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THE
ART OF DESTRUCTION |
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The Vienna
Aktion Group
formed the most provocative, insurgent and challenging of all the worldwide
art movements of the 1960s. Their sexually-charged and anti-social actions
exacted a profound and irreparable upheaval in the way in which art
was conceived. Using their own bodies as raw material, the Aktion Group
undertook experiments in cruelty that disassembled the human body and
its acts into compacted gestures of blood, meat and excreta. The films of
the Vienna Aktion Group – made both by the group themselves, and
by collaborators such as Kurt Kren – form the essential residue,
debris and evidence of their performances. Film forms the sensitized
medium – as unique and ferocious in its impact as the corporeal
material upon which the Aktion Group worked – that allied itself
most intimately to their experiments. For the first time, THE
ART OF DESTRUCTION examines such films as SODOMA,
SHIT-BASTARD, OH
SENSIBILITY, BODYBUILDING,
and ART AND REVOLUTION, focusing
on how they reveal the obsessions, ambitions and outrages of the Aktion
Group. The iconoclastic work of the Vienna Aktion Group is now more contemporary than ever before, and THE ART OF DESTRUCTION provides a comprehensive introduction to that work in both film and performance. Fully illustrated and annotated, this is a book of compelling interest to all students of film, art and performance, and for all readers engaged with questioning social and corporate cultures. Paperback. Size: 8.25 X 8.25 inches, 148 pages.
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