In the 1960s, the Viennese Actionists were united under the common task of liberation. For these artists, liberation was broadly conceived, ranging from breaking the limitations of artistic materials to more abstract freedoms, including moral, aesthetic, and even metaphysical forms. Otto Mühl and Hermann Nitsch envision the more abstract conceptions of liberation in critically different ways, at least during their formative years. Nitsch’s project continues the avant-garde venture of using myth and psychoanalysis to engage the depths of experience. The downward journey into the cave is then followed by an upward move that transcendences what Nitsch calls “animal nature.”
Conversely, Mühl’s program is carried out on a horizontal plane of immanence, in which one experiences liberation through expanding oneself into unknown zones and intensities. Caught between transcendence and immanence, we can see Actionism as containing both the apotheosis of modernism and the advent of tendencies some consider postmodern.
