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Famous Austrian performance artist Hermann Nitsch, whose elaborate and gruesome so-called “acts”, often involving slaughtered and gutted animals, blood, feces and viscera, and evoking Christian and pagan rituals, died Monday in Mistelbach. House in Lower Austria. He was 83 years old.
His wife, Rita Nitsch, confirmed his death at the hospital, but did not reveal the cause.
Mr. Nitsch was the founding father of the Vienna Activists, a small group of radical artists who, beginning in the 1960s, turned artmaking upside down by throwing their bodies to work, as did many European and American artists at the time. literally and to use all kinds of materials and methods to question social norms, political systems and artistic metaphors. Joseph Beuys was hugging a dead rabbit and lecturing him about art (in a later work, he and the coyote hung out in a Manhattan gallery). The Fluxus jesters, as they are known, held a mock Ritual with a chorus of gorilla costumed priests and barking dogs, among other Happenings. Yoko Ono invited the audience to cut their clothes with a pair of scissors.
The action painting of the Abstract Expressionists had given way to just action—some mundane, for example New Zealand-born artist Billy Apple Chelsea sweeps the roof of her apartment and some like Vito Acconci are just disgusting masturbate for days At the Sonnabend Gallery in SoHo.
But the Viennese were tougher. Along with Mr. Nitsch, Otto Muehl, Gunter Brüs and Rudolf Schwarzkogler they put on eerie, bloodstained performances. Oftentimes they injured themselves.
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