Hermann Nitsch, the notorious Austrian performance artist whose elaborate and eerie “actions,” as they were called, often involved the slaughtering and breaking open of animals, blood, feces and entrails, and evoking Christian and pagan rituals, died Monday in Mistelbach, a town near his home in Lower Austria. He was 83.
His wife, Rita Nitsch, confirmed his death at a hospital, but did not give the cause.
Nitsch was one of the founders of the Viennese Actionists, a small group of radical artists who, from the 1960s, turned art making upside down, as many European and American artists did at the time, by throwing their bodies into the work, quite literally, and using all kinds of materials and methods to question social norms, political systems and artistic tropes. Joseph Beuys was cuddling a dead rabbit and giving it a lecture on art (in a later work, he and a coyote hung out in a Manhattan gallery). The Fluxus pranksters staged a mock mass, which included Happenings, as they were known, with clergy in gorilla suits and a chorus of barking dogs. Yoko Ono invited an audience to cut her clothes with scissors.
The action painting of the Abstract Expressionists had given way to pure action – some mundane, like New Zealand-born artist Billy Apple vacuuming the roof of his Chelsea apartment, and some plain gross, like Vito Acconci masturbating for days in the Sonnabend. Gallery in SoHo.
The Viennese, however, were tougher. Nitsch played gruesome, blood-soaked performances with Otto Muehl, Gunter Brüs and Rudolf Schwarzkogler. They often mutilated themselves.