This dissertation explores the ethico-aesthetic impulses of Viennese Actionism and the philosophical and aesthetic contributions of artists Günter Brus, Otto Muehl, Hermann Nitsch, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler. Due to its violent, sadomasochistic tendencies engaging with the taboo, Actionism remains framed by political, feminist, and psychoanalytical methodologies. This study extends our collective understanding by privileging the Actionists’ philosophical prose, articulating themes of extending art beyond the canvas into life, staging life as performative expression, and the work of art as life itself. An intertextual analysis of these practitioners with philosophers including Mikhail Bakhtin, Gilles Deleuze, Sigmund Freud, and Fredrich Nietzsche, centers on Félix Guattari’s ethico-aesthetic paradigm, examining ecosophy—the relation of the environment and the formation of subjectivity through an emphasis on individual action, belief, and praxis—and chaosmosis, the unfixed and ontologically unstable groundless ground of subjectivity, a space of ontological possibility that defies neuroses.
This dissertation examines the Actionists’ aesthetic and philosophical contributions through the lens of both its ethical aims and shortcomings and argues that these practitioners invented themselves first and foremost as artist-philosophers. Like Nietzsche, the Actionists donned performative “monstrous and terrifying masks” to seek new values and possibilities of being. Intentionally occupying and provoking the intersection of ethics and aesthetics—an opening where novel ways of being and living in the world emerge—the Actionists engaged with place (topos), the psyche (subjectivity), and the socius (the political with the social). Their highly controlled and prescriptive violent performances expose the deep-seated and ever-present dark desires of humanity persisting underneath structures of ideology. As the Actionists revisited fundamental questions asking what is art and what is art’s responsibility, this dissertation reconsiders this line of inquiry and further asks what our obligation is in constructing a framework for understanding Actionism.https://digitalmaine.com/academic/1064/thumbnail.jp
