The correspondance between Otto Muehl and Erika Stocker from 1962 to 1970, forms an intense journal of Viennese actionism, and more particularly of Otto Muehl's work. We assimilate the creative development week afer week of Muehl's progression from junk sculpture to the destruction of the canvas, and from his framework of material action to premises on his utopia for today.
Artist co-founder of the
Viennese Actionism (with
Hermann Nitsch,
Günter
Brus and Rudolf Schwarzkogler), controversial founder of the sulphurous utopian community of Friedrichshof in 1972 (which will earn him seven years in prison in the 1990s), Otto Muehl (born 1925 in Grodnau, Austria, died 2013 in Moncarapacho, Olhão, Portugal) staged a series of "material actions" from 1963 to 1970, for film and photography, in which the body becomes part of the environment. Since then, he has developed his work as an enterprise of "surpassing pictorial painting by representing the process of its destruction", with the idea that the body is also an "object" to be shaped, the living body, as well as the social body, art and life being inseparable.
