SFCINEMATHEQUE

X

Sunday, January 29, 1995

Austria 4

Body as Material

San Francisco Art Institute





The postwar climate encouraged direct physical confrontation by many Viennese performance and visual artists. Shocking uses of the body in Materialaktions by Gunter Brus and Otto Muehl (footage included in several films tonight) and performances and films by Valie Export, Peter Weibel, Kurt Kren, Ernst Schmidt Jr., Hans Scheugl and others had a notorious word-of-mouth influence on underground culture in 1960s Europe. Included here are incendiary films by Export, Kren, Schmidt Jr., Rudolf Polanszky, Moucle Blackout, Renate Kordon, Mara Mattuschka, and Dietmar Brehm.