includes references to anti-classical art from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries and to precursors from the first half of the twentieth century, works that also use pulsating patterns, beating and ephemeral after-images, paradoxical illusions of space, and other methods of optical illusions. Text: Eva Badura-Triska, Eva-Marina Froitzheim, Ulrike Groos, Sergius Kodera, Karola Kraus, Charissa N. Terranova, Markus Wörgötter

mumok is presenting its collection focus on Vienna Actionism in the context of international developments in performance-based art. Whereas previous mumok shows of Vienna Actionism always concentrated on the pictorial artifacts of the movement’s main protagonists, the focus of this exhibition is on the performative aspects of their creative work. Actions by Günter Brus, Hermann Nitsch, Otto Muehl, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler will be contrasted with works by significant international practitioners of performance art, with works by Marina Abramovic, Joseph Beuys, Chris Burden, Jon Grigorescu, Shigeko Kubota, Paul McCarthy, Ana Mendieta, Bruce Nauman, Yoko Ono, Gina Pane, Neša Paripovic, Ewa Partum, Carolee Schneemann, and VALIE EXPORT. The exhibition will be divided into several thematic sections that look at the questions that generally shaped a broad range of action art in the 1960s and 1970s. A comparison with parallel international movements will show that the Viennese artists were not only right up with the times but in many ways developed pioneering positions.

Das belgische Ehepaar begann im Sog der politischen und gesellschaftlichen Umbrüche der 1968er-Bewegung Kunst zu erwerben. Seine Begeisterung und sein Interesse galten jenen Entwicklungen, die – parallel zu den gesellschaftlichen Erneuerungsbestrebungen der Zeit – die Erweiterung des Kunst- und Werkbegriffs vorantrieben.

VIDEO ist ein Verzeichnis aller Videoarbeiten von Heimo Zobernig von 1981 bis heute, gestaltet vom Künstler selbst in der für seine Arbeiten charakteristischen Typografie. Angefangen bei frühen Videos, in denen der Künstler mit Langhaarperücke das Künstler-Subjekt thematisiert, über Dokumentationen von Performances und reduzierten grafischen Arbeiten, bis hin zu den technischen Möglichkeiten des Chroma-Key-Verfahrenes, bietet die Publikation zusätzlich eine kleine (subjektive) Geschichte des Mediums Video.

Eine umfassende Werkübersicht gibt einen fundierten Überblick über 25 Jahre künstlerischer Tätigkeit. Jede Arbeit wird fotografisch dokumentiert und in ihrem Kontext erläutert. Dieses Standardwerk, das Layout besorgte der Künstler, ist quasi ein Catalogue Raisonné.