More on Lieshout and the Vienna Actionists

The traditional notion of an “Atelier” being an artist’s workshop is continued in the craft oriented practice of Atelier van Lieshout. In similar fashion to the art and industry collaborations of the Art and Technology program of the 1960’s and 70’s, AVL functions as a self contained design and manufacturing corporation. While not pushing the limits of technology in the way that the earlier A+T collaborations did, Lieshout conduct their own research and have the facilities and equipment necessary to construct everything from mobile homes to automatic weapons. Their work is interested in the total work of art, both in the affect of the final piece as well as in production.

When AVL-Ville was envisioned, it attempted to bring together all previous projects into a cohesive political event. Joep van Lieshout, the founder of Atelier van Lieshout considers the AVL-Ville to be a Gestamtkunwerk or total work of art, saing "Perhaps, one could say that I create a new world or an enormous Gestamtkunwerk. I produce a piece of art as a unique work but, in fact, each piece is always connected to another, much like a story. Each piece of sculpture is either a change or an addition. For example: At the beginning, for our free state, I constructed a sewage system for our own toilets; this has something to do with the idea of freedom... Following this was the biogas construction and the sex toilet, in connection with the works that dealt with excrement and which, in turn, finally led to the Technocrat. This had more to do with restrictive systems than with freedom." (1)

This interest in a gestamtkunwerk stems directly from a group of artists in the 1960’s-80’s known as “Wiener Aktionismus” or the Vienna Actionists, who dealt with the creation of a new art form to engage all five senses of human perception. The Actionist’s, including artists, Gunter Brus, Alfons Schilling, Rudolf Schwarzkogler, Hermann Nitsch and Otto Mühl, conducted performance art designed evoke outrage and disgust from the viewer. Brus was known to publicly slice open his thigh and then urinate in the wound, while Mühl “painted” using blood and feces.

In 1984, over a period of three days, Hermann Nitsch conducted the “Orgien Mysterien Theater” (The Orgy Mystery Theater), a spectacle involving hundreds of participants consisting of live music, ritualistic slaughter of animals and the covering of human actors in animal blood, entrails and feces. The “Aktionen” were a perversion of both Catholic and pagan traditions to register familiarity and revulsion with the participants. The audience for such performances were participatory, and became more witnesses of the dramatic and violent productions than passive viewers. In the production, actors representing Oedipus and Dionysus enact a three day “feast” at Nitsch’s own castle, Schloss Prinzendorf. The performance marked a coming to terms with the nature of mortal life: in the midst of fertility and abundance, there is also death and destruction. (2)

Lieshout’s work stays away from blatant religious references and stays within a more secular, political realm. Conceptually they borrow heavily from the Actionists, but aesthetically the references are less apparent. The work attempts a subversion of material culture through the familiarity of industrial design techniques mixed with political ideology.

References:
1. Noever, Peter. Atelier Van Lieshout: The Disciplinator. Verlag Der Buchhandlung Walther Konig; Bilingual edition 2006
2. Munchen, Fred Jahn. Hermann Nitsch: Die Architektur Des Orgien Mysterien Theaters (The Architecture of the O.M. Theatre) Verlag Fred Jahn 1987

Atelier van Lieshout
Herman Nitsch
Writings of the Vienna Actionists