"Direct Art Festival"

Porrhaus, Vienna

b/w photographie as later c-print

signed and numbered verso

"Direct Art Festival" on November 9, 1967 in the ballroom of the Gewerkschaftshaus in Treitlstraße (the so-called Porrhaus) in Vienna.

Artists in particular internalized the sixty-eight's maxim that everything private is political; but there is nothing more private than one's own body. In Vienna at the end of the 1960s, actionists such as Otto Muehl, Rudolf Schwarzkogler, Hermann Nitsch and Günter Brus went one step further: as the perceived pressure of the state was to be made visible, the artist's own body became the canvas, the medium of artistic expression, and this literally: from now on, the artist's corpus belonged to the artist's corpus, the body was painted over and over, of which body painting has remained as a fading stage at alternative festivals to this day.¹
Günter Brus, Kurt Kren, Otto Mühl, Hermann Nitsch and Peter Weibel were invited to the "Destruction in Art Symposium" (DIAS) in London in 1966. For the first time, the Viennese Actionists were able to present themselves in an international context. They did this in London in a more extensive way than they had ever done in Austria.² Back in Austria, the art of the Viennese Actionists and the former Vienna Group now also turned to the purely physical. They provoked spectators, the press and the police at events, including the "Direct Art Festival" 1967 in Porrhaus in Vienna. Numerous artists of the time were represented: Günter Brus, Otto Mühl, Otmar Bauer, Josef Nöbauer, Michael Pühringer, Herbert Simböck and others.
René Prassé, the photographer, was a young 21-year-old student in the audience at the time. The photos were taken without flash on highly sensitive film with an Exakta SLR camera and a normal lens. Prassé was therefore forced to move very close to the stage.³ This leads to the immediate character of the pictures, almost as if the photographer were part of the actionists.
(Christoph Fuchs)

1
Stefan Trinks, "Existenz als Zerreißprobe", FAZ.net, 27.9.2018, https://www.faz.net (16.11.2023, transl. by deepl.com)

2
Thomas Dreher, Aktionstheater als Provokation: groteske Körperkonzeption im Wiener Aktionismus, Vortrag, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, 30. Juni 2009, https://dreher.netzliteratur.net/2_Performance_Aktionismus.html (16.11.2023, transl. by deepl.com)

3
According to the photographer on the supplement to the photo edition