Rudolf (With Accompanying Breakdown)

A poem about the life and work of Viennese Actionist artist Rudolf Schwarzkogler (1940-1969)

My world is stills of black and white

My body, my weapon of war

Cut it open and reveal the man within

Slice through the dark and reveal the light 

Mummified man on film

Phantom-like patient in a nightmare clinic

What disease must be cured

Who is this loathsome cynic

A man wrapped in gauze

Is a rebel without a cause

Living fast and crashing hard

Smashed from station to station 

Why is the world so hurtful

Like a corkscrew through your skin

What even was my sin

That I fell so hard to earth

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The poem above concerns itself with the Viennese Actionism art movement of the 1960's and 1970's. It is written from the perspective of Rudolf Schwarzkogler, who tragically passed away at age 29 in 1969. He fell from his apartment window, or he jumped. Urban legends around his having taken a performance too far are untrue. Let's do a deep dive into this piece and dissect my thinking around creating this poem. 

Important Context

Wiener Aktionismus was one of the first major art movements in post-WW2 Austria. It was a reaction to the prevalent post-war attitude that Austria had merely been at worst a bystander during the war years when in reality, the Anschluss was widely acclaimed at the time and there were many unpunished war criminals living in Austria. It was also a movement wherein the artists expressed themselves through aktions rather than through paintings or sculptures. Aktions were generally expressed by photography or through film as well as through performance art. 

Rudolf Schwarzkogler was a young Viennese artist who befriended Hermann Nitsch, a founding figure of the movement in the late 1950's while he studied graphic arts. His art involved the exploration of pain through self-mutilation, fasting etc. and also concerned itself with the esoteric. His father had died by suicide, unable to cope with lasting war injuries and traumas and Rudolf himself struggled with mental health issues in his life, fueling speculation that he too had died by suicide. 

The First Verse

My world is stills of black and white

My body, my weapon of war

Cut it open and reveal the man within

Slice through the dark and reveal the light

If you browse through the art of the Viennese Actionists, you will find that a lot of it is in black and white film reels or simply pictures. It is also art where the easel is replaced in most cases by the human body. It was also a reaction to war and a denunciation of collective war guilt. 

Another characteristic of Viennese Actionism was the willingness to put the body under duress, to experiment with pain, to self-mutilate. Schwarzkogler himself was known for creating art with medical themes that served as a grisly reminder of Nazi medical experiments. There was also an esoteric character to this. Schwarzkogler would fast and put his body under extreme duress in search of "purity". Furthermore, some of his oeuvre carries with it a certain ritualistic quality.

The last line is me stressing the ideas informing the previous three lines in a different way, with the pain serving as a conduit for the light, that is to say, the self-awareness that Schwarzkogler probably sought through his art. It is also a macabre nod on my part to Leonard Cohen's famous idea of "There is a crack in everything / That's how the light gets in".

The Second Verse

Mummified man on film

Phantom-like patient in a nightmare clinic

What disease must be cured

Who is this loathsome cynic

The second verse extends the ideas of the first and further adds to the dark ambience. The first line is the image of Schwarzkogler that always comes to mind for me. Remember, much of his art was in pictures or short movie clips. The second line is more of me inserting my impression of his art. The nightmare clinic bit is the image that comes to mind if I put myself into the position of the subject in these pictures. 

The third and fourth lines are more philosophical. The disease can be that of an individual but also of a society as a whole. The loathsome cynic is the artist. Schwarzkogler and the other Viennese Actionists were not celebrated in their time. In fact, they often operated on the margins of the law and similar artists such as Otto Mühl and Günter Brus were arrested several times. They were also disdained by mainstream Austrian society. 

The Third Verse

A man wrapped in gauze

Is a rebel without a cause

Living fast and crashing hard

Smashed from station to station 

Line one is another reference to the image of Schwarzkogler that many have in mind, myself included. The second line speaks more to the early death of our subject by making a reference to a very famous celebrity that also died young. Of course, Rebel Without A Cause was the 1955 film featuring James Dean. The third line expands on the parallel by referring to how both men died. Dean died in a car crash. Schwarzkogler died from a fall. 

The final line introduces a second celebrity reference that is even more important. Station To Station is a song by David Bowie where the stations refer to stations in the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. The tie-back to Schwarzkogler is the transition from life to death in his tragic demise. This whole stanza fixated on the idea of a life truncated too soon. The final line also ties back to the esoteric, ritualistic quality of Schwarzkogler's work by referring to Bowie's most esoteric album, deeply influenced by mysticism, existentialism and gnosticism. 

Finally, it should be noted that Bowie was strongly influenced by the Viennese Actionists. If you read about them and then see the Lazarus music video, you will see what I mean. 

The Fourth Verse

Why is the world so hurtful

Like a corkscrew through your skin

What even was my sin

That I fell so hard to earth

The first line of the final stanza hearkens back to what the Viennese Actionists set out to challenge. Austria's role had been neatly sanitized in the 1960's as in much of the rest of Europe. The atrocities of the war were a German issue, and collaboration in these atrocities by locals in the occupied lands was a subject best avoided. 

The corkscrew through the skin in the second line is a direct reference to an aktion by Schwarzkogler himself. It is obviously a painful image and therefore a proper supplement to the idea in the first line. 

The third line is almost a kind of cosmic protest. Schwarzkogler, who harmed no one,  died young, having never had the opportunity to mature fully as an artist. Yet many of the war criminals whose crimes Viennese Actionism was meant to protest lived full lives without having ever faced justice. 

The poem ends with another reference to that untimely death. And like the end of the third verse, it ties back into David Bowie. The immediate predecessor of the Station To Station album was the film The Man Who Fell To Earth. Now my thinking for this final line becomes obvious. In the film, the main character played by Bowie looks like a normal person but is really an alien, a great metaphor for how artists often feel. Furthermore, towards the end of his life, Bowie's character has descended into despair. In Schwarzkogler's life, his output decreased as he became more withdrawn and depressed. His output after 1968 is sparse and he died the following year. 

Concluding Thoughts

In a short poem, I wanted to give a new lease on life to an unappreciated figure in history. The fact that he died at precisely my current age makes the connection feel stronger. It is a dark piece, like many of my poems tend to be. But it needed to be in order to create the right ambience. Many artists are tragic figures and many draw on the darkness around them to fuel their work. And yet there is something incredibly heroic that they can bring forth light, create something enduring and worthwhile through all of this, even if this is not understood by contemporaries. It also underscores something I've said in the past and that is that art need not be beautiful. Some of it answers to higher callings.