The Image of the Artist in Performance Art: The Case of Rudolf Schwarzkogler
The Image of the Artist in Performance Art: The Case of Rudolf Schwarzkogler

Summary/Abstract: 'The Image of the Artist in Performance Art: The Case of Rudolf Schwarzkogler' explores the enduring myth of the Viennese Actionist artist's death, which maintains that he expired from a deliberate and extended self-castration as a part of a series of performances in the late 1960s. This myth was most famously propagated in 1972 by the /Time Magazine/ critic Robert Hughes, and it continues to demonstrably and negatively inflect the reception not only of Schwarzkogler's work, but also of contemporary performance art more broadly---this, despite a number of scholarly studies that have exposed its fallacy. The essay's central arguments are concerned with examining the contours of the Schwarzkogler myth in its current guises and the relationship between the myth's production and absorption into the assumed critical expectations for what the medium of performance art entails. The enduring impact of the myth would seem to indicate that the contemporary reception of performance art depends as much upon the stories that surround its artists as it does the substance of the works themselves.

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