All roads from Rousseau leads to Sade Plato feels sorry for Socrates The unwritten poem - Hafiz

Anwar or Hafis Anvar

Somebody is whistling, there s a marching band in the background. Thundering drums, cymbals, gongs, trombones; Music , noise to be exact. And where do these people clad in white are going ? What are they carrying? A man on a crucifix; definitely not Jesus Christ , according to catacomb of Commodilla there was this bearded man with long hair and Martin Scorsese also says so. So forget about Willem Dafoe, this bald guy is blindfolded and looks rather like a Gitmo detainee taking part in a little game of psychotic happiness for the average retarded Yankee soldier . They place the cross down with the large white canvas attached to it, somebody brings a bowl with what seems to be fruit juice of some kind of lurid color. There are people in white jumping up and down in a huge lug full of tomatoes. Now ,there is a second group of people carrying a naked woman sitting on an open palanquin, something red and flowing down her curves. Blood, and you cant mistake it for anything else when the preceptor of all this is none other than that man with a beard and wearing a hat who looks detachedly enthused about what s going on. There is a live man on the white board with a slaughtered ox placed cut open on him. People, all drunk trampling in a trough full of wine, blood, animal lungs, flesh and intestines. Welcome to the Psycho circus of Aktionismus. Hermann Nitsch started his career of an artist as a painter and received his training from Wiener Graphische Lehr-und Versuchanstalt and gained his notoriety being associated with the Vienna actionists. Along with Otto Mehl, Rudolf Schwarzkogler and Gnter Brus etc. he pioneered the actionist movement though never worked as a group. Rooted in the nihilistic approach of Dadaist school, they shocked and provoked the high art connoisseurs and went further evoking contempt. They challenged the conventional approach towards art and aesthetics through the exploration of chthonian aspects of life and art. While Otto Mehl emptied his bowels on to canvas, Nitsch experimented more with the cosmic and existential questions relating to menstrual blood, placenta and other afterbirth excrements making art miserable for the unrealistic ideation of the art. Patriarchal high art revolved around holiness of the female nudity, rather the lips than the labia. Hermann Nitsch was born in 1938 in the Austrian city of Vienna. He was interested in the religious art in the beginning of his studies. He made copies of religious works of artist like Rembrandt , Tintoretto etc. He started featuring the avenging of Dionysian repression in his works by as early as when he was 18 years old. He had a problem with the conception of art which he thought needed a better medium than canvas. As art gives only limited scope for his rebellion and he wanted to conceive something which would shake the foundation of its very ideation. Some time in 1962 he conceived the his grand idea of a 6 day theatre of Das Orgien Mysterien Theater. The cultic, ritualistic idea of his grand festival took both the audience and the performers to the oneness of a mystical experience which would have all the senses operating at once. He killed the taste for beauty. Hermann Nitsch is also a prolific composer. His

idea of music is the gradual progressing of music from Mozart to the likes of Merzbow. His theatre would have music, animal carcasses, blood, intestines, wines and a feast of ritualistic drama. Although all forms of performance art challenged the conventional ideas of high art, those were merely gradual evolution of art itself. By posing itself against the forms of art prevalent, thus forming a new kind of bonding between the participants and the audience performance art is often attributed to and as different forms of Dadaism. Though Dada was anti-establishment, his ideas were hardly revolutionary. Making Monalisas face obviously and unmistakably lugubrious is not a revolution or negation. May be painting a smiling arseflower Monalisa, may be. Most nihilistic art forms were just another form of the Narcissistic mirroring of the patriarchal high art or just the extensions of it. The difference that makes the actionists is their embracing of violence as a form of art. Listen to Nitsch We propagated a very aggressive type of art, not a cozy art but an art that displayed tremendous power and intensity. The first form of violence that a human being experience is the birth itself. While the patriarchal high art often amuses itself by making fun of sex, which is nothing but beautified violence on female body, he is confused at approaching the shame of his birth among piss and shit and the polymorphous perversity arising out of it. Unable to channelize it to his aesthetics, the high art keeps mum on birth. Comedy on birth is a taboo and the male ideation of aesthetics often fails even to translate it to the plains of any form of art. By making his drunken volunteers from both males and females trampling in birth excrements, Nitsch dares to cross all lines thus making the art itself irrelevant, the most finest form of intervention of anything chthonian. Nitsch s art is celebrating abyss than submitting to heaven.

Nitsch s works stand out from other performance arts exploring the elements of space, time, performer and the audience. By the sheer tribal qualities of its ritualistic atmosphere Nitschs art carry on the traditions of the secrete pagan societies of Christian Europe rather than the continuation of experimentation left by the renaissance art movement or Dadaist school. He draws his performers from applicants willing to volunteer and they have a feast through out the days of happening of this cult art. The success of his art is not in selling but in the ecstasy it gives to both the participants and the audience by striking the chords of primitive functioning of his actions hidden by his own consciousness. The music composed by Nitsch himself translates the different of emotions experienced in the ceremony from its solemnity of the tribal ritual to the ludicrousness of ones own existence to the jubilant mood of surviving through the ceremony. The participants (actors/volunteers) hoot around inviting the audience to share the mood with them. Nitsch says I also believe that, with regard to both the tragic aspect of suffering and instants of extreme ecstasy and affirmation of life, art needs to have a sense of sacred solemnity.

His idea of solemnity liberates his art from the otherwise inevitable commercialization of art which made the poster boy of Pop Art Andy Warhol to state to me business is the highest form of art . That

exactly how Nitsch s rolling around in menstrual blood differs from the drinking spit by Ozzy. The honesty is different in its very idea itself, the rebellion is pure because of its difference in its approach to honesty. It s taking the rebellion to the very foundations of culture, rather than making its an orgasm achieved through masturbation. High art is a celebration of eyes and ears symbolizing other sense into mere experiences through them, to be seen art in a totality he always reminds of the artifact of Venus of Willendorf which was nothing but an unbeautiful mass of female body the beginning of the eyeful art. As art has gone this far of liberating itself from chthonian abyss of fetishes and pleasures of birthBoth the giving birth and being born, Hermann Nitsch s ceremony works around the natural principles of violence, the pleasure of devouring and being devoured.

His rebellion is not merely an intellectually stimulating exercise. His rebellion cost him dearly. Many times the law, cops and animal rights activists would have his performance busted and he made it to prison many times on several accounts of blasphemy, cruelty on animals and causing scandal etc. His sworn comrade Otto Mehl , who was also behind commune experiments of the actionists movement was sent to prison for seven years. Nitsch s art , however graphic it is, deserves a better appreciation. Aktionismus is not just about art Their art is about the change of times and the unchanging intentions of the abyss of human mind. The certain difference about the performance of this art/ceremony is still the generality of the chthonian exploration which differs from the performance of a rock star purely in its intentions; both psychoanalytically and artistically. May be that s why there is not a bit of apollonian androgyny in rather the rabbi like appearance of this great artist who is for the average connoisseur a Freud, Steven Taylor, Mozart, Ozzy Osborne, Osho etc. all rolled into one .

The Instruction for the feast

"All are invited to drink. A mass intoxication is imperative, an all-embracing intoxication of the participants is ordained, unrestrained drinking takes place, day and night, in vineyards and cellars. Slaughter of a pig. GRAPES, FRUIT and TOMATOES, ANIMAL LUNGS, FLESH and INTESTINES are trampled on in ecstasy. People trample in SLAUGHTERED ANIMAL CARCASSES FILLED WITH INTESTINES, in troughs full of blood and wine. Extreme noise from the orchestras. Slaughtering of the bull, slaughtering of two pigs. Disembowelment. "