manifesto 1963

manifesto
march 1963

the seismograph of sensual excitation (producing lust) becomes an essential part of present art
productions. the ANALYTICAL actions of the o.m. theater reach a “naturalism” of the psychic which awakes consciousness. deep-lying psychic strata, which previously lay without the area of artistic transmission, are touched upon and begin to have a formal artistic effect. in order to exploit these resulting possibilities to the full, the acknowledgement of an unconditional exhibitionism is necessary. there should be no shrinking away from revealing one’s own psychopathological situation. it is in many respects an intensification and typification of a generally human predisposition for affliction (perversion).

through a formal attempt to awaken consciousness, the person unburdening himself by means of the
creative process fulfils for himself and his fellow human beings a cathartic function. art should not and cannot conceal. the whole realm of life must be stored up in it. there are no longer any thematic. Considerations. my “theme” is the intensity of my excitement, the “UPSURGE OF LUST”, the joy of CREATION which transposes itself into art. everything which suggests to me thematical or tendential considerations is creative blasphemy, the act of informal association.

my inability could be constructed as not having been intensive enough, to have cultivated too little joy through my art, to have liberated too little FERVOUR. i can witness how the ability mounts in me to excite myself more and more. through this there arises almost organically a possibility to bond oneself more intensively to existence. my sensitising efforts are an instinctive growing into being. through an informal seismographic process i want to sound out my subtlest psychic, sensual and spontaneous realities and beyond this reveal my type-like relation, also already structured in the physiological and collective-psychic, to a specific kind of human reaction and feeling whose representative i can more or less be characterised as being.

under the various kinds of experience which manifest themselves in humanity through religion, and the various ways of abreactions, the means of overcoming and sublimating life, there can be recognised, looking at it from a simplified point of view, a primary difference between asiatic meditative sublimating (buddha, lao tse) and the european grappling with being characterised by rapid, hectic, excessive abreaction (dionysus, tragedy, cross).

everything about me deep into the physiological is gripped by the european, dionysian, excessive drivereleasing structure of abreaction. all of my intensity levels, my predisposition conditioned within me to hectic masochistic sacrificial gratifications are released in the performance action. living this out through my actions, their cathartic impact, their immediate abreaction character fills the deep-seated unconscious need for imitatio experiences of mythical sadomasochistic situations and substitutes them indirectly.

abreactions can be completed through the analytical informal path of art without the filtration through mythic experience templates, inviting unconscious identification. these intensities, which metamorphose into the seismograph plotting the result of the action, render the latent causes of all mythic excesses visible.

my painting is the visual (epic) part of the o.m. theater, portrayed on the canvas, derived from the fundamental excess experience, and is directly connected to the intensely sensual excitation which i feel when

seeing a smashed egg lying on the street
lacerated flesh of fruit
cotton wool dipped in urine
white bread soaked with wine
tea roses (wet with saliva) chewed and bitten
a white cloth splattered with wine and water
raw flesh and entrails, and when smelling incense and vinegar.
the emotional excitement aroused when the lamb is dismembered is the cause of and not the example for my painting.

goals striven for by the o.m. theater and thus by my painting:
1. painting can develop into a painted liturgy, to a liturgical path of meditation which prompts an affirmation of life.
2. through the o.m. theater a pivotal resurrection feast of existence is to be created.
3. the descent into the perverse, the unsavory takes place in the sense of a healing process of the awakening of consciousness.