1960s
A01=Caroline Lillian Schopp
action art
art history
Austrian art
Author_Caroline Lillian Schopp
Category=AFKP
Category=AG
Category=AGA
Category=ATQ
Category=ATX
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Feminist Actionism
historiography
passivity
performance art
Viennese Actionism
vulnerability
Product details
- ISBN 9780226839219
- Weight: 594g
- Dimensions: 178 x 254mm
- Publication Date: 01 Dec 2025
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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A novel approach to performance art and its history that revisits Viennese Actionism, one of the most controversial episodes of the 1960s.
Viennese Actionism represents a notorious case within art history, often cited but little studied, especially in the United States. By carefully looking at the unsettling performances that define this movement, Caroline Lillian Schopp offers a vital corrective to the narrative. Schopp observes that contrary to the reception of their graphic violence, many performances explore passivity, vulnerability, and dependence in gestures of “in-action.” Viennese Actionism registers hesitations about the liberatory ethos of the 1960s, amplified by Austria’s marginalized postwar social and artistic culture. In dialogue with feminist theory, In-action assembles a vocabulary for performance art without the standards of self-assertion, emancipation, and expressive action that continue to inform how art and politics are understood today.
Decentering the traditional focus on the male protagonists of Viennese Actionism—Günter Brus, Otto Muehl, Hermann Nitsch, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler—Schopp draws attention to women who performed with them, including Anna Brus, Hanel Koeck, and Ingrid Wiener. Doing so brings into view how these performances scrutinize intimate relationships like marriages, partnerships, and friendships, as well as the conventions of traditional artistic media such as painting and tapestry.
Viennese Actionism represents a notorious case within art history, often cited but little studied, especially in the United States. By carefully looking at the unsettling performances that define this movement, Caroline Lillian Schopp offers a vital corrective to the narrative. Schopp observes that contrary to the reception of their graphic violence, many performances explore passivity, vulnerability, and dependence in gestures of “in-action.” Viennese Actionism registers hesitations about the liberatory ethos of the 1960s, amplified by Austria’s marginalized postwar social and artistic culture. In dialogue with feminist theory, In-action assembles a vocabulary for performance art without the standards of self-assertion, emancipation, and expressive action that continue to inform how art and politics are understood today.
Decentering the traditional focus on the male protagonists of Viennese Actionism—Günter Brus, Otto Muehl, Hermann Nitsch, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler—Schopp draws attention to women who performed with them, including Anna Brus, Hanel Koeck, and Ingrid Wiener. Doing so brings into view how these performances scrutinize intimate relationships like marriages, partnerships, and friendships, as well as the conventions of traditional artistic media such as painting and tapestry.
Caroline Lillian Schopp is assistant professor of the history of art at Johns Hopkins University. She was previously guest professor of art history, art theory, and aesthetics at the Berlin University of the Arts and a faculty member in art history at the University of Vienna.
