Archivi Casa Morra
Wiener Aktionismus
Curated by Giuseppe Morra
1 October 2024 – 1 March 2025
3 – D A Y S R E P E R T O R Y
Friday 27 September – 7pm – Archivi Casa Morra
interventions by Giuseppe Morra, Julia Moebus-Puck e Leopoldo Siano
Saturday 28 September – 7pm – Museo Hermann Nitsch
interventions by Giuseppe Morra e Leopoldo Siano
Sunday 29 September – 8pm – Vigna San Martino
interventions by Giuseppe Morra e Leopoldo Siano
Three days of events to inaugurate the two-year period 2024-2026 exhibitions at Casa Morra and Museo Hermann Nitsch celebrating the history of Wiener Aktionismus and the 50 years of friendship (1974-2024) between Hermann Nitsch and Giuseppe Morra.
The works at Casa Morra testify to the tendencies and poetics of a philosophy without preconceived structures, with a revolutionary function of life – the psyche and the unconscious, the mind and the body – and a renewed interest in the primitive, which is capable of perceiving the human as a temporal fragment of a continuum with the community, the natural environment, and the entire universe, employing rituals and ceremonies such as sacrifices, initiations, flaying, and tattoos, using the body as a vehicle to connect with that which has existence. The traditional two-dimensionality of the canvas as a support for the medium of painting is surpassed in favour of the physicality of the artist’s body as he paints, through action; experiences of sensory reality are extended to include objects and pictorial substance that aspire to transcend pictorial abstraction through actions that investigate the possibilities of an active body.
As with the poets Friedrich Achleitner, Konrad Bayer, Gerhard Rühm, and Oswald Wiener of the Wiener Gruppe (1952–1964), so too with Wiener Aktionismus (Viennese Actionism, 1960–1970) represented by Günter Brus, Hermann Nitsch, Rudolf Schwarzkogler, and Otto Mühl. Although they had no stylistic manifesto, their works are connected – through a close reading – to texts and statements expressed in both individual and collective actions, as well as in paintings, drawings, photographs, and films. These artists responded directly to the academicism, backwardness, and closed-mindedness of the official culture prevalent in Austria (and not only in Austria), which persisted well beyond the historical period in question. The Viennese Actionists, each following their own path, applied the terminology of psychoanalysis to art, adopting terms such as abolition, purification, psychic hygiene, abreaction, and catharsis. Self-harm and bodily humiliation became methods of confronting obsessions, neuroses, and trauma, serving as a means of liberation from the supremacy of power and hierarchical structures.
A history of connections and separations under the cipher of the body, gesture, action, and intellectual commitment, for a shared experience that springs from the effects, even beyond the perception of the performative moment, re-emerging in the memory with photos, films and videos, relics, and objects. From Dadaism to Futurism, from Surrealism to Duchamp, from Cage to Klein, Pollock, and Shimamoto; from Kaprow, to Beuys,… Art has changed, and the body has become a substantial element of the artistic process in which any ordinary situation can generate a creative event.
A galaxy whose planets are the artists who, through their power, inspire the audience to think, meditate, and construct bold ideas for the near future.