The Gallery White in Budapest's Falk Miksa Street is celebrating the 70th birthday of the Austrian "actionist" Hermann Nitsch with an exhibition.
The robe has become a saleable object of art, even though what Nitsch has made since 1957 is the antithesis of consumer art. With his "Theatre of Orgies and Mysteries" Nitsch showed performance art filled with flowing blood and ancient symbols in an effort to get audiences to feel at the most radical level. His use of sacred symbols compounded the scandal the pieces created.
Nitsch's blood-splattered works have become museum pieces, but without the context of the performance in which they were created, they lack power...without the noises, the music, the naked actors, the blood, animals and the smells.
