If I am here tonight, and very happy to be so, it is because Peter Noever asked me to say a few words, and I sincerely thank him for this sign of esteem, which greatly honors me. I undoubtedly owe this invitation to the two exhibitions which I curated at the Louvre, where a number of Muehl's works appeared: Possess and Destroy (2000), on Western sexuality, and Painting as Crime (2001-2002), on Western rationality.
These two exhibitions, very similar yet very different, presented themselves as a critical anthropology Freudian (and post) of Western imagery: discontent in (visual) culture. Muehl had, in both cases, a crucial task that of concluding. And the iconoclastic power of his images, films and photographs, which flout aesthetic traditions, did not fail to surprise: this was a great shock to the Louvre's visitors.
In France, there were thus aggressive reactions. But not hysterical. Nothing comparable to Austria, where the violence of the rejection leaves usincredulous. It seems that Otto Muehl remains the scapegoat of an entire nation: the convenient outlet for a pharisaic, if not puritan morality that same morality that he maligned without respite, with the help of Freud and Reich, and which returns like a boomerang in these sad times of moral order (the return of the repressed).
From the outside, the phenomenon is impossible to understand. An ancient tradition in France (and elsewhere) marks the first of April as a day of verbal liberty where one pleasantly substantiates the wildest rumors. I remember how four years ago, an Austrian TV channel took the announcement that the Louvre was exhibiting Muehl for an April Fool's joke. It was, they told me, as if the devil had entered paradise - a henchman of Satan in the garden of Eden. Why not? But this strange stupor forgot the essential: Otto Muehl is a great artist of the twentieth century.
And this is precisely the point of this exhibition. The man, who has already paid his debts, and paid dearly, hardly matters. All that matters is what remains: images. It is too early to judge the experience of the community, which still unleashes passions. But it is not too late on the contrary to judge the work of Muehl, which commands admiration: prolific, intense, and polymorphous work, yet to be discovered.
But who knows Muehl? No one (or hardly). The name alone is famous, by virtue of scandal. But what lies beyond? Nothing: ignorance and oblivion. For the general public - and even for the happy few - Muehl is reduced to his biographical avatars, trial, prison, exile - a bad novel. Whence this strange paradox: the myth (and what a myth: a doomed artist) has overshadowed all. Otto Muehl is notorious, but his œuvre unknown.
The MAK shows here some great films from the Actionist period. (I myself have shown them at the Louvre.) They might be problematic, by dint of violence and pornography. But the whole is a revelation. These are not only unique documents about the actions referred to as material. These are the actions themselves, or what is left of them, images, echoes, vestiges. For it is the trace that makes the work, in this art of life. Now, we no longer have traces. Or not yet.
Muehl is often called the father of Actionism. But what do we know of his actions? Very little. He previously made dozens in the sixties, mostly inVienna, then in Germany. Who remembers them today? And yet: all is photographed. Thousands of negatives, in the artist's archives, are but waiting to be printed, published, scrutinized. Undoubtedly this will require time and money. But it is then and only then that we will be able to assess Muehl's work. And this will be, unquestionably, an other revelation
Those already on the walls of the MAK (once of the Louvre) clearly attest to this, like the extraordinary Bodybuilding: Muehl is a master of the symbolic - a scenographer of the unconscious. None but him have known how to project into space the sexual fantasies of the old West: the ferocious rites of a patriarchal society that knows nothing of love but possession, that is, destruction.
His painting, undoubtedly, is better known. For we have seen examples everywhere. But they were hardly more than pieces. Now, the verve of the painter is tireless. And his plethoric production embraces all genres, from satire to obscenity - from politics to pornography (which might be the same). Such an exhibition is not a conclusion. An apotheosis. But the opposite: a beginning. A discovery
This exhibition crowns an entire series of Viennese tributes to Actionism. The Albertina has just shown Brus. And the MUMOK has just acquired the Friedrischof collection. Today the MAK exhibits Otto Muehl: this is the logical conclusion of a long movement of recognition which owes much to the pioneering - and decisive - works of Hubert Klocker, who turned a passionate attitude into critical discourse. We strongly hope that this movement continues. And expands.
And we expect that the archives of the MUMOK, under the direction of Eva Badura-Triska and Klocker, will be the start of a future center (or museum) of Actionism, which must certainly be created some day, even if the two words (Actionism and museum) contradict each other like an oxymoron. So much noise has been made about Actionism that generations of artists no longer want to hear anything about the subject: they are deaf, blind, and mute, when one speaks of it. Many critics do the same. The best essays on body art, which are American, do not refer to it. This is the price of scandal: another form of censorship. It is high time, not to speak less, but to speak better of it. With concepts, not with gossip.
For there are so many things to say - so many things that we ignore - of Austria in the sixties that everything is still left to be done. We eagerly wait for exhibitions of a new genre that know how to exploit films, photographs, and other materials, which do not cease to appear, and that jostle our historical intuitions. These manifestations should return to Austria its part in the genesis of so-called contemporary art. A cursed part, as Bataille says. But a major part (if ever there was one).
Here is, therefore, a kind of historic event: Muehl's return to Austria, ferocious homeland, which has not ceased to hate him, and did everything to break him. This requires, as we can see from the securitymeasures surrounding us, great courage and conviction. We must thus give Peter Noever and his team the homage they deserve. They certainly measure the risks of this resurrection. But they also know how necessary it is.
For this return to origins is loaded with meaning. Never has Muehl's persona seemed more emblematic: he incarnates all that still opposes the Malthusian ideals of our regressive democracies. Or the sound and the fury in a world ruled by screams and whispers. Muehl is a figure of the sixties, and even, so they say, a father (or a son) of May sixty-eight: a master of subversion.
Far from retracting, as so many others have done, with the Zeitgeist, he remains faithful to his libertarian values, today so reviled. His interviews, which continually protest against all forms of repression, social, familial, sexual, and others, attest to this. He who is very much the patriarch, is a sworn opponent of patriarchal society. And this is why his return, albeit metaphorical, has so much importance (and, consequently, so many detractors): Muehl is in himself an incarnation of resistance.
Now, we do need Muehl. For we do need to resist. These are dark times. Our old liberties are everywhere threatened. Our old societies are increasingly unequal. Our old democracies no longer even believe in their own values: as if seized by a shivering withdrawal to their domestic interests and we hope at least that this hibernation is not the cold of the grave.
It may be that Austria has alas! shown the way. But it is the entire West that is sick of itself. And I am not very proud to belong to a country (France) which votes en masse for a party of the extreme right the party of hate, racism, and stupidity. There is thus a real urgency, a moral duty, a categorical imperative to resist. Resistance is a familiar word, I think, in the Austria of today, just as it was in the France of yesterday. The exhibition here attests to this: to show Muehl is to resist intolerance. To return art to the heart of debate. And to make the fools howl.
We who are, and have always been, in love with Austria, know well that its grandeur was never in the political sphere (often disastrous). But in the cultural sphere (often sublime). It is striking - it is gratifying - to see that Viennese museums are more than elsewhere a land of independence: a space of resistance. I have already cited a few, which are not the least.The MAK (of course), the Albertina, the MUMOK defend in their own ways the best that Austria has produced in living art. Let me cite another example. When a renowned French thinker, Eric Alliez, is dismissed from the Académie des Beaux-Arts, under doubtful conditions that evoke a witch hunt, it is the Luitpold Museum (and Romana Schuler) who offer hospitality to his teaching: resounding proof of liberalism and intelligence.
This strategy of difference does not come without pressures or problems: the permanent conflict of art and politics. We all deeply regret that one of the great figures of Austrian museums (of Austrian culture), PeterWeibel, is no longer in a position to exercise, in Graz, his well-known talents, to which last year's Sacher-Masoch festival brilliantly testified. Even so. In a world where museums are nothing more than bureaucratic cogsof a cultural Disneyland shipwreck of the state - Austrian museums still have things to say, and strong things, that go against the current of opinion, always sensitive to demagogues (media and politicans). Here art becomes politics true politics: politics of symptoms.
Who's afraid of Otto Muehl? We always say: he is a provocateur. But provocation is nothing but a word forged by idiots for imbeciles. It is never but the reverse of the norm. And the norm is the new idol: the sacred principle of a new obscurantism. We are at this point so normative, that is, so repressive, that everything seems a provocation. Tristes tropiques. Where moralism triumphs.
What have we done to become such censors? Each of us should ponder this evidence: the performances of the Actionists would today be completely forbidden. I do not speak of the final actions of Muehl or Brus, at Cologne and Munich, in 1970, which were almost unbearable. But of others, shall we say, less provocative, to use the term with irony. Who would today agree to receive them? Not a single museum. Not a single gallery. Hermann Nitsch knows a lot about it. Everyone would cry pornography, even pedophilia. We believe ourselves to be liberals. We are nothing but puritans. Who take artists to be provocateurs.
Muehl (and his peers) did nothing but explore too soon, that is, before others, and too far, that is, better than others, a mysterious continent which remains little known: the body. They were obsessed by nothing more - liberating - than staging, with violence and derision, what we may call, to use a Christian word, the passion of the Western body: taboo, repression, suffering. But we are incapable of seeing this martyred body, which is our own, as it is. We are still incapable of accepting the corporeal message - the radical message - of the Actionists. It is not Muehl who is the devil: it is we who claim to be angels. But fallen angels. Who behave like beasts
Moral progress? Or cultural regression? For this (and for the rest), let me thank you again, Peter Noever, for bringing Muehl back to Vienna, which, in a way, he never left.