ART OF DESTRUCTION

Persistence of Vision

by First Last

The Vienna Action Group formed the most provocative, insurgent, and challenging of all the worldwide art movements of the 1960s. Their sexually charged and antisocial actions exacted a profound and irreparable upheaval in the way in which art was conceived. Using their own bodies as raw material, the Action Group undertook experiments in cruelty that disassembled the human body and its acts into compacted gestures of blood, semen, and meat. The films of the Vienna Action Group form the essential residue, debris, and evidence of their performances. For the first time, this book focuses on those films as fully revealing the obsessions, ambitions, and outrages of the Action Group. Fully illustrated and annotated, this is a book of compelling interest to all students of film, art, and performance, and for all readers engaged with questioning social and corporate cultures.

Genres: Art, Film

100 pages, Paperback

First published March 15, 2004

Reviews

[Ripley Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overall, this book takes a decent look at the Actionists through the lens of film and acts as a nice overview. However, the author, in discussing Muehl's commune, his criminal behaviour and subsequent incarceration, feels the need to mention the Austrian age of consent and suggests that the growing tensions within the commune were, in part, a result of jealousy which minimizes the violence enacted upon children in order to protect and uphold Muehl's previously transgressive and consensual violence. I believe both can and should co-exist if we are to engage with the lives and actions of artists and people in general, minimizing the real harm he caused is an act of censorship that this author proports to be against and is in opposition to the ethos of the Vienna Actionists. Here is a decent article on the subject of Muehl: https://news.artnet.com/art-world/how...

[zara · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting, albeit extremely repetitive in some areas, mind-numbingly so towards the end of the book. The biographies of the artist-actionists were the most interesting. I had been meaning to read something in detail about the Vienna Action Group for a long time, only having been familiar with their work through images and references. I don’t need to read anything else about them as a group after this, I’m more interested in their individual exploits, especially Schwarzkogler and Nitsch

[Michael X · Rating 2 out of 5]

Reads like an art history textbook. This was a very hard read and the author writes as though he is trying to attain a word count for a professor, with long drawnout descriptions of the Action Groups exploits and long winded thoughts and observations about them. Every so often you get a morsel of good stuff and then it is back to the dry recounting of who and why, even if it has already been explained.

[Tony Poerio · Rating 3 out of 5]

Academic, but well done. And one of the only books on the subject.