Austrian Expanded Cinema Performances of the 1960s

Abstract

During the 1960s, Vienna’s most active group of artists were the “Wiener Aktionisten“ (Vienna Actionists), whose unprecedented, provocative actions shocked contemporary society. Using nudity, ritual and violence they confronted modern taboos and challenged conventional attitudes towards the human body. From 1967 Austrian filmmakers like Peter Weibel, Ernst Schmidt Jr., Hans Scheugl and Valie Export among others developed Austrian expanded cinema, which was in vogue with the underground movement and the student protests of 1968. There seems to exist a general agreement among scholars that Austrian expanded filmmakers of this period followed the trend within modernist art toward medium-specific purification: the reduction of the art object to the essential physical or material components of its medium. By contrast, I would like to argue that expanded cinema is not entirely receptive to the modernist model. Its engagement with the physical materials of film lead to the creation of cinematic works challenging the material limits of the film medium as it had been defined for over 80 years. The rejection of film stock, cameras, and projectors as necessary filmmaking tools subverts the model of medium-specific, reflexive filmmaking and bears testimony to the search for an art form in accordance with what Rosalind Krauss called the „postmedium condition“. In terms of its semiotic framework, expanded cinema-performances privilege the indexical sign which becomes effective as a gesture. As the process of creation and reception take place simultaneously, it is not the product that counts, but the here and now of the very act of enacting, or performing. Performance-based art practices, like expanded cinema performances, go even so far as to abolish the temporal and spatial distances that separated the trace from its referent. Paraphrasing Philipp Rosen, who conceived of the trace as a “matter of pastness“ we can conceive of the gesture as a matter of presentness. Intimately allied with the world of objects, art practices based on the index, represent a challenge for any assertion of “autonomy” or “purity” in the work of art. Through its introduction of reality and therefore “impurity” into the medium, expanded cinema-performances can be considered an alternative to high modernist claims and offer a new understanding of the genealogy of the cinematic avant-garde.

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VII Magis International Film Studies Spring School

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