So I was somewhat philosophically conflicted! In this environment the Actionists were tolerated because they were very anti. And then of course it came out that Heidegger was a Nazi. And if you read Hegel, you should then read Heidegger. I tried Kant, and people said you should read Hegel. The French writer Roland Barthes, I remember, was considered important at the time. In the end, the police came and took them away.īesides the Actionists there was also the Vienna Group, focused more on literature and philosophy. It was incredibly shocking and really depressing. Then Hermann Nitsch came along with a cadaver of a lamb and smashed it on the wall and the table. It was amusing and a little obscene and sexual. He dropped a matchbook and on the way to pick it up, he broke a table and so on. It was actually quite funny-more like Laurel and Hardy. The police intervened before he could begin, so the whole event moved down the basement, into the cellar. The kitchen had all the accessories for bourgeois living. Otto Mühl was there and he wanted to throw everything out of a fourth-floor kitchen onto the street. It was called the Feast of Psycho-Physical Naturalism. I got my first invitation to an Actionist event when I was fourteen. When was your first encounter with the Viennese avant-garde? As with the Beat generation, I was not really left or right. And here we were in this housing project with snickering old Nazi women. In the immediate postwar period they were quite optimistic, but then came the news of Stalin’s gulags and people lost most of their illusions. ![]() My parents were communists before the war, or at least on the left. We weren’t accepted either way.ĭid you grow up with any particular iconography in the home? Was there religion in your home? My father wasn’t Jewish, so we weren’t considered “clean” Jews. Was it significant that your mother was Jewish? All I saw were churches with all these Catholic motifs. What about your first experiences with art? There was, of course, the café scene with existentialists dressing in black, wearing long hair, and being pessimistic. As a teenager, I took drugs and traveled to places like Baghdad and Tehran. I also experienced the first waves of the Beat generation with Allen Ginsberg and others. I didn’t fit here, and I didn’t fit there. It really goes back to my childhood, which wasn’t particularly accommodating. What happened before that?įrom seventeen to twenty-five, I had a pretty catastrophic life. You went to art school quite late in life, at twenty-six. It would have fit right in with the Actionists. My mother used to come out in this bloodied apron. Every forty minutes a new patient was screaming. Without anesthetics at that time, it was a pretty painful experience to go to the dentist! With very few doctors after the war, my mother worked until 10 o’clock at night. There was always a lot of screaming and blood. My mother used one of the apartments for dentistry. We had two apartments adjacent to each other. It’s ironic that this social housing project named after Karl Marx, with new bathrooms and light, was full of old Nazis. ![]() You lived in a famous public housing project called Karl-Marx-Hof. In the sixties, when Viennese Actionists created these performances with bloodied cadavers, everyone shouted “It’s horrible, it’s horrible!” Suddenly faced with what they had done in the war, they all became nice and proper. There was always that shadow a dark shadow that you could not completely identify. I’m also interested in your experience of being a child in a city and a culture that had embraced Nazism. We wondered how they would grow up, perhaps what kind of artists they might become: certainly cleaner than my generation. It was real contrast to the sixties, when I was in my twenties, and probably more so to the seventies, with children watching television in their rooms, glued to the TV. But I would describe it as a time of really essential living. There was either dirt or ruins to play in. Many of the houses and buildings were bombed out, and as children we played in ruins rather than on the grass. ![]() When I grew up in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, it could only be described as a time of darkness. What was your experience growing up in Vienna?
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