ArteActa

ArteActa 2023, 9:1-31 | DOI: 10.62804/aa.2023.006

Pozice mlčícího umělce. Případ Rudolfa Schwarzkoglera

Tomáš Kubart

Rudolf Schwarzkogler (1940-1969) was one of the main representatives of Austrian performance art in the 1960s. He became particularly famous for his short-lived (active years 1965-1966) activity within the art group Viennese Actionism, during which he created six events. Schwarzkogler worked at a time when softer forms of censorship were applied in Austria, and as such the artist stood at the imaginary seam of direct and "surrogate" communication. Direct enough to be understood by the audience, and "surrogate" enough to be misunderstood by the censors. According to the testimony of his colleagues at the time, and the research of Yvonne Ziegler, Schwarzkogler showed homoerotic tendencies, which manifested themselves in his artistic work. In the Roman Catholic Austria of the time, this meant constant clashes with censorship and misunderstanding. He has fallen into what the German literary theorist Georg Schmid calls the "Totschweigen", the cultural sphere of silence. His work was incomprehensible and inaccessible to his contemporaries for two reasons: the too-symbolically empty form of communication left room for the projection of the collective unconscious of his contemporaries; the deliberately keyed-out outcomes of his work, in turn, became too enigmatic to be understood by the layman. By analysing one of his most famous actions, the 1964 event The Wedding (Hochzeit), we will look at the strategies he employed and what he was actually trying to communicate to his contemporaries through his apparent silence.

Keywords: Viennese Actionism, Rudolf Schwarzkogler, Totschweigen, Schweinvokabular, performance art, purgatorium of the mind, Hochzeit, queer art

Published: September 1, 2023  Show citation