A novel approach to performance art and its history that revisits Viennese Actionism, one of the most controversial episodes of the 1960s.
 
Viennese Actionism represents a notorious case within art history, often cited but little studied, especially in the United States. By carefully looking at the unsettling performances that define this movement, Caroline Lillian Schopp offers a vital corrective to the narrative. Schopp observes that contrary to the reception of their graphic violence, many performances explore passivity, vulnerability, and dependence in gestures of “in-action.” Viennese Actionism registers hesitations about the liberatory ethos of the 1960s, amplified by Austria’s marginalized postwar social and artistic culture. In dialogue with feminist theory, In-action assembles a vocabulary for performance art without the standards of self-assertion, emancipation, and expressive action that continue to inform how art and politics are understood today.
 
Decentering the traditional focus on the male protagonists of Viennese Actionism—Günter Brus, Otto Muehl, Hermann Nitsch, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler—Schopp draws attention to women who performed with them, including Anna Brus, Hanel Koeck, and Ingrid Wiener. Doing so brings into view how these performances scrutinize intimate relationships like marriages, partnerships, and friendships, as well as the conventions of traditional artistic media such as painting and tapestry.

How small details in the paintings of Otto Dix materialize the realities of a modern German artist.
 
Offering a fresh look at German art during a period of extraordinary transition and precarity, James A. van Dyke focuses on overlooked but critically significant details in works completed by Otto Dix between 1919 and 1936. A small lump of paint, a monogram, an almost invisible self-portrait, the verso of a drawing, a patch of discoloration, and a web of fine cracks—van Dyke reveals such details, hidden in plain sight, as coded dialogue through which Dix addressed audiences and art-world insiders amid the combative world of cultural production in Weimar Germany. Sly, cutting, and provocative, these are the material traces of social relationships between the painter and those who represented threats to his professional ambition: an avant-garde mentor and rival, an increasingly skeptical critic, a prominent bourgeois photographer, and a local Nazi authority.
 
Proving that small things offer insight into the big picture, this book highlights Dix’s satirical, transgressive work as nuanced and polyvocal, reflecting the complex fields of power and economics in which the field of art is located.