Rudolf Schwarzkogler

High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Rudolf Schwarzkogler (13 November 1940 in Vienna 20 June 1969) was an Austrian performance artist closely associated with the Viennese Actionism group that included artists Günter Brus, Otto Mühl, and Hermann Nitsch. He is best known today for photographs depicting his series of closely controlled "Aktionen" featuring such iconography as a dead fish, a dead chicken, bare light bulbs, colored liquids, bound objects, and a man wrapped in gauze. The enduring themes of Scwarzkogler's works involved experience of pain and mutilation, often in an incongruous clinical context, such as 3rd Aktion (1965) in which a patient's head swathed in bandages is being pierced by what appears to be a corkscrew, producing a bloodstain under the bandages. They reflect a message of despair at the disappointments and hurtfulness of the world. Chris Burden once remarked that a 1970s Newsweek Magazine article, which had mentioned himself and Schwarzkogler, had embarrassingly misreported that Schwarzkogler had died by slicing off his penis during a performance.