After the intensive research for Let’s Twist Again: If You Can’t Think It, Dance It, Performance in Vienna from 1960 until Today. [1] I took another look at the Vienna Actionism photos and wondered about the authorship of the women Actionists and about the form of collaboration in an action. Why were the names of the women who collaborated on actions—the Aktionistinnen—for the most part not named? Out of conversations with the Aktionistinnen Hanel Koeck and Anni Brus, there emerged the fictive Aktionistin “Lora Sana, 62.” In art historian Johanna Schwanberg’s interview with Anna Brus and me, Anna Brus spoke in revealing ways about her role as an actor in actions by Günter Brus, Otto Muehl, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler and about the self-conception of the women who collaborated on the actions of the Vienna Actionists and who in many cases remained anonymous:
„I think that for years the artists failed to say that they worked together with others. If they don’t name names, who will? For a long time, the texts only spoke about “the model,” and “the model” had no name—with the exception of Heinz Cibulka, but he was also photographer and a man. Only later did women, mainly young ones, become interested in the people who associated with the Actionists.“[2]
In addition, a telephone conversation with Hanel Koeck contributed to the performance and textual work “Lora Sana, Actionist, 62.” For “Lora Sana,” I worked over copies of the original photos of actions, using black minimalist insertions and carving out the active actions of the “woman Actionist” and, in a performative intervention, drawing over the male protagonists in a section of an action photo chosen by me. Then the work was photographed again and thus became documentation of another action, a performative intervention. In the catalog Afterimages of a Non-simultaneous Present, the curator and art historian Silvia Eiblmayr writes, “‘Lora Sana is a fictive figure in whom Dertnig artistically condenses her extensive research on this issue.”[3] My works then provoked discussions among the Vienna Actionists themselves, and Peter Gorsen asserts in his book The Afterlife of Vienna Actionism that “neglect in art criticism, in feminist reckoning with the ‘male gaze’ and a photojournalism carried out without knowledge of the sources have led to a negative image of women in Vienna Actonism.”[4] This is exactly what is thematized in my works Let’s Twist Again and “Lora Sana, Actionist, 62.” I was interested in analyzing and critically interrogating the classical canon of art from a feminist and queer perspective.

“Lora Sana, Aktionistin, 62,” in Andrea Ellmeier, Doris Ingrisch, and Claudia Walkensteiner-Preschl, ed., Gender Performances. Wissen und Geschlecht in Musik Theater Film (Vienna: Böhlau, 2011), 154-155.

1) Carola Dertnig and Stefanie Seibold, ed., Let’s Twist Again: Performance in Vienna from 1960 to Today, If You Can’t Think It, Dance It, A Psychogeographic Map (Gumpoldskirchen/Vienna: D.E.A. Buch- und Kunstverlag, 2006).
2) Johanna Schwanberg, “Female Performers in Actionism: Anna Brus and Carola Dertnig in a Conversation with Johanna Schwanberg,” trans. Camilla Nielsen, in Silvia Eiblmayr, ed., Carola Dertnig. Nachbilder einer ungleichzeitigen Gegenwart/Afterimages of a Non-simultaneous Present (Innsbruck/Wien: Galerie im Taxispalais and Skarabæus Verlag, 2006), 81.
3) Silvia Eiblmayr, “Foreword,” in Carola Dertnig. Nachbilder einer ungleichzeitigen Gegenwart/ Afterimages of a Non-simultaneous Present, 7.
4) Peter Gorsen, Das Nachleben des Wiener Aktionismus. Interpretationen und Einlassungen seit 1969 (Klagenfurt: Ritter, 2009), 21.