Otto Muehl was condemned to 7 years of prison in Austria in 1991. His book takes us through the dungeons of society to disclose images of the cruelty of the state and prison systems. In prison he exchanges letters with his family and friends and accepts a series of interviews with
Danièle Roussel on art, which for Muehl is radical, creative and social. for him, the only acceptable authority is one's own energy, which in his case, remains intact throughout the seven years.
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.
