Hermann Nitsch. Drawings

In his Orgies Mysteries Theater, Hermann Nitsch (*1938 in Vienna; †2022 in Mistelbach) created an extensive Gesamtkunstwerk (total art work) that fused painting, music, action, theatre and architecture. His goal was to produce an all-encompassing aesthetic and spiritual experience. Nitsch’s drawings and prints do not represent an independent body of work but rather are an integral part of his overall concept. They reveal the architectural visions he developed for his action theatre while offering fascinating insights into his thoughts and plans for its realisation.

Hermann Nitsch learnt basic printmaking techniques such as lithography and etching at the Graphische Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt. After graduating in 1957, he took up a position as a graphic designer at the Vienna Museum of Science and Technology. Even at this early stage he was engaged in an intensive exploration of the themes that would later become key elements in his work, such as scenes of the crucifixion and the descent from the cross as well as other motifs drawn from Christian iconography. An interest in classical art history, including works by Rembrandt, also shaped his oeuvre.

Like many artists of the post-war generation, Nitsch embarked on a search for new forms of expression that involved both a critical examination of their own history and an opening up towards the international art scene. His informal doodle drawings from 1959-1961 are a manifestation of this: their spontaneous, gestural and intuitive lines resemble quick notations. The focus here is on direct expression and the process of artistic work. Around the same time he began to produce his splatter paintings, in which he impulsively poured or flung paint onto the canvas, creating gestural structures similar to those in the drawings.

In 1962 Nitsch carried out his first action. He swapped paint for animal blood, thus radically probing themes such as sacrifice, death and redemption beyond traditional art conventions. Subsequently a central role was played by slaughtered sheep, which were hung upside down in front of a wall or in space. Flavours and stimuli redolent with symbolism such as blood, egg yolk, bread, wine, water, sugar, meat, handkerchiefs, bandages, menstrual pads, aniline dyes, etc. were set out with precision on tables for further use. In his drawings he sketched the arrangement of the objects and the sequence of actions.

In 1965 these large paper panels were mounted on the walls of Nitsch’s studio in the cellar of the municipal building in Brünner Straße, Vienna, where he realised his ‘16th Action for Stan Brakhage’. The action was named in honour of the American experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage (1933-2003), who was in attendance. The traces of blood that are still visible on the panels today not only take us back to this cellar room, but also reveal the dialogue between the sketched idea and the actual spatial realisation of the action. The surviving relics of the action give the impression of a transfer of the drawing into space. The lengths of packing paper hang side by side, overlapping and covering the entire wall. Nitsch prepared the setting by drawing lines and signs on the wall of paper with wax crayons. He nailed menstrual pads, raw meat and fish to the wall, which he then covered with blood, water and aniline dyes. He drew connecting lines between the objects with ‘hyacinth-scented’ lipsticks. At its core, the three-hour action showed the sublimated need for abreaction that runs through all religions and cults. Once the sheets of paper had dried, they were rolled up and stored. It was not until decades later that they were rediscovered and lined with canvas.

Alongside Günter Brus, Rudolf Schwarzkogler and Otto Muehl, Hermann Nitsch is seen as belonging to the Viennese Actionists. What these artists had in common was the quest for a new expanded form of art and the desire for an intense sensory self-experience that would result in a liberation from social taboos and ultimately to catharsis. Nitsch’s ideas and aims culminated in the development of his Orgies Mysteries Theater. He saw this as an extension of classical theatre, which no longer aspired to the representation or imitation of stories but rather to direct and real experience. The ‘pretending’ is replaced by actual experience and sensation in real time and real space.

The Orgies Mysteries Theater was a synthesis of diverse cultural, religious, philosophical and artistic influences that merged into a radical, sensually charged total experience. Nitsch tried to create a profound sense of catharsis and spiritual transformation by reviving archaic rituals while integrating modern art forms. A central element of this was the use of blood, which is evocative of both Christian symbolism and archaic/ancient sacrificial rituals. In its double meaning as a symbol of both suffering and redemption, the blood is intended to help overcome boundaries and achieve a state of deeply felt spiritual and existential realisation.

The expansion and revitalisation of theatre in the form of the Orgies Mysteries Theater called for an architecture that fulfilled this vision. Nitsch began to design underground theatre complexes that would offer the ideal setting for the six-day performance he planned to stage. To his mind, building underground was the only possible response to contemporary architecture, which he found repulsive and ‘disfiguring’. The theatre was to be built under the castle of Schloss Prinzendorf, the main venue for his Gesamtkunstwerk. The high costs involved, however, meant that these project sketches remained unrealised – although this did allow Nitsch to explore a utopian dimension in his architectural drawings and to go beyond the practically feasible limits in terms of the structure, size and monumentality of the spaces. The underground architecture carries a range of associations: a deep connection to nature, the cycle of growth and decay in which life bursts out of the earth and finally returns to it. A recurrent motif in Nitsch’s work is the pressing of wine, which takes place in cellars, and symbolises transition from one state to another. The descent into the underground architecture also represents an immersion/descent into the unconscious of the human psyche, which Nitsch sought to explore in his actions.

“the uterus-like darkness of the subterranean passageways and rooms and, above all, the sheltered vegetative life in the lightless womb, exercise a very strong attraction on myself. in the underworld, in the grave, in the earth, the nascent sleep of death takes place.”

Colour was extremely important to Nitsch – he even saw it as the ‘essence of painting’. Colour scales and colour studies are to be found throughout his oeuvre. In the 1980s and 1990s he devised colour exercises for his students at the Frankfurt Art Academy, which he described as ‘simple experiments in colour and form’. The aim of these exercises was to give students an unprejudiced relationship with colour and to encourage their openness to colour perception. At the same time, the colour scales serve to explore intuitive and emotional levels of colour perception. In order to explain the difference between ‘random combinations of bright colours and genuine colourfulness’, Nitsch made task sheets with precise instructions for creating colour scales. He showed how each colour can be associated with different sounds, smells or tastes and, conversely, how all of these sensory impressions can be translated into colours. As in every area of his Gesamtkunstwerk, here too there are different sensory impressions that merge into one perception. The interweaving of painting and music, of colours and sounds, is in particular an explicit theme in Nitsch’s work. He spoke of bringing ‘colours to resonate’ and noted that for both colours and sounds we talk about harmonies and dissonances. This interplay of sound and colour is also evident in some of his ‘scores’. Nitsch saw colour and sound as a way of experiencing life more deeply and intensely. He sought to create a connection between the two principles described by Friedrich Nietzsche, the Apollonian – form and order – and the Dionysian – intoxication and the creative drive that transcends all forms – as part of his concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk.

From 1976 to 1979 Nitsch worked on the drawing ‘The Last Supper’, which was realised on a single sheet of paper despite its striking size. In 1983 he translated the work into a screen print. Nitsch imagined that his actions could take place in architectural spaces in which not only individual organs but the entire human body was transformed into rooms. He explained: “the act of starting with rather abstract organic forms led to my present designs for actual architectural forms which literally replicate entire bodies or refer thereto. drawings such as the last supper and the entombment of christ are architectural drawings according to figurative models”.

His approach goes beyond just architectural design. With the visual realisation of physical equations that calculate the expansion of the universe as a model, Nitsch examined the desire to experience a harmonising analogy between man and the cosmos in ‘The Last Supper’ – supported by the reference to the Eucharist contained in the title.

Another major work is the drawing ‘The Conquest of Jerusalem’, created in 1971 and issued as a print in 2008. Here, as in several other works, Nitsch printed onto original relics. While the title could refer to the First Crusade, Nitsch once again visualised an imaginary architectural plan for his ideal theatre in the form of an underground city. Its appearance is defined by countless nested corridors and rooms, fine cross-symbol fields and organic structures. A descent into this architecture represents submerging oneself in the depths of the human psyche. However, Nitsch’s descriptions of his designs also include the ascent, emerging and the resurrection after the catharsis (purification) experienced.

While drawing the architectures, Nitsch soon recognised the interrelation and the challenges that exist between action and architecture. He achieved the extreme sensoriality of his actions through, among other things, the inversion of bodily and psychological conditions. He opened and cut into animal bodies to display blood-drenched organs and intestines. These elements found their way into his architectural drawings, where they were translated into amorphous, anatomical spaces, corridors and chambers. The characteristics and use of the individual rooms are reflected in the inscriptions that Nitsch wrote directly onto the drawings.

At the centre of the drawings there is often a cross, from which passageways radiate like arteries. Nitsch sometimes spoke of his theatre as the ‘Temple of the Holy Grail’ – a holy site or sacred space – referring to a myth of Christian and pre-Christian symbolism that is often associated with the Chalice of the Last Supper and the Blood of Christ. The Holy Grail is described in the medieval Grail legend and in Arthurian myth as a vessel that can be used to obtain divine grace and redemption. Nitsch took up this myth to explore and reinterpret the symbolic meaning of the Grail in his actions. His Temple of the Holy Grail stands not only for a physical space, but also represents a spiritual place where a connection can be established between the human and the divine, the physical and the spiritual.

Nitsch began creating his first scores in 1958, even before he staged his first action in 1962. In his comprehensive Gesamtkunstwerk, the Orgies Mysteries Theater, hearing plays a central role alongside sensory perceptions such as sight, taste and smell. As with the theatre itself, Nitsch also wished to expand and reinvent music in his explorations. His desire for new forms of acoustic expression arose from endeavours to liberate sound from the familiar context of meaning and hearing in order to attain a new acoustic intensity, which is an integral part of the Orgies Mysteries Theater.

What Nitsch referred to as scores in fact go far beyond what is traditionally understood by the term. They serve a dual function as musical notation and as stage directions. Since he did not know traditional musical notation, he developed his own scriptural-visual notation. In doing so, he placed particular emphasis on the ‘playing level’, as determined by an increase in volume and tone. These two factors are visually represented in his scores by the thickness of the lines, while spaces or silences are marked by areas of black.

The score shown in the exhibition relates to Nitsch’s 122nd action, which took place in 2005 at the Vienna Burgtheater and was his first action in a permanent theatre building. It was staged to mark the 50th anniversary of the reopening of the Burgtheater building after the war. The event involved over 100 participants from eleven countries and lasted from 3pm to 10.30pm. The entire structure of the Burgtheater was incorporated into the performance and the audience was able to move freely around the building while observing the participants. Nitsch once again used the motif of Parsifal’s spear, which included five huge lances, four dead pigs, tons of grapes, tomatoes and blood. A freshly slaughtered bull was carried around the theatre by the participants in a torchlight procession and then presented on the stage to be publicly sliced and disembowelled.

Over the last years of Nitsch’s life as an artist, he created works that are highly reminiscent of his early informal scribble drawings, as well as some that represent a gestural extension of his colour scales. These late, bright pictures in radiant, luminous colours are once again intended to capture sounds, tactile and taste sensations on canvas or paper. His late work typically features vibrant colour harmonies that have a light, optimistic and life-affirming effect. After many years in which red dominated his painting, he now turned above all to yellow, the colour of light and resurrection.

Having spent a lifetime studying sacrificial death, purification and resurrection, Hermann Nitsch died on Easter Monday, 2022.