Though undoubtedly a collection of avant-garde works, it’s tempting to view Kurt Kren’s “action films” as documentaries. A series of collaborations made between 1964 and 1967, these ten assembled shorts find the Austrian director working primarily with the performance artists Günter Brus and Otto Mühl. Each piece serves as a recording of their actions – funny, confrontational, shocking examples of body art that should be vaguely familiar to most – yet addresses them in Kren’s own distinct manner. They’re not straight representations therefore, but highly constructed individual entities dictated by complex editing patterns – the results being visual onslaughts as intense as the performances themselves.
Indeed there’s a symbiosis occurring between the two which seemingly makes for a more accurate representation than witnessing the events first hand. The films may often be non-linear in their construction, barely allow us to register individual images and always lack a soundtrack (live or otherwise), yet it doing so they become as hypnotic as their subjects. The absence of sound prevents us from ever once tearing our eyes away from the screen – to do so would be to miss so much – whilst the strict rhythms of the editing complete the task of sucking us in. In fact you could go as far as to say that Kren makes us complicit with Brus’ and Mühl’s performances; there’s work to be done as we set about containing this onslaught and rendering their collections of often abstract colours and shapes into more palatable, perhaps emotional forms. We’re able to snatch brief images (a head, a nipple, a leg, or are they?) and make of them what we will. As such the inherent horror or humour to be found in these works (depending on your point of view) becomes all the more pronounced; we’re no longer just watching, as would be the case with a “straight” representation, but experiencing.