Interview Conducted by Wolfe Lenkiewicz August 2003 in Muehl’s home
in Portugal, Viveda Miradouro


WL:  What is your opinion of the role of the artists in today’s society?

OM:  I am basically misunderstood. I feel the artists that surround me today are artistic illiterates. When I am involved with people connected to the state then it invariably goes wrong. Whether it is judges or prison staff. They tried to control my painting output in prison although I really stepped on the gas when I was allowed to paint. They found my work disgusting and wouldn't even accept it as a gift.

WL:  You talk a great deal about the role of ecstasy in your artwork. Could you define what you mean by this and do you equate it with a religious experience?

OM:  Ecstasy can express itself religiously but normally the church rejects the sexual aspect of it. They are against life and therefore have a great need for religious imagery. The sexual libido and energies is the source of this. Every ecstasy whether it be for the whole country is always driven by sexuality. This is not because it produces the most pleasure but because it produces life. Sexuality is a positive force. I thank that I have my life because of sexuality. The most beautiful thing in the bible, which is a fairytale of course, is Adam and eve in the garden. God made eve to satisfy Adam but what was he doing he gave man sexuality and then forbade it. He forbade them to eat from the apple. I suspect what the old man was doing was to stop Adam from sleeping with eve as he had made her from his own image and wanted incest. This story didn't start at the beginning but rather when agriculture started. This was a great revolutionary change as the oerfather was killed. It was the two homosexual brothers that killed their father. They pledged that never again should someone be able to play god. All the animals had free sexuality. In the first society there was the oerfather .He was the strongest and could keep the women satisfied. They were only on heat four times a year. Aristotle says the human is an animal, which produces community.

 WL:  In Nietzsche’s book "The Birth of Tragedy" he talks about Dionysian and Bacchic rights, does this have any relation to your work?

OM:  I don't think so although I was very enthusiastic about Nietzsche right from the beginning. I read this when I was 15 and was also enthusiastic about Karl Miel, I didn't understand it but the language impressed me a great deal.
WL:  Do you find your jail sentence has a parallel with the Austrian artist Egon Schillers imprisonment? There are many jailed artists in art history such as Benvenuto Cellini and Jacque Louis David.

OM:  What was David jailed for?

WL:  I believe it was because he had been involved with propaganda for the emperor napoleon and had signed hundreds of death warrants during the reign of terror.

OM:  David was disgusting for doing this.

OM:  No he spent only two weeks in jail and whined all the way through.

WL: Yesterday I was looking at Guernica in Madrid. What do you think of Picasso and how does his art differ from your close referencing of him in your recent films?

OM:  Picasso was formulaic and essentially a classical painter. In the early days I was much influenced by him and had a teacher called Kumisch who taught us cubism. I had a very strict formal training. Soon I rejected this for Actionism and found myself. I have made a film called Picasso but haven't shown it as the family may sue me. It is about Picasso knocking out paintings for Jacqueline to make money. In one part he is falling in love with a goat with a nightshirt on. Picasso thought he was a communist but really he was a petit bourgeois and did nothing with his money. Anyhow forget the revolution sexuality is the revolution. He was a regressive. I have studied everything on Picasso but he is still a stupid ape. I like to work with a development from one image to the next without they’re being a finished piece. The whole process being one work. I can do 400 drawings in sequence one developing out of the other. I am more relaxed and less stiffly controlled than Picasso,

WL:  What is your opinion of Marcel Duchamp's practice, which is in sharp contrast to that of Picasso?

OM:  He was a collage artist and a bad painter.  He made artwork like the son of a lawyer would.  He has influenced a great many bad artists.

WL:  What is your opinion of British artists, which seem to use transgressive elements in there work such as the Chapman brothers?

OM:  If they were to live their ideas through in life it might be more interesting.  They are just useless intellectuals.

WL: The concept of ecstasy is important in your art, could you define what you mean by it?

OM: It is the moment before you loose control, (not a physical abandon but a chemical loss of control) stemming at root from a sexual base. This is not of course that I am climaxing when painting but that it is informed by the sexual drive. This is a mysterious act of the emergence of meaning. The state is that of pre-language or the state of the child before it has learned anything. I would like to help create in the next generation the übermensch.  The model of my commune would achieve this. We would like to throw away common values and moral systems. I have suffered greatly for having these ideas.

WL:  Did you like Swarzcogler?

OM:  No. He was heavily critical of me. In performances he was concerned too much with aesthetic principles such as the use of white balloons etc. the colour of the balloons was not as important to me. I remember seeing him before his death. He was walking like a man who didn't have long to live. He was very depressed. Towards the end he had totally lost interest in the actions and was only inspired by Klein and the colour blue. He began just to use blue in his work with a discovery he had involving breathing.

WL:  Were these breathing exercises similar to those which yoko ono practiced with John Lennon?

OM:   No. It was more of a meditation influenced by eastern thought. He then took his life and threw himself from a window.

WL:  What do you think of Kurt krens work?

OM:  We both made films but eventually he just wanted to make them with Brus. Kren had no mother - no mother's milk and because of this he became an alcoholic. He was also very short. When he did finally see his mother from whom he had been divided by the war, she was shocked at how small he was and this finished him off.

WL: What kind of genre would you characterize your artistic practice?

OM:  Painter, dancer, and maker of hot speeches, singer, filmmaker, photographer, theatre, and poetry...every artist must use the whole spectrum to represent himself or herself. I don't like taking risks but if I need to then I will fight back using art. What I have said may sound vain but we are living in a multi-media age and its not enough just to be a painter or musician. This is too stupid. We must have multimedia and what I do is always multi-media - that's actionism.

WL: What do you think of Wagner?

OM: I hate Wagner, anything older than two minutes deserves to be destroyed.

WL: It has been said about the actionists that art is not art but rather art is politics. How do you feel about this?

OM: There is no relationship between the two. Politics is a sly method. Machiavelli says that if a prince needs to dismiss someone then he would rather kill him instead. Someone dismissed will seek revenge. I wasn't a prince but when we had the commune (600 people involved) I had to depose some people who had worked their way i.e. a man who had grinded his teeth like the dwarf in Kafka’s novel who collected all the nobility and burned them. This man went to the court and brought accusations against me. He was married to a prostitute who had taught her children to steal. All her children were from different men. She had fled to Austria and had asked to join the commune. She then formed a union with a drunkard and they went against me. I don't want to play Machiavelli but he was right. If you make this move into politics then that's the way it goes. It was the five people who were stamped out of the commune who got upset and started this business.

WL: In the early actions you did with Brus and Nistch in the Vienna University you were charged and arrested. They put you in jail for two months .how do you feel about this now?

I find Austria hypocritical. At least the German people felt guilt after the holocaust; even their children feel remorse. In Austria it was as if nothing ever happened to this day. I hate them.

WL: there is a farcical element in your work. Does this relate to Rabelaisian comede de arte or notions of the carnivalesque?

OM: This seems so old fashioned to me. Most of the concepts are used up. It is like a statue that has been kissed so its face is no longer visible.

WL: Your recent work both films and paintings include a great many images of sharks. Can you explain if they are a metaphor for anything?

OM: Yes, the sharks. They represent the human environment and above all the state. They are not personal entities. As an artist I have often felt the biting of the state I think unjustly. In culture the state has always been stupid. Was there ever a culture where the state was contemporary? This has always been the case with ancient Greece and Egypt, which resulted in a very sombre style, caused by the unity of religion in state and culture. In the seventeenth century the authorities for murder imprisoned Caravaggio. I think it was just a blow, which was misjudged. I rate Caravaggio highly as one of the most important revolutionary artists in terms of the lighting, which later Rembrandt turned into a religious affair, which is inner illumination.

WL: Do you consider your recent work "The Electric Paintings" to be the perfect embodiment of your work to date?

OM:  No it's just different. I don't see it as anything absolute. I do not see painting as a language as an end product but as a process.  It is more important what happens on the way. One picture follows another at great speed. When it is completed it can be destroyed again

End of interview.