The Art Of Destruction: The Films Of The Vienna Action Group (Persistence of Vision)

The Vienna Action Group formed the most provocative, insurgent, and challenging of all the worldwide art movements of the 1960s. Their sexually charged and antisocial actions exacted a profound and irreparable upheaval in the way in which art was conceived. Using their own bodies as raw material, the Action Group undertook experiments in cruelty that disassembled the human body and its acts into compacted gestures of blood, semen, and meat.

The films of the Vienna Action Group form the essential residue, debris, and evidence of their performances. For the first time, this book focuses on those films as fully revealing the obsessions, ambitions, and outrages of the Action Group. Fully illustrated and annotated, this is a book of compelling interest to all students of film, art, and performance, and for all readers engaged with questioning social and corporate cultures.