Günter Brus, artist who shocked post-war Austria, dies at the age of 85
Günter Brus, a founder of the radical art movement known as Viennese Actionism, who provoked outrage and arrests in the 1960s by using his body – and bodily excretions – to destroy the civil civility of a country haunted by its Nazi -past, died February 18, 2014. 10 in Graz, Austria. He was 85.
His death was announced in a rack by Kunsthaus Bregenz, an art museum in Bregenz, Austria, which currently houses a exhibition by Mr Brus. The museum did not say where he died or name the cause.
The weight of his country’s history weighed heavily on Mr. Brus, who was too born in the village of Ardning in 1938, the year of the Anschluss, the annexation of the country by Adolf Hitler, born in Austria, into the Nazi Empire.
Over a career spanning six decades, he amassed a vast archive of work as a painter, graphic artist, experimental filmmaker and poet. Still, he cemented his fame—and infamy—with the Actionists, a performance art collective he founded in the early 1960s with artists Hermann Nitsch, Rudolf Schwarzkogler, and Otto Muehl, all of whom were committed to creating art that resisted commodification. instead, they use their bodies, in all their earthiness, as canvases for subversive art.
In a series of performances in 1965 entitled “Selbstverstümmelung”(‘Self-mutilation’) Mr. Brus lay on a white sheet on the floor, his body covered with a sticky plaster. Writhing in pain, he performed various acts self-pollution involving various implements including a knife, razor blades and a corkscrew.
Such “actions,” as the group called its performances, were intended to shake what Mr. Brus called the “frozen authoritarian structures in politics and the arts” of a country that, in his view, had retreated into oppressed bourgeois politeness, while denying his identity. role in Hitler’s war machine and the Holocaust, and instead posed as a victim of Nazi tyranny.
At the height of his career, Brus’ embrace of depravity in the service of art seemed to know no bounds.
In 1968, when left-wing student uprisings broke out across Europe, he took part in an incendiary actionist event “Art and revolution”(‘Art and Revolution’) at the University of Vienna.
Committed contribution from Mr Brus urinating in a glass and smearing his body with feces, before shouting out his country’s national anthem while masturbating. At the end of the performance he drank the urine and vomited.
“The goal was to break taboos,” Mr. Brus was quoted as saying about his work in a 2018 profile in The New York Times. “My art not only stinks in the physical space, but also stinks in the souls of people.”
In a country that was “not a police state, but close enough,” as Mr. Brus put it, the response was swift and severe. He was sentenced to six months in prison for ‘humiliating the symbols of the state’. But he avoided imprisonment by fleeing with his wife and artistic collaborator. Anna Brusand their daughter Diana, to West Berlin, where they settled for many years.
In a 2018 interview with the Austrian newspaper Kleine Zeitung to which his wife also belonged, Mr Brus recalled a movement to ‘take our daughter away from us’. He added: “People had already collected 2,000 signatures for it.”
His wife added: “We all know that people become hyenas when they get excited.”
Mr. Brus was born on September 27, 1938 in Ardning, in the Austrian state of Styria, and grew up in Mureck, about 160 kilometers southeast.
He studied at an art school in Graz and later enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, although he dropped out in 1960. During that period he met a young Swiss art student, Alfons Schilling. The two eventually settled down for several months in Mallorcawhere they met a young American artist, Joan Merritt, who inspired them with stories of the boundless creative energy of abstract expressionists such as Jackson Pollock, who influenced Mr. Brus’s early painting.
The artists organized a joint exhibition in 1961. That same year, Mr. Brus was conscripted into the Austrian army – a traumatizing experience for the rebellious young artist. After his service was completed, he found himself to wash up and shining shoes for a living.
However, his days of obscurity were numbered; he would soon join the Actionists.
In July 1965 he carried out a very public action with his “Wiener Spaziergang” (“Vienna Walk”). He stepped out of a Citroën 2CV parked on Heldenplatz, Heroes’ Square, in Vienna, dressed in a suit and covered from head to toe in white paint, with a line of black paint, like a violent stitch, down the middle. of his body and face.
Mr. Brus’s action was reminiscent of a Franz Kline painting of legs and suggested the violent division in the Austrian psyche – or perhaps his own – caused by the Nazis, as he walked to the Hofburg Imperial Palace, where Hitler once had addressed a cheering crowd.
Although he did not stir the crowd as expected – “absolutely nothing happened,” he told The Times – he attracted the attention of police, who arrested him for disturbing the peace.
It would be a rare occasion where his action was met with a collective shrug. His work as an actionist finally came to an end after a 1970 performance in Munich in which he cut himself with razor blades.
By then this work was taking its toll. ‘I couldn’t keep this up serious injuries more,” he said in a 2016 interview with The Art Newspaper. “My actions were not theatrical like Nitsch’s or Muehl’s; they involved me, and I couldn’t continue this self-harm forever.
Information about his survivors was not immediately available.
Mr. Brus continued to work at what he called a manic pace as a painter, printmaker and writer and creator of “visual poems” – collage-like graphic narratives including drawings, text and other visual elements. His wife told Kleine Zeitung in 2018 that he had made around 80,000 drawings over the years.
At 80, Mr. Brus said he had no desire to try to take a scandal to court, as he had done in his early days. When asked if age had become its own source of provocation, he demurred.
“No,” he said. “I just find it boring.”