The mystery of Rudolf Schwarzkogler’s death
Countless people have complained that in the age of social media, we’ve lost the art of the myth.
That we can know for sure exactly what our heroes have and haven’t done pretty much the moment the thought occurs to us, this might not sound like all that much, but at its core is a question of relatability. A generation that grew up viewing their heroes as gods, clashing with a generation that views their heroes as just like them.
Honestly? I never really saw what all the fuss is about. Surely not putting your heroes on a pedestal and treating them like the human beings they are is a good thing?
Not to mention how sometimes, it’s good to know when people didn’t do the really, really stupid things they’re associated with? Take the German artist Rudolf Schwarzkogler, for example. The man was responsible for a great many barmy things. Which makes sense, he was a fully paid-up member of the Viennese Action movement, who made their name by doing barmy things in the name of boundary-pushing performance art.
Not just for the sake of it either, if you gave much of a toss about what they had to say for themselves. Fittingly for a generation of artists that were born in Austria during the Second World War, this was a group of hard leftists who felt that any art that was acceptable to mainstream society was selling out at best and outright betrayal at worst. Thus, they did everything they could to make the most shocking, counter-cultural work they could.
Schwarzkogler is no different, and this is how you get a rumour about his most infamous achievement circling for years.
How did Schwarzkogler die?
Some of the pieces Schwarzkogler performed are still pretty shocking today. He made up his models to look like patients undergoing surgery, all bloodstained gauzes and plastic tubes, before staging photos that looked like he was about to slice into them with a scalpel. He himself would often pose nude, his cock perched on a table in front of him, surrounded by seemingly random things from food to light bulbs to dead fish to surgical implements.
In fact, it’s these shoots and that last prop in particular that lead to the most enduring rumour about his work, that he died from cutting off his own penis as part of one of his performances. Hate to break it to you, but it isn’t true. It was a theme of his work, for sure. Check out the picture of him nude with a vivisected fish covering his junk, but it was nothing more than a theme of his art. If you need proof, just look at the fact that his death is one of the most enduring mysteries in German art.
The body of Rudolf Schwarzkogler was found in 1969, having fallen from a window of his apartment. Was it self-inflicted? Was he pushed? Was it simply an accident? We have no idea and probably never will. There’s a mystery for you if you miss the days when artists were inscrutable legends that you only knew myth and hearsay about.
If that’s not enough for you, give it a couple of years, and you’ll never be truly certain whether you’re looking at a real piece of art or AI-created slop! Mystery eh? You can’t beat it.