The four artists who made up the core of the movement — Günter Brus, Otto Muehl, Hermann Nitsch and Rudolf Schwarzkogler — witnessed the ravages of World War II and its aftermath, though only one of them, Muehl, was old enough to fight, entering the Wehrmacht in 1943 at the age of 18.
The movement faced the horrors of fascism and war head on, with an unapologetic brutality. By involving every taboo and bodily fluid imaginable, the artists used violence to awaken a largely complacent (and manipulated) society.
In a 2010 interview with Jonas Vogt for the online magazine, VICE, Nitsch, who continued to stage performances of his Orgien Mysterien Theater (Orgies Mysteries Theater) into the late 1990s, states that his intention was “to deal with immediate color, real flesh, real entrails, the human body. In addition, my work is also more or less a psychoanalytic realization of subconscious associations. I am a great admirer of Freud and Jung. Myths of all times play an important role in my work.”
As a person very interested in the limitations and vast potential of the human body (I have Yukio Mishima and Kafka to thank), the movement interested me the most. Its embrace of the grotesque is beautiful.
Noise artist John Duncan is largely influenced by the principles and qualities of the movement:
http://www.tokafi.com/15questions/15-questions-to-john-duncan/
Fluxus was a movement based in the 1960s influenced largely by John Cage, who idealized the process behind making art. To Cage, the process of creating was paramount to anything else. Another main influence was Marcel Duchamp, of toilet-in-a-museum fame. It's all about potential. Yet with potential, you let yourself be vulnerable to the flame. See Yoko Ono's Cut Piece:
Stencil?
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