The grotesque art of Rudolf Schwratzkloger: the man accused of cutting off his own penis
The man once dubbed “the Vincent van Gogh of body art”, performance artist Rudolf Schwratzkloger curated a body of work that routinely horrified viewers. One of four Viennese artists to emerge from the Vienna Action Group in the 1960s, his work took on a ritualistic aspect, often concerned with mutilation and taboo. This often came in the form of lengthy performances or “Actions”, with blood and food often providing what paint traditionally would have.
Although photography was the way Schwratzkloger documented his work, that’s not to say you can’t see the influence of painters within it. The freakish figures of Egon Schiele and Arnulf Rainer worked their way into his strange Actions, which he produced over two years.
Wedding was the first and the only ever performed to an audience, which he found so distracting that the five subsequent pieces were done solely to camera. He was the only member of the Vienna Action Group whose primary goal wasn’t public interaction. The shocking nature of his work seemed to compensate for this, making his images so rousing that a visceral reaction was almost guaranteed, subverting the need for an audience altogether.
His images were stark, with a white background consistently driving his subjects to the forefront. Consistently shot in black and white, motifs recurring in 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 6th Actions ranged from razor blades to bandages. His niche seemed to be body horror, often subjecting his male subjects to being swaddled in white bandages with scissors, scalpels and plastic tubing.
The medical theme of his work extended to injection, forced fluids from strange tubes, and castration, always bundled in claustrophobic white bindings, the dynamic often being Schwarzkogler acting as a tool-wielding doctor. Artist Heinz Cibulka was the one subjected to these devices in his Actions, serving as the principal model in the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th.
Cibulka unwittingly became the feature of infamous art folklore after critic Robert Hughes saw an image of him seemingly cutting his penis off during one of the Actions. On the horrific series of images, Hughes assumed it was Schwarzkogler himself, writing that these “acts of self-amputation finally did Schwarzkogler in” before adding that “he died, a martyr to his art”. Although it is widely contested that Schwarzkogler had indeed died for his art after jumping from a window, it was Cibulka in the images.
The overwhelming theme of his art seemed to be a fascination with injuries and external control over the body by visually inflicting them with pain. His models are contorted and disfigured, so hideous they’re covered with bandages. It’s notable that his father was a doctor who killed himself after losing both of his legs in the war. The trauma of that manifests quite overtly, with Schwarzkogler literally disfiguring and emasculating his subject. He is in total control, orchestrating the efforts of both doctor and patient. He seemed to want to explore what it meant to be truly physically broken.
