Letters from Vienna #61
I sit in Bräunerhof, Thomas Benhard’s favourite café, in Vienna’s first district, at the exact same table where Peter Kubelka once introduced me to Hermann Nitsch and think of how Peter Kubelka once met Georges de Beauregard, the producer of “À bout de souffle” (see letter #60) in Paris. All Kubelka needed to make a film was a pretty girl, de Beauregard told him; otherwise he could be as free to experiment as he wished. Of course, I think to myself now, this is where Jean-Luc Godard’s famous quote: “All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl”, comes from.
Behind me an Austrian lady is struggling for the right Russian word (le mot juste) when chatting to her Ukrainian friend, a refugee from near the Belorussian border (“They (the Russians) are now gone,” she tells me later, and “we have to do some spring cleaning”), and not far removed is Peter Kubelka himself, reading a newspaper while savouring a delicious-looking meal.
I read in an Austrian magazine: “Profil”, that Hermann Nitsch has passed away and there’s an interview with Peter Kubelka concerning this unhappy fact.
“I am nearly five years older than Nitsch” Peter Kubelka says in the interview, “and I was a kind of mentor for him. We learned a lot from one another. Our friendship remained unclouded over all the years. It isn’t easy for me to talk about Nitsch’s death, it touches me deeply and deepens my sense of loneliness in old age…”
Kubelka got to know Nitsch in 1960, when the latter was working as a graphic designer in the Technical Museum. Nitsch had seen one of his films and invited him to the Vienna Loyalty Club, where he was exhibiting his Rinnbilder (dripping paint) in Kreuzform (in the form of a cross), with texts inspired by Greek tragedy.
“For years on end I had to calm his mother down; she was very much like her son: stubborn and theatrical. He got the job in the museum just to stop her worrying about him.”
Viennese Actionism
Nitsch had lost his father on the Eastern Front and the war had traumatised him in much the way it had other Viennese Actionists. Otto Muehl (1925-2013), for example, who was drafted in 1943, fought in the Ardennes (the “Battle of the Bulge”) in 1944/45 while Adolf Frohner (1934-2007) once pointed out the importance of the war for his generation. “How can you paint a picture of a pretty sunset” he told me “when your child is dead?”.
Viennese Actionism, of which Frohner was once a part, was a direct result of and reaction to this trauma. Thomas Bernhard, who also sat at the exact same table I am now sitting, was shocked and appalled at the Austrians refusal to talk of their grim and terrible experiences after the war. He too was traumatised by the conflict, which fed into the radicalism of his thinking and writing.
“In the mid 1960s” Kubelka says in the interview “Nitsch did a performance that was the most beautiful and important, which he ever made: he poured ink and other liquids onto sugar cubes and urine out of apothecary vials onto roses. The interest in the non-verbal, the real…united us. Our world views were very different but this didn’t affect our friendship. I, in contrast to Nitsch, am anti-metaphysical.”
“Nitsch was a Being fetishist. Given the vagueness of his language as well as that of Heidegger it’s impossible to know what either meant or intended to mean.”
An example of Nitsch’s early ideas is the following from 1962: “Through my art production (form of a live devotion) I take the apparently negative, the unsavoury, the perverse, the obscene, the lust and the victim hysteria resulting from them upon myself to save YOU the polluted, shameless descent into the extreme.”
“I am expression of the total creation. I have dissolved myself in it and identified myself with it. All agony and lust, mixed to a single state of intoxication, will penetrate me and therefore YOU.”
“Comedy will become a means of finding access to the deepest and holiest symbols through blasphemy and desecration. The blasphemous provocation is devotion. It is a matter of gaining an anthropologically determined view of existence, through which grail and phallus can be considered two qualified extremes. A philosophy of intoxication, of ecstasies, enchantments shows as result that the innermost of the living and intensely vital is the frenzied excitation, the orgy, which represents a constellation of existence where pleasure, pain, death and procreation are approached and permeated.”
“As a consequence of this way of seeing, one must recognise the sacrifice (Abreaktion) as a matter of ecstasy, of inspiration for living. The sacrifice is another reversed form of lust, which develops in a changed state out of the hectic of the unconscious. Forces of the sexual alter and are transposed to the cruelty of the sacrificial process. I accept the absolute jubilation of existence whose condition is the experience of the cross. Through completely experiencing and enjoying life to the full can the resurrection festival be obtained.”[1]
Cosmic Impudence
“We didn’t radicalise one another,” Kubelka continued in the interview “we were radical from the very start; although, at the same time, we were both highly conservative. I feel the past and strive after it, trying to catch up with what was before. Because only those who stand on solid ground can go further. All real avantgardists knew their history. Nitsch was also extremely well-educated, well-read and well-versed in the theory of music.”
“His music, which up till now has been neglected, is decisive. His approach was unbelievable. He couldn’t play an instrument, couldn’t sing, didn’t know musical scales and couldn’t sing a triad, yet was able to compose all on his own. This enabled him to take a step forward in a tradition rooted both in dexterity and training on instruments…”
“He always had a broad, sunny face, a big head; was benign, knew what he owed others, yet was relentless when it came to realising his ideas. He remained basically a child, to the very end. And he could do what few can: really experience simple things: air, smells, food, wine and intoxication.”
“He had a cosmic impudence, was cheeky toward authority, yet was also good-natured and grateful for his cosmic purpose. He wanted to show that which is beyond words and he never wavered in this task.”
Now in times of war and crisis an observation by Nitsch seems more applicable than ever before: “We must be careful with our reverence for appearances, sport, holidays, and our Mickey Mouse culture. Nothing big has to happen, just some criminal, someone like Hitler, has to come into power, and everything we have and live from will be immediately threatened.”
In this time of superficiality, digital media, fascistic fake news, lies, authoritarianism, Zombie-like conformity and virtual reality a return to reality, earth, nature, truth, common sense and common humanity is most urgently needed.
[1] p.269 Viennese Actionism Volume 2, 1960-1971