Notes on Rudolf Schwarzkogler’s Images of Healing: A Biographical Sketch (1990)1
Notes on Rudolf Schwarzkogler’s Images of Healing: A Biographical Sketch (1990)1
This chapter examines images of healing in the works of Rudolf Schwarzkogler. Schwarzkogler began what would be his short corpus of actions in the summer and fall of 1965. His first four actions took place in his friend Heinz Cibulka's apartment: Hochzeit (Wedding), 2nd Action, 4. Aktion, and 6. Aktion. He initially titled these four actions, made for the production of photographs, Aktion mit einem menschlichen Körper (Action with a Male Body). The chapter suggests how, in highly compacted arcane signifiers of regeneration and transformation, Schwarzkogler opposed death with the fragility of mortality, seeking to redefine fragmentation in terms of the contingency of suffering bodies in strange forms of resurrection that anticipated Jacques Derrida's observation: “Cruelty is consciousness, is exposed lucidity”.
Keywords: healing, Rudolf Schwarzkogler, actions, photographs, regeneration, transformation, death, mortality, suffering, resurrection
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