Over the course of two consecutive evenings this past February, Hermann Nitsch executed the first American “Painting Action,” officially the sixtieth such performance since 1960, when he debuted this mode at the Technisches Museum in Vienna. The Painting Actions—the most recent one included—are not as scandalous as his better-known Actions from the early 1960s, for which he once skinned, mutilated, and crucified a lamb, displaying its body on a wall of white fabric and its entrails on a white table, covered with blood and hot water. Hermann Nitsch 60. Painting Action // 60. Malaktion, 2011, while lacking a lamb—presumably the sacrificial lamb of God—did refer to the Crucifixion, incorporating a number of cross-shaped canvases on which the artist and his assistants had splashed paint, some of it bloodred. White robes and several large-scale canvases were also included, splattered with bold greens, yellows, and browns. The effect of the performance—and the resultant canvases—was suggestively sensational, as all action painting is.
Nitsch regards himself as a “person gifted for religion,” and, as such, “gifted for grasping being . . . in its manifold forms.” Presumably, his Painting Actions are orgiastic celebrations of Christ’s sacrifice. But it isn’t just killing that Nitsch is interested in, however sanctified, but sex, too—also a sacred act. “Sexual love need not compete with a love of god or loving life,” he has written. “On the contrary, god has created all that leads to sexual consummation of love”—through sexual orgasm “we enter into his most inward substance.” Shades of Saint Teresa! She also seemed to have confused/fused sexual rapture and religious ecstasy.
So are the Abstract Expressionist paintings that we see in the gallery the traces of sexual acting out, or the residue of a sacred ritual meant to inspire our worshipful awe? Likely they are both. There are four in total, each large-scale and unfolding horizontally, mural-like, along the wall. Two feature several colors splashed around a thick band running horizontally through the center. A truncated cross is positioned amid a luminously yellow work; another painting features bold splashes of blood red, with a bit of blue, and the “heavenly” white of the canvas coming through. In the center of the room is an altarlike white table with white lilies and roses, as one will often find in a Catholic church. Such a reference to ecclesiastical space is Nitsch’s standard vocabulary, and, in lieu of the lamb, he no doubt sacrificed himself during the two days of the performance, painting with fervor and using a multiplicity of colors, as the paint cans and bags of pigment on display imply.
Harold Rosenberg, who coined the term action painting, spoke of its tendency to turn into “apocalyptic wallpaper,” raising the questions of whether Nitsch’s painting actions merely recycle Abstract Expressionism, and whether the artist’s religious fervor serves to impart an extra edge of meaning and expressive frisson to the splatters and drops. Indeed, Nitsch’s work seems oddly quaint, despite its grandness, its welcome celebration of painting for painting’s sake, and its implied profundity. At the least, Nitsch’s works are saturated with spontaneous gesture and personalized idea, and, as such, meet psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott’s test of the true self.
—Donald Kuspit
