Rudolf Schwarzkogler Biography
Rudolf Schwarzkogler (Vienna, 13 November 1940 – Vienna, 20 June 1969) was an Austrian performance artist. He was one of the most controversial and complex spokespersons of the Wiener Aktionismus, an artistic and political movement, remembered in the broader field of Body Art, which, between the sixties and seventies, worked around the body as an object of social repression and which included among its protagonists Hermann Nitsch, Günter Brus, Otto Mühl and Arnulf Rainer. Viennese Actionism, which was born in the arms of Austrian Expressionism, Egon Schiele, the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, the revolution of Sigmund Freud, did not turn out to be a real movement, as it lacked a manifesto and homogeneous poetics and unitary, despite this it showed itself as a necessary meeting point between individuals with a need to express discomfort and existential metastasis. Schwarzkogler makes his body the essential material of his performative art, putting it into sensitive form of all the cruelty and repression, the mortification and pain infused by the suffocation of the capitalist, bourgeois and respectable state. Fundamentally, Schwarzkogler's actions, like those of the other shareholders, have a strongly political connotation, despite the fact that they take place, by the artist's own will, in private, where a photographer documents the progress of the actions. The only evidence of Schwarzkogler's actions, therefore, remain these photographs, decidedly reductive compared to the actual actions, but no less dazzling. The material with which he martyrs his body is distressing material, which evokes frustrating and asphyxiating dimensions. Schwarzkogler committed suicide in 1969 at the age of 28.
