Flying Luttenbachers/Otto Mühl Event

The Aktionist movement began to take shape in the early Sixties in Austria. Proponents of this movement included Hermann Nitsch, Gunther Brus, Rudolf Schwarzkogler, and Muehl. The art of the Aktionists generally involved ritualistic public displays of self-mutilation/body fluid/sexual function/animal sacrifice induced symbolism and catharsis. Each artist took his own individual spin on the Aktionist aesthetic. Nitsch still organizes frenzied, quasi-spiritual events that surround its participants in a total gestalt (food, music, action, psychodrama) over the course of days. Schwarzkogler became infamous for rumours that he killed himself during a project which involved slicing himself to pieces and documenting it in a series of still photographs. In fact, his photos were all staged and he actually died when he fell out of a window in a fit of depression. Muehl seems to stand for a more blatantly extroverted and purile strain of chaos.

My knowledge of Muehl's work up to this point was based on small mentions in various books on "subversive film" and performance art. These all-too-brief summaries seemed to dwell on the basic, sheer "fucked-up-edness" of his output. "Fucked-up-edness" is a general characteristic in art I rarely tire of. In this world of total insanity and illogic, the only way I have found to feel better about my position in life is to force what I perceive as the repressed mass psychosis of the human race outward, right back in their own fucking faces, as hard as I can. This seems "fucked-up", doesn't it?

My initial plan was to match visual chaos with aural chaos (of course.) I confirmed Michael Colligan and Kurt Johnson for the date and planned for us to just improvise sound as frenetically as possible. When William Pisarri was added to the line-up, I took a more structuralist tact and devised a composition for the group. I chose to relate the music directly to the film only in regards to length; its beginning and end coinciding with the film. I realized that a fractured, varied/random structure would create more confusion and discomfort than a monochromatic wall of noise and would indeterminately synchronize itself with what I expected would be the film's frantic, primitive editing style. I felt that this subliminal aesthetic "synchronization" would inherently aid in helping to avoid the obvious pit falls of past multi-media abortions I witnessed, with so many annoying "musicians" failing miserably to illustrate the film by pretentiously "emoting" with their instruments.

The composition is simply comprised of 90 events that last various specific durations. These events were all cued continuously, one after another by a non-playing conductor (Dylan Posa in this case). When arranging these events into an order, I consciously thought in terms of varying the sonic weight of the music frequently and radically while forcing a constant, forward momentum based on surprise and making sure the acoustic instruments in the group had some particular stretches of rest! Except where occasionally noted, all events were to be performed at a normal/loud volume (in an attempt to banish those "touchy-feely" sensitive moments in music/improvised music that I hate so much) and the musicians were instructed to perform 'violently' (Colligan got the medal for this, Pisarri got the dunce cap). I wanted to have at least some purely destructive noise executed, so I arbitrarily chose to create a five-minute climax section with the instructions "ALL - FFF!!!!", at which point the conductor would let off a smoke machine, filling the room with confusion.

The rehearsal was brief but acceptable. The main problem seemed to be the relative volume of Johnson's contrabass. We all pompously vowed to accomodate the volume of the theoretical quietest member, but neither Colligan or myself could be bothered to restrain ourselves during the actual performance.

I knew something was going right when the kid from the university called me, slightly alarmed at having just viewed a video copy of the film. He wanted us to play "later" on the bill (probably so all the colligiate wimps could walk out on us after getting the other more "appropriate" entertainment they paid three bucks for). Alas, we had to play first in order to accomodate another gig one of the players had that evening. He told me he felt obligated to give a disclaimer before our performance and that the movie was "pretty, uh, hardcore." As they say in the olde Ivy League, no shit, Sherlock! You call us, you'd better expect fucking hardcore.

The fated night arrived and the film rolled. I had the event documented on video so I could gain a more objective feel for the outcome at a later date. It seemed like many people enjoyed parts of the film, (actually several short films under the blanket title, "Materialaktionsfilme") and laughed loudly at some of the more absurd images. I don't know that anyone was particularly offended or that anyone had to leave in disgust. I'm sort of glad, because this sort of subject matter shouldn't be that much of a deal anyways; and sort of bummed, because once again we wind up preaching only to the converted. I felt like some of the individual playing was not intense as it should have been, but over-all the composition came off reasonably. I hope to make some video stills available at this site soon.

One acquaintance hated the films merely because she interpreted them as "upper class attempts at fake S/M." I don't think you can infer the actor's bank accounts from their performances, nor do I think any of the segments are attempting to work as mere titillation fodder, per se. If anything, Muehl's films are messy, snotty, blatantly stupid jabs at the perennially prudish threshold of contemporary status quo morality and bitter, atavistic parodies of prevalent norms in pornography. Although to the cynical, the acts depicted in films like "Scheisskerl" and "O Sensibility" may seem like mere stock performance art cliches thirty years after the fact, these films still have the ability to amuse and entertain those with a more liberated sense of humor.