Surely that spread-eagled smock, nailed dead-center of the canvas could elicit interpretations of an aggrandized crucified martyr. Is this a religious painting? Great art can be ever so evasive. Does this not resemble the open embrace of a human too? The Vitruvian Man would have fancied these threads.
Or is this an effigy of the creative spirit? The artist’s presence distilled and suspended in a still, hieratic levitation. There’s a sense of drama: that charged spectacle of creation transferred onto this cotton stage and called to ever more forcefully. Betwixt and between painting and sculpture, the eye darts from shirt to canvas, paint to fabric, and back. O, sweet sensations!
Yes, Hermann Nitsch, co-founder of the Viennese Actionists, knew much about sensations. His shocking Orgien Mysterien Theaters, one hundred and fifty of them at this time of writing, have been inducing catharsis in its participants for almost sixty years. Blood has been shed and meat–naked human participants and animal carcasses–stripped of all ego, displayed publicly like, well, meat. The liturgical panoply of Nitsch’s extreme vision.
So just what are we talking about here?
I believe this great painting sums up what it means to be alive. Life, with all its dark struggles and lighted joys. The chaotic black mass (perhaps alluding to carbon, that main ingredient of all known life) suggests what a messy affair mortal experience can be, but spiritual transcendence is omnipresent in the pure white, untainted surface.
Dexterously flung on, paint explodes on canvas with brilliant determination. The Big Bang captured in six by ten feet. For his mark-making, Nitsch prefers his hands. Touch–moist acrylic pigment is no different from warm entrails–is one of the key sensations in his theater play. So into the thick tar-like primordial substance goes his hands, clawing, daubing, freewheeling.
The result is a fossilized image of expressive intensity. See that rushing, sweeping composition, it envelops the lower half of our smock, flowing like a Bernini drape. All-over, small eddying gestures culminate in a great, crashing wave of Hokusai proportions.
Sound is yet another essential sensation–Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk had been a big influence– that should be considered here. Listen with your eyes. Scaling from top left to bottom right, this sonorous work jolts with such thrill! It is the “Ta-Ta-Ta-Taa” that opens Beethoven’s Symphony №5, that urgent, relentless outburst of sheer energy. Bravo Maestro Nitsch!
Yes, that smock has the stuff of life on its sleeves.
