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

A novel approach to performance art and its history that revisits Viennese Actionism, one of the most controversial episodes of the 1960s. Viennese Actionism represents a notorious case within art history, often cited but little studied, especially in the United States.By carefully looking at the unsettling performances that define this movement, Caroline Lillian Schopp offers a vital corrective to the narrative.Schopp observes that contrary to the reception of their graphic violence, many performances explore passivity, vulnerability, and dependence in gestures of “in-action.” Viennese Actionism registers hesitations about the liberatory ethos of the 1960s, amplified by Austria’s marginalized postwar social and artistic culture.In dialogue with feminist theory, In-action assembles a vocabulary for performance art without the standards of self-assertion, emancipation, and expressive action that continue to inform how art and politics are understood today. Decentering the traditional fo