Protesters denounce Vienna Otto Muehl exhibition

Protesters gathered outside Vienna’s Wiener Aktionismus Museum on Tuesday, using whistles and placards to oppose its Otto Muehl retrospective, ORF reported. Muehl, founder of the Friedrichshof commune, was sentenced to seven years in prison in 1991 for sexually abusing minors.

Demonstrators from the Mathilda group held signs reading “Paedophile criminal and cult leader,” “Responsibility instead of increased value” and “WAM equals perpetrators’ museum.” Inside, director Klaus Albrecht Schröder hosted a press preview of the controversial exhibition, titled “Otto Muehl: Art on the Edge.”

A group of prominent figures from the cultural and university sectors had shortly beforehand expressed solidarity with the protest in an open letter. The signatories include artists, academics and people who say they experienced sexual and psychological abuse in Muehl’s commune at Friedrichshof.

The group says Muehl incorporated art and artistic status into an authoritarian system of power, control and dependency, as well as severe psychological and sexual abuse of children and young people. It also accuses Austria’s art world of canonising, exhibiting, collecting and financially exploiting Muehl’s work for decades.

The letter calls for responsibility from the entire Austrian art sector and says affected people have still not received material compensation. It argues that celebrating perpetrators as artistic avant-garde figures while minimising their violence continues to legitimise abusive patriarchal power structures.

The retrospective opens on Thursday and presents 150 paintings, objects and prints, as well as two films. Its six sections trace Muehl’s artistic development from the early 1960s through his arrest and conviction.

Schröder defended the exhibition, saying it should neither erase the importance of Muehl’s art because of his crimes nor minimise the crimes because of the art’s importance. “We are an art museum and we are exhibiting Otto Muehl’s art,” he said, adding that the works were not being shown as an illustration of Muehl’s biography or as evidence of his offences.

The museum’s press material says the exhibition includes no works showing victims of abuse. Muehl, who died in 2013, continued living in similar abusive structures after his imprisonment.

Schröder faced questions about the lack of context but defended the autonomy of art. Separating the artist, the work and the offences is also difficult because Muehl viewed the commune he founded as a total work of art.

The exhibition includes texts about the commune’s history. One says Muehl showed people as material, like war turns people into material, “a being without identity.” It later states that his actions gradually intensified this view of people into an excess of sexuality, violence and obscenity, adding that the commune’s founder developed no awareness or sense of guilt regarding his own later abuse of power.

Members of Mathilda and others have long demanded compensation. According to the Presse, the cooperative plans to give part of the collection’s proceeds to children who lived in the commune in Burgenland between 1972 and 1990. The details have not been finalised. The Kurier reported that the payment could amount to 2.5 million euros for 160 people.