The Story of Fotoaktion

By Perry Vasquez

Around 1969 a story began circulating in the Austrian art scene about a man who had interrupted a university lecture by pulling down his pants and defecating on stage in front of the astonished students and professor. The professor’s response was not recorded but he was said to have been a hold over from the Nazi era and so this provocative act was understood to be unmistakably political in nature. The man’s name was Otto Mühl and from 1960 to 1971 he was part of a loose group of Viennese artist who came to be known as the Viennese Aktionists. Aktionism was a violent, iconoclastic response to the atrophy of life in all its aspects in post-war Europe. Each of the significant artists of the Aktionist movement, Otto Mühl, Rudolph Schwartzkogler, and Günter Brus, spent time in jail for their art.

Doris Berman was an 18-year-old singer-songwriter known as Isabel Domin living in Salzburg, Austria in 1969. Her brother told her the infamous story of Mühl’s performance that day in the lecture hall. “In German there is a saying, ‘Pissing and shitting is also an art.’ For me it was the first time I truly understood what modern art was all about,” she said. Her producers had tight control over her image as the girl-next-door. But Doris began to chage and soon afterwards, she abandoned her pop career, departed for America and became a punk rocker. Settling in Palo Alto in 1979 with her husband, Russell Berman, she invented a new persona, Doris “Boris” Berman, fronted a noise-art band and enrolled in photography classes at San Francisco City College. Her photo teacher had a reputation for shooting people from the hip, literally holding his camera by his side and clicking the shutter randomly. That cavalier approach offended Doris’s understanding of what the relationship between photographer and subject matter should be. Why not let people take their own portraits she thought? So one evening at an art gallery she set up a camera on a tripod with a cable release and invited people to squeeze the black rubber ball and take their self-portraits. She called her event a “fotoaktion” in the spirit of the original Viennese Aktionist art movement.

Doris and I became friends in 1980 while I was a student at Stanford University where her husband lectured on Nietzsche wearing black leather pants and an intimidating look able to reduce coeds to tears. His class inspired me to publish an art magazine so I placed an ad in the personals looking for contributors, and by coincidence, Doris answered it. Over the phone we agreed to meet in a nearby café. When I asked her how I would know her, she said in her clipped Austrian accent, “I’ll be wearing puss print and smoking a cigraette, darling…” My spirit quaked. When a tall woman with big orange hair walked through the door wearing a hot pink leopard skin mini-skirt, fishnets, go-go boots and a black leather jacket I just about fell over. It was friendship at first sight.

One day Doris invited me to a fotoaktion event as her assistant, to manage her props and make sure everything ran smoothly. I assisted at several fotoaktions and the people who participated ranged from members of the San Francisco gay underground to the inhabitants of a bombed out Bronx neighborhood. Years later after moving to San Diego, I told a friend about Doris’s fotoaktions and how fun they were. He suggested we do one for our house party. After some hesitation I decided to continue the practice of fotoaktion as homage to Doris and those early groundbreaking events. Since then I’ve staged 10 different fotoaktions in San Diego in bedrooms, garages, art galleries and museums.

Fotoaktion is rock and roll. It’s appeal lies in the levels of risk and caution involved when crossing the boundary between spectator and performer. Fotoaktion participants also use props to turn the experience into theater. I provide masks so they can hide and give cover to a side of their personalities they might otherwise not feel comfortable with in public. A fotoaktion is a trap that you willfully fall into. You have to give yourself to it. Fotoaktion is part improv comedy and part psychotherapy. Within its logic, symbols of power may come tumbling down, secret truths may be revealed and lunar beauty may surface and grow. 

Each fotoaktion has it’s own unique timing. A fotoaktion typically starts out slow but once it catches fire it can burn hot very quickly. Like a bubble economy at its peak, no one can wait to buy in. Is there no such a thing as order at a fotoaktion then? That’s good question. There may come a moment during a fotoaktion when the sum of the crowd’s collective border-crossings, existential transformations and risk unawareness reaches critical mass. Then the audience can sense an immediate shift in the magnetic fields of creative possibility. Time, space and motion become realigned into an orderly, unified field, like a painting, and a greater truth is revealed. The event itself becomes an organic feedback loop as image follows upon image, produced by living, breathing human enigma machines.

For me that moment came half way through the evening at a fotoaktion I recently staged in downtown San Diego for MCASD Live!When two young dudes dressed in hip-hop gear put on Fidel Castro and George Bush masks, things got weird. Moving through a series of images, they aped a satirical showdown between good and evil with hyperbolic, self-aggrandizing moves straight out of the hip-hop playbook. It was like watching someone tag the Museum wall with a living political cartoon. Afterwards you could tell the level of risk and caution had changed for everyone and the following performances became edgier and more pointed. The moment was pure Aktionism; spontaneous, political, funny, revolutionary and self-aware. At that moment I felt both the spirits of Otto Mühl and Doris “Boris” Berman moving in the house. They were there to deliver a postcard. “To San Diego from Vienna, with love.”