Franz West and Vienna in Baltimore, part two

Continued from part one, in which I described Vienna's cultural and intellectual history as the backbone of West's work.

Vienna's leading 1960s avant garde artists were known as the Viennese Actionists. Like their far-away contemporaries who were exploring performance-driven art, the Actionists believed in making art that directly engaged the viewer with live actions, art that was explicitly confrontational. Their confrontationally transgressive work included naked bodies, a fascination with bodily fluids and carcasses, interaction with their audience -- and often encounters with Austrian police, which found their work indecent.

Much has been made of how a young Franz West absorbed the performances of the Actionists and how their work informed his 'adaptives' and other 'please touch!', viewer-activated sculptures that have been a staple of West's oeuvre for over 30 years. The concept behind West's adaptives is simple: It's art. The viewer is invited to handle it, to play with it, and to join others in playing with it. [Above: BMA photo, which isn't staged, no, not at all. The text says, "Take an Adaptive and go into the cabinet." Visitors' interactions with the adaptives are shown live on the television screen at the lower-right.]

The Actionists weren't the only artists who influenced West toward creating art that was both interactive and hands-on, and art that was unusually frank in referencing both sex and bodily functions. Both West and the Actionists learned from Vienna's first modern: Gustav Klimt.

Klimt was the first modern artist to use sex and then-radical portrayals of the body as a response strategy. Throughout his career -- but especially in 1902-1907, his peak, controversy-soaked period -- Klimt used sexual paintings as a specific way of responding to his critics. (Most famously: In late 1902 anti-Semitic politicians and journalists, outraged in part at the way in which Klimt was openly consorting with Jewish women, circulated a petition expressing outrage at Klimt's art. Klimt responded by posing his favorite model effectively and suggestively mooning the viewer, looking over her shoulder and grinning. Klimt wanted to title the painting 'To my critics...', but friends talked him out of it.)

Klimt was especially notorious for maintaining a studio-cum-sexual-playspace in which his models both posed and performed sexually, as directed by Klimt. Hundreds of surviving drawings serve as documentation of the way Klimt's models entertained him by masturbating (apparently at Klimt's direction), by performing sexually with each other (again, apparently at Klimt's direction), or by having sex with Klimt, who seems to have drawn himself having sex with his models. Or, to look at it another way, Klimt was handling, playing with and joining the women who would become the art.

The Actionists learned at Klimt's feet, and used their bodies, sex and sexuality in much the same way. Like Klimt, they were eager to respond to bourgeois society with bohemian progressiveness, a formula that often equaled 'sex.' Hermann Nitsch's Actionist theater took Freudian ideas about sexuality and orgies as jumping-off points. (Nitsch later expliclitly acknowledged the debt to Klimt in a painting that abstracts the embracing figures in Klimt's famous The Kiss.) In 1970, Actionist Otto Muhl formed a utopian, free-love commune that by 1972 had become well-known in Viennese progressive circles: The commune had grown to house 600 people and had 'branches' across central Europe. (In fact, 1972 was something of a last hurrah for the Actionists, as West would have known: In addition to 1972 being the peak year for Muhl's sex commune, Nitsch participated in Documenta V and created 'Aktions' in the United States. Gunter Brus' artists books documenting and referencing Actionist performances were published in 1971 and entered wider circulation in 1972.)

But by 1972 the Actionists were also notorious: Nitsch and Brus had been imprisoned for their provocations, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler was dead. A 25-year-old West likely wanted to demonstrate that his work had roots other than in the most recent, notorious Viennese art, and so that year West produced this work-on-paper (which I showed yesterday.) It indicates that West was aware of the salacious details of Klimt's studio practice (which were well-documented by contemporary visitors to Klimt's studio), and grounds his forthcoming practice in the work and practice of Vienna's earliest modern. The drawing sets the stage for much of West's work that is to come, work that would marry sex, the body, performance and art.