Opening reception Saturday, July 18, 6 – 9 pm

On June 7, 1968, in Hörsaal 1 of the Neues Institutsgebäude at the University of Vienna, an evening billed as Kunst und Revolution ran its course: first, Oswald Wiener, of the Wiener Gruppe, gave an apparently incomprehensible lecture on input-output theory, a cybernetic language of signs and systems that, in this setting, flew over everyone’s heads. This was followed by further “theoretical explanations” by the Actionists, all of which were either barely audible or deliberately fragmented: Mühl insulting Robert Kennedy and his family; Weibel attacking the Austrian finance minister; Günter Brus undressing, cutting himself, urinating, drinking his urine, vomiting, defecating, and smearing himself with excrement while singing the Austrian national anthem and masturbating; and Mühl whipping Malte Olschewski, who was reading pornographic texts.[1]

When the evening’s organizers, after all of that, asked for questions from the audience, the story…