Otto Muehl exhibition opens in the Vienna Actionism Museum

The exhibition Otto Muehl – ​​Art on the Abyss has just opened at the Vienna Actionism Museum (WAM). And it happened as it had to happen: two days before the event, activists, including many former members of the convicted sex offender and cult guru Muehl's community, loudly protested against the show with whistles and rattles. Banners read: “WAM – Perpetrator Museum,” “Responsibility instead of personality cult,” and “Anyone who sells Muehl today is selling repression.”

The actual opening the following day went undisturbed, and so the former Albertina boss Klaus Albrecht Schröder, now director of the WAM and curator of the exhibition, had the chance to explain his point of view: Otto Muehl, who died in 2013, had incurred enormous guilt through sexual abuse, but he was also a great artist whose work should not be withheld from the public. “An exhibition of his work,” said Schröder, “should neither make the meaning of his art disappear through his crimes nor relativize the crimes through the meaning of his art.”