Review of In-action: Viennese Actionism and the Passivities of Performance Art

VALIE EXPORT, From the Portfolio of Doggedness, 1968. Photo: Joseph Tandl.

This review was commissioned before the recent death of VALIE EXPORT. Given EXPORT’s central role in both Caroline Lillian Schopp’s book and Rose-Anne Gush’s critical discussion, we are publishing it at a moment when questions around her legacy have taken on renewed urgency.

—Editors

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In her book In-action: Viennese Actionism and the Passivities of Performance Art (2025), Caroline Lillian Schopp volunteers the term “in-action” to explore and account for a subjugated history of artistic action in Vienna in the 1960s. Schopp identifies Viennese actionism—now broadly understood to have been retroactively named in 1970 by Peter Weibel and VALIE EXPORT—as a broad context that is seldom rigorously studied. In doing so she makes an important historiographical intervention, telling a new history of this period of artistic production, expanding its canon to include accounts of women—Anna Brus, Hanel Koeck, and Ingrid Wiener, among others—and approaching the history of performance art without taking “action” as its organizing assumption. Indeed, carefully attending to how “actionism” has been widely interpreted as either a liberatory project or one set on violence and hate, she persuasively brings into view a different image of actionism, one that seems more demure—a history of “incidents,” to use Brus’s term. Schopp writes, 

In-action describes a tendency toward intimacy, inarticulacy, and impotence. The term accounts for figures involved in a performance, yet disinclined to entirely take part, and inclined rather toward relations of dependency. In-action names a suspension, a hesitation, a reservation within the field. It affords also, within violent or upsetting scenes, space for figures that do not enact explicit violence but expose vulnerability and precariousness.1

“In-action” is itself an open concept, hard to pin down. For Schopp, it refers to the potential to mistake the politics of artistic or political action, and also to an art-historical approach that does not foreground the action within performance art. What are the politics of in-action?

Schopp positions performance art as emerging into wider visibility at Documenta 5 (1972), which both produced the frame for understanding Viennese actionism as politically charged live art, and simultaneously promulgated the idea that it was deviant and an “artistic ‘dead end’” (5). Central to her counter-history is Rudolf Schwarzkogler, both best known and least known within the actionist milieu. His death in 1969 was mythologized as a suicide by self-castration, a myth that obscures the actual circumstances: He fell from a window, leaving no note. This mythology places Viennese actionism at what Schopp calls a “point of extremity,” tethered to Arthur Danto’s description of performance art as bringing “the reality of the extreme experience into being an artist” (2)—a framework that also underwrites the actionists’ own self-narration, in which they described their intention as acting directly on reality.

Yet against this litany of what “really” happened, Schopp offers a counter-reading. Rather than any violent or aggressive heroics, Schwarzkogler’s works (his Aktionen), appearing to us as carefully composed photographs, are characterized as “in-sincere”—and in that insincerity they ask us to question our expectations of, and disappointments with, the entangled practices of art and life. With Schwarzkogler, action starts to look like its opposite: passivity. He is characterized as a figure who declines to appear, as retreating from the stage, hiding. Schopp looks again and again at the photographs; we read her looking. She sees vulnerable bodies that are touched, performances that are affecting, desire that does not elide violence, and acts and gestures that are gentle, slow, and wounded. She sees both “assurance and anxiety,” “incapacitation and difficult emotions.” In approaching these images, Schopp adopts what she calls an “intimate idiom” (12)—a language of intimacy focused on her exploration of the photographs produced in the wake of the “actions.” And she asks how the viewer is “sensitized” by these images rather than being “activated,” as the actionists intended. Being sensitized might avoid the activation involved in passing quick judgement, taking a position. She asks the reader to stay with what she describes as the bewildering, non-explicit quality of in-action.

In-action argues against the dominance of what became known as the “action paradigm”—a discourse that holds that performance art should model emancipatory action, activating audiences and individuals, freeing art of media constraints, liberating bodies and collectivities, and agitating politically, thereby presenting a blueprint for an ideal society. Schopp traces this paradigm to a broader cultural narrative of emancipatory action in the postwar period, anchoring it in Christine Stiles’s 1998 account in which she opts for the term “action art” over “performance art” because it “keeps the pressure on the political reference inherent in the term activism” and reflects a “highly determined strategy for artistic intervention in public life” (15). For Stiles, action art “recovers a social force in art” and “remains one of the last and most effective modes of resistance to all forms of domination” (15). For Schopp, this both promises too much and is too restrictive with regard to what performance art might actually be. Instead, Viennese actionism is seen as a form of art that betrays the promise of the action paradigm, because its actions cannot be straightforwardly understood as political. Schopp is attentive to publication and reception histories, showing where slippages and misreadings have occurred. One such example concerns the word “action” itself, which would usually be rendered in German as “Handlung” or “Tat,” but which was taken up in the art field in the early 1970s to describe what Schopp terms “performance art.” She traces this history from Die Aktion—the left-wing, Berlin-based, early twentieth-century magazine—through postwar West German avant-garde artistic movements, and into the more familiar American history of performance art rooted in the work of Allan Kaprow.

The conceptualization of in-action proceeds through three models, each posing a distinct challenge to the action paradigm. The first is “feminist actionism,” a term coined by VALIE EXPORT across a series of short texts written during the 1970s and consolidated into a thesis published in German in 1980. In Schopp’s reading, feminist actionism largely reaffirms rather than challenges the action paradigm, reauthorizing the expectations of action that Vienna actionism had established, as framed principally by Peter Weibel and EXPORT herself. The crux of Schopp’s argument turns on a single phrase from EXPORT’s manifesto. Citing EXPORT’s claim that “just as action aims at achieving the unity of actor and material, perception and action, subject and object, Feminist Actionism seeks to transform the object of male natural history, the material ‘woman,’ subjugated and enslaved by the male creator, into an independent actor and creator, subject of her own history,’” Schopp reads the locution “just as” as symptomatic: proof that feminist actionism reproduces the logics of the very paradigm it purports to contest (23). This figure of the “independent actor” draws feminist actionism into a vision of history defined by “self-assertive, willful emancipatory action” (23)—too heavy a burden for art to bear.

Schopp’s reading of EXPORT is, I think, open to question—and the disagreement is instructive. While EXPORT’s model of action broadly follows Weibel’s—and indeed, in her manifesto Weibel’s theorization functions as a kind of protagonist—the work of transformation that EXPORT envisions operates at a level that exceeds the sovereign individual. In my own reading, EXPORT rejects the features that define the action paradigm as a domain of liberal, autonomous selfhood or straightforward political activism. She turns to a history of gendered defeats: those that have taken place in the home, in relation to the right of inheritance, the right to a name. She brings women into a quasi-class relation where women’s power has been, in her account, at best “a weak power of refusal.” This is hardly the posture of the action paradigm. In its place, EXPORT proposes a form of sovereignty founded on pain—what she calls the “painful energy of resistance,” which resists the intertwined structures of capitalist reification and patriarchal subjugation. This orientation is not confined to her theoretical writing. Even in her works most frequently cited as “active” or actionist—and still more so in performance pieces from 1973, described as “body material actions” that engage with pathological psychic states—there is a sustained interest in forms of psychic inhibition, depletion, and loss of drive that run counter to any straightforward expectation of emancipatory action. Emancipatory action might come about via small acts of escape. It would also be a mistake—one Amelia Jones has arguably made—to reduce feminist actionism to “aggressive self-enactment” by reading it primarily through works like Genital Panic: a deeply ambivalent work that, as Schopp and other have noted, may or may not have taken place. Misreading feminist actionism limits the feminist dimension, or what is made possible within the domain of “action”—actions which are indeed difficult to interpret. 

Schopp also introduces a compelling figure to her account of feminist actionism in Hanel Koeck, who collaborated with Pierre Molinier and moved within the scenes of Viennese actionism before marrying the Austrian art historian Peter Gorsen. As Schopp narrates, Koeck is at the center of the artworks that give Viennese actionism its label as misogynist. She is also a central protagonist for Gorsen’s own theorization—crucially, his work on “sexual aesthetics”—yet she remains officially excluded from these accounts: “Gorsen seems ultimately unable to conceive of a place for Koeck in art history” (57). Schopp shows that both Gorsen and EXPORT fail to include Koeck in their feminist correctives (she does not appear in EXPORT’s manifesto) and that Lucy Lippard equally fails to see her in her analysis of Nitsch’s work Maria Empfängnis—Aktion mit Hanel Koeck, 31. Koeck embodies a kind of complicit subjectivity—too objectified, surrendering to or participating in the obscenities of male actionists in a way that EXPORT refused to do. Yet Schopp argues that Koeck counters the misogyny within the actions that she participates in by occupying—and exposing?—the obscenity and perversity of such misogynist stereotypes. She participates in forms of debasement and degradation, but she also authors her own. In blistering prose, Schopp recounts how Koeck ruins now-infamous abuser Otto Muehl in her 1969 work Scheißkerl: “After eating a scoop of ice-cream served to her by Kurt Kren, who is dressed in the costume of a French maid, Koeck and her friend Waltraud Stieglitz (also Kren’s partner) tie Muehl down naked to a table on his back” (78). What follows is a violent and revengeful act: Muehl is forced to eat her feces and undergo all manner of subjection. Would Koeck even want the title of “feminist actionist”? How do Koeck’s forms of complicity relate to Muehl’s own? (Muehl has said his forms of violent action were derived from his time in the Wehrmacht.) In-action succeeds as a framework for recovery, and for making space for positions marginalized within art history. If Koeck represents one kind of figure rendered invisible by the action paradigm—too compromised, too enmeshed in the very scenes she subverts—the second model Schopp develops concerns a different kind of overlooked practice: the ordinary.

The notion of “ordinary action” concerns something closer to everyday life—the performance of common, matter-of-fact aspects of life that are typically overlooked, and which also trouble the “action paradigm.” In In-action, this domain of ordinariness is said to become interesting when performance art contains reservations about, rather than rehearses, the normative assumptions of everyday life—and when it troubles rather than affirms the entanglement of art and life. Examining the performances of Mierle Laderman Ukeles, which bring forms of “women’s work” into visibility as artwork, Schopp suggests that they echo the feminist slogan “Wages for Housework” and anticipate what would become the US model of “feminist care ethics.” Here, art concerned with care opposes the paradigm of action and politics, or at least foregrounds the logic “no action without care.” Yet the problem is thus raised: “Can one oppose the action paradigm without entering into the arena of action and becoming an actionist?” (29). 

The third model is her own: With in-action, performances are described that are “constitutively mistaken” within their ascribed genre. In this sense, In-action is thus a book about the politics of being misunderstood: of being mistaken within a category, of being fundamentally misplaced or not being seen at all. These performances are difficult to understand. “In-action does not unambiguously exist as performance art”: It is in this troubling status that its interest lies. In-action thus resonates with discourses exploring the inoperative and the unworking—these are minor practices of refusal, just as, I would argue, feminist actionism is. The politics of in-action consists in attending carefully to works that are hard to recognize, or that are misread in terms of their message or political orientation: works that move away from didactic positioning but, in their complexity, carry genuinely interesting propositions and gestures. As Schopp puts it, “in-action unfolds within action” (30). In my reading, in-action is sometimes the dialectal counterpart to action; sometimes it simply gains in suggestiveness. Without offering correctives or narratives of redemption, Schopp traces passages of dispossession and unravelling in Viennese performance art, opening gaps in accounts that feel like they should have been known the whole time. Her approach involves engaging with art and writing art history in a manner that is, as she describes it, “ready to relinquish much of the repertoire of the author and the critic in order to be attentive to the failures and the hard feelings that dishearteningly pervade certain art and much of politics” (33).

The aim, in short, is to attend carefully to what little is there—to trace the uncomfortable, tedious, and unsettling positions that are, in her view, so often mistaken and disparaged in accounts of artistic and political life. This attentiveness is demonstrated in the chapter on Kunst und Revolution, where Schopp carefully examines the role of mediation in the event. She claims that Kunst und Revolution produced a display of the impotence of both art and politics in Vienna in 1968; an action that, by most accounts, projected a kind of virility is instead read as pathetic. Schopp demonstrates how this event registers an anxiety about action: It does not affirm a political program, because it is art. She recounts the event by means of the media scandals and court cases it produced. Following Philip Ursprung, she treats the press as primary audience: “Kunst und Revolution took place in this escalatory tension generated between rumor and written record in the press” (99). If the media and the police were most offended by the actionists when they were seen to be violating moral codes—and those violations were understood at the time to carry genuine transgressive force—why does Schopp characterize such violations as a passive political form? Because they weakened the leftist movement? Can in-action really bring violence and passivity together? 

In the book’s final chapter, Schopp returns to the distinction between feminist actionism and what she calls “feminist in-action,” exploring what she characterizes as an “impasse” in the history of feminist performance art (166). She brings EXPORT’s works into dialogue with her friend Ingrid Wiener, who rather than making brazen actions chose to pursue weaving, making Gobelins as an artistic practice. Schopp characterizes Wiener’s practice by using the category “ordinary action” (which also includes works by Lea Lublin and Mierle Laderman Ukeles), highlighting care against indignation and rage while also discussing EXPORT’s exclusion of Wiener and weaving in the corpus of feminst actionism. I read this to be Schopp’s main position: “No action without care,” or rather feminist in-action. But also, no action without in-action. Like Hanel Koeck and Anna Brus, Ingrid Wiener also married into this circle, to Oswald Wiener. She only really surfaced in the literature as his wife. Wiener is an artist whom Schopp describes as weaving persistently and caring consistently. It is this attention to care that she ends on. 

In-action succeeds in paying attention to the comportment of actors who might be acting against our interpretation, figures who are so prominent in the photographs that we fail to see them, and women who do unglamorous maintenance work or go unnamed because we feel compelled to look away. Schopp sees them and tells their stories.