Hermann Nitsch

Translated by Halinka Fietta
Photo Credits: Sven Eisermann

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Red: everything’s oriented to the colour of ecstasy, of blood, of sacrifice, of passion, of flesh.

“My art is a prayer. Not only a prayer to God, but also to nature, to the being, to the entire cosmos. I’m deeply religious but I don’t belong to any particular creed. My job and my theatre are an esthetical way to pray, a contemporary path to prayer. The symbols I utilise are also present in all religions: wine, blood, sacrifice. The difference is that they’re not metaphorical, but true and real”.

Hermann Nitsch

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Hermann Nitsch is the author of the disturbing bloody ritual of “Orgien-Mysterien Theatre”, where the individual gets in touch with his being thanks to rituals that take place for several days and encourage the killing of a pack animal to extract their entrails. Ecstasy leads to an extreme excitement, falsified by hallucinations that create an identification with the divinity, which is represented by the hidden part of the self. Affected by squint towards his artwork, he’s aware of not being able of giving a codified system to his expression because, to him, to be subjected to will means also not being able to feel anything apart from it.
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His actions have to provoke a sense of loathing in the spectator, causing a reaction of catharsis and purification that leads to the re-emergence of the primordial human instinct from the repression of social impositions in order to aim to a spirituality where the work of art is no more an object when disappears the idea that the artwork has a value itself.

Hermann Nitsch part 5 of 6 from Incubate Festival on Vimeo.

Inspired to the Wagner ideal of “Opera Totale”, he shows a dramatic painting , in which the pictorial process is much more important than the result itself and the stage is countered, becoming wider and conveying the idea that everything is extension of our body.
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Monochrome thought as an evocative escape of symbolic themes such as hope and redemption, life and death, where the body becomes canvas and colour is no longer a simple pigment created by the master-hand of the artist but is now living on its own, born from the violated work of art in which every possible contrast between art and life is cancelled. Painting is now seen as an immersion in the “it”, a place where the death pulse is removed, replaced by the vital rush of Eros and Thanatos in the inter-psyche, where sexual pulse reaches the highest level. The idea of visceral pulse is made evident by the comparison between ancient and Christian life philosophies, where the Church mysteries, linked to pain and passion, lead to eternal life, creating a contact with a transcendence existing by itself, while the core of these works is destruction and, at the same time, the founding of metaphysic of the eternal return we suffer right here, right now.

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His production is influenced also by figures such as Artand, Freud and Nietzsche but is the last one who shows him the art path as a process and not as the final point. Power will is “creator” and that’s why it enables to feel the essence of things overcoming the idea of supremacy of reason over life.
Knowledge is permeated with carnality and it is real. In it art is integrated with reality and has to make up for the lack of a primitive rush.

Cruelty, sexual instinct and drunkenness represent the mask of the Dionysian action which creates a symbolic image of dreaming, exploited to stimulate the depth of the becoming human. In his performances ecstasy is the aim and it is also a way to free the knowledge of the self.
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: Photo credits: Sven Eisermann

The fascination Nitsch creates aims to distort the daily logic, predictable seduction in the mystery of body communication. The watching public is asymmetrical to the protagonist and to the ritual itself, which is made of soliloquies and it is aware of not being able to address to society until the end of the mourn due to the loss of the direct contact of artist with reality. The ritual victim is going to melt together with the executioner, penetrating feelings and pulses through the thaumaturgic liquid that makes all of us equal.
The being shows a contaminated and wild dark chasm, and lives where destruction and construction stay together, in the quiescence that stimulates the vital act. The existing alchemic research aims to the disappearance of the veil that divides the “born” from the “non-born”, to discover archaic dimension of clear mysticism.
The interplay between the performing plan and the structural choice of the setting is evident in the architectural drawings of the original project and it almost outlines the perimeter of a wreck, so as to give the rite what it really needs: a worship place where express oneself, guidelines for an ideal path that create a time/space where to move, physically invisible but perceptible by senses.
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In the Prinzendorf castle of Wien lays the base of his experimentation and performances since 1971. It is right there that in the 60s emerged the Wiener Aktionimous, an artistic environment that can be compared to the Performance Art and that uses images with a high psychological value, with a religious background, linked both to Christianity and Greek tragedy. The perception of the artwork as a crime and the fact it has been cause of many accusations, detentions and triasl for the artist, have to be placed into a joining channel for artist and society where a negative vitality could lead to divide logic and instinct.Sense of anamorphosis felt by the spectator, destabilization of daily life, break with a language made of definite structure: the parachute is torn and to fall down becomes an experience that goes beyond any kind of meaning.
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Nitsch’s relation with Asolo is due to the particular attraction already felt by many other artists before. This bond made him look for a place where the will of artistic power meets a place that is not so affected by modernity, a laboratory in which cultivate his own ideas and where art reproduce itself. A concept and a place put together, a neutral dimension that, thanks to its simplicity, fills the creative space, giving Nitsch his satisfaction without needing the creative act.

Alessandra Sutto
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