Down in a Mayfair basement, a video shows hands rummaging through burbling innards and blood dripping across naked bodies as an immense, heaving, discordant clash of notes screams out of a church organ. Austrian artist Hermann Nitsch is not a man you want to take home to mum and dad. ‘Hi, guys. This is my new boyfriend Hermann – he’s a revolutionary European performance artist who crucifies people and drenches them in animal blood as part of an ongoing engagement with religion, ritual, philosophy and mysticism! The sex is fab!’
Nitsch came to prominence in the ’70s as part of a movement of radical Austrian artists – the actionists – who used their own bodies to create shockingly confrontational art in the wake of WWII. Nitsch has always been the most mystical of them, causing endless controversy with his use of animal carcasses and blood as part of his performance rituals. The video here details one of those events, as part of his ‘Das Orgien Mysterien Theater’ series: blood, guts, religious iconography, tits and dicks. You can see how Catholic old Austria may not have been too into it.
The rest of the show is made up of massive canvases doused in paint and blood, covered in priests’ chasubles and bloodied smocks.
The whole thing feels like a collection of heretical altars, and that’s sort of what they are. By ripping into the imagery of Catholicism and squidging through the just-dead entrails of huge beasts, Nitsch actually celebrates life. These are a cult’s altars to vitality, to the lived moment, to breathing and bleeding. Nitsch performs these works as a sort of sacrifice to being alive. It’s cathartic desecration, it’s violence and death.
Yes, it’s over the top, and it’s ridiculous, and it’s stomach-turning. But your revulsion is just proof that you too are alive.
@eddyfrankel
