Post-World War II Viennese artists responded to violence, sanitized culture, and bourgeois morality with ritual destruction and sacrilegious aesthetics. Hermann Nitsch employed blood, rotting meat, and animal carcasses to merge sacrifice, ritual, Christian rebirth motifs, theater, painting, and installation. Nitsch developed the Orgies Mysteries Theater from the 1950s and conceived a durational 6-Day-Play staged at Schloss Prinzendorf, acquired in 1971. The work debuted in 1998 and evolved through 2022, with an updated version premiering after Nitsch's death. The final three days were realized by Rita Nitsch, presenting a Dionysian festival of carcasses, live bodies, pouring, and smearing amid overwhelming scents.
Nitsch began developing the Orgies Mysteries Theater in the 1950s through numerous actions and installations over the decades. These were preparatory studies for an ultimate form, a lifetime vision of a Gesamtkunstwerk: 6-Day-Play, a durational work that takes place at Schloss Prinzendorf, a former monastery in rural Austria that the artist acquired in 1971 as the permanent site for his ritual actions.
This June, as I walked up the ramp toward the Schloss, the surrounding landscape resembled any other sleepy stretch of European countryside, with low fields and an eerie silence. But passing through the gate, I stepped into something else entirely. The scent hit first: a dense, overwhelming mix of blood, flowers, and incense. The performers, dressed in their signature white T-shirts and trousers, now stained deep red, sat in a moment of rest.
Collection
[
|
...
]