Otto Muehl (born June 16, 1925, at Grodnau, Burgenland, Austria) is an Austrian artist, who is best known as one of the co-founders as well as a main participant of Viennese Actionism. In 1972 he founded the Friedrichshof Commune, which has been viewed by some as an authoritarian sect1 that existed for several years before falling apart in the 1990s. Muehl himself was sentenced to 7 years imprisonment for sexual offences with adolescents. He was released after serving six and a half years and set up a smaller commune in Portugal.
In 1943, Otto Muehl served in the Wehrmacht and in 1944 he was sent to the Front. After the war, he studied teaching German and History, and Pedagogy of Art at the Wiener Akademie der bildenden Künste.
In the sixties his aim was ‘to overcome painting on canvas through staging the process of its destruction’. He made rhizomatic structures with scrap iron (“Gerümpelplastiken”), but soon proceeded to the “Aktion” in… read more
Otto Muehl (born June 16, 1925, at Grodnau, Burgenland, Austria) is an Austrian artist, who is best known as one of the co-founders as well as a main participant of Viennese Actionism. In 1972 he founded the Friedrichshof Commune, which has been viewed by some as an authoritarian sect1 that existed for several years before falling apart in the 1990s. Muehl himself was sentenced to 7 years imprisonment for sexual offences with adolescents. He was released after serving six and a half years and set up a smaller commune in Portugal.
In 1943, Otto Muehl served in the Wehrmacht and in 1944 he was sent to the Front. After the war, he studied teaching German and History, and Pedagogy of Art at the Wiener Akademie der bildenden Künste.
In the sixties his aim was ‘to overcome painting on canvas through staging the process of its destruction’. He made rhizomatic structures with scrap iron (“Gerümpelplastiken”), but soon proceeded to the “Aktion” in the vein of the New York Happenings. In 1962, when he was 37, the first “Aktion” “Die Blutorgel” was performed in Muehl’s atelier in the Perinetgasse by Muehl himself, Adolf Frohner and Hermann Nitsch. The “Fest des psycho-physischen Naturalismus” and “Versumpfung einer Venus” followed in 1963. From 1964 to 1966 many “Malaktionen” were filmed by Kurt Kren and photographed by Ludwig Hoffenreich. In 1966 a new concept of Aktion was developed with Günter Brus: instead of the canvas, the body became the scene of action. In 1968, Muehl, Brus and Oswald Wiener organised an Aktionsveranstaltung “Kunst und Revolution” in the University of Vienna, which caused a scandal in the press; they were arrested and Brus emigrated to Berlin.
Gradually, Muehl began to distance himself from “Aktion”. He regarded the “happening as a bourgeois artform, mere art”. The “transition from art to life” resulted in the founding of the commune as a kind of anti-society. All members submitted to the so-called Aktionsanalyse. The declared aim was the destruction of bourgeois marriage and private property, free love, and collective education of the children. In 1974 he played a small role as a member of an anarchic/therapy commune in Dusan Makavejev’s Sweet Movie. In the eighties, tensions within the commune increased until they culminated in a revolt under the direction of Altenberg. When, on top of that, Muehl was arrested and imprisoned in 1991, the commune fell apart. In 1997, when he was 72, Muehl moved to Faro, Portugal to start a new commune experiment. Despite suffering from Parkinsons disease, Muehl continued his art work, and in 2002 developed “electric painting films”, a new technique in which he paints digital photos from actions using a computer tablet and pen and edits the process into films. —wikipedia
