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.”

GENEVA — Switzerland and Austria, two countries with a strong tradition of foreign policy neutrality, announced on Friday their intention to join a German-led initiative aimed at strengthening Europe’s air defenses to fight the to face the threats highlighted by Russia’s attack on Ukraine.

Swiss and Austrian defense ministers Viola Amherd and Klaudia Tanner, during a meeting with their German counterpart, Boris Pistorius, signed a memorandum of understanding to participate in the project, known as Sky Shield, which has so far seen 17 other European countries involved. Friday in the Swiss capital Bern.

Sky Shield aims to coordinate the procurement of air defense systems and promote cooperation in training, research and logistics, and has received support from Britain, the Baltic States, Sweden and Finland. The Swiss and German ministers also said on Friday that they want to cooperate in the field of strategic air transport.

Switzerland and Austria denied that their participation would in any way jeopardize their traditional stance of neutrality. A Swiss government statement said: “It is in Switzerland’s interest to more consistently align its security and defense policy with international cooperation and to increase its contributions.”

But Switzerland’s participation is another step toward closer cooperation with Europe’s neighbors since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a process that has sparked heated debate with critics who fear the country is straying from its tradition of strict neutrality.

Switzerland has joined the European sanctions imposed on Russia after its invasion and has shown signs of easing its stance on allowing the sale of defense equipment to countries providing military support to Ukraine.

Switzerland last year rejected requests from Germany and Denmark to re-export Swiss-made armored vehicles and ammunition, but the House of Commons voted last month to sell decommissioned Leopard tanks to Germany. Under the proposed terms of sale, which have yet to be approved, the tanks could not be shipped to Ukraine, but could be used to replace tanks that Germany sends from its own depots.

Germany promotes Sky Shield as a fast and cost-effective approach to plug gaps in European air defenses by purchasing available off-the-shelf systems from the United States or other suppliers, and has led by example through the Israeli-American “Arrow 3 “to order” defense system.

Berlin’s approach is met with resistance in particular from France and Italy, which are eager to promote their own defense industries and develop systems that could help Europe break free of dependence on the United States. Those arguments don’t immediately weigh on Switzerland, which chose to upgrade its air force by buying Lockheed-Martin F-35s instead of competing European fighters, and is also buying the United States’ Patriot missile system.

Max Verstappen wants you to know that this is all harder than it looks.

Verstappen will start from pole position in the Austrian Grand Prix on Sunday. This is not surprising. Verstappen, the two-time Formula 1 champion, has started from pole in six of the nine races of the season. He won six. Goes faster than everyone else is what Max Verstappen does.

But Verstappen doesn’t like anything or anyone holding him back. So he grumbled on Friday after race officials scrapped dozens of the fastest laps in qualifying because drivers had slipped outside the strictly defined race area. And he grumbled again on Saturday after poor visibility hit his teammate, Sergio Pérez. briefly push it onto the grass during a rainy sprint race.

“I think it looked very stupid today”, Verstappen said of Friday’s qualifying problems. “It almost seemed like we were amateurs given the number of laps that were dropped.”

“People will say, ‘You should have kept the car within the white lines,'” he added. “If it were that easy, you could grab my car and try it.”

How to watch

Time: The Austrian Grand Prix starts at 9 a.m. Eastern time. (Worldwide start times are here.)

TV: The race will be broadcast on ESPN in the United States. Streaming is available on ESPN+. Prerace coverage begins at 7:30 p.m. Not in the United States? A complete list of Formula 1 channels can be found here.

Sunday starting grid

Verstappen, the courageous Dutch underdog, will start from pole position for the fourth race in a row. Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz will be excited about starting in positions 2 and 3, but not nearly as much as Lando Norris and McLaren will start fourth.

Sergio Pérez’s battle continued though, starting 15th after some of his best qualifying lap times cleared for not staying on the grid.

This week’s storylines

Sour grapes? When Lewis Hamilton suggested in an interview with Sky Sports this week that the sport’s leaders should change the rules to allow other teams to close the design and performance gap on Red Bull, or at least prevent Red Bull from getting ahead of a new (and possibly even faster) car for next week’s season he got a quick reprimand from Verstappen. “Many things in life are unfair,” said Verstappen curtly. He later commented in his response to Sky that Hamilton was less concerned about competitive imbalances when his Mercedes team won seven drivers’ championships in a row.

Rail. The Red Bull Ring has a reputation for being a fast circuit, with long sections built to reward straight-line speed – an area where Red Bull’s cars have had a significant advantage all year. But it also has some of the biggest elevation changes in Formula 1, and those rises and falls can affect a car’s grip on the track. Want a real-world comparison? Think about that split second when you’re driving a car and it’s going over an unexpected rise at high speed. Now think about doing that at 200 miles per hour and with a turn ahead. In the rain.

Weather Rain almost made a mess of the sprint race on Saturday, especially at the start, and there is a chance of more in the forecast for Sunday. That affects tire choices and pit strategies – one stop? or two? – and maybe even the outcome.

What they say

• “We didn’t talk about that when he won everything.” — Verstappenin response to Hamilton’s suggestion that Formula 1 make rule changes to limit Red Bull’s dominance.

• “It feels good to finally have a clean qualifying again and be back on the front row. The feeling has been a bit better in the last few races.” — Leclercin position to change Ferrari’s luck.

• “Two Red Bulls out of the way would be a good way to achieve that.” — Fernando Alonsoabout what it takes to win in Formula 1 today.

• ‘I haven’t lost it, you know. You don’t go from winning races to suddenly being a really bad driver.” — Perezafter having what has been a rarity for him lately – a great day – by finishing second in the sprint race on Saturday.

Last Time Out: Canadian Grand Prix

If someone stops you in the street and asks who won the Formula 1 race, your safest answer remains: ‘Max Verstappen’.